gentlemen, till night had fallen and the clock pointed to half-past ten. By this time they were all, said the captain, pretty fresh, and Mr. Atkins very much fuddled. Captain Vittells put his guests, with a Dutch cheese and half a dozen bottles of wine as a parting gift, into a boat belonging to the yacht and sent them to land. The tide flowed so strongly that the men rowing the wherry could not make London Bridge, but set Atkins and the two ladies ashore at Billingsgate at half-past eleven o’clock, and assisted them into a coach. “Atkins,” said one of the sailors, “was much in drink, and slept most of the way up.”[208] He must have blessed the fate that led him to joviality and intoxication on that evening. It was obvious that he could not have been soberly watching Sir Edmund Godfrey’s corpse at Somerset House when he was at the time named by Bedloe, and for two hours after, first hilarious and then somnolent at Greenwich. The evidence was unimpeachable. The only fact revealed by a somewhat sharp examination was that some of the sailors had signed a paper for the information of Mr. Pepys stating at what time they had left Atkins. One of them admitted that he could not read, but added immediately that he was a Protestant. In the seventeenth century sound religious principles covered a want of many letters. At this point the case rested. A true bill had already been found against Atkins by the grand jury, but it was not until Tuesday, February 11, 1679 that he could obtain a trial.[209] Important developments had in the meantime taken place, and Atkins was no longer the game at which the plot-hunters drove. On the day before he was brought to the bar three men were convicted of the same murder for which he was indicted on two counts, both as principal and as accessory. The former of these was now dropped, and Atkins was tried only as an accessory to the murder of Sir Edmund Godfrey. The centre of interest in the case had moved away from him and Mr. Pepys and the Duke of York, and the same evidence originally preferred against him was produced in court without addition. The case for the prosecution was lamentably weak. Captain Atkins swore to his previous story at greater length, but without any new statement of importance.[210] Bedloe followed with the story of the man who gave his name as Atkins at the meeting over Godfrey’s corpse; but whereas he had formerly seemed willing to recognise Atkins without much difficulty, he now professed himself entirely unable to swear to his identity. “There was a very little light,” he said, “and the man was one I was not acquainted with.... So that it is hard for me to swear that this is he. And now I am upon one gentleman’s life, I would not be guilty of a falsehood to take away another’s. I do not remember that he was such a person as the prisoner is; as far as I can remember he had a more manly face than he hath, and a beard.”[211] The crown evidence