Meal-tub Plot

Meal-tub Plot, a conspiracy fabricated in 1679 by Thomas Dangerfield to gain credit as an informer equal to that of Titus Oates and Bedloe. The son of a Roundhead farmer, he was born about 1650 at Waltham in Essex, and he had first started with the baseless assertion that the Presbyterians were conspiring to destroy the government and set up a republic. When this was discovered to be a lie he was flung into Newgate, whereupon he rounded at once upon the Roman Catholics, declaring that the pretended Presbyterian plot was only a cover for their own design upon the king's life, and that the papers would be found concealed at the bottom of a meal-tub in the house of one Mrs Cellier, who, together with Lady Powis, was actually tried and acquitted for the plot. Dangerfield himself was whipped and pilloried in June 1685, and on his way back from Tyburn was killed by a blow in the eye from the cane of a barrister, Robert Frances, who was executed for the murder.