Conspiracy Culture in Stuart England: The Mysterious Death of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey (Studies in Early Modern Cultural, Political and Social History, 48) 9781783277629, 9781800108264, 1783277629

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STUDIES IN EARLY MODERN CULTURAL, POLITICAL AND SOCIAL HISTORY Volume 48

CONSPIRACY CULTURE IN STUART ENGLAND

Studies in Early Modern Cultural, Political and Social History ISSN: 1476-9107 Series editors Tim Harris – Brown University Stephen Taylor – Durham University Andy Wood – Durham University Previously published titles in the series are listed at the back of this volume ‎

CONSPIRACY CULTURE IN STUART ENGLAND THE MYSTERIOUS DEATH OF SIR EDMUND BERRY GODFREY

Andrea McKenzie

THE BOYDELL PRESS

© Andrea McKenzie 2022 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation ‎no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, ‎published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, ‎transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, ‎without the prior permission of the copyright owner The right of Andrea McKenzie to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 First published 2022 The Boydell Press, Woodbridge ISBN 978-1-78327-762-9 (hardback) ISBN 978-1-80010-826-4 (ePDF) The Boydell Press is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd ‎PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK ‎and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. ‎668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620-2731, USA ‎website: www.boydellandbrewer.com A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library The publisher has no responsibility for the continued existence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate Front cover: image from John Gadbury, A True Narrative of the Horrid Hellish Popish-Plot, to the tune of Packingtons Pound, the first Part (1682), Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

For Simon ‎

Contents List of Illustrations ix Acknowledgements x Abbreviations xii Chronology of Events xv Dramatis Personae xxii Introduction. The Bottomless Pit: Conspiracy Theories and the Death of a Westminster Magistrate

1

1. The Usual Suspects: The Case against the Catholics The English anti-Catholic conspiracist tradition Rumours, hearsay and the corpus delicti Accusers and accused

16 21 26 33

2 An Inside Job? The Earl of Danby and Other Court Suspects A constitutional and conspiratorial crisis Thomas Osborne, earl of Danby An Anglican plot? Israel Tonge’s ‘very honourable friends’ Plots and counterplots: Danby in the Tower

51 54 59 66 76

3 ‘The Devil in his Clothes’: Suicide Theories, Then and Now Early suicide theories Roger L’Estrange’s crime scene investigation ‘Master of a dangerous secret’: Godfrey’s mental state Spectral sightings: tracking Godfrey’s last movements Ockham’s razor?

87 89 98 105 115 120

4 ‘Managery … behind the Curtain’? Oppositional Plots and Whig Lords True crime, false leads and tall tales Shaftesbury and subornation Whig suspects and oppositional secrets

123 128 138 147

5. ‘Horrible Secrets … not for his Majesty’s Service’: The Evidence of William Lloyd’s Shorthand The correspondence of Roger L’Estrange and William Lloyd Royal suspects and secrets ‘Died Abner as a fool dieth?’ What William Lloyd believed

159 162 174 188

vii

CONTENTS

Conclusion. A Bipartisan Martyr? In Search of the Real Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey ‘Keeping faire with boeth sides’: Godfrey as critic, courtier, mediator and sleuth A plausible suspect: the secrets of ‘a certain great man’ A possible murder scenario

195 196 208 221

Select Bibliography 229 Index 241

viii

Illustrations 1

Portrait of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, by Frederick Hendrik van Hove, published by Joseph Nutting, © National Portrait Gallery, London, UK

2 and 3 Images from John Gadbury, A True Narrative of the Horrid Hellish Popish-Plot, to the tune of Packingtons Pound, the first Part (1682), Huntington Library, San Marino, California 4

5 6

18

47

Godfrey’s last known movements, Saturday 12 October 1678, superimposed on a detail from William Morgan’s London &c. actually surveyed in 1682, Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division

118

Detail of Lloyd’s shorthand response to L’Estrange’s letter of 13 April 1686 (Lloyd Papers, No. 76), Gloucestershire Archives

168

Detail of Lloyd’s shorthand response to L’Estrange’s letter of 13 April 1686 (Lloyd Letters, No. 76), Gloucestershire Archives

171

7

Detail of Lloyd’s undated shorthand response to L’Estrange’s letter of 20 April 1686 (Lloyd Letters, No. 78), Gloucestershire Archives 173

8

Detail of text quoted from Lloyd’s undated shorthand response to L’Estrange’s letter of 20 April 1686 (Lloyd Letters, No. 78), Gloucestershire Archives

173

Detail of conclusion of Lloyd’s shorthand response to L’Estrange’s letter of 13 April 1686 (Lloyd Letters, No. 76), Gloucestershire Archives

173

9

The author and publisher are grateful to all the institutions and individuals listed for permission to reproduce the materials in which they hold copyright. Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders; apologies are offered for any omission, and the publisher will be pleased to add any necessary acknowledgement in subsequent editions.

ix

Acknowledgements This book was written from December 2020 to February 2022, under the shadow of the pandemic. The fact that the project was completed under the usual radar of academic conferences, university visits and discussions in the archives often made me feel like something of a conspirator – or a conspiracist – myself, writing furtively at home in my pyjamas and slippers in between Zoom lectures and virtual meetings. The project soon snowballed, as I realised that the article I had originally planned to write on the shorthand drafts of William Lloyd’s correspondence with Roger L’Estrange about Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey’s death could not do justice either to the labyrinthine complexity of this most partisan of murder mysteries, or to the enigmatic personality of the victim himself. As I was drawn further into the byzantine and conspiratorial world of Restoration politics, the article became a short, and then, a longer book. My research on the larger topic of the Popish Plot goes back much further, however, and in that time I have accrued many debts large and small. I am grateful for an initial grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada, as well as to the archivists and staff at many record offices and libraries in both North America and Europe. I can never thank enough our dear friends Berna Hudson and Presley Warner, and Scott, Alexia, Christina and Katya, for so generously welcoming us into their home in London during our research trips over the years. On a less personal note, I have greatly benefited from the herculean work of all those, past and present, who have contributed to the great works of transcribing, editing and, later, digitising seventeenth-century manuscript material: amongst others, the Historical Manuscript Commission, the Calendar of State Papers Domestic, State Papers Online, not to mention diaries and journals such as those of Samuel Pepys, John Evelyn, Narcissus Luttrell and, more recently, Roger Morrice. I am also grateful to those who have worked in the Early English Books and Eighteenth Century and British History Online projects, as well as the wonderful reference resources such as the ODNB and the History of Parliament. More than anything else, the impetus for this project grew out of a talk I was invited to give on Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey at a conference on conspiracies organised by the Spectrum high school Challenge Program in May 2019. The interest and encouragement of this remarkable group of young people not only inspired me to include a section on Godfrey’s mysterious death in a new course I was co-teaching on the history of conspiracies and moral panics, but to embark on my own investigation. The book has retained largely the same structure as that first talk and subsequent lectures on the subject, improved by the keen x

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

insights and questions of many great students along the way. I have also been lucky in my convivial History Department at the University of Victoria and a succession of supportive chairs. Several friends and colleagues – Penny Bryden, Rachel Cleves and Mariel Grant – have kindly read parts of the manuscript or offered useful advice and suggestions. Hélène Cazes and Cedric Littlewood generously helped me work through two particularly difficult passages in French and Latin, respectively. I am grateful to Lindsay O’Neill and Vanessa Wilkie for having invited me to present an early version of some of these ideas at the Early Modern Studies Institute at the Huntington Library in February 2020, as well as to the participants of that group. I have benefited from feedback on an earlier paper on shorthand from various members of the Pacific Coast Conference on British Studies: Susan Amussen, Jenny Anderson, Tom Cogswell, David Cressy, Lori Anne Ferrell, Sears McGee, Kathleen Noonan, Mary Robertson and Michelle Tusan, as well as from suggestions from David Como as this project was wrapping up. I owe a particularly heartfelt debt of gratitude to my ‘writing friends’ Melissa Mowry and Dana Rabin, without whose inspiration this book would have been written much more slowly, or maybe not at all. Nick Rogers offered good advice early on, and I am grateful to Stephen Taylor for his kind and very thorough suggestions. I owe special thanks to Tim Harris for his encouragement, helpful feedback and keen eye, and am still in awe of both the breadth and depth of his knowledge and the speed with which he commented on drafts. I am much indebted to the readers and the editors at Boydell generally (and absolve them of responsibility for the split infinitives and contractions that remain). My parents, Pearl and Ken McKenzie, have as always lent unconditional love and support. My greatest debt of all is to my husband and fellow British historian, Simon Devereaux, who read and commented on everything with his usual tact, insight and generosity. This book is dedicated to him with love and gratitude. ‎

xi

Abbreviations Note on sources: unless otherwise noted, printed works are published in London. In quotations of primary documents, I have retained the original spelling and capitalisation, but have extended abbreviated words. Dates are according to the Old Style (Julian) calendar used in England until 1752, which was in this period ten days behind the New Style (Gregorian) calendar used on the continent; the beginning of the year I have however taken to begin 1 January. In the case of French diplomatic sources, originally dated in New Style, I have also inserted Old Style dates. AAE

Add MS Baschet

BL Bod. Burnet

Care CJ Compendium

Coventry Papers CSPD Dalrymple DRO

Archives des Affaires Etrangères, Archives diplomatiques de la Courneuve, Paris Additional manuscript The National Archives, transcripts by Armand Baschet, PRO 31/3, letters to Louis XIV from French ambassadors British Library Bodleian Library, Oxford Bishop Burnet’s History of his own Time (ed.), Martin Joseph Routh, 2nd ed. (3 vols, Oxford, 1833) Henry Care, The History of the Damnable Popish Plot (1681) Journals of the House of Commons Roger Palmer, The Compendium: or, a Short View of the Late Tryals, in Relation to the Present Plot Against his Majesty and Government (1679) Longleat, Coventry MSS, Bath ACLS British Manuscripts Project (microfilm) Calendar of State Papers Domestic John Dalrymple, Memoirs of Great Britain and Ireland (4 vols, Dublin, 1773–88) Derbyshire Record Office xii

ABBREVIATIONS

Elmer

Examen Grey, Debates Haley HJ HLQ HMC Kenyon Knight

L’Estrange LJ Lloyd letters Lloyd, Sermon Lords MSS

Luttrell

Marks Marshall

Marshall, ‘Correspondence’

Peter Elmer, The Miraculous Conformist: Valentine Greatrakes, the Body Politic, and the Politics of Healing in Restoration Britain (Oxford, 2012) Roger North, Examen (1740) Anchitell Grey, Debates of the House of Commons (1763) K.H.D. Haley, The First Earl of Shaftesbury (Oxford, 1968) Historical Journal Huntington Library Quarterly Historical Manuscripts Commission John Kenyon, The Popish Plot (New York, 1972) Stephen Knight, The Killing of Justice Godfrey: An Investigation into England’s Most Remarkable Unsolved Murder (1984) Roger L’Estrange, Brief History of the Times (3 vols, 1688) Journals of the House of Lords Bishop Lloyd’s autograph letters, Gloucestershire Archives D3549/2/2/1 William Lloyd, A Sermon at the Funeral of Sr Edmund-Berry Godfrey (1678) HMC, 11th report, Appendix, Part II. The Manuscripts of the House of Lords, 1678–1688 (1887) Narcissus Luttrell, A Brief Historical Relation of State Affairs from September 1678 to April 1714 (6 vols, Oxford, 1857) Alfred Marks, Who Killed Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey? (1905) Alan Marshall, The Strange Death of Edmund Godfrey: Plots and Politics in Restoration London (Phoenix Mill, 1999) Alan Marshall, ‘The Westminster Magistrate and the Irish Stroker: Sir Edmund Godfrey and Valentine Greatrakes, Some Unpublished Correspondence’, HJ, 40 (1997) xiii

ABBREVIATIONS

Muddiman Newdigate Newsletters NLI ODNB

OED Ormonde

PC 2 Pollock

Rawl Shaftesbury Papers SP 29 SP 44 State Trials

Treby Papers Tuke

J.G. Muddiman, ‘The Mystery of Sir E.B. Godfrey’, National Review, 84 (1924) Newdigate Newsletters, Folger Shakespeare Library National Library of Ireland C.G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (eds), The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004) Oxford English Dictionary Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Marquess of Ormonde Preserved at Kilkenny Castle, New Series (8 vols, 1902–20) Registers and Minutes of the Privy Council, The National Archives John Pollock, The Popish Plot: A Study in the History of the Reign of Charles II, 2nd ed. (1903; repr. Cambridge, 1944) Rawlinson MSS, Bodleian Library Shaftesbury Papers, The National Archives, SP PRO 30/24/43/63, pt 1 State Papers Domestic, Charles II, The National Archives Domestic Entry Books, The National Archives William Cobbett, Thomas Bayly Howell, and Thomas Jones Howell (eds), A Complete Collection of State Trials (34 vols, 1809–28) George Treby Papers, Derbyshire Record Office, D239 M/O Richard Tuke, Memoires of the Life and Death of Sir Edmondbury Godfrey (1682)

