LONDON^243lowing an attempted assassination of Frederick William IV in May 1850
and Kinkel's escape from prison the same year.^75 Peter Nothjung, a
journeyman tailor and a member of the Cologne Central Committee, was
arrested in Leipzig while travelling on League business: on his person
were found copies of the Communist Manifesto, Marx's March Address, the
Cologne Address of December, the new statutes and a list of addresses
which enabled the authorities to arrest the ten other members of the
(Cologne Committee. The prosecution was not at first successful: follow-
ing the arrests, six months of investigation revealed no more than that
the accused were members of a propaganda society and failed to show any
conspiracy or plot to overthrow the regime; and the judicial authorities in
the Rhineland (who retained from the French occupation a more liberal
legal system and an antipathy to Prussia) duly declared that there was not
enough evidence to justify a trial. The result, however, was not release but
further imprisonment while the Government's agent, Stieber, attempted to
secure the necessary evidence.
Marx set up a committee which collected money for the accused and
organised letters from his friends to as many British newspapers as possi-
ble protesting against the imprisonment without trial. But, public opinion
was not impressed, The Times declaring that 'if the whole gang were
treated as "sturdy beggars" instead of conspirators, they would be dealt
with more according to their true characters'.^74 The trial was continually
postponed during the summer of 1852 and when eventually it opened
in October the prosecution revealed the evidence it had been so long
accumulating it amounted to nothing more than an attempt to associate
Marx and the Cologne communists with some of the more bizarre
schemes of Willich's Paris friends - the principal exhibit being a notebook
purporting to contain the minutes of meetings of the Communist League
recently held in London under Marx's leadership. The notebook was a
pure fabrication by one of Stieber's agents, helped by Hirsch, a former
member of the League. No attempt had been made to imitiate the
handwriting of Liebknecht and Rings, the two supposed minute writers.
In fact, Rings was the one member of the group who hardly knew how
to write; and Liebknecht's initial was wrong. Marx made two trips to the
Police Court in Marlborough Street to authenticate a sample of Lieb-
knecht's actual handwriting and corroborate the testimony of the owner
of the public house where they met, who was willing to confirm that no
minutes were ever taken and that the dates of the meetings were in any
case inaccurate. This and other information had to be sent off to the
defence counsel in Cologne in several copies through cover addresses.
Jenny Marx described the scene in their household: