Charles II
One other more illustrious victim was reserved for a more ignominious fate. Oliver Plunket, Archbishop of Armagh, a man whose saintly virtues and untainted loyalty have been recognised even by writers the most hostile to his race and creed,103 was arrested, in December, 1679, on a charge of conspiring to procure a French invasion and a massacre of the Protestant population. Some priests, whom, for the looseness of their lives, Piunket had suspended from their sacerdotal functions, "brutal and profligate men," as Burnet calls them, "hearing that England was at that time disposed to hearken to good swearers, thought themselves well qualified for the employment."104 The Archbishop was accused in the following year in Dublin; but, such was the high character of the prisoner and the palpable absurdity of the evidence, that the grand jury, although exclusively composed of Protestants, threw out the bill. The witnesses then re-edited their story, and Plunket was conveyed to London, where his accusers could be sure of a more sympathetic jury. In July, 1681, after a trial which was not the least infamous among the State trials of that reign, he was executed at Tyburn. He "suffered very decently," says a Protestant historian, "expressing himself in many particulars as became a
108