‎

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Chronology of Events Note: here and throughout the book, unless otherwise indicated, the dates are in Old Style (according to the Julian calendar), but the year is taken to begin on 1 January. 1660 (October) Godfrey becomes JP for Westminster and Middlesex. 1665 Plague rages in London. 1666 Great Fire of London; Godfrey knighted. 1669 (May) Godfrey thrown into prison after ordering the arrest of the king’s physician for debt. 1669–71 Godfrey out of the commission of the peace after May 1669; reinstated April 1671. 1678 August 13. Israel Tonge obtains an audience with Charles II, whom he warns about a supposed Popish Plot against his life and the government and Church of England. 14. Christopher Kirkby and Tonge meet with the earl of Danby about the Plot. September 6. Titus Oates and Israel Tonge bring their Popish Plot informations to be sworn before Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey. 27 or 28. Oates and Tonge return to swear their informations before Godfrey. The document is dated 27 September, but Tonge, Oates and Christopher Kirkby claim they actually met with the magistrate on 28 September. Godfrey most likely sent a warning to Edward Coleman and, through him, the duke of York, shortly afterward. 27. In the late afternoon or early evening, Tonge and Oates are summoned to give evidence at the Privy Council; they arrive too late and are told to return the next day. 28. Titus Oates is examined by the Privy Council. Godfrey secretly meets with Edward Coleman at Colonel George Weldon’s house. 29. An arrest warrant is made out for Edward Coleman, whose residence is searched and his papers seized; he is put in the custody of a ‘messenger’ (royal bailiff).

xv

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30. Titus Oates claimed that Godfrey had confided to him he had been threatened by several prominent Catholics, and that he was being followed. October 1. Charles II and James duke of York go to the horse races at Newmarket. Godfrey visits Mary Gibbon, acting oddly, asking her if she had not heard that he was to be hanged for not having sooner revealed the Plot; Godfrey leaves her to meet with the lord chief justice Scroggs. 4. Coleman is committed to Newgate. 5 or 6. Richard Mulys claims that Godfrey told him he had been threatened by some ‘great men’ for having done too much, and criticised by others for not doing enough in regard to the Plot. 9. Thomas Robinson claimed that Godfrey told him that the substance of the Popish Plot had not yet been discovered, and that he feared he would be the ‘first Martyr’. 11. (Friday) Early afternoon [?]. Godfrey dines at the house of his friend Lady Margaret Pratt, where the company remarked on his ‘melancholly’. c. 4–5pm. Godfrey observed by several acquaintances as being ‘Melancholique’. c. 5pm. Godfrey seems ‘in Great Disorder’ when he drops by Henry Bradbury’s. c. 5:30–6:30pm. Godfrey attends the vestry meeting at St Martin’s Church, where his behaviour attracts notice as ‘Ghastly’ and distracted. c. 7–9pm. Godfrey pays a visit to George Weldon and shows him his pocketbook. 9–10pm [?]. Godfrey’s maid claimed that a letter had been delivered to her master, who seemed surprised and at a loss as to what answer to give the messenger; story confirmed by Sir Edmund’s housekeeper Judith Pamphlin and her daughter. 10–11pm [?]. According to Mary Gibbon, Godfrey’s housekeeper saw Godfrey burn ‘as many papers as her apron would hold’. 12. (Saturday) The day of Godfrey’s disappearance Before 7am. Richard Adams calls on Godfrey and is told he has already left home. 8am. Mary Gibbon junior calls on Godfrey but is told he is out. c. 8am. Godfrey is seen by and speaks to Richard Cooper, Mary Leeson and James Lowen in St Martin’s Lane. c. 8:30am. John Parsons supposedly told Godfrey’s clerk Henry Moor that Sir Edmund had asked him for directions to Primrose Hill or Paddington Woods. xvi

CHRONOLOGY OF EVENTS

c. 9am. William Collins claims to have seen Godfrey near Paddington. c. 9am. According to Moor, Godfrey is spotted by an acquaintance in Soho. c. 9:30–10am. Thomas Mason claims to have seen Godfrey in Marylebone, walking in the direction of his home in Charing Cross. 9–10am. According to Moor, Godfrey returns to his house in Hartshorn Lane before going out again for the last time between 9 and 10. c. 10–11am. Rumours (circulating in manuscript and printed in June 1679 in Henry Nevill Payne’s Reflections on the Earl of Danby) that Godfrey was at the Cockpit, waiting on the lord treasurer. 11am. Richard Adams claims that he called on Godfrey a second time and found the household ‘in Great Consternation’, apparently already seriously worried about their master’s absence. According to Henry Arundell of Wardour’s papers, Adams told lord Powis about 4pm that day that he had spoken to Godfrey late in the morning, c. 11am. 1pm. Last confirmed sighting near St Clement’s church by Thomas Radcliffe and his wife, who spoke to Godfrey outside the door of their house in the Strand; two other acquaintances witnessed this conversation. c. 1–2pm. According to Payne’s Reflections, Godfrey met with the lord treasurer at 1pm, and was sighted at Danby’s daughter’s lodgings nearby at about 2pm. While the claim that Godfrey was last seen at the Privy Stairs about to take a boat over the Thames with Danby’s servant Edward Christian seems to have been disproved, Godfrey’s presence in Danby’s anteroom around 1pm was apparently verified by several witnesses, including Lady Margaret Pratt, Sir John Banks, Richard Mulys and Danby’s own sister-in-law, the countess of Lindsey. c. 1pm–2pm. Adam Angus claims to have been told in a bookshop in St Paul’s churchyard that Godfrey’s body had been found in Leicester Fields, impaled on his own sword, with ‘two wounds’. 2–3pm. When Godfrey fails to meet them for a business lunch, George Weldon tells Thomas Wynnel that they will never see their friend again, as ‘the Papists have been watching for him a long time, and that now they are very confident they have got him’. Soon after, Wynnel confronts a Catholic acquaintance, Thomas Burdet, about what his ‘People’ had done to the magistrate. 13. (Sunday) Judith Pamphlin visits Mary Gibbon looking for her master. 14. (Monday) Michael and Benjamin Godfrey visit Mary Gibbon looking for their brother, and go to the Privy Council demanding that a xvii

CHRONOLOGY OF EVENTS

search be launched. Henry Moor searches for his master in the fields around Marylebone. 15. (Tuesday) Michael and Benjamin Godfrey again pressure the Privy Council to investigate their brother’s disappearance. Henry Moor attends a funeral of a neighbour, where he announces that his master is missing. A servant of the mother of one of the coroner’s jurymen searches the area near Primrose Hill for a lost calf. 16. (Wednesday) The king and the duke of York return from Newmarket. Hunters with hounds supposedly see nothing in the area where Godfrey’s body is later found. 17. (Thursday) c. 2pm. William Bromwell and John Walters (or Waters) spot Godfrey’s stick, gloves, belt and scabbard lying by a ditch near the White House tavern at Primrose Hill. c. 5pm. Bromwell and Walters, accompanied by the master of the White House, John Rawson, discover Godfrey’s body. c. 6pm. A constable and neighbours arrive at the scene. c. 6–8pm. The body is removed to the White House and word is sent to Godfrey’s household and brothers. c. 9–10pm. Godfrey’s brother-in-law Christopher Pluncknett and Danby’s servant Serjeant John Ramsey arrive at the scene. c. 10pm–1am. Danby and the king are informed of the discovery of Godfrey’s body. c. 1am–3am. A coroner’s jury meets at the White House but retires without a verdict. 18. (Friday) Morning. The coroner’s jury re-convenes at the Rose and Crown at St Giles in the Fields, deliberating until 4am Saturday 19 October. 12 noon. The surgeons Zachariah Skillard and Nicholas Cambridge examine Godfrey’s body. 21. The 17th session of the Long (Cavalier) Parliament meets. Arrest of the ‘five popish lords’: Petre, Arundell, Belasyse, Stafford and Powis. 30. Royal proclamation orders Catholics to withdraw ten miles from London and Westminster. 31. Godfrey’s funeral at St Martin-in-the-Fields; William Lloyd delivers the sermon. William Bedloe writes to the secretary of state, claiming to have information about Godfrey’s death. November 27. Edward Coleman is tried and convicted for treason at the Old Bailey. xviii

CHRONOLOGY OF EVENTS

December 3. Coleman is executed at Tyburn. 19. Letters are produced in Parliament implicating Danby in soliciting money from France. 21. Arrest of Miles Prance. 23. Prance delivers initial confession, implicating Green, Berry and Hill in Godfrey’s murder. 29. Prance recants his evidence and then vacillates between recantation and his original confession. 30. Parliament is prorogued. 1679 January 11. Prance retracts his recantation, and delivers a fuller confession. 24. Parliament is dissolved. February 8. Samuel Pepys’s clerk Samuel Atkins is acquitted at the Old Bailey of Godfrey’s murder. 10. Trial and conviction of Green, Berry and Hill for Godfrey’s murder. 21. Green and Hill are executed at Tyburn. 28. Berry is executed at Tyburn. March 6. 1st Exclusion (or Habeas Corpus) Parliament meets. 22. Commons votes to impeach Danby. April 15. Exclusion Bill is introduced in the House of Commons. Bill of attainder against the earl of Danby, who is committed to the Tower the following day. 27. Parliament is prorogued. July 12. Parliament is dissolved. 1680 October 21. 2nd Exclusion Parliament meets. November. 15. Exclusion Bill is defeated in the Lords. 1681 January 10. Parliament is prorogued. 18. Parliament is dissolved. March 10. Edward Fitzharris deposes that Godfrey’s ‘murder was consulted at Windsor’. xix

CHRONOLOGY OF EVENTS

21. 3rd Exclusion (Oxford) Parliament meets. 28. Parliament is dissolved. May 16. A Middlesex grand jury indicts the earl of Danby for Godfrey’s murder. 25. James Magrath visits Danby in the Tower, offering evidence that Godfrey had hanged himself. 1682 June 20. Nathaniel Thompson, John Farwell and William Payne are convicted at the King’s Bench for libel, for writing and publishing the first and second Letter to Miles Prance in February and March, respectively. 1684 February 12. Danby is released from the Tower of London. 1685 February 8. Death of Charles II and accession of James II. May 8. Titus Oates is convicted at the King’s Bench for perjury. 1686 February 19. James II grants L’Estrange a warrant to reopen the investigation into Godfrey’s death. 13 April–2 May. Correspondence of L’Estrange and Lloyd about Godfrey’s death. June 15. Miles Prance pleads guilty to perjury. 1688 The third part of L’Estrange’s Brief History of the Times, which argued that Godfrey had committed suicide by falling on his own sword at Primrose Hill, is published. June 10. Birth of James II and Mary of Modena’s son, James Francis Edward Stuart. 29–30. The ‘Seven Bishops’ are acquitted at their trial at the King’s Bench for seditious libel. 30. William of Orange receives an invitation from the ‘Immortal Seven’ (including Danby and Compton) to claim the throne for himself and his wife Mary, James’s daughter. November 5. William of Orange and his invading army make landfall in England, at Torbay. xx

CHRONOLOGY OF EVENTS

December 23. James flees England for France. 1689 February 6. Parliament offers the throne jointly to William and Mary. 1740 Roger North’s Examen is published, arguing that Godfrey was murdered by opponents of the crown in order to promote the Popish Plot. 1903 John Pollock’s book on the Popish Plot argues that Jesuits murdered Godfrey to protect the duke of York, who had secretly hosted their society’s triannual meeting at St James. 1905 Alfred Marks’s book on Godfrey reasserts L’Estrange’s suicide thesis. 1924 J.G. Muddiman claims Godfrey was murdered by Philip Herbert, 7th earl of Pembroke. 1984 Stephen Knight argues that Godfrey was a double agent murdered on the orders of the ‘Peyton Gang’, associated with the radical republican Green Ribbon Club. 1999 Alan Marshall publishes a book on Godfrey’s death, arguing that the magistrate strangled himself and his suicide was covered up by his brothers. ‎

xxi

Dramatis Personae The name by which the individuals below are commonly referred to in the text, in some instances a title or, in the case of royalty, a first name, is bolded. Richard Adams, Middlesex JP and fellow member of the ‘Peyton Gang’; friend of Godfrey’s. Henry, 3rd baron Arundell, of Wardour (1608–94), Catholic peer accused by Titus Oates of complicity in the Plot; often referred to as one of ‘the five popish lords’ (with Petre, Stafford, Belasyse and Powis) imprisoned in the Tower of London from late October 1678; released without trial, February 1684; privy to the secret provisions of the 1670 Treaty of Dover. Samuel Atkins, Samuel Pepys’s clerk at the Admiralty; accused by Bedloe of murdering Godfrey, but acquitted on 8 February 1679 because of a watertight alibi. Paul Barillon (or Barrillon) d’Amoncourt, marquis de Branges (1630–91), French ambassador to England, 1677–88. Thomas Barlow (c. 1608–91), bishop of Lincoln; a doctrinal Calvinist and anti-Catholic; former mentor of Israel Tonge; voted for the Exclusion Bill. William Bedloe (or Bedlow; d. 1680), a Plot witness who emerges in early November 1678, claiming that he has firsthand knowledge of Godfrey’s murder, supposedly committed at Somerset House, the queen’s residence. John 1st baron Belasyse (or Bellasis; 1614–98), Catholic peer accused by Titus Oates of complicity in the Plot; one of ‘the five popish lords’ imprisoned in the Tower of London from late October 1678; released without trial in February 1684. Charles Howard, 2nd earl of Berkshire (1615–79), Catholic peer and client of the duke of Buckingham; correspondent of Edward Coleman; flees to France after Popish Plot revelations. Henry Berry, porter at Somerset House, accused by Miles Prance of complicity in Godfrey’s murder; executed in February 1679. William Boyce, a glass eye-maker, a Protestant friend of Miles Prance. William Bromwell, a baker and regular at the White House tavern; along with

