Father John Gerard in his Autobiography[409] relates an experience of his own which illustrates the methods employed to procure evidence such as was required. When, in Queen Elizabeth's time, he had himself been taken and thrown into prison, the notorious Topcliffe, the priest-hunter, endeavoured to force him into an acknowledgment of various matters of a treasonable character. Father Gerard undertook to write what he had to say on the subject, and proceeded to set down an explicit denial of what his questioner suggested. What followed he thus relates.[410] "While I was writing this, the old man waxed wroth. He shook with passion, and would fain have snatched the paper from me." "'If you don't want me to write the truth,' said I, 'I'll not write at all.'" "'Nay,' quoth he, 'write so and so, and I'll copy out what you have written.'" "'I shall write what I please,' I answered, 'and not what _you_ please. Show what I have written to the Council, for I shall add nothing but my name.'" "_Then I signed so near the writing, that nothing could be put in between._ The hot-tempered man, seeing himself disappointed, broke out into threats and blasphemies: 'I'll get you into my power, and hang you in the air, and show you no mercy: and then I shall see what God will rescue you out of my hands.'" It was not by Catholics alone that allegations of this sort were advanced. Sir Anthony Weldon tells us[411] that on the trial of Raleigh and Cobham, the latter protested that he had never made the declaration attributed to him incriminating Raleigh. "That villain Wade,"[412] said he, "did often solicit me, and, not prevailing, got me, by a trick, to write my name on a piece of white paper, which I, thinking nothing, did; so that if any charge came under my hand, it was forged by that villain Wade, by writing something above my hand, without my consent or knowledge." Moreover, there exists undoubted evidence that the king's chief minister availed himself upon occasion of the services of such as could counterfeit handwriting and forge evidence against suspected persons. One Arthur Gregory[413] appears to have been thus employed, and he subsequently wrote to Salisbury reminding him of what he had done.[414] After acknowledging that he owes his life to the secretary who knows how to appreciate "an honest desire in respect of his Majesty's public service," Gregory thus continues: "Your Lordship hath had a present trial of that which none but myself hath done before, _to write in another man's hand_, and, discovering the secret writing being in blank, to abuse a most cunning villain in his own subtlety, leaving the same at last in blank again, wherein although there be difficulty their answers show they have no suspicion."