Venner’s insurrection and the trouble in Scotland served during the earlier years to make plain that stability was not assured, and it was not only events on the surface that denoted uneasiness. In 1673 and the following year attention was occupied by a mysterious affair, never probed to the bottom, in which Edmund Everard, later perjured as an informer at the time of the Popish Plot, was charged with a design to poison the Duke of Monmouth and other persons of quality, and himself confessed his ill intention, having apparently been tutored by some of the experts in that art who flourished across the channel; with the result that he was thrown into the Tower, and was able four years after to boast of having been the first to discover the Plot and to charge the authorities with stifling it in his person.[318] Other problems trod upon the heels of this in quick succession. Throughout the years 1675 and 1676 the government shewed anxiety lest a fresh sectarian movement was on foot. A great riot made in the former year by the London prentices drew watchful eyes upon reputed fanatics. Considerable information was collected in the provinces, and judges on circuit earned golden praise by proving their attachment in word and deed to the established church. At Worcester a man of notorious opinions stood his trial for treason, but the jury acquitted him on the ground of madness, and despite plain speaking from the bench held to their verdict. Dark hints reached the government that on the first meeting of Parliament after the long prorogation an attempt would be made to seize the king and his brother and “order all things securely.” Somewhat later Compton, Bishop of London, furnished the Lord Treasurer with particulars of conventicles held by Anabaptists and other dangerous dissenters in the city and in Southwark, amounting to the number of sixteen, and for the most part frequented by between one and three hundred persons; while from another source Danby learned that the total of a few of the London congregations rose to over four thousand souls.[319]