William Scroggs
Scroggs was noted for his violent hatred of, and public outbursts against Catholic priests, of which perhaps the most notorious was: "they eat their God, they kill their King, and saint the murderer!".
Another leading informer, Stephen Dugdale, was arguably a case apart as he was a person of good social standing, and was generally regarded as "a man of sense and temper", with "something in his manner which disposed people to believe him".
[citation needed] In November 1678 William Staley, a young Catholic banker, was executed for treason, the precise charge being that he had "imagined (i.e. threatened) the King's death".
Gilbert Burnet later made a violent attack on the character and credibility of William Carstares,[6] the Crown's chief witness, who testified that while dining in the Black Lion Pub in Convent Garden he had heard Staley say in French: "the King is a great heretic...this is the hand that shall kill him".
His speaking in French (this was confirmed by another witness) attracted suspicion, although in fact, it was perfectly understandable since the guest he was dining with, one Monsieur Fromante, was a Frenchman.
Colman's letters, in which he urged Louis to press Charles II for dissolution of Parliament, by bribery if necessary, showed a grave lack of political judgement, but it was straining the law very far to call them treasonable.
[3] When Lawrence Hill's wife boldly accused Miles Prance, the Crown's chief witness, of perjury in open court, Scroggs said incredulously "You cannot think that he will swear three men out of their lives for nothing?".
The Chief Justice on this occasion threw grave doubt on the trustworthiness of Bedloe and Oates as witnesses, and warned the jury to be careful in accepting their evidence.
Nevertheless, his proposing the Duke of York's health at the Lord Mayor's dinner a few months later, in the presence of Shaftesbury, indicated his determination not to support the Exclusionists against the known wishes of the King.
At the trials of Elizabeth Cellier and of Lord Castlemaine in June of the same year, both of whom were acquitted, he discredited Dangerfield's evidence, calling him "a notorious villain ... he was in Chelmsford gaol", and on the former occasion committed the witness to prison.
In the same month, he discharged the grand jury of Middlesex before the end of term in order to save the Duke of York from indictment as a popish recusant, a proceeding which the House of Commons declared to be illegal, and which was made an article in the impeachment of Scroggs in January 1681.
The dissolution of Parliament put an end to the impeachment, but the King now felt secure enough to dispense with his services, and in April Scroggs, much it seems to his own surprise, was removed from the bench, although with a generous pension.
[19] Scroggs was a judge at a time when many members of the High Court Bench were considered corrupt and unfair, and his temper and treatment of defendants were an example of the endemic problems with the judiciary, whose coarse and brutal manners shocked most educated laymen.
Forty years after his death, Jonathan Swift in his celebrated attack on William Whitshed, Lord Chief Justice of Ireland, called him "as vile and profligate a villain as Scroggs".
Scroggs was the author of a work on the Practice of Courts-Leet and Courts-Baron (published posthumously in London, 1701), and he edited reports of the state trials over which he presided.