xxii

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John Walters (or Waters), discovered Godfrey’s body near Primrose Hill on 17 October 1678. John Brown, constable who identified Godfrey’s body, and ordered it to be taken to the White House. George Villiers, 2nd duke of Buckingham (1628–87), prominent Restoration rake and statesman and on and off-again favourite of Charles II; erstwhile patron, later enemy to Danby. Gilbert Burnet (1643–1715), Scottish historian and Anglican clergyman with latitudinarian sympathies; bishop of Salisbury (1689); friend of William Lloyd and acquaintance of Godfrey. Nicholas Cambridge, surgeon at the coroner’s inquest; testified at trial of Green, Berry and Hill. Henry Care, Whig polemicist and publisher. Roger Palmer, earl of Castlemaine (1634–1705), Catholic apologist and husband to Charles II’s favourite mistress in the 1660s, Barbara Palmer, née Villiers, later countess of Castlemaine and then duchess of Cleveland; accused of complicity in the Plot but acquitted in June 1680. Catherine of Braganza (1638–1705), Portuguese Catholic princess and queen of England; married Charles II in 1662, but produced no living offspring. William Bedloe and Miles Prance place the murder of Godfrey in her residence, Somerset House. Elizabeth Cellier, Catholic activist, polemicist and midwife, worked closely with the countess of Powis and imprisoned Catholics; pilloried for libel for her pamphlet Malice Defeated, which claimed that Prance and other Catholics imprisoned in Newgate were tortured. Charles II (1630–85), king of England and Scotland (1660–85). Edward Christian, confidential servant of the earl of Danby; accused in the libels written and distributed by Henry Payne of having murdered Godfrey on Danby’s orders. Edward Coleman (1636–78), Catholic convert, protégé of the duke of York and former secretary to his duchess. Coleman is named in Oates’s Popish Plot informations and imprisoned and his papers seized in late September; tried and executed for treason in December 1678. Henry Compton (1632–1713), bishop of London from 1675 to his death; ally of Danby’s, ardent antipapist and prosecutor of the Plot, member of the Lords committee investigating the conspiracy; one of the ‘Immortal Seven’ issuing invitation to William of Orange in 1688.

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Francis Corral, a coachman imprisoned in Newgate in November 1678 on suspicion of having transported Godfrey’s body to Primrose Hill. Henry Coventry, senior secretary of state (i.e. of the southern department), 1674–80. Elizabeth Curtis or Draper, Edmund Godfrey’s maid. Sir Thomas Osborne, earl of Danby (1632–1712); later marquess of Carmarthen and duke of Leeds; lord treasurer (1673–79) and Charles II’s principal minister at the time of Godfrey’s death; impeached by the Commons in December 1678, forced to resign his office in March 1679; imprisoned in the Tower of London, April 1679–February 1684; one of the ‘Immortal Seven’ inviting William of Orange to England in 1688. Stephen Dugdale (d. 1683), Plot witness; came forward in December 1678; claimed to have read a letter in Staffordshire reporting on Godfrey’s murder before the discovery of the body; turned court informer after 1681. Lawrence Dupuy, barber and confidential servant of James duke of York; his name is linked to Godfrey’s murder by Edward Fitzharris and Bryan Haynes. Edward Fitzharris, Irish Catholic double agent, probably hired by the duchess of Portsmouth to plant a seditious paper on Whig leaders; he turned Plot witness after being arrested in March 1681; accused Danby of complicity in Godfrey’s murder in May 1681; executed in July 1681. Mary Gibbon, Catholic friend to Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey; the main source of evidence that Godfrey was depressed and may have taken his own life. Benjamin Godfrey, brother to Sir Edmund and Michael Godfrey. Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey (1621–78), coal merchant, woodmonger and Westminster justice of the peace; knighted in 1666; goes missing on Saturday 12 October; his body is discovered near Primrose Hill in the late afternoon/early evening of Thursday 17 October. Michael Godfrey, brother to Sir Edmund and Benjamin; foreman of the secondary Middlesex grand jury (for Enfield) that indicted Danby for Sir Edmund’s murder, May 1681. Valentine Greatrakes, Anglo-Irish JP, businessman and faith healer or ‘stroker’, friend and correspondent of Edmund Berry Godfrey. Robert Green, cushion layer in the queen’s chapel in Somerset House; accused by Prance of Godfrey’s murder and executed in February 1678. William Griffith, underclerk to Henry Coventry, principal secretary of state. Godfrey Harrison, nephew to Edmund Berry Godfrey.

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Jane Harrison, sister to Edmund, Michael and Benjamin Godfrey and Sarah Pluncknett. Lawrence Hill, servant to Dr Godwin, treasurer of the queen’s chapel in Somerset House; accused by Prance of Godfrey’s murder and executed in February 1678. James duke of York (1633–1701), brother and heir to Charles II, whose Catholicism is effectively public knowledge after 1673; later James VII and II of Scotland and England (1685–88). Widely viewed as privy to Edward Coleman’s seditious correspondence with French and papal agents and hence a suspect in Godfrey’s murder. Sir William Jones, lawyer and Whig MP, attorney general (1675–October 1679). Sir Roger L’Estrange (1616–1704), Tory propagandist, licenser of the press and author of the Brief History of the Times (1688) arguing that Godfrey’s death was suicide; knighted 1685. Thomas Lloyd, Danby’s servant, who carried messages from Israel Tonge to the lord treasurer. William Lloyd (1627–1717), Anglican clergyman; vicar of St Martin-in-theFields in 1678, preached at Godfrey’s funeral; bishop of St Asaph (1680) and Worcester (1690). One of the ‘Seven Bishops’ charged in 1688 with seditious libel for opposing James II’s Declaration of Indulgence. Louis XIV, king of France (b. 1638; r. 1643–1715). Mary of Modena, duchess of York; married James duke of York, 1673; later queen of England and Scotland. Thomas Mason, client of Godfrey’s and one of the coroner’s jury; claimed to have seen Godfrey in Marylebone about 10am on 12 October 1678. Ralph Montagu (1638–1709), English ambassador to France who, after losing his post in the spring of 1678, worked with the political opposition in Parliament (becoming an MP in November 1678) and the French ambassador Barillon (from whom he accepted bribes) to bring down his enemy Danby, revealing the latter’s own illicit financial dealings with France. Henry Moor, Godfrey’s clerk, suspected by some of having covered up his master’s suicide. Henry Howard, 6th duke of Norfolk (1628–84), Catholic peer; former employer of Titus Oates; suspected of involvement in Godfrey’s death as latter last seen near his residence, Arundel House. Richard Mulys, secretary of the duke of Ormond and earl of Ossory; acquaintance of Godfrey. xxv

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Francis North (1637–85), Tory judge; lord chief justice of the Common Pleas (1675–82), Lord Keeper of the Seals (1682–85); 1st baron Guilford after 1683. Roger North (1653–1734), lawyer, author of Examen, a Tory history of the Popish Plot (published in 1740, written c. 1713), brother to Francis North. Titus Oates (1649–1705), Anglican clergyman and the first and principal Popish Plot witness; communicated allegations to Charles II in August 1678, swore to them before Godfrey on 6 and again on 27 or 28 September; convicted of perjury in May 1685. James Butler, 1st duke of Ormond (1610–88), Anglo-Irish peer and court loyalist, lord lieutenant of Ireland, 1677–85. Thomas Butler, 6th earl of Ossory (1634–80), son of James Butler, duke of Ormond. Judith Pamphlin, Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey’s housekeeper. John Parsons, coachmaker and St Martin’s churchwarden; reported that Godfrey spoke to him in St Martin’s Lane before 9am on 12 October, asking for directions to Primrose Hill. Henry Payne, alias Nevill, Catholic polemicist and later Jacobite, probable author of manuscript libels and Reflections on the Earl of Danby (1679) accusing Danby of Godfrey’s murder. Samuel Pepys (1633–1703), diarist and naval officer, loyalist MP and protégé of the duke of York; accused of complicity in the Popish Plot in May 1679 and imprisoned in the Tower until July but released without a trial. William, 4th baron Petre (1626–84), Catholic peer accused by Titus Oates of complicity in the Plot; often referred to as one of ‘the five popish lords’ imprisoned in the Tower of London from late October 1678 to his death in January 1684. Christopher Pluncknett, Godfrey’s brother-in-law; first family member to identify his body. Sarah Pluncknett, sister to Edmund Godfrey. Charles FitzCharles (‘Don Carlos’), earl of Plymouth (1657–80), Charles II’s illegitimate son with his mistress Catherine Pegge; married the earl of Danby’s daughter Bridget Osborne in September 1678. Louise de Kéroualle, duchess of Portsmouth (1649–1734), French Catholic, favourite mistress of Charles II from about 1672 to his death in 1685. William Herbert, 1st marquess of Powis (1626–96), Catholic peer accused by Titus Oates of complicity in the Plot; often referred to as one of ‘the five popish

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lords’ imprisoned in the Tower from late October 1678; released without trial in February 1684. Elizabeth Herbert, née Somerset, countess of Powis (c. 1634–91), wife of the earl of Powis; patron of Elizabeth Cellier. Miles Prance, Catholic silversmith and Plot witness denounced by his lodger and pressured into confessing to complicity in Godfrey’s murder in late December 1678; implicated several Irish priests (Gerald and Kelly) and three men who worked at Somerset House (Green, Berry and Hill); later recanted but then confirmed his initial confession in January 1679, finally recanting and pleading guilty to perjury in June 1686. Lady Margaret Pratt, wife of Sir George Pratt (d. 1678) and a friend of Godfrey’s, who supposedly dined at her house in Charing Cross the day before he disappeared. Joseph Radcliffe, oil merchant, Godfrey’s friend and fellow vestryman; Sir Edmund’s last confirmed sighting was at his door in the Strand at 1pm 12 October 1678. Sergeant John Ramsey, an upper servant of Danby’s and suspected of influencing the coroner’s inquest into Godfrey’s death. John Rawson, master of the White House tavern near Primrose Hill, where Godfrey’s body was found. Thomas Robinson, clerk of the Court of Common Pleas; friend and old schoolmate of Godfrey’s. William Scroggs (1623–83), lord chief justice and presiding judge in the Popish Plot trials. Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st earl of Shaftesbury (1621–83), leading figure of the political opposition and active in the Lords committee investigating the Plot; Lord President of the Privy Council April–October 1679; accused by Tory writers of having suborned witnesses and manufactured or exploited the Plot. Zachariah Skillard, surgeon in the coroner’s inquest; testified at the trial of Green, Berry and Hill. Sir Robert Southwell (1635–1701), Anglo-Irish bureaucrat, clerk of the Privy Council from 1664 to late December 1679; Tory MP; correspondent of court loyalists Ormond and Ossory. William Howard, 1st viscount Stafford, Catholic peer accused by Titus Oates of complicity in the Plot; one of ‘the five popish lords’ imprisoned in the Tower of London; only one of the five to stand trial; executed December 1680.

