well-known Jesuits, David Henry Lewis and Philip Evans, popularly dubbed Captain. Lewis was taken by Arnold in person, Evans through his agency. Against both he produced the witnesses and managed the evidence.[476] Both were convicted of high treason under the statute of Elizabeth, for being priests in orders received from the see of Rome. Evans was executed at Cardiff on July 22, Lewis at Usk on August 27, 1679.[477] In the summer of 1680 Arnold’s name leaped into notoriety in London, when on July 16 John Giles was brought to the bar at the Old Bailey “for assaulting and intending to despatch and murder John Arnold, one of his Majesty’s justices of the peace.”[478] This incident however, which raised Arnold’s importance so high with the Whig party that his popularity bade fair to rival even that of the murdered Sir Edmund Godfrey,[479] affords strong grounds for doubting the candour of motive in his official alertness; for there is reason to believe that no attempt whatever was made upon his life, and that the whole affair was trumped up in a most discreditable manner with a view to establishing more firmly the reputation of the Protestant party and the guilt of the Roman Catholics.[480] One more, and this again a characteristic instance, may suffice to illustrate the varied, almost intriguing, nature of a magistrate’s position and the inquisitorial side which did not completely disappear from his duty until far into the nineteenth century.[481] At Lord Stafford’s trial the three justices who had examined Dugdale immediately after his arrest in December 1678 were called by the prisoner to prove that the witness had then absolutely denied all knowledge of the Plot.[482] To rebut this evidence the managers of the prosecution called William Southall, coroner of the county of Stafford. This man, who was not even a magistrate and occupied the least judicial position known to the law, had taken the opportunity of some legal business which was to be transacted between a cousin of his and Dugdale to undertake a little private examination of the latter on his own behalf in the hopes of obtaining information about the Plot. According to his own account Southall acquitted himself with some skill and, by assuming a knowing air as if convinced of Dugdale’s guilt and playing upon his hopes of pardon and reward, managed to extract from him a material confession. With this he repaired, not to the justices of the peace by whom Dugdale had originally been examined, but to three different magistrates, and in their company was present the next day at a detailed examination of Dugdale, who then swore to nearly the same evidence as he now gave at the trial of Lord Stafford.[483] Whether this story was true, or, as is suggested by the ease of Southall’s success where others naturally better qualified had failed, the interview and its result was arranged beforehand between the two men, is at this point immaterial; for honest