On 24 February 1660 one Tobias Knowles – most likely Tobias Knowles (d.1669), pewterer of St Peter Cornhill, London, and afterwards a common councilman – gave evidence at the London sessions of the peace held in the Old Bailey. Knowles was charged with forging foreign coinage, a less serious offence than counterfeiting coin of the realm, which was a treasonous capital crime. He was to be declared innocent by a jury, but what is interesting for our purposes is that his testimony reveals details of a plot. Although Knowles's evidence cannot be regarded as entirely trustworthy because he sought to avoid implicating himself, a narrative can still be pieced together. In early spring 1659, accompanied by Thomas Violet (1609?–1662), a scheming goldsmith and possibly also his neighbour, Knowles claimed to have gone to ‘Dukes-Place’ in London's East End. There the pair apparently entered the ‘Synagogue of the Jewes’ where they spoke with ‘Mr. Moses their High-Priest’ and some other unidentified Jews with whom Violet was apparently ‘very conversant’. These details can be substantiated. On 19 December 1656 a hitherto secret Jew of foreign origin called Antonio Carvajal (c.1596–d. 1659) had, following his endenization, signed a 21-year lease for a brick tenement on Creechurch Lane in the parish of St Katherine Creechurch. By March 1657 this structure was being converted into a synagogue.