The peers gave power to their committees to send for and examine such as would maintain the innocence of those who had been condemned for the plot.

A pamphlet having been published to discredit the informers, and to vindicate the Catholic lords in the Tower, these lords were required to discover the author, and thereby to expose their own advocate to prosecution.

And both houses concurred in renewing the former vote, that the Papists had undoubtedly entered into a _horrid_ and _treasonable_ conspiracy against the king, the state, and the Protestant religion.
It must be owned, that this extreme violence, in prosecution of so absurd an imposture, disgraces the noble cause of liberty, in which the parliament was engaged.

We may even conclude from such impatience of contradiction, that the prosecutors themselves retained a secret suspicion, that the general belief was but ill grounded.

The politicians among them were afraid to let in light, lest it might put an end to so useful a delusion: the weaker and less dishonest party took care, by turning their eyes aside, not to see a truth, so opposite to those furious passions by which they were actuated, and in which they were determined obstinately to persevere.
Sir William Temple had lately been recalled from his foreign employments; and the king, who, after the removal of Danby, had no one with whom he could so much as discourse with freedom of public affairs, was resolved, upon Coventry's dismission, to make him one of his secretaries of state.