in London at the consult at the White Horse Tavern. This was refused by the court without hesitation. Fenwick exclaimed bitterly that the judges seemed to think there was no justice out of England.[621] But in supposing that a special piece of unfairness was directed against himself and his friends he was mistaken. It was a regular and unbroken rule of the court that no evidence could be brought, if such an expression may be used, from outside the trial. Such evidence as reports of other trials, the journals of the Houses of Parliament, the minutes of the privy council was allowed to be used on neither side. It was one of the points in which the practice of the day pressed hardly on the accused, but the judges could not, as Scroggs truly said, “depart from the law or the way of trial.” The theory of the law was that the evidence at a trial might be disproved by the defence, or its value might be destroyed if the witness were proved not to be competent; but neither could it be shaken by such a document as Fenwick proposed to produce,[622] nor could evidence afterwards be called against it to shake the credit of a witness at a previous trial. To effect this the witness must be indicted and convicted for perjury and the record of his conviction proved. Every trial stood by itself, and everything alleged at it had to be proved or disproved on the spot, either by direct evidence or by judicial records sworn at the trial to be correct.[623] Bedloe was then called. He began by giving evidence of the Plot in general, in pursuit of which he had been employed, he swore, for the last five years to carry letters between Jesuits and monks in England, Ireland, and France, and Sir William Godolphin and Lord Bellasis.[624] But of the prisoners in particular he could only speak to Ireland, Pickering, and Grove. Whitebread and Fenwick he knew by sight alone. At the trial of Reading he confessed that this was a lie.[625] There he explained that he would have borne witness before against the two Jesuits had not Reading been intriguing with him at the time, and that he kept back his evidence in order to lead the attorney deeper into the business.[626] Not only was this admitted by the court as sufficient justification of his conduct, but at their later trial, when Bedloe gave decisive evidence against them, Whitebread and Fenwick hardly made any objection to his credibility upon this ground.[627]