Bedloe was a man of evil character. He had been in the service of Lord Bellasis, and had subsequently held a commission as lieutenant in a foot company in Flanders.[201] He was of a type not uncommon in the seventeenth century, one of the vast crowd who lived a roving life of poverty and dishonesty, travelling from one country to another, in many services and under many names, living upon their own wits and other people’s money, men for whom no falsehood was too black, no crime too gross to be turned to profit, men without truth, without shame, without fear of God or man. Bedloe was afterwards known to be notorious throughout Europe. He had been imprisoned in Spain for obtaining money under false pretences. He had been imprisoned in the Marshalsea for debt. He had been sentenced to death for robbery in Normandy, but had escaped from prison. When the agitation of the Popish Plot broke out he had only lately been released from Newgate. He had passed himself off on the continent as a nobleman, and had swindled his way from Dunkirk to Madrid. In Flanders his name was Lord Newport, in France he called himself Lord Cornwallis, in Spain Lord Gerard.[202] When he was examined before the House of Lords he denied without reservation that he knew Titus Oates.[203] The government made inquiries behind his back. His mother, his sister, and a friend were examined by the Bishop of Llandaff on Bedloe’s behaviour between November 2 and 5, when he had stayed at his mother’s house at Chepstow. It appeared that he had discoursed to them about the plot, and had announced his intention of discovering the murderers of Godfrey; but he also told them that he had known Oates intimately when they were together in Spain.[204] This might have led to unfortunate consequences. Bedloe attempted to recover the slip by saying that he had known Oates personally, but not by that name, since at Valladolid he had called himself Ambrose. Oates supported him by the statement that he had been acquainted with Bedloe in Spain under the name of Williams.[205] The recovery was not sufficient, for Bedloe had told his family that he had known Oates by the same name; but the unsystematic method of examination came to the informer’s aid, and the fact passed at the time unnoticed. His denial of Oates’ name and recognition of his person took place before the House of Lords, while the facts which proved his perjury in this only came to the notice of the privy council. When examinations of the same persons on the same or different points might be conducted by the secretaries of state, by the privy council, at the bar of the House of Lords, at the bar of the House of Commons, or before the secret committee of either one house or the other, and when it was the business of nobody to dissect and digest the results of this mass of raw evidence, it can hardly be a matter of surprise that contradictions went undetected and lying statements unrebuked.