Lionel Albert Anderson, alias Munson (died 1710) was an English Dominican priest, who was falsely accused of treason during the Popish Plot, which was the fabrication of the notorious anti-Catholic informer Titus Oates.
[2] Anderson had taken an oath of allegiance to King Charles II, and had accordingly been allowed to live quietly in England, with unofficial Government permission, since 1671; he was left in peace for a short time even after the outbreak of the Popish Plot.
This statute, which under Elizabeth I had been very vigorously administered, became after her death practically a dead letter, and so remained until the panic into which the nation was thrown by the fabrications of Oates and his fellow informer William Bedloe led to its resuscitation.
No evidence was forthcoming to prove any one of them, but the judges presumed them all against him, holding that the mere fact of his having celebrated the Catholic mass (which he admitted) was sufficient to make him guilty; and so they held of all the prisoners.
In fairness to the judges, J.P. Kenyon points out that all seven of the accused were in fact priests, and some of them like Anderson himself, Maurus Corker and the colourful, one-legged Civil War veteran Colonel Henry Starkey, were well known to be such by the Government.
[6] Another of the accused, David Kemish or Kemiss, who was a very old man and too frail to defend himself properly, was remanded in custody, so, Scroggs remarked, "that the world may not say we are grown barbarous and inhumane", and he died in prison ten days later.
[7] All the others were sentenced to be hanged, drawn, and quartered, but J.P. Kenyon, in his definitive account of the Popish Plot, concludes that they were all reprieved (Maurus Corker was certainly spared since he survived until 1715, while Colonel Starkey had been set at liberty by November 1680, although we hear of him in prison again in 1683).