And now the Neck-verse was free to everyone were he or were he not in holy orders, and he claimed the privilege after conviction, but in the reign of Henry VII. (1487) an important change was made. A person who claimed clergy was to be branded on the crown of his thumb with an "M" if he were a murderer, with a "T" if he were guilty of any other felony; if he "prayed his clergy" a second time this was refused him, unless he were actually in orders. Of course the mark on the thumb was to record his previous escape from justice. It was with this "Tyburn T" (as it was called in Elizabethan slang) that Ben Jonson was branded. It is only within the last few years that careful Mr Cordy Jeaffreson has exhumed the true story from the Middlesex County Records. The poet quarrelled and fought a duel with Gabriel Spencer, an actor, and probably a former colleague. The affair came off at Shoreditch. Jonson, with his rapier, which the indictment (for a reason explained in the chapter on "Deodands") values at three shillings, briskly attacked his opponent, and almost immediately gave him a thrust in the side, whereof Spencer died then and there. Ben was forthwith seized and thrown into prison. Whilst waiting his trial he said that spies were set on him, but he was too much for them, and afterwards all the judges got from him was but "Ay" and "No." Why spies should have been necessary in so plain a case is far from clear. It is more significant that a devoted priest succeeded in converting him for the time to Roman Catholicism, and he afterwards confessed to Drummond of Hawthornden that he had come near the gallows. However, what he said, or did not say, is of little weight as compared with the evidence of contemporary judicial records. The fact is clear that the poet of _Every Man in his Humour_, the cunning artist of _Queen and Huntress_, and _Drink to me only with thine Eyes_, had a true bill found against him by the grand jury, who sat, by the way, in a tavern, for as yet Hicks Hall, the predecessor of the Session's-House on Clerkenwell Green, was not.