The credit of the Popish plot still stood upon the oaths of a few infamous witnesses.

Though such immense preparations were supposed to have been made in the very bowels of the kingdom, no traces of them, after the most rigorous inquiry, had as yet appeared.

Though so many thousands, both abroad and at home, had been engaged in the dreadful secret, neither hope, nor fear, nor remorse, nor levity, nor suspicions, nor private resentment, had engaged any one to confirm the evidence.
Though the Catholics, particularly the Jesuits, were represented as guilty of the utmost indiscretion, insomuch that they talked of the king's murder as common news, and wrote of it in plain terms by the common post, yet, among the great number of letters seized, no one contained any part of so complicated a conspiracy.

Though the informers pretended that, even after they had resolved to betray the secret, many treasonable commissions and papers had passed through their hands, they had not had the precaution to keep any one of them, in order to fortify their evidence.

But all these difficulties, and a thousand more, were not found too hard of digestion by me nation and parliament.