stressed to the jury. A stream of witnesses spoke of his good character, including a judge, an MP, his butcher, brewer, confectioner and solicitor—his coal merchant thought Acton "improper for the post he was in from his too great compassion"—and he was found not guilty on all charges. The Gaols Committee had managed to draw attention to the plight of England's prisoners, but reform had eluded them. Notable prisoners Although most Marshalsea prisoners were debtors, the prison was second in importance only to the Tower of London. From the 14th century onwards, minor political figures were held there instead of in the Tower, mostly for sedition. William Hepworth Dixon wrote in 1885 that it was full of "poets, pirates, parsons, plotters; coiners, libellers, defaulters, Jesuits; vagabonds of every class who vexed the souls of men in power ..." During the Elizabethan era, it became the main holding prison for Roman Catholics suspected of sedition. Bishop Bonner, the last Roman Catholic Bishop of London, was imprisoned there in 1559, supposedly for his own safety, until his death 10 years later. William Herle, a spy for Lord Burghley, Elizabeth I's chief adviser, was held there in 1570 and 1571. According to historian Robyn Adams, the prison leaked both physically and metaphorically; in correspondence about Marshalsea prisoners suspected of involvement in a 1571 plot to kill the Queen, Herle wrote of a network within the prison for smuggling information out of it, which included hiding letters in holes in the crumbling brickwork for others to pick up. Intellectuals regularly found themselves in the Marshalsea. The playwright Ben Jonson, a friend of Shakespeare, was jailed in 1597 for his play The Isle of Dogs, which was immediately suppressed, with no extant copies; on 28 July that year the Privy Council was told it was a "lewd plaie that was plaied in one of the plaie houses on the Bancke Side, contaynynge very seditious and sclandrous matter". The poet Christopher Brooke was jailed in 1601 for helping 17-year-old Ann More marry John Donne without her father's consent. George Wither, the political satirist, wrote his poem "The Shepherds Hunting" in 1614 in the Marshalsea; he was held for four months for libel over his Abuses Stript and Whipt (1613), 20 satires criticizing revenge, ambition and lust, one of them directed at the Lord Chancellor. Nicholas Udall, vicar of Braintree and headmaster of Eton College, was sent