The prisoners complained bitterly that they had been allowed neither time nor facility to produce their witnesses. At Oates’ second trial for perjury on May 9, 1685 there were called for the prosecution no less than forty-five witnesses, who proved conclusively where Ireland had been on every day but one between August 3 and September 14, 1678, the dates when he left and when he returned to London.[638] Five months after Ireland’s execution, Whitebread, Fenwick, and Harcourt called at their trial, to prove the same points, ten witnesses, whose evidence covered a considerable part of the time in debate,[639] Had he been able himself to call even those ten, not to say the whole number afterwards collected, it can scarcely be doubted that their evidence must have procured his acquittal and have given birth to the reaction against Oates which every additional conviction postponed. As it was, there were for the defence only four witnesses, two of whom were intensely interested in the prisoner’s acquittal, against the hitherto unshaken credit of Oates himself and the testimony of a disinterested person called to support him. Scroggs put the point quite fairly to the jury,[640] and the jury chose to disbelieve the prisoner’s witnesses. The real hardship lay, not in the prejudice of the court or the violent speech which the Chief Justice appended to his summing up of the evidence,[641] but in the fact that the accused were kept wholly in the dark as to the evidence which was to be produced against them. The practice of the law, as it is still the theory,[642] made it impossible for the accused to defend himself with certainty against the evidence which might be brought against him. The preparation of his defence had to be undertaken in the dark and conducted at random. On the same day Ireland, Pickering, and Grove received sentence of death from Jeffreys, as Recorder of London, in a speech which wavered between pure abuse and a sermon which would have done credit to the most strenuous divine.[643] More than a month later Ireland and Grove were executed at Tyburn. Had Ireland’s execution been postponed, an insurrection was feared. Pickering was respited by the king for so long that the indignant Commons on April 27, 1679 petitioned urgently that the law might take its course on the man who “did remain as yet unexecuted, to the great emboldening of such offenders, in case they should escape without due punishment;” and on May 25 Charles sent a message to the House by Lord Russell to say that the sentence should have effect.[644] All three died protesting their innocence to the last.