The letters which Everard Digby wrote in lemon juice from the Tower to his wife had recently been published, and were often quoted.
He was a scholar and a gentleman, upright in all ordinary dealings, and strongly impressed with a sense of duty to God.

Yet he had been deeply concerned in the plot for blowing up King, Lords, and Commons, and had, on the brink of eternity, declared that it was incomprehensible to him how any Roman Catholic should think such a design sinful.

The inference popularly drawn from these things was that, however fair the general character of a Papist might be, there was no excess of fraud or cruelty of which he was not capable when the safety and honour of his Church were at stake.
The extraordinary success of the fables of Oates is to be chiefly ascribed to the prevalence of this opinion.

It was to no purpose that the accused Roman Catholic appealed to the integrity, humanity, and loyalty which he had shown through the whole course of his life.

It was to no purpose that he called crowds of respectable witnesses, of his own persuasion, to contradict monstrous romances invented by the most infamous of mankind.