More trials followed quickly. The trials and testimony in courtrooms were filled with conflicting evidence. Both the Hughsons and Peggy Kerry were tried on June 4. They were sentenced to hang eight days later. At the height of the hysteria, half of the city's male slaves over the age of 16 were implicated in the plot and jailed. Arrests, trials and executions continued through the summer. "The 'epidemic of mutual incrimination' reached such proportions that officials were forced to suspend circuit courts for the rest of 1741. The jails simply could hold no more people." An anonymous letter was sent to the city of New York, cautioning them against the epidemic of suspicion and executions, as the writer claimed to have seen in the Salem witch trials. Five men known as the "Spanish Negroes" were among those arrested. Dark-skinned Spanish sailors who had been sold into slavery by a privateer, they contended they were full Spanish citizens and unfairly enslaved. Because Britain was at war with Spain, this did not earn them much sympathy; it even raised suspicions against them as infiltrators. The British colonists were worried about anyone with Spanish and Catholic ties. The five Spanish blacks were convicted and hanged. At the height of the trials' hysteria Horsmanden believed he had found an irrefutable link between the Papists and fires. As the investigation wore on, Horsmanden also came to believe that a man named John Ury was responsible. Ury had just arrived in town and had been working as a school teacher and a private tutor. He was an expert in Latin, which was enough to make him suspect by less educated Protestants as possibly being a Roman Catholic priest. Horsmanden arrested him on suspicion of being a priest and Spanish secret agent. Burton suddenly "remembered" that Ury had been one of the plotters of the conspiracy and testified against him. Ury was put on trial. His defense was that he was a dissenter from the Church of England, but not a Catholic priest, and had no knowledge of any conspiracy. But at the time of the trial, Horsmanden had received a warning from the governor of Georgia that Spanish agents were coming to burn all the considerable towns in New England. James Ogelthorpe, founder and governor of Georgia, sent word to Prosecutor Joseph Murray that the Spanish were planning a secret invasion of the British colonies: A