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Nathaniel Thompson, Tory printer who published several pamphlets in 1682 arguing that Godfrey had committed suicide, leading to a libel conviction. Israel Tonge (1621–80), clergyman and anti-Catholic writer, mentor to Titus Oates and collaborator with him on the Popish Plot informations. Simpson (Simson) Tonge, son of Israel Tonge; briefly collaborated with L’Estrange and several Catholic activists in promising evidence to disprove the Popish Plot; later accused L’Estrange of suborning him. George Treby, lawyer and recorder of London; oppositional MP and chairman of the Commons Committee of Secrecy investigating the Popish Plot. John Walters (Waters), farrier or smith and regular at the White House tavern; along with William Bromwell, discovered Godfrey’s body near Primrose Hill on 17 October 1678. Colonel George Weldon, friend and business associate of Godfrey’s; supposed to meet him for dinner 12 October 1678; Godfrey met Coleman at his home in York Buildings. Sir Joseph Williamson, undersecretary of state (i.e. of the northern department), in 1678. John Wren, Miles Prance’s lodger; denounced him to the authorities as a suspect in Godfrey’s murder. Thomas Wynnel, business associate of Godfrey’s; had dinner date with Sir Edmund Saturday 12 October. ‎

xxviii

Introduction The Bottomless Pit: Conspiracy Theories and the Death of a Westminster Magistrate The middle-aged man who left his house near Charing Cross on the morning of Saturday 12 October 1678 didn’t know it, but the cause and circumstances of his death, probably later that same day, would become one of the most famous of all British unsolved mysteries. Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey (the full name by which he would be known to posterity)1 was a justice of the peace for Westminster and Middlesex, an unpaid official tasked to keep the peace and to receive criminal complaints. He had been knighted in 1666 for his courage and diligence in discharging his duties during the plague and the Great Fire of London, remaining at his post when other officials fled. Godfrey’s body was found on the evening of Thursday 17 October, five days after he had gone missing, several miles from his home, face-down in a ditch near Primrose Hill, impaled with his own sword. The forensic evidence – there was little or no blood, there seemed to be bruises on the body and a ligature mark around the neck – indicated that the wound had been inflicted post mortem and Sir Edmund had in fact been strangled or garrotted. Robbery was quickly ruled out, as neither Godfrey’s rings nor the substantial sum of money he had been carrying had been stolen. The fact that the dead man’s clothes were dry and his shoes clean, despite the wet weather and the muddy conditions, convinced contemporaries that the body had only recently been dumped at the scene. The tracks of a cart, a bent grate and some straw scattered nearby seemed to corroborate this theory. Wilder rumours, which would persist into modern times, also circulated – that Godfrey had been sequestered and starved, possibly tortured, for days before being murdered by asphyxiation. Within hours of his disappearance, Godfrey’s household was in confusion, with friends and acquaintances worried and speculating over the magistrate’s whereabouts. And within days, Godfrey’s two brothers had raised the alarm, informing the Privy Council, and demanding that a search be launched. The contemporary lawyer Roger North would view the rumours that ran ‘as wild 1

Some contemporaries rendered it Edmundbury or even Edmundsbury Godfrey; this unusual double-barrelled name was the result of the fact that Godfrey had two godfathers and hence two given names, after his father Thomas Godfrey’s neighbour Edmund Harrison and cousin Captain John Berrie, respectively (Marshall, 8).

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Fire in a Train, and … spread all over the Town’ the very afternoon of Godfrey’s disappearance as in itself evidence of a deeply laid ‘Party Intrigue’. ‘What a Matter was it, that a Justice of Peace did not dine at home, to raise such and Hubbub as this? A Thing that must, sometimes, happen to every one, as Business or Friendship may engage them abroad’.2 Why indeed all this fuss over a fifty-six-year-old bachelor, a reasonably prosperous woodmonger and coal merchant and an active and respected but hardly top-ranking official? The reason, for contemporaries at least, was plain: Godfrey had, first on 6 September and then again on 27 or 28 September 1678,3 taken the information of the now notorious perjurer Titus Oates, an unemployed and impecunious Anglican clergyman who claimed to have feigned a conversion to Catholicism in order to infiltrate Jesuit ranks and to detect and foil an elaborate Catholic plot against Charles II, his government and the Church of England. Many in Godfrey’s circle, including his brother Michael, reported that the justice had in his final weeks complained of having been ‘blamed’ and threatened by ‘some great men’ because of his role in the investigation, making ominous predictions about being ‘knocked on the head’ and himself becoming ‘the first Martyr’ of the plot supposedly discovered by Oates.4 It was also widely remarked that the magistrate’s notebook, which he was known to carry about with him, was missing from the body; nor was it found among his papers at his home. In the view of contemporaries, the fact that Godfrey met his death so soon after receiving Titus Oates’s evidence could be no coincidence. Few doubted – openly, at least – that the magistrate had been murdered by ‘the papists’ to suppress and thwart the investigation of a hellish Catholic conspiracy. Thus, Godfrey’s death proved the reality of the Popish Plot – with ultimately tragic consequences for those English and Irish Catholics whose judicial murders can be linked either directly or indirectly to Oates’s false accusations.5 Rumours had flown thick and fast even before the discovery of the body, and spread exponentially afterwards, spawning dozens of conspiracy theories. The last reliable sighting of Godfrey was in the Strand, near St Clement’s church, at about 1pm on that fateful Saturday,6 and the fact that this was close to Arundel 2

Examen, 201. Israel Tonge claimed that he and Oates in fact swore the information on 28 September, but that the papers were mistakenly dated the 27th: SP 29/409; I question the reliability of this claim in Chapter 2. 4 Lords MSS, 48; Burnet, 2:52; State Trials, 7:168. 5 One Catholic authority has counted the number of deaths that can be attributed to Oates’s plot as eighteen, with a further twelve men condemned as Catholic priests, eight of whom were executed, the other four dying in prison. An additional sixteen priests sentenced to death for being priests but later reprieved subsequently died in captivity or as a result of ‘ill usage’; Henry Foley, Records of the English Province of the Society of Jesus (1879), v, 96. 6 Burnet, 2:153; Marshall dates the last sighting to 3pm, apparently based on Michael Godfrey’s statement to the Lords Committee (Lords MSS, 47), but the Godfrey brothers seem to have ruled this out (SP 29/366, fol. 305); see my more detailed discussion of this in Chapter 3. 3

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INTRODUCTION

House meant that suspicions first fell on the Catholic duke of Norfolk, whose residence it was. It was also, significantly, a short distance from Somerset House, the palace of Charles II’s Catholic queen, Catherine of Braganza, three of whose servants would later be hanged for Godfrey’s murder. Others whispered that the magistrate had been last seen at the Cockpit in Whitehall, home to the king’s principal minister, the earl of Danby (who would also be accused of having a hand in Godfrey’s death). Alongside these extravagant claims, there had at least initially been more prosaic speculations – that Godfrey was visiting his ‘ancient mother’ in Hammersmith, had absconded for debt or contracted a clandestine marriage – that circulated in the hours and days after his disappearance.7 There was also, from the first, more covert speculation that the magistrate had committed suicide, which persisted after the coroner’s jury returned a verdict of wilful murder by persons unknown, and even after three men were tried and executed for the crime in February 1679. Both the basic facts known about the case and the main theories that would later be advanced were reported in a dispatch from the French ambassador Paul Barillon to Louis XIV on 21 October 1678. Godfrey had been transfixed by his own sword; there were marks that suggested he had been strangled and the surgeons who had examined the body found no blood on the dead man’s clothes. Barillon described Godfrey as a ‘fanatic’ whom Charles II and his brother James believed had killed himself – noting in a characteristic aside that such suicidal melancholy was common enough in England. Barillon also alluded to the evidence of one of Godfrey’s friends (Mary Gibbon, to whom we shall return) that the justice had not only been depressed, but had been afraid that he would be hanged for not having revealed the plot sooner, having kept the information to himself for several weeks. Barillon speculated that Godfrey might have hanged himself elsewhere but that his relatives had then moved the body and impaled it with the sword in order to prevent the confiscation of the estate that would follow from a coroner’s verdict of felo de se, or suicide. While the rumour was rife in London that Godfrey was murdered by Catholics, the well-informed Barillon reported that ‘more suspicious people’ believed he had been killed by those who had invented the plot and who believed that they would thus make the Catholics ‘even more odious’ by blaming them for his death.8 Thus, from the start, the sheer clumsiness with which an apparent murder had been staged (or so it seemed) to look like a suicide raised doubts in the minds of a few sceptics – even if these kept largely silent until the initial panic had died down. Roger North, writing later (about 1713, but on the basis of notes made long before),9 claimed to have suspected that both the rumours and the magistrate’s death were the product of the same oppositional ‘managery … behind the curtain’: 7

Burnet, 2:153. Baschet 140, Barillon to Louis XIV, London, 21/31 October 1678, fol. 33v. 9 Examen, 272; P.T. Millard, ‘The Chronology of Roger North’s Main Works’, Review of English Studies, 24, 95 (1973), 287. 8

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i.e. the work of Oates’s patrons who would after about 1680 be known as ‘Whigs’ (and their loyalist opponents, ‘Tories’). In his Brief History, published in 1688 with the encouragement of the new – if soon to be deposed – Catholic king James II, the royalist propagandist Roger L’Estrange laboured to prove that Godfrey’s death was in fact suicide, an attempt that was explicitly aimed at debunking the Popish Plot more broadly, as the two were indissolubly linked: ‘If there was no such Plot, there was No such Murther’ – and, it followed, vice versa.10 In the years and decades that followed, theories about Godfrey’s death would take shape and harden along ‘Whig’ and ‘Tory’ lines – Tories, largely following L’Estrange, favouring suicide theories, Whigs still plumping for murder, even after the Glorious Revolution of 1688/9. In the short term, few dared openly dispute that the culprits were the ‘papists’. In his sermon at Godfrey’s funeral on 31 October 1678, the Anglican clergyman William Lloyd whipped his auditors into an antipapist frenzy by asking (and answering) the question of ‘Cui bono’: who benefits? According to Lloyd, the ‘Wicked men’ who had benefited from Godfrey’s death were clearly the Jesuits, whose business was to ‘discourage the Exercise of the law’ and who hold it ‘Lawful to kill Men that would prejudice them, or their Religion’.11 Common sense objections – Godfrey was known to be tolerant towards Catholics and on friendly terms with many of them, while the witness, Oates, was not only still living, but his sworn information already in the possession of the Privy Council – were swept away in a groundswell of emotion. The ensuing moral panic of the Popish Plot (c. 1678–81) would claim the lives of many innocent Catholics and precipitate a sustained political and constitutional challenge to the authority of Charles II and the right of his Catholic brother and heir, James duke of York, to succeed him (the Exclusion Crisis, c. 1679–81). The Popish Plot has been traditionally viewed as a regrettable but salutary lesson in the dangers of religious intolerance and collective hysteria. Jurists and legal historians such as Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, keen to draw a veil over the prosecutorial excesses of the 1670s and 1680s, hastened with obvious relief towards the 1696 Treason Trials Act, which helped redress some of the terrible disabilities under which seventeenth-century defendants laboured. In the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the death of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey was generally discussed separately from the larger issue of the Popish Plot simply as one of the most famous unsolved mysteries in British history, a subject worthy of genteel investigation. The intricacy and the inscrutability of the case inspired the self-styled connoisseur of murder, Thomas de Quincey, to characterise it as the ‘finest work’ of that genre of the seventeenth century.12 Godfrey’s name would continue to be a household name in popular as well as 10

L’Estrange, 2:159; Peter Hinds, ‘The Horrid Popish Plot’: Roger L’Estrange and the Circulation of Political Discourse in Late Seventeenth-Century London (Oxford, 2010), 237. 11 Lloyd, Sermon, 33. 12 Thomas de Quincey, ‘On Murder Considered as one of the Fine Arts’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 21 (February 1827), 208.

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INTRODUCTION

academic circles into the mid- to late twentieth century, inspiring a BBC radio show devoted to his death in 1952, and routinely featuring in compilations of famous mysteries, alongside such historical ‘whodunits’ as the fate of the two princes in the Tower. Why then revisit Godfrey’s death, a mystery which, if unsolved, appears insoluble, and which in any case has in the twentieth century attracted extensive popular attention? While a new scholarly study is overdue, the best argument is the new age of conspiratorial politics in which we now live.13 As historians have increasingly – if ruefully – appreciated, we can no longer consign conspiracy beliefs and the persecutions to which they give rise to a safely bygone age, one more barbaric, emotional and irrational than our own.14 The aim of this book is not to pass judgement on the judicial miscarriages and deadly prejudices of the past but rather to examine the particular circumstances and contexts that give rise to them. For the question of Godfrey’s death cannot be examined in isolation either from the Popish Plot or from the larger, and deeply conspiracist, political culture of the 1670s and 1680s. In revisiting the subject of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, I hope both to breathe new life into a celebrated and centuries-old murder mystery and to analyse and make sense of the complex web of conspiracy theories to which his death gave so much oxygen. And this late seventeenth-century English conspiratorial culture, from which we can trace the origins of what Richard Hofstadter famously termed ‘the paranoid style in American politics’, continues to have resonance in the contemporary Anglo-American world. Seventeenth-century anti-Catholicism was more than the ‘pornography of the Puritan’: it was the lifeblood of oppositional politics, animating and shaping not only eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Whig but even modern libertarian thought.15 In late Stuart England, no less than in our own time, conspiracy theories were the product of a divided society in which trust in authority was contested or had broken down, and in which rumours and speculation were often seen as more reliable than official information. This study seeks to tease out – often searching (literally) in the margins for cryptic commentary or coded shorthand 13

Mark Knights, Representation and Misrepresentation in Later Stuart Britain: Partisanship and Political Culture (New York, 2006); Frances E. Dolan, True Relations: Reading, Literature, and Evidence in Seventeenth-Century England (Philadelphia, 2013). 14 See, for instance, Jonathan Scott, ‘England’s Troubles: Exhuming the Popish Plot’, in Tim Harris, Paul Seaward and Mark Goldie (eds), The Politics of Religion in Restoration England (Oxford, 1990); Rachel Weil, ‘“If I did say so, I lyed”: Elizabeth Cellier and the Construction of Credibility in the Popish Plot Crisis’, in Susan D. Amussen and Mark A. Kishlansky (eds), Political Culture and Cultural Politics in Early Modern England (Manchester, 1995), 189–212; Frances E. Dolan, ‘“The Wretched Subject the Whole Town Talks of”: Representing Elizabeth Cellier (London, 1680)’, in Arthur F. Marotti (ed.), Catholicism and Anti-Catholicism in Early Modern English Texts (Basingstoke, 1999), 218–58; Hinds,‘Horrid Popish Plot’; and John Gibney, Ireland and the Popish Plot (Basingstoke, 2009). 15 Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (1964; Cambridge, MA, 1996), 22.

