In 1678, William Howard, Viscount Stafford, a Roman Catholic peer, was accused of being concerned in the Popish Plot, that monstrous tangle of lies, invented, for the greater part, by the infamous Titus Oates. Stafford was accused by Oates, with four other Roman Catholic peers, of being mixed up in the plot to overthrow the King, and to place the Duke of York upon the throne. From his place in the House of Lords Stafford had declared his innocence of the charge, but he was committed to close imprisonment in the Tower in the month of October (1678), remaining a prisoner until the month of November 1680, when he was tried at Westminster Hall, Titus Oates being the principal witness against him. In Reresby’s “Memoirs” it is said that Charles wished to save Stafford, whom he knew to be innocent; but his mistress, the Duchess of Portsmouth, whom Reresby believed to have been bribed, prevented the King from acting in the matter as he would otherwise have done, and Charles allowed an innocent man to be judicially murdered in order not to thwart his mistress’s wishes. Stafford was beheaded on Tower Hill on the 29th of December 1680, the crowd hooting him on his way to the scaffold, for Titus Oates’s infamous accusations had made any Roman Catholic an object of hatred to the populace. On Stafford asking one of the Sheriffs, of the name of Cornish, to interfere, the latter brutally replied: “I am ordered to stop no man’s mouth but your own.” So fervently, however, did Stafford proclaim his innocence on the scaffold, that many of the spectators, “with heads uncovered, exclaimed: ‘We believe you, God bless you, my Lord!’” “He perished,” writes Sir J. Reresby, “in the firmest denial of what had been laid to his charge, and that in so cogent and persuasive a manner, that all the beholders believed his words, and grieved his destiny.” The same tribunal which had condemned Stafford, three years after his death reversed the attainder they had pronounced against him, it having, in the meanwhile, been proved that Stafford had perished an innocent man, done to death by the false witness of the villain Oates. Lord Stafford was buried in the Chapel of St Peter’s. [Illustration: _William, Lord Russell._ (_From the Portrait in the National Portrait Gallery_)] The Rye House Plot brought two of the best and noblest heads in England to the block—William, Lord Russell, and Algernon Sidney. Both suffered death for the good cause of the liberty of England. Russell was the proto-martyr in that faith, Sidney the second.