customs house.[374] At least one who was closely acquainted with the Catholic leaders and could not be suspected of prejudice declared the whole affair to be a design of persons zealous for the Duke of York. Lord Peterborough and Lady Powis, wrote the French ambassador, thought to render a great service by bringing forward a man who would give evidence against the Earl of Shaftesbury. They had merely tried to use tools similar to those by which their enemies were thought to have achieved success.[375] Though it was admitted that Dangerfield had tried to fit the Protestants with a forged plot and highly probable that the Catholics had a hand in the forgery, there is yet something to be said on the other side. The Presbyterian plot was a fiction; but there was a basis of Dangerfield’s story that was not fictitious. An actual movement, the lines of which are partly known, was at the moment being concerted by the Whig leaders. The list of those concerned in the plot drawn up by Dangerfield contains the names of many undoubtedly implicated, and of many afterwards guilty of the treason of the Rye House Plot, which grew out of the designs at this time.[376] Another fact is of importance. To strengthen his story in the eyes of the secretary of state, Dangerfield produced two letters belonging to Lord Shaftesbury.[377] In his confession he declared he had stolen these on one of the occasions when he went to kill the earl. There is no need to linger over the tales of attempted assassination. Improbable as they were in themselves, they are set beyond the bounds of credibility by the informer’s halting narrative and the ridiculous excuses he alleged for failure.[378] Nevertheless his production of the letters makes it evident that he had been with the Whig leader. There can be no doubt that he had some knowledge of the Whig designs. Most likely he was intriguing with both parties at the same time in order to see which he could with greater profit betray, and ended by betraying both, though the Catholics, since they had trusted him the more, were more severely affected by the results of his treachery. In the course of the next year Mrs. Cellier and the Earl of Castlemaine were tried for high treason. Lady Powis too had been committed to the Tower, but the bill against her was ignored by the grand jury. Both cases rested largely upon the evidence of Dangerfield, against whom records of crime were produced by the defence. As his pardon did not cover a felony of which he had been convicted, Mrs. Cellier was formally acquitted on the ground that he was no good witness and that only one other appeared against her; and when the pardon was afterwards corrected, the jury before whom Castlemaine was tried refused to believe the word of a man who bore the accumulated weight of sixteen convictions, guilty of “six great enormous crimes,” and pronounced a verdict of not guilty after an absence of only a few minutes from the box.[379] Few will be