evidence offered in the investigation of the Plot. He expressed himself doubtful as to the guilt of Berry and thought that Prance might have made a mistake of identity. It was immediately said that Berry had made horrible confessions to him, and that he had been pressed at court not to divulge them.[252] Prison life in the seventeenth century was hard. Prisoners were treated in a way that would now be considered shameful, and Prance did not escape his share of ill-treatment. He was kept in the cell reserved for felons and murderers. According to the general practice he was heavily ironed. Until his life was thought in danger he had nothing but the boards on which to lie. The greatest hardship arose from the cold, against which there was no real provision. But there is no evidence that Prance more hardly used than his fellow gaol-birds. A detestable attempt was afterwards made to prove that he had been tortured in prison to extract confessions from him. In the course of the year 1680 Mrs. Cellier, the Roman Catholic midwife of otherwise dubious reputation, published a pamphlet entitled “Malice Defeated; or a Brief Relation of the Accusation and Deliverance of Elizabeth Cellier.” The work was an attack upon the prosecutors of the Popish Plot, conducted with all the coarse weapons of seventeenth-century controversy. Incidentally she called the crown witnesses “hangman’s hounds for weekly pensions.” On September 11 she was indicted for a malicious libel and tried before Baron Weston and the Lord Mayor. The libel lay in her open declaration that Prance was put on the rack in Newgate and that Francis Corral, who had been imprisoned on suspicion of complicity in Godfrey’s murder, was subjected to intolerably ill treatment and active torture in Newgate in order to make him confess his guilt.[253] The charges which Mrs. Cellier made were not only outrageous but ridiculous, and were so improbable as not to deserve detailed discussion. Witnesses were called for the prosecution who proved their complete falsity, and Mrs. Cellier’s counsel virtually threw up his brief. Not only did the keeper of Newgate deny everything in the publication relating to himself, but the parties who had been mentioned in it were summoned as witnesses and gave decisive evidence. Prance denied the whole story and, what was of greater value than his word, made the pertinent remark that, had he been used in such a way as Mrs. Cellier suggested, Dr. Lloyd must certainly have known about it. The man Corral had been kept out of court by the defence, but he had already denied all Mrs. Cellier’s allegations in a deposition made before the Lord Mayor. His wife had made a similar deposition and, being now called as a witness, wholly refused to support the statements of the accused. Her husband had been treated hardly, as were all prisoners, but Mrs. Cellier’s charges of torture and brutality were false. She had been allowed to see her husband occasionally and