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notes – what people really believed about Godfrey’s death, much of which was too seditious to be printed. While Godfrey’s death was not the only or even the most compelling evidence for the reality of the Popish Plot, it was a matter that could be openly investigated, while other, related issues, such as the known or suspected Catholicism of the royal brothers and their secret diplomacy with France, could not. As we shall see, not only did the suspicious death of Godfrey apparently prove the plot, but the correspondence of the former secretary of the duchess of York, Edward Coleman, seized after Titus Oates gave his information to the Privy Council, dramatically corroborated suspicions that the king’s brother was soliciting and receiving foreign money to promote toleration and Catholic conversion efforts and to bring about a dissolution of Parliament. Simply put: the country’s own leaders were colluding with France, its traditional enemy, and conspiring against its own laws, Church, and representative institutions. Many in Godfrey’s circle knew that Edward Coleman and the magistrate were acquaintances, even friends. Some may have known or suspected one of the most curious facts about this curious affair, one which would come to light early on in the investigation: that it was Godfrey himself who had gone, several weeks before his death, to warn Coleman of the charges against him, and of the danger the prosecution of the plot posed to his master, the duke of York. A closer look at Godfrey demonstrates that he was not only a much more ambiguous and complex figure than later mythology suggested, but also that he was indeed in possession of dangerous secrets – and likely, not only secrets that were compromising to the Catholics but also the government and even the political opposition. His death invited rumour and speculation which no theory identifying his killer or killers could ever quell and was part of a larger culture of questioning official information which was fast gaining ground in the seventeenth century, and which – as we know all too well – continues to flourish today. The debate over the manner and author(s) of Godfrey’s death was, and indeed remains, political. For the Whigs and anti-Catholics of the seventeenth century, and beyond, it was an article of faith that the magistrate who had received Titus Oates’s depositions was a Protestant martyr, murdered by papists in an attempt to suppress the plot against Parliament and the Protestant religion as much as the king, and of which his death was incontrovertible evidence. One of the first acts of the Glorious Revolution was Titus Oates’s release from prison in December 1688; an attempt to reverse his conviction for perjury under James II was overwhelmingly supported in the House of Commons, if defeated in the Lords. William III compromised by giving Oates a free pardon in June 1689.16 The belief that papists had murdered Godfrey persisted long after Catholic 16

However, a result of his subsequent legal wrangles, Oates was re-committed to gaol until August 1689 (Alan Marshall, ‘Titus Oates’, ODNB entry). See Rachel Weil, A Plague of Informers: Conspiracy and Political Trust in William III’s England (New Haven, 2013), 59–65.

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INTRODUCTION

emancipation (the repeal of discriminatory laws against recusants) in 1829. The original Whig historian of the nineteenth century, Thomas Babington Macaulay, believed that Godfrey had been killed by a Catholic fanatic; this was also the verdict of William Dougal Christie, the author of a partisan 1871 biography of the earl of Shaftesbury. More subtle anti-Catholic prejudices have continued to shape British politics to the present day. There has been, to this writing, no openly Catholic prime minister of Britain – Tony Blair only ‘came out’ as a Catholic after he stepped down from political life in 2007. Until 2013, the monarch or the heir to the throne could not marry a Catholic and, even today, cannot be a Catholic themselves (even if this last is largely a function of the fact that the queen or king of the United Kingdom is also the supreme Governor of the Church of England). By the twentieth century, however, there was a sea-change in attitudes towards Godfrey’s death. John Pollock’s controversial resurrection of the theory that Jesuits had murdered Godfrey in his 1903 book on the Popish Plot provoked a wave of indignant rebuttals, including Alfred Marks’s 1905 book Who Killed Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey?, which revived the theory of suicide, first floated by contemporary Catholics and the royalist propagandist Roger L’Estrange. ‘The discovery of [Godfrey’s] body’, Marks wrote, acted as ‘the signal for the letting loose of a tempest of furious passion, at once so groundless and so boundless as to be without a parallel in the history of civilized communities’. Marks’s outrage stems in large part from the lèse-majesté of both the low-born Plot witnesses – ‘wretches of proved infamy’ who ‘drove the king’s brother into exile, and even dared to charge the queen of England with the design of poisoning her husband’ – and the Parliament that had received such accusations ‘with eager credulity’.17 By the early and mid-twentieth century, it was the Tory view that had claimed the moral high ground, with conservative writers like Arthur Bryant viewing Oates’s perjury as a scurrilous attack on the monarchy. In 1924, J.G. Muddiman advanced the ingenious if unprovable theory that Godfrey had in fact been murdered by Philip Herbert, the 7th earl of Pembroke, a peer with a history of violent and, occasionally, lethal assaults, who may have held a grudge against the magistrate for having served as a foreman on a grand jury that had indicted him for murder. John Kenyon chose to sideline the question altogether in his 1972 high-street history of the Popish Plot, consigning the issue of Godfrey’s death to an appendix in which he speculated that Godfrey was killed by a career criminal with no connection to the Plot. In 1984, the journalist Stephen Knight, who had earned some notoriety for his Freemason conspiracy theories about Jack the Ripper, argued that Godfrey was murdered because of his links with the ‘Peyton Gang’, a group of men loosely affiliated with the republican Green Ribbon Club. While Knight’s conclusions are far-fetched and ultimately untenable, he touches on some interesting points

17 Marks,

1–2.

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about Godfrey’s connections with members of both the opposition and the Catholic faction that I shall expand upon later.18 Finally, the most recent book-length study, Alan Marshall’s The Strange Death of Edmund Godfrey (1999), introduces what is essentially a variation on the suicide argument, although also making several significant contributions to the debate – notably, by centring the discussion on Godfrey’s personal history and troubled personality. Marshall has provided an invaluable service in that he has given us both a detailed account of Godfrey’s last days and a fuller picture of his earlier life: those interested in knowing more about both are referred to his excellent study.19 As I shall argue, however, Marshall’s attempt to argue for a more simple ‘Ockham’s razor’ solution to the mystery is itself ultimately dependent on a relatively convoluted hypothesis of a suicide subsequently covered up and staged by the family. It is also, in my view, a theory that is not consistent with the evidence. Interestingly, Marshall himself, the foremost scholar of espionage and intelligence in late seventeenth-century England, has in the context of his other work about the shadowy world of Restoration informers, spies and agents, acknowledged that there are numerous plausible suspects for Godfrey’s murder. We shall explore some of these avenues further in this book. While the sheer scale of observation, opinion, speculation and rumour about Godfrey’s death still extant in manuscript and print is overwhelming, modern search engines and digitised sources have revolutionised scholarly research in the twenty years since Marshall’s work was published, not only making more documents accessible but also more readily searchable and thus (somewhat) more manageable. This new study reviews old evidence and theories and scours the traditional sources – contemporary pamphlets and trial accounts, newsletters, parliamentary records and state papers, journals, memoirs, diaries and correspondence – with a fresh eye. It also examines numerous documents, especially those from local record offices or in Latin and French, that have been neglected or overlooked, as well as some entirely new manuscript sources, including previously undeciphered shorthand material. Most of the sources discussed in these pages were never intended for public consumption. The detailed and gossipy dispatches of the French ambassador Paul Barillon to Louis XIV, which shed so much light on the goings-on at court in this period, were, like most diplomatic correspondence, routinely written at least in part in cipher – words and letters being replaced by random numbers corresponding to a key which changed at regular intervals. (One of the excuses Barillon presented to his impatient monarch for any delay in his response was that it had taken ‘some time’ to decipher incoming letters.)20 Godfrey’s friend Edward Coleman used cipher extensively, especially for proper nouns; some of 18

Muddiman; Kenyon, 264–70; Knight. See also Marshall, ‘Correspondence’. Peter Hinds has also dedicated a chapter to Godfrey (‘Horrid Popish Plot’, 233–91). 20 Baschet 138, Barillon to Louis XIV, 1/10 March 1678, fol. 109. 19

8

INTRODUCTION

his correspondence consisted of innocuous pleasantries interlined with sensitive passages written in invisible ink. The people for whom such missives were intended often complained that they were illegible: in places, the lines ‘crost’ or the lemon juice ran out without the writer’s knowledge; in others, the paper was damaged from being held up to a candle so as to make the words visible.21 Other contemporaries resorted to shorthand or ‘secret writing’: a method intended not only to record information speedily but also to keep it from prying eyes. Samuel Pepys wrote most of his diary – including, of course, passages detailing his sexual exploits – in a shorthand he believed would be unintelligible to contemporaries (and, indeed, which took centuries to crack). The dissenter and court critic Roger Morrice was similarly convinced that his carefully adapted and personalised shorthand would be comprehensible to no one but himself; it has been decoded only recently by a modern expert on seventeenth-century stenography, Frances Henderson. I have deciphered two collections of shorthand consulted here: the marginalia and drafts of the chairman of the House of Commons Committee of Secrecy, George Treby, in which he sometimes betrayed his deep distrust of the government; and the shorthand draft copies of William Lloyd’s letters to Roger L’Estrange discussing Godfrey’s death, examined in Chapter 5. Even in these drafts, Lloyd largely restricted himself to innuendo and dark hints.22 Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey himself, in a letter to his friend Valentine Greatrakes, warned him to ‘be very careful of what you write & to whome’ as ‘many have sufferd lately for being too free in their intelligences and occurences, Especially now that letters are soe often broke open, & exposd to the various Scanning & Censuring of those to whom they were never writ’.23 Much of Godfrey’s correspondence with Greatrakes was unsigned or written under initials or pseudonyms, a common practice amongst both pamphleteers and letter-writers of the era, who feared that their letters would be intercepted and opened and their papers seized and that they could be prosecuted for sedition or libel. It is thus often difficult to identify the authors of such works. The context and internal evidence suggest that the author of a Latin manuscript account of the Plot in the British Library, De nupera Catholicorum in Anglia conspiratione epistolaris dissertation (Discourse on the letters about the recent Catholic conspiracy in England), dated 1680, was an English Jesuit writing to his superior. The anonymous author of the French history Les Conspirations

21

DRO D239/M/O/1420, Sir William Throckmorton to Coleman, 2 January 1674/5; see also similar complaints in 1540, 9 January 1674/5; 1546, 2 February 1674/5. 22 Mark Goldie (ed.), The Entring Book of Roger Morrice 1677–1691, vol. 1, Roger Morrice and the Puritan Whigs (Woodbridge, 2007), 1:130, 135; Lloyd letters, no. 76, shorthand response to L’Estrange’s letter from 13 April 1686. 23 NLI, MS 4728, copy of letter from Godfrey to Greatrakes, 14 August 1666, 66. These letters are also reproduced in Elmer, Appendix 3, 210–37; see also Marshall, ‘Correspondence’.

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d’Angleterre, published the same year, seems to have been a French Protestant, most likely from Paris, judging from the frequent references to that city.24 Some of my sources were manuscript libels surreptitiously distributed, posted or simply tossed into the streets and then handed over to authorities. The fact that people were sometimes prosecuted for such libels or mentioned in state or private papers as being suspected of writing them can give us some clues as to their authorship, but much of the innuendo, rumours and gossip about Godfrey was not only anonymous but has left little trace in the historical record. Many documents have been destroyed or lost; those that survive are inevitably mediated through the political biases and assumptions of their authors. Many depositions or witness statements are based on second-, third- or fourth-hand reports and garbled by repetition and scripted by both the expectations and the political agenda of those who questioned them. And, as we shall see, people’s suspicions were self-perpetuating, not only predisposing them to believe the worst about authorities and/or political rivals, but eroding their own inhibitions against resorting to underhanded and unscrupulous methods in what they believed was their own defence. In other words, conspiratorial beliefs begat conspiratorial behaviour. This book will not only introduce new evidence but shed new light on Godfrey’s death: in the concluding chapter, I propose a plausible (murder) hypothesis. It must be acknowledged from the outset, however, that no one theory can account for all the different, and often contradictory, reports and testimony, let alone the rumours and speculation generated by the case. But as I shall demonstrate, rumours and speculation were an integral part of the story, opening a window onto what contemporaries themselves, as opposed to clever armchair detectives centuries later, actually suspected or believed. Most modern writers – with the significant exception of the conspiracy theorist Knight – have sought common sense answers, as though in rejection of the antipapist beliefs that led to the miscarriages of justice and judicial murders of the Popish Plot. Such explanations have accordingly focused either on suicide or a plausible (Protestant) assassin, like the violent psychopath the earl of Pembroke, either working alone or assisted after the fact by those who are often, especially in Tory accounts, assumed to be the true villains of the piece – the political opposition, headed by Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st earl of Shaftesbury. Some have wishfully speculated that the despicable Titus Oates himself was the murderer.25 Most recent writers have thus, ironically enough, fallen into the trap characterised 24

BL Add MS 36770, De nupera Catholicorum in Anglia conspiratione epistolaris dissertation (1680); Les Conspirations d’Angleterre, ou L’Histoire des troubles suscités dans ce Royaume (Cologne, 1680). Antoine Arnauld is convinced that the writer was a Huguenot; see his Apologie pour les Catholiques (Liège, 1681), 444. 25 Sir James Fitzjames Stephen seems to have been the first scholar to have seriously considered it: History of the Criminal Law of England (1883), 3:393. In Emma Robinson’s 1844 novel Whitefriars; or day of Charles II, it is Oates, aided by Colonel Thomas Blood, who does the deed.

