What effect a verdict of Guilty and the near prospect of the gallows might produce on him remained to be seen.
His accomplices were by no means willing that his fortitude should be tried by so severe a test.

They therefore employed numerous artifices, legal and illegal, to avert a conviction.

A woman named Clifford, with whom he had lodged, and who was one of the most active and cunning agents of the Jacobite faction, was entrusted with the duty of keeping him steady to the cause, and of rendering to him services from which scrupulous or timid agents might have shrunk.

When the dreaded day came, Fuller was too ill to appear in the witness box, and the trial was consequently postponed.

He asserted that his malady was not natural, that a noxious drug had been administered to him in a dish of porridge, that his nails were discoloured, that his hair came off, and that able physicians pronounced him poisoned.