their account they took from him the tale of a Presbyterian plot; by his own he invented it at their direction. Were the Catholic statements accepted as true, they would convict the duke’s party of most gross folly in trusting a man of character so depraved: more than that, for the man had been paid to play the spy and, it was admitted by his employers, had been given hints that it would be good to discover plots of the nature of that which he retailed to them; and to accept such a story without investigation, when it was known that the teller had orders beforehand to collect materials, argues at least some disingenuity. Nor is this all. There is reason to think that in some essentials Dangerfield’s confession contained the truth. Supposing that, as Lord Peterborough and his friends declared, the captain had only hidden his parcel behind Mansell’s bed in order to be detected, he would at least have taken the trouble to make discovery of evidence against Mrs. Cellier certain. The papers concocted between them were in his possession, and he had only to hide them without her knowledge where they could be easily found by an officer. On the supposition that he meant to turn informer against the Catholics their discovery at Mrs. Cellier’s was necessary to his success. Without it there would be no more than his bare word to shew that they had employed him at all. As evidence the find of papers was invaluable to him. Yet he did not even attempt to supply that evidence. So far from concealing the incriminating notes himself, he gave them to Mrs. Cellier to dispose as she thought best. The natural thing for her to do was to burn them and, for all Dangerfield knew, she might have done so. For whatever reason she preferred the other course. She gave the papers to her servant to hide, and it was the servant who placed them in the regions of the kitchen where they were found by Sir William Waller.[373] Dangerfield could not possibly have known of their concealment or even of their preservation. The fact that Mrs. Cellier chose to conceal the evidence against her rather than deliver it to the council, which would have been her best course had she been wholly innocent, or burn it to destroy the traces of her guilt, if she were guilty, tells nothing; for on Dangerfield’s arrest she hoped that he would still be faithful to her, and was not in any case so clean of hand as to court an inquiry into the nature of the services she had from him. She may well have hoped that their connection would escape notice. But beyond this it is plain that, even if she was not aware of Dangerfield’s intention to fix the odium of a fictitious plot on the Protestant party, her relations with him were of so intimate a kind that only wilful ignorance could have saved her from knowledge of it. She knew of the treasonable papers in Colonel Mansell’s room and, when a search warrant could not be procured, it was she who advised Dangerfield to have recourse to the