10

INTRODUCTION

in the early twentieth century by the Catholic Rev. John Gerard: ‘History “ex Hypothesi”’26 – a solution which fits the most politically amenable and emotionally satisfying theory. While trying to find simple, rational explanations for Godfrey’s death may satisfy a modern impulse to repudiate conspiracy thinking and its pernicious effects, such an approach fails to appreciate both the complexity and the centrality of such beliefs to the late seventeenth-century political mainstream. Not least, it obscures what we shall see as the surprising plausibility of some of even the wilder theories to contemporaries. Most importantly of all, it fails to do justice to the sheer dramatic impact of Godfrey’s death and the serious political ramifications of the investigations into its cause. Thus this book is not simply a historical murder mystery; nor is it merely a case study or ‘microhistory’. Rather, it is the story of how accusations, rumours and speculations about the death of one man transformed English political culture: an anatomy of a conspiratorial crisis that shook the nation to its core. Social psychologists have explained the appeal of conspiracy theories with reference to three main functions: they satisfy a need to understand (‘epistemic’), to feel in control (‘existential’) and to construct a positive image of the believer and their group (‘social’), generally at the expense of a demonised ‘other’ or ‘folk devil’.27 Conspiracy theories typically provide explanations which match the moral certainty and prior convictions of the believer (the famous ‘confirmation bias’). Ironically, however, while people may be attracted to such theories because they provide simple answers, conspiracy theories tend to snowball, taking on byzantine and mind-boggling dimensions. In the case of Godfrey’s death, as with so many other historical mysteries which lend themselves to conspiratorial explanations, the various scenarios and possible suspects continue to expand in both outlandishness and labyrinthine complexity that ultimately defies the attempts of anyone to untangle them. In the short term, the Popish Plot normalised conspiracy thinking and political paranoia, but neither the panic nor the passions it stirred up could be indefinitely sustained. The long series of accusations, fake news and sham plots and counterplots which followed in its wake undermined the credibility of both politicians and the press, brought people to a saturation point and eventually created a reaction (the so-called ‘Tory Revenge’) in which passion and conviction were replaced by cynicism, moral relativism, indifference and resignation – effectively, a kind of plot fatigue. Yet the investigation into the causes of Godfrey’s death also had, arguably, a permanent and deleterious effect on political culture. As a variety of what scholars have called ‘plot talk’, not unlike the salacious ‘secret histories’ which served a similar function after the Glorious Revolution, speculation about 26

The Month: A Catholic Magazine, 102 (July 1903), 2–22. Karen M. Douglas, Robbie M. Sutton and Aleksandra Cichocka, ‘The Psychology of Conspiracy Theories’, Current Directions in Psychological Science, 26 (2017), 538–42. 27

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Godfrey’s fate allowed people to indulge in larger, if indirect, criticisms of the government during the reign of a king – the so-called merry monarch Charles II – whose true intentions, views, policies, even his religion, were unclear and suspect.28 And this speculation opened a door that could not easily be shut. As Roger North would write, the conviction that Godfrey’s death was an attempt at a cover-up of secret popish plots activated a kind of perpetual motion machine of paranoia and distrust: The common Place was that this daring Fact (an odd Sort of Daring, to kill a Man in a Corner, and hide him three Miles off in a Ditch) was to hinder a farther Search into the Bottom of the Plot. After this, every new Witness, that came in, made us start[: ‘]now we shall come to the Bottom[’]: And so it continued from one Witness to another, Year after Year, till at last it had no Bottom, but in the Bottomless Pit.29

Chapter 1 explores what was until the twentieth century the dominant theory: that the Catholics murdered Godfrey. The ‘papists’, although a small minority of the population, loomed large in the English conspiratorial imagination: ‘usual suspects’ with divided or dubious loyalty, whose denials carried little weight, given the association of Catholics (especially Jesuits) with equivocation and deception. Most modern histories have focused on the weakness of the evidence against the three hapless – and, indeed, wholly innocent – men executed for Godfrey’s murder: Lawrence Hill, Robert Green, and Henry Berry. We now know that William Bedloe, the first of the witnesses who came forward with the story that Godfrey had been murdered at Somerset House, was an errant rogue. We also now know that the second witness, Miles Prance, was subjected to pressures and mistreatment that we would today characterise as torture, and that he recanted his confession at least twice, finally being convicted of perjury after recanting a third time in 1686. We now know that Godfrey, far from being a persecutor of Catholics, was a friend to many of them – including Edward Coleman, the former secretary of the duchess of York and one of the first men executed (in early December 1678) for the Popish Plot. While I agree that the chances that Catholics murdered Godfrey are practically nil, we shall see that the magistrate’s surprisingly strong links with recusants and his access to highly compromising secrets to which Coleman was privy constituted a threat to several important political figures, some of whom were, however, not Catholic but Protestant. 28

Rachel Weil, ‘Matthew Smith versus the “Great Men”: Plot Talk, the Public Sphere and the Problem of Credibility in the 1690s’, in Peter Lake and Steven Pincus (eds), The Politics of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Manchester, 2007); and Weil, Plague of Informers; Peter Lake, Bad Queen Bess? Libels, Secret Histories and the Politics of Publicity in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth (Oxford, 2016); Rebecca Bullard, The Politics of Disclosure, 1674–1725: Secret History Narratives (2009). 29 Examen, 204.

12

INTRODUCTION

For not only were various obscure and high-ranking Catholics, including not only the duke of York but the crypto-Catholic king himself, implicated or suspected in Godfrey’s murder, but so too was Charles II’s principal minister, the staunchly Anglican earl of Danby. Chapter 2 will investigate the many rumours and accusations circulating in print and manuscript that Godfrey’s murder was an inside job. Although the notion that the then lord treasurer, Thomas Osborne, earl of Danby, murdered Godfrey may sound absurd to modern readers, we shall see however that many well-informed people at court immediately suspected Danby of having manufactured the Plot for his own political purposes. He was later accused of having withheld knowledge of the Plot from authorities for weeks or even months, and of attempting to suborn and to tamper with witnesses. Many of the sources consulted in this chapter have not been studied, including the bulk of Danby’s own papers dating from his long imprisonment in the Tower of London. The fact that, in some of these memoranda and notes, he reflects on the utility of cobbling together ‘counterplots’ and engages in questionable correspondence with informers and double agents lends at least some plausibility to such charges. And accusations against Danby led inevitably higher up the political hierarchy: to Charles II’s brother, the duke of York; and, finally, to the king himself. As we shall see, some Catholics pushed the theory of Danby’s complicity; others favoured the suicide hypothesis; many did both. Chapter 3 will explore the case for suicide, dominated by the work of Sir Roger L’Estrange, whose 1688 Brief History of the Times has been (rightly) criticised for selecting and bending the evidence to suit his arguments. This chapter will situate L’Estrange’s arguments within the larger context of earlier – and clearly debunked – attempts to prove suicide, as well as more recent theories, such as those of Marks and Marshall. I shall also re-examine both contemporary and modern medical assessments of the forensic evidence, as well as the witness testimony, to advance my own conviction that suicide, while an intellectually and emotionally appealing theory, was in fact unlikely. To late Stuart and Hanoverian Tories and many modern writers who have seen the Plot as a political fiction engineered by the political opposition, Godfrey’s death was at best a convenient accident manipulated by the opposition and, at worst, part of a larger machination aimed at the king’s brother and heir, James duke of York. Chapter 4 explores alternative murder theories implicating non-Catholic suspects. Roger North, whose history of the Popish Plot was published well after the Glorious Revolution, pointed the finger not merely at members of the political opposition like the earl of Shaftesbury, but even hinted (if only in his unpublished manuscript notes) at the involvement of William III himself. This chapter will also take up both conspiratorial scenarios involving the earl of Pembroke and his Whig cronies, the Peyton Gang, as well as other non-conspiratorial theories involving lone killers, ranging from the persuasive but unprovable to the highly improbable. I shall review the more conventional evidence and also introduce some 13

CONSPIRACY CULTURE IN STUART ENGLAND

altogether new sources to revisit the question of to what degree evidence was coerced, suborned and scripted on the part of the political opposition. I shall also point to new evidence that suggests that the earl of Shaftesbury, the villain of eighteenth-century Tory history, was in fact a much less likely suspect than another prominent Whig: George Villiers, 2nd duke of Buckingham, had a strong motive to eliminate Godfrey, who was privy to compromising secrets about his own secret, and corrupt, dealings with France. Chapter 5 focuses on information from an entirely new source: the draft shorthand letters of Bishop William Lloyd, formerly the curate of Godfrey’s parish, St Martin-in-the-Fields, perhaps best known for having delivered Sir Edmund’s funeral sermon. Lloyd was responding to the queries of Sir Roger L’Estrange, who had in 1686 begun researching Godfrey’s death with a view to proving that it was suicide. As I have already noted, L’Estrange’s history and collection of interviews and informations has been a central, if often problematic, source for subsequent historians, and I shall critically re-examine this material in light of the new evidence afforded by this correspondence. But the bishop’s shorthand reveals still more. Lloyd, an intimate of Godfrey’s, and well-acquainted with his circle, who had himself viewed the magistrate’s body and interrogated some of the leading Plot witnesses and suspects (including the three innocent men hanged for Godfrey’s murder), was particularly well-placed to speculate on what might really have happened to Godfrey. Lloyd, in his heavily scored and redacted shorthand drafts, not only rejected the thesis of suicide, but implored L’Estrange ‘not to ravel farther into this matter’, as he risked ‘stirring’ up something better left alone: ‘horrible secrets’ that were ‘not for His Majesty’s [i.e. James II’s] service’.30 And even if these previously undeciphered notes may not – to the satisfaction of the modern reader, at least – solve the mystery of Godfrey’s death, they do shed new light on what many close to the heart of these events actually believed. Not just for Lloyd but for most of his contemporaries, questions about Godfrey’s fate and the investigation itself (‘murder talk’) morphed naturally into speculation about secret Anglo-French diplomacy and the Catholicism of both royal brothers. The Conclusion will reconstruct what we can know of Godfrey the man, a much more complicated (and sympathetic) figure than the Protestant martyr of Whig hagiography. It is a tragic irony that Godfrey – a natural mediator with close ties both to the political opposition and Protestant dissenters and the English Catholic community, who seems to have laboured in the cause of compromise and toleration – contributed by his death to a dramatic breakdown in trust in the government, culminating in what recent historians have termed the ‘Restoration Crisis’: a prolonged political struggle, extending beyond the question of the succession and continuing after the 1681 Oxford Parliament. While I shall propose a plausible (murder) scenario of my own, ultimately who or what killed Godfrey – or even if we can be certain he was murdered – is 30

Lloyd letters, no. 76, Lloyd’s shorthand draft to L’Estrange’s letter of 13 April 1686.

14

INTRODUCTION

not what really matters. Rather, what is important is the fact that hundreds of thousands of people, many of them intelligent and well-informed, genuinely believed that Godfrey had been killed as the result of an elaborate and diabolical plot against English liberty and the Protestant religion. In this climate of distrust and fear, the duke of York, the queen, the earl of Danby and even the king himself could be, and were, suspected of having a hand in Godfrey’s death. This culture of conspiracy simultaneously fanned suspicions on the other side of the political spectrum that Godfrey’s murder was in fact an elaborate smoke-screen or frame-up, and that the real ‘managers’ of the Plot were those who would benefit from the political fallout against the Catholics: oppositional leaders like the earl of Shaftesbury or even, perhaps, William of Orange himself. This book is thus not so much about a murder mystery but rather about how the death of one man acted as the proverbial spark that set the political nation ablaze. By the autumn of 1678, the paper-thin Restoration consensus had eroded to breaking point; fragile coalitions and compromise, toleration and goodwill were fragmenting into partisanship, militancy and distrust. It was, in short, a world that bears a striking, and disturbing, resemblance to our own.

