The times were in a ferment when Parliament met on October 21, 1678. In his speech from the throne the king gave notice to the Houses that information had been laid of a Jesuit conspiracy against his life, and he and the Lord Chancellor following promised a strict inquiry. The government wished to keep the investigation clear of Westminster, recognising the danger of parliamentary interference;[311] but the Commons were of another mind. They returned to their house, and business was begun by members of the privy council. Motions were made to take the king’s speech into consideration, for the keep of the army, and the court party tried first to turn the attention of the house to the need for money. The question was about to be put, while country members sat in amazement. Suddenly one rose to his feet and in a speech of fire brought to debate the subject that was in the mind of every man present. He admired, he said, that none of those gentlemen who had spoken nor any others of the house who held great places at court should speak one word of the Plot, though his Majesty’s life and government were exposed to manifest danger; the property, liberty, lives, and, yet dearer, the religion of all were embarked in the same bottom; that neither an army nor money, in however vast sums, could protect a prince from the knife of a villain the murder of two Kings of France testified; and was the prisoner Coleman, so inconsiderable a person, to be thought the chief agent in a design of such importance, of such deep intrigues and tortuous ways But a few days before Sir Edmund Godfrey had been done to death. Were a spaniel lost, inquiry was made in the _Gazette_: now a worthy gentleman had been barbarously murdered in discharge of his duty, and no search was undertaken for the criminals. The privy council, declared the speaker, was cold in its pursuit; let the great council of the land proceed with greater vigour.[312] Parliament threw itself into the case with immediate determination. Committees were appointed to consider ways and means for the preservation of the king’s person, to inquire into the Plot and Godfrey’s murder, a bill was prepared to disable papists from sitting in either house of Parliament, addresses were made for the removal of all popish recusants from London and for a day of solemn fast, which was accordingly appointed by proclamation for November 13. Oates and Bedloe were heard with their expansive tales at the bars of both houses, and on the 1st of November a joint resolution was voted that “there hath been and still is a damnable and hellish Plot, contrived and carried on by Popish Recusants, for the assassinating and murdering the King and rooting out and destroying the Protestant religion.”[313]