Coleman was not the first man to suffer for the Popish Plot. On November 26, the day Coleman was brought to trial, William Staley, a Roman Catholic goldsmith, had undergone a traitor’s death at Tyburn. Staley was accused by two scoundrels of having in a public tavern uttered words which announced his intention of taking away the king’s life. The chief witness was a wretch named Carstairs, who had eked out a precarious livelihood by acting as a government spy on conventicles in Scotland.[605] Two others of the same kidney corroborated his evidence. They swore that Staley had entered a cookshop in Covent Garden to dine with a French friend named Fromante, and had there burst into a rage against the king; the old man, Fromante, his friend, said “that the king of England was a tormentor of the people of God, and he answered again in a great fury, ‘He is a great heretic and the greatest rogue in the world; here is the heart and here is the hand that will kill him.’... In French the words were spoken, he making a demonstration stamping with his foot: ‘I would kill him myself.’”[606] By an act passed early in Charles II’s reign, “malicious and advised speaking” had been made an overt act of high treason, and on this Staley was indicted. Over his sentence historians have gone into ecstasies of horror, on the ground that it is impossible to believe that “a great Roman Catholic banker” in the position of Staley should have spoken such words.[607] Staley however was not the banker, but the banker’s son, and was not therefore of the same highly responsible age and position as has been supposed. “Young Staley,” as he is called in a letter of the time,[608] is identified by Von Schwerin, ambassador of the Great Elector to the court of Charles II. On November 19 he writes: “Auch ist der Sohn eines sehr reichen Goldschmieds gefänglich eingezogen worden, weil er bei einem Gelage—wiewohl in trunkenem Zustande—Reden geführt hat: die Conspiration sei noch nicht ganz entdeckt, so habe er noch Hände den König zu ermorden.”[609] But the decisive evidence on the point is the fact that William Staley’s father, the banker, was alive some three weeks after he should, according to the received account, have been hanged and quartered. On December 18 his clerk and cashier were examined before the committee of the House of Lords on the subject of a reported connection between their master and Sir George Wakeman. The cashier had been in his service for seven years. The next day Mr. Staley, as ordered, himself attended the committee, bringing with him “the books wherein he has kept his accounts the last two years.”[610] Obviously this man had been head of the firm for more than the previous month, and the account given by the Brandenburg envoy is correct.[611]