15

1 The Usual Suspects: The Case against the Catholics On 31 October 1678, the Anglican clergyman William Lloyd preached the funeral sermon of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey to an audience overflowing the pews of the church of St Martin-in-the-Fields, which had a normal capacity of about four hundred people.1 By all accounts it was an anti-Catholic tour de force. According to the contemporary Roger North, ‘the Crowd was prodigious and so heated that any Thing called a Papist, were it cat or Dog, had probably gone to Pieces in a Moment’. So high were emotions running – fear as well as grief and anger – that Lloyd was supposedly flanked on either side by two burly ministers ‘to guard him from being killed … by the Papists’ (North adding ironically, ‘Three Parsons in one Pulpit! Enough of itself, on a less Occasion, to excite Terror in the Audience’).2 William Lloyd was a natural choice to deliver Godfrey’s funeral sermon in that he was both a friend of the deceased and the vicar of St Martin-in-the-Fields, Sir Edmund’s parish. He was also the dean of Bangor and something of a rising star in the Anglican Church (he would be made bishop of St Asaph in 1680 and of Worcester in 1699). Lloyd’s eulogy was critical in Godfrey’s construction as a Protestant martyr: a sacrifice to a ‘bloody religion’ whose blood, like Abel’s, cried out to God for vengeance. His text was 2 Samuel 3:33–4, in which David mourned the death of Saul’s cousin Abner, who had died as a result of a treacherous ambush: ‘And the King lamented over Abner, and said, Died Abner as a fool dieth? Thy hands were not bound, nor thy feet put into fetters: as a man falleth before wicked men, so fellest thou. And all the people wept again over him.’ Just as Abner was ‘an eminent man, both in dignity, and also in usefulness among his people’, Godfrey ‘was perhaps the Man of our Age that did the most good in that Station [of justice of the peace]’; Abner’s ‘Sufferings’ and ‘bloody violent death’ also paralleled Godfrey’s. With a pathos that would not have been lost on his auditors, Lloyd took on Godfrey’s voice: ‘I spent my life in serving you. It was my business to do Justice and shew Mercy. See what I had for it, Insnared and Butcher’d by wicked Men against Justice and without Mercy.’3 1

A. Tindal Hart, William Lloyd, 1627–1717: Bishop, Politician, Author and Prophet (1952), 27. Examen, 258, 205. 3 Lloyd, Sermon, 33, 1, 15, 3, 2. 2

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THE CASE AGAINST THE CATHOLICS

To answer the question of who had killed Godfrey, William Lloyd invoked ‘Cassius’s word’, or the classic conspiracy theorist’s line: ‘Cui bono? For whose Interest was it?’ According to Lloyd, the ‘wicked men’ who had benefited from Godfrey’s death were clearly the Jesuits, whose ‘Interest’ was to ‘discourage the Exercise of the law’ and whose ‘Principles’ held it ‘Lawful to kill Men that would prejudice them, or their Religion’. Given that the Jesuits would not, he claimed, scruple to commit murder to protect ‘a secret Crime … who that knows what Informations our Friend had against them, can doubt but they might lawfully kill him by these Doctrines?’ While Lloyd hinted darkly at an elaborate papist conspiracy whose depths had yet to be plumbed, he conceded, somewhat anticlimactically, that he did not know the ‘Secret’ that was so fatal to Godfrey, nor the specific papist ‘Authors’ of the crime – only that ‘They must be some that were not safe while he lived’.4 We now know that the moral panic that Lloyd’s funeral sermon helped to inflame caused the death of many innocent Catholics. But his speech was more than simply a rallying call to the villagers to burn down Dr Frankenstein’s castle: it also offers a snapshot about what was known and believed about Godfrey and his death up to that moment, before any witness had come forward or any arrests had been made. There is no doubt that his auditors were swept up in a wave of grief and anger, but they also hung onto every word because Lloyd had known Sir Edmund in life and seen his body after death. Moreover, Lloyd was also well-connected at court and thus had intimate knowledge not just about the deceased but also about the investigation. Before the lapse of the Licensing Act in May 1679 unleashed a torrent of news-sheets and other publications – a major factor in the radicalisation of opinion during the Exclusion Crisis5 – Lloyd’s sermon was a particularly vital source of information about the case. Lloyd’s sermon made it clear that Godfrey had died from strangulation, making much of his missing ‘Band’ – a lace cravat or a ‘falling’ neckband,6 like that he wore in the portrait reproduced with Richard Tuke’s 1682 biography – suggesting that it had served as a ligature or had at least been torn off by the ‘wicked men’ who had murdered him.7 Lloyd invoked the missing ‘effusion of blood’ as evidence that the sword wound was inflicted posthumously by the murderers to make the death look like suicide, whether out of a desire to throw off suspicion from themselves or out of ‘malice’ to the dead man – to ‘ruin’ his ‘Name’, forfeit his ‘Estate’ and bring ‘a blot upon his Family’ – or (most likely) both. Godfrey’s ‘clean Shoes’ indicated that the crime had occurred elsewhere and indoors. ‘God knows where they kept him’, Lloyd told his auditors. He nonetheless went on to assert: ‘We know it was under restraint’ and ‘for many comfortless hours’, as indicated by his ‘sunk Belly, his empty Stomach, his 4 Lloyd,

Sermon, 25, 28, 26, 29. Mark Knights, Politics and Opinion in Crisis, 1678–81 (Cambridge, 1994). 6 A ‘falling band’ was ‘a broad band of fabric fastened at the neck and lying flat against the body … this style of collar was particularly fashionable during the 17th century’ (OED). 7 Lloyd, Sermon, 22. 5

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CONSPIRACY CULTURE IN STUART ENGLAND

Figure 1. Portrait of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, by Frederick Hendrik van Hove

blancht Tongue’. These comments would fuel rumours that persisted into the twentieth century both that Godfrey had been sequestered – possibly for days – after he had gone missing and that a full autopsy had been done on his body: neither was true.8 Lloyd also remarked significantly upon the white ‘Wax-candledrops’ found on Godfrey’s clothes. As Lloyd’s fellow clergyman Gilbert Burnet, 8 Lloyd,

Sermon, 21–2. John Dickson Carr claimed that an examination of Godfrey’s stomach demonstrated that he had not eaten and he had hence been imprisoned for two days at the ‘very least’ (The Murder of Sir Edmund Godfrey (1936), 100, 331). In fact, medical evidence

18

THE CASE AGAINST THE CATHOLICS

who had gone with him to view Godfrey’s body, later explained: ‘since only persons of quality, or priests, use those lights, this made all people conclude in whose hands he must have been’.9 In other words, Godfrey (like most people of the time) used candles made out of tallow rather than expensive white beeswax. The implication was that the priests in question belonged to a great household: why not that of some Catholic lord, or even the queen herself? The authors of Godfrey’s death could, in addition to their ‘Principles’ and their ‘Interest’, be identified by their ‘Actions’. Who, Lloyd asked, ‘had practiced, and intrigued … to hinder the Search, or the Discovery’ of the body? Here he was referring to such prominent Catholics as Henry Howard, 6th duke of Norfolk, who in the days after Godfrey’s disappearance promoted various rumours about the magistrate, such as his having absconded for debts, ‘run away with a Harlot’ or been ‘privately married’ to the widow of the lawyer Robert Offley, and ‘that not very decently’ (Offley had been dead less than a month). As Burnet recalled, Norfolk’s ‘officiousness in this Matter’ – no less than the fact that Godfrey had been last sighted near the duke’s town residence at Arundel House – ‘brought him under great suspicion’.10 Lloyd also believed that the fact Godfrey’s death had been staged to look like a suicide could provide hints as to the identity of his killers. Thus anyone who advanced this theory was suspect, including those who claimed that ‘Distraction’ – what we would today call depression – was ‘an Hereditary Disease in his Family’. While Lloyd acknowledged that Godfrey’s father had been ‘afflicted to Melancholy’, he assured his auditors that the latter had ‘recovered’ of this before the age of fifty, and lived to be almost eighty. Lloyd claimed that he had been open to the possibility that his friend had taken his own life until ‘I saw the contrary with my own eyes. When I saw he was strangled as well as thrust through, I soon considered, that no man could kill himself both ways.’ Lloyd also denied reports that Godfrey had been depressed in the weeks leading up to his death: what others had taken for ‘Melancholy’ was merely ‘thoughtfulness … proceed[ing] from the Intricacy and Multiplicity of Business’. Indeed, the ‘weightiest’ of all of this business was that of the Popish Plot, which had led Godfrey to say, although ‘without any great visible Concern’, only days before his death: ‘I am told I shall be knock’d in the Head’. Far from being daunted by such threats, Godfrey continued ‘Serious in Business, but Chearful and Pleasant at other times … till the hour that we lost him. And how he was afterwards’, Lloyd added pointedly, ‘I suppose they best know, that were the Authors of these Rumours.’11 Lloyd ended his sermon by ostensibly calling for calm, praying for the conversion of the Catholics and praising the Christian temper of his auditors suggests that Godfrey had died on the day he went missing and, while the body was probed by surgeons, a full autopsy, with removal of organs, was never performed. 9 Burnet, 2:154. 10 Lloyd, Sermon, 23; Shaftesbury Papers, fol. 15; BL Add MS 38015, fol. 317; HMC Fitzherbert, 10; Burnet, 2:153. 11 Lloyd, Sermon, 17, 26; Burnet, 2:154.

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who, after the Great Fire of London in 1666, ‘bore patiently’ and without ‘Tumult’ or ‘Violence’ the ‘great loss of your Houses and your Goods’ even ‘though so many believed, and few very much doubted whence it came’ – i.e. ‘from the same hands which we justly suspect for this Wickedness’.12 This casual reference to the groundless conspiracy theory that Catholics had been responsible for the catastrophic Great Fire of London still has the power to shock the modern reader, and such attitudes have inclined scholars, perhaps encouraged by Roger North’s characterisation of him as ‘an old grey headed dreaming profet’, to dismiss Lloyd as a crackpot.13 Lloyd indeed lived to a great age (ninety) and in his dotage embraced fringe millenarian beliefs. In addition to peddling antipapist stories about the Fire, to his dying day Lloyd advocated the conspiracy theory that James Francis Edward Stuart, the so-called ‘Old Pretender’, was not James II’s biological child, but an imposter smuggled into the birthing room in a warming pan.14 In the autumn of 1678, however, Lloyd was in hale middle age and his views were mainstream, not to mention perfectly attuned with the moment. The anti-Catholic paradigm to which most seventeenth-century Englishmen and women subscribed meant that the ‘papists’ were not only the usual, but the logical suspects for any perceived attack on the state.15 The belief that liberty and Protestantism – and despotism and Catholicism – were causally linked was as deeply engrained in them as the elision of freedom and democracy is to Westerners today. While modern writers have tended to follow such sceptics as North and L’Estrange in simply dismissing the evidence against Catholics for Godfrey’s murder as inconsistent and absurd, it is important to acknowledge that such accusations seemed entirely plausible to contemporaries. In part, this was because of their ‘truthiness’ (to employ a neologism coined by Stephen Colbert) – that is, the fact that they conformed perfectly with what late seventeenth-century Englishmen and women were sure they already knew. But as this chapter will demonstrate, the case against the Catholics for Godfrey’s murder would have also seemed to many, if not most, people at the time to be convincingly corroborated not just by the sworn testimony of a few witnesses, but by a hundred rumours, hearsay reports and a seeming mountain of circumstantial evidence.

12 Lloyd,

Sermon, 31, 36. Add MS 32509, Roger North, ‘Oates’s Plot’, from ‘Current and Extempore Recollections of the late Lord Keeper Guilford’, fol. 51. 14 Lloyd was the source of a story about a Catholic board member in a project piping water to London deliberately shutting down the water supply to the city the day before; see Burnet, 2:401; Hart, William Lloyd, 120–6. 15 The literature on anti-Catholicism in the British Isles is vast; for a recent discussion and overview, see Tim Harris, ‘Anti-Catholicism and Anti-Popery in Seventeenth-Century England’, in Evan Haefeli (ed.), Against Popery: Britain, Empire, and Anti-Catholicism (Charlottesville, 2020), 25–50. 13 BL

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The English anti-Catholic conspiracist tradition

Late seventeenth-century English Catholics laboured under the weight of both grave legal disabilities and deeply-embedded prejudices on the part of the Protestant majority. But if the kind of anti-Catholicism expressed by William Lloyd in Godfrey’s funeral sermon was anything but subtle, the politics of religion in late Stuart England were rather more complicated and warrant some introduction here. For one thing, English Protestants themselves were not a homogeneous group. While most conformed to the reformed Church of England established by Henry VIII in 1534 (‘Anglicans’), there were also a significant number of Protestant dissenters who believed the state church insufficiently purged of the remnants of Roman Catholic liturgy and hierarchy. The latter objected to the episcopal system (in which the monarch was head of the church and appointed bishops) as unscriptural; most objected also that it gave too much spiritual authority to secular powers. Protestant nonconformists, many of whom would have been termed ‘Puritans’ before the Restoration, included both Congregationalist or independent groups such as Quakers and Baptists as well as Presbyterians.16 During the Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis, loyalists (later, ‘Tories’) often used the generic term ‘Presbyterian’ – sometimes interchangeably with the pejorative ‘fanatic’ – to refer to the ‘faction’ or the political opposition (‘Whigs’). Needless to say, Protestant dissenters were associated with the Puritans and Parliamentarians of the 1640s who had defeated and executed Charles I and were after the Restoration of his son in 1660 often suspected of harbouring secret republican or ‘king-killing’ sympathies. But however they may have been divided by continuing tensions over the Church settlement and festering memories of the Civil War, regicide and Interregnum, English Protestants of all stripes shared a mutual distrust for and rejection of ‘popery’ as a superstitious, even idolatrous, belief system.17 The fact that Catholics were routinely called ‘papists’ reflected the English Protestant conviction that Catholics owed their primary allegiance to the pope rather than to God or to secular authorities, and that their faith (and political conscience) was dictated and mediated by their clergy and the Vatican. The assumption that Catholics put their collective confessional identity before their duties as individual subjects or citizens would, of course, long survive the seventeenth century. Belief in Catholic conspiracy theories would not only help fuel the famously ‘paranoid style’ of American politics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries but has, unfortunately, gained new life in the early twentyfirst century, with increasing evidence of systematic institutional cover-ups of sexual abuse within the modern Catholic Church. 16

English Presbyterians, although intensely anti-episcopal, differed from other Protestant sectarians in that they, like their Scottish Calvinist counterparts, subscribed to a belief in a national church. 17 For an overview of the problems of the Restoration religious settlement, see Tim Harris, Restoration: Charles II and His Kingdoms, 1660–1685 (2005), 43–84.

