Maurus Corker

Maurus Corker (baptised James; 1636 – 22 December 1715) was an English Benedictine who was falsely accused and imprisoned as a result of the fabricated Popish Plot, but was acquitted of treason and eventually released.

He was born in Yorkshire. His baptismal name was James: he took the name Maurus when he entered the Benedictine order. On 23 April 1656, he took vows at the English Benedictine Lamspringe Abbey near Hildesheim, in Germany, and returned to England as a missionary in 1665.

Being accused by Titus Oates of collusion in the Popish Plot, (which was in fact Oates's own invention), he was imprisoned in Newgate Prison, but was acquitted of treason by a London jury, 18 July 1679. His acquittal was due in part to his own eloquent defence (he has been described as one of the ablest priests of his generation), and in part due to his good fortune in being tried with Sir George Wakeman, personal physician to Queen Catherine of Braganza. The Crown was determined to save Wakeman, and Lord Chief Justice William Scroggs, formerly a firm believer in the Plot, now turned on Oates and the other informers, denouncing them as liars. Despite his notorious antipathy to Catholic priests, Scroggs made no effort to distinguish between Wakeman and the three priests who were tried with him, warning the jury that no accused person, priest or layman, should suffer death for treason if there was any doubt as to their guilt.

Corker was returned to prison, and was then arraigned for acting as a priest within England, an offence which carried the death penalty although after the death of Elizabeth I the law had fallen into disuse until the advent of the Popish Plot. He was tried with six others, including the leading Dominican Lionel Anderson, and the colourful, one-legged Civil War veteran Colonel Henry Starkey. One of the seven, David Kemiss (or Kemish), was found unfit to plead on the grounds of his great age and ill-health, while another, Alexander Lumsden, was acquitted, on the ground that he was a Scot, not an Englishman, and therefore could not be said to have "acted as a priest in England" within the meaning of the statute of 1585.

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