in favour of the witness and against the prisoner. The first reflection upon this scene which occurs to the mind of one who comes to study it in the twentieth century is that in a modern court it could scarcely have taken place at all. It seems as if the elaborate care taken to discuss particular omissions and contradictions in Oates’ evidence was only so much waste of time, for to the modern eye the whole bulk was of a character which would now be considered wholly inadmissible as good testimony. Writing of the evidence of the other informers as well as of Oates throughout the trials, Sir James Fitzjames Stephen says: “No one accustomed to weighing evidence can doubt that he and the subordinate witnesses were quite as bad and quite as false as they are usually supposed to have been. Their evidence has every mark of perjury about it. They never would tie themselves down to anything if they could possibly avoid it. As soon as they were challenged with a lie by being told that witnesses were coming to contradict them, they shuffled and drew back and began to forget.”[574] The evidence which Oates gave against the accused consisted largely in his swearing that he had carried letters from one person to another, which upon a mental comparison with yet more letters, he recognised to be in the handwriting of a third person, being in this case that of Coleman.[575] Or that he had been told by Coleman of treasonable letters which he had written into the country to encourage the Catholic party. Or again, that he had been told by other persons that at a consult, from which he himself had been absent, various treasonable designs were formed and approved; or that it was generally understood among the conspirators that the accused had done this, that, or the other. Even definite facts sworn by the witness, as for instance when Oates swore that he had seen Coleman pay an extra guinea to the messenger who carried £80 to four Irishmen as payment for the king’s death, and when Bedloe swore that he had heard Coleman say that “if there was an hundred heretical kings to be deposed, he would see them all destroyed,”[576] were statements which did not receive and were scarcely susceptible of corroboration. Nowadays it is an established principle that the uncorroborated evidence of an accomplice is not to be acted upon, and the direct evidence of witnesses in the Popish Plot, even when it was most definite and precise, would without exception have fallen under this rule. But in the seventeenth century the rule was unknown. Practically any statement made on oath in the witness box was accepted unconditionally, unless the witness was either contradicted by better evidence or else proved to be no “good witness.” The competence of a witness was technically destroyed only by a record of perjury proved against him, but the credibility of evidence was a question for the judgment of the jury; and where the witness had been