Only three men, John Gerard, Peter Vowell (a schoolmaster) and Somerset Fox were brought to trial before the High Court of Justice. The trial began on 3 June. Fox pleaded guilty (and was sentenced to transportation to
Barbados). The other two were convicted on the evidence of ten of their accomplices, one of whom was Gerard's brother Charles, a youth of nineteen, he himself being but twenty-two. Gerard declared that he had been to Paris on private business, and that Charles II had desired his friends not to engage in plots. The reluctant evidence of his younger brother Charles, to whom he sent his forgiveness from the scaffold, pointed to treasonable conversations with Henshaw and the rest in taverns. Gerard and Vowell were sentenced to death by hanging. Vowell was hanged, but Gerard successfully petitioned to be beheaded instead. Gerard died with undaunted courage on 10 July 1654 at
Tower Hill, avowing his Royalism, but denying all participation in the conspiracy. The Royalist writers published a copy of his prepared speech, and affirmed that he fell into a trap set by Cromwell. This view has been elaborately restated by Reginald Palgrave in the
English Historical Review for October 1888, in the course of a controversy between that writer and
C. H. Firth. However, no certain proof has been adduced of Cromwell's complicity. ==Notes==