laid before Charles in the August of 1678 and
received, as was natural enough, with the cool incredulity of one who
knew what plot there really had been; but Oates made affidavit of its
truth before a London magistrate, Sir Edmondsbury Godfrey, and at last
managed to appear before the Council. He declared that he had been
trusted with letters which disclosed the Jesuit plans. They were
stirring rebellion in Ireland; in Scotland they disguised themselves as
Cameronians; in England their aim was to assassinate the king and to
leave the throne open to the Papist Duke of York. The extracts from
Jesuit letters, however, which he produced, though they showed the
bitter disappointment and anger of their writers at the king's
withdrawal from his schemes, threw no light on the monstrous charges of
a plot for his assassination. Oates would have been dismissed indeed
with contempt but for the seizure of Coleman's correspondence. The
letters of this intriguer, believed as he was to be in the confidence of
the Duke of York, gave a new colour to the plot. Danby himself,
conscious of the truth that there really were designs which Charles
dared not avow, was shaken in his rejection of the disclosures and
inclined to use them as weapons to check the king in his Catholic
policy. But a more dexterous hand had already seized on the growing
panic. Lord Shaftesbury, released after a long imprisonment from the
Tower, ready since his discovery of the Treaty of Dover to believe in
any conspiracy between the Catholics and the king, and hopeless of
foiling the king's policy in any other way, threw himself into the plot.
"Let the Treasurer cry as loud as he pleases against Popery," he
laughed, "I will cry a note louder." But no cry was needed to heighten
the popular frenzy from the moment when Sir Edmondsbury Godfrey, the
magistrate before whom Oates had laid his information, was found in a
field near London with his sword run through his heart. His death was
assumed to be murder, and the murder to be an attempt of the Jesuits to
"stifle the plot." A solemn funeral added to the public agitation; and
the two Houses named committees to investigate the charges made by
Oates.

[Sidenote: Shaftesbury and the Plot.]

In this investigation Shaftesbury took the lead. Whatever his personal
ambition may have been, his public aims in all that followed were wise
and far-sighted. He aimed at forcing Charles to dissolve the Parliament
and appeal again to the