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There was a larger historical and international dimension to English anti-Catholic prejudice. Most late seventeenth-century Englishmen and women subscribed to an antipapist providential narrative of their Protestant nation’s survival in the face of repeated Catholic threats, from without and within, to its laws, liberties and religion. The litany was long, but the highlights included the Marian martyrs, the Protestants burned at the stake during the reign of Mary Tudor, the last Catholic monarch; the Spanish Armada in 1588; and, of course, the 1605 Gunpowder Plot, the foiled attempt by a small group of Catholic extremists to blow up both Houses of Parliament. The suspiciously convenient arrest of Guy Fawkes hours before the gunpowder was to have been detonated, together with the fact that the plot justified harsh reprisals against Catholic recusants on the part of James VI and I’s staunchly Protestant minister, Robert Cecil, 1st Earl of Salisbury, would spawn centuries of speculation that the Gunpowder Plot was an inside job or ‘court trick’: that Cecil had incited and entrapped the plotters or even that some of them were double agents.18 In the eyes of the English Protestant majority, however, the Gunpowder Plot cemented the association between Catholics – especially Jesuits – and treachery, equivocation and deception. The conspirators were said to have taken an oath of secrecy before a priest administered the sacrament, while the ringleader, Robert Catesby, had supposedly confided his intentions to his Jesuit confessor who, in turn, consulted his superior, Father Henry Garnet, about whether he should alert authorities. Garnet would weakly defend their subsequent silence on the grounds that the information was confidential, as delivered under the seal of confession.19 He was executed for treason in 1606 after a trial in which the legendary jurist Sir Edward Coke delivered a blistering prosecution address characterising Jesuits as ‘doctors’ of the ‘five Ds’: ‘dissimulation, deposing of princes, disposing of kingdoms, daunting and deterring of subjects, and destruction’.20 The harsh Elizabethan penal laws against Catholics which had radicalised the Gunpowder plotters had been passed in the context of anxiety about the succession and a series of conspiracies centring on the childless Protestant queen’s closest royal relative and logical heir – the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots, ancestress of the Stuart monarchs of England. The penal laws were also a response to Pope Pius V’s 1570 Regnans in Excelsis, which excommunicated 18

For the most recent iteration of this conspiracy theory, see Francis Edwards, The Enigma of Gunpowder Plot, 1605: The Third Solution, with a foreword by Thomas M. McCoog (Dublin, 2008). The title is a reference to Archbishop Mathew’s summary of the ‘three solutions’: ‘According to the orthodox-old-fashioned view Salisbury discovered the conspiracy, a second judgement is that he nourished and a third that he invented it’ (1). 19 Catesby’s confessor was Father Oswald Tesimond alias Greenway and the priest who administered the sacrament was believed to be the Jesuit John Gerard, although whether he was in the room when the oath of secrecy was taken is debated. The fact that Garnet was the author of a treatise justifying equivocation further worked to his discredit. 20 State Trials, 2:234.

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Elizabeth and declared her a heretic, absolving her Catholic subjects of allegiance to her. This papal bull, intended to promote the succession of Mary Stuart and the return of England to the old religion, not only failed in the short run – Mary was executed in 1587, and it was her Protestant son James VI of Scotland who acceded to the English throne in 1603 – but had the more fateful longer-term consequence of branding all English Catholics as potential traitors with divided loyalties. As a result of a statute passed in 1581, lay recusants could be fined for non-attendance at Anglican service, while Catholic clergy who absolved English subjects of their allegiance to the monarch risked charges of high treason. A statute of 1585 effectively made simply being a Catholic priest in England a treasonable offence, punished by the terrible death of hanging, evisceration and quartering; even harbouring priests became a capital felony.21 And while the most draconian provisions of the penal laws had fallen into abeyance in the reign of Charles II, the Popish Plot would change all that.22 English Catholics constituted a small minority of the population, some estimates placing this figure as low as 1.5 per cent.23 But ‘papists’ loomed large in the conspiratorial imagination, associated both with England’s external enemies (in the late 1670s, this meant France in particular) and its restive Irish hinterland. Protestant propagandists such as Sir John Temple claimed that the Catholic clergy had not only incited the 1641 Irish Rebellion but authorised the massacre of over a hundred thousand English and Scottish Protestant settlers.24 During the English Civil War there were waves of panics about Irish uprisings and French invasions; similar rumours would revive during the Popish Plot, especially in the weeks following Godfrey’s death.25 Jesuits in particular were 21

23 Eliz. c. 1; 27 Eliz. c. 2. After a series of royal proclamations ordering that Catholics withdraw at least ten miles from London and Westminster, offering rewards for various suspects in Godfrey’s murder and commanding officials to disarm and conduct searches and make detailed lists of all Catholic recusants, the penal laws against Catholic clergy were also explicitly revived in a proclamation of 20 November 1678 (London Gazette, 18–21 November 1678). 23 John Miller, Popery and Politics in England, 1660–1688 (Cambridge, 1973), 10–12. Robert Southwell estimated that Catholics numbered ‘hardly one to two hundred Protestants all over England’ (HMC Ormonde, 4:473). Southwell’s calculation probably originated from his friend, the political arithmetician William Petty. However, recusancy rates likely underestimate those ‘Church Papists’ who may have occasionally conformed outwardly (see Alexandra Walsham, Church Papists, Catholicism, Conformity and Confessional Polemic in Early Modern England (Woodbridge, 1993)). Kenyon favours an estimate on the higher side – around 5 per cent (Popish Plot, 24–5, 25n). 24 John Temple, The Irish Rebellion: or, A History of the beginnings and First Progress of the General Rebellion Raised Within the Kingdom of Ireland (1646), 78. Temple gives the figures, variously, as 105,000 British Protestants murdered (106) and 154,000 ‘destroyed’ (126), this last apparently including those drowning or dying of exposure and injuries. These estimates, needless to say, were grossly inflated: modern estimates range between four and twelve thousand; there were also atrocities on both sides. See John Gibney, The Shadow of a Year: The 1641 Rebellion in Irish History and Memory (2013), 71–6. 25 Robin Clifton, ‘The Popular Fear of Catholics during the English Revolution’, Past & 22

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associated with incendiary plots and ‘king-killing’ doctrines: the controversial views of the hardline Spanish Jesuit Juan de Mariana, who had in the sixteenth century argued that it was legitimate to depose or even assassinate heretical tyrants, were frequently generalised to all Catholic clergy by English Protestant polemicists.26 Catholic apologists countered that it was their co-religionists who were the crown’s most loyal supporters during the Civil War, and Protestant nonconformists who were the true king-killers, rebels and enemies to the monarchy and the Anglican Church.27 What modern political scientists have referred to as the ‘horseshoe theory’ – the belief that extremes on either end of the political spectrum not only resemble one another, but pursue similar agendas – was a frequent feature of English conspiratorial thought. As has long been noted, Titus Oates’s eighty-one articles of ‘Popish Plot’ informations recycled both older and current conspiracy beliefs: claiming, for instance, that Jesuits masqueraded as Covenanters (militant Scottish Presbyterians) to foment rebellion in Charles II’s northern kingdom, and that they had also impersonated Fifth Monarchists (radical Protestant sectarians) to incite and later to entrap them for plotting the Fire of London. Conspiracy theories of Jesuits posing as Quakers, Anabaptists and Presbyterians in false flag operations flourished both during the 1640s and after the Restoration, providing a convenient alibi to former republicans and Protestant sectarians for their role in the regicide – not unlike modern claims that Antifa militants infiltrate white nationalist rallies for the purpose of discrediting them by inciting violence.28 Significantly, these types of false equivalences tended to work to the disadvantage of Catholics rather than Protestant dissidents: while former Cromwellian hardliners and foreigners of all descriptions, including Dutch Calvinists, had been suspected of setting the Fire of London, it was only against Catholics, foreign and domestic, that the charges really stuck.29 Present, 52 (August 1971), 23–55; Miller, Popery and Politics, 159–61. 26 See for instance Care, 4. 27 See for instance Antoine Arnauld, Apologie pour les Catholiques (Liège, 1681), 16–24. 28 Care, 65, 70, 245–7; Kenyon, 53; W.C. Abbot, ‘The Origin of Titus Oates’s Story’, English Historical Review, xxv (1910), 126–9; see also Ian Y. Thackray, ‘Zion Undermined: The Protestant Belief in a Popish Plot during the English Interregnum’, History Workshop Journal, 18 (1984), 30. 29 Robert Hubert, a watchmaker from Rouen, was hanged in October 1666 after making a dubious confession of having started the Fire. L’Estrange argued that Hubert was not only innocent, being elsewhere during the Fire, but that he was in fact a Huguenot (Observator, 5 July 1683); the Parliamentary committee investigating the Fire maintained he ‘was a Papist, and dyed so’ (A True and Faithful Account of the Several Informations Exhibited To the Honourable Committee appointed by the Parliament To Inquire into the late Dreadful Burning of the City of London (1667), 8). See also Frances E. Dolan, True Relations: Reading, Literature, and Evidence in Seventeenth-Century England (Philadelphia, 2013), ch. 3; and Peter Hinds,‘The Horrid Popish Plot’: Roger L’Estrange and the Circulation of Political Discourse in Late Seventeenth-Century London (Oxford, 2010), ch. 10.

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While older work on the Popish Plot tended to dismiss anti-Catholic conspiratorial beliefs as a function of irrationality and hysteria, antipopery has been taken more seriously on its own terms by more recent scholars.30 The threat of popish plots seemed all too plausible in the years leading up to the Civil War, given the larger concentrations of Catholics in London and Westminster than elsewhere, and their disproportionate influence at court.31 During the reign of Charles II, diplomatic anxieties about the encroaching threat of Louis XIV’s France to continental Protestants, especially in the Low Countries, dovetailed with (well-founded) suspicions about the Francophile and Catholic tendencies of both royal brothers.32 And by 1678, as in the late Elizabethan period, a major succession crisis was brewing. Despite having sired a string of bastards with various (and mostly Catholic) mistresses, Charles II had no legitimate children, and thus the at least nominally Protestant king would be succeeded by his brother, James duke of York, whose Catholicism was an open secret.33 Finally, Catholics were natural suspects simply because their behaviour was of necessity furtive: because of the penal laws, they were forced to congregate in secret, and their priests routinely took false names and were obliged to practise deception both to avoid arrest and to protect their co-religionists. The Catholic chapels exempted by convention or treaty from the penal laws – those of foreign embassies, and that of the queen at Somerset House – were a sanctuary for the faithful and a magnet both for curious spectators and for speculation and suspicion alike. And the measures against Catholics taken during the Popish Plot made Catholics appear even more suspect. In late September, shortly after Titus Oates had testified before the Privy Council, numerous Jesuits and other Catholics named in his informations (including Godfrey’s friend Edward Coleman) were rounded up, questioned and taken into custody. On the eve of Godfrey’s funeral, and in large part a response to the panic sparked by his death, a royal proclamation was issued ordering Catholics to withdraw ten miles from London and Westminster. An exception was made for householders practising a trade or a manual occupation, provided they took, on pain of arrest

30

Jonathan Scott, ‘England’s Troubles: Exhuming the Popish Plot’, in Tim Harris, Paul Seaward and Mark Goldie (eds), The Politics of Religion in Restoration England (1990), 107–31; Peter Hinds has criticised the ‘governing frame’ of hysteria of writers such as Kenyon (‘Horrid Popish Plot’, 269). 31 Caroline M. Hibbard, Charles I and the Popish Plot (Chapel Hill, 1983). 32 Scott, ‘England’s Troubles’. 33 If, after 1673, James’s Catholicism was effectively public knowledge, his brother’s true religious leanings were (and remain) more opaque. Charles II’s 1670 promise to Louis XIV to announce his conversion to Catholicism is well known, as is the fact that he was accepted into that Church at his deathbed in 1685; both will be discussed further in Chapter 5. Ronald Hutton has convincingly argued that such professions were the result of political expediency rather than genuine religious conviction: ‘The Religion of Charles II’, in R. Malcolm Smuts (ed.), The Stuart Court and Europe: Essays in Politics and Political Culture (Cambridge, 1996), 228–46.

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and imprisonment, the oaths of allegiance and supremacy.34 As we shall see, for some of those Catholics who remained in the metropolis, the rumours, speculation, gossip and careless talk in the streets, coffee-houses and taverns generated by Godfrey’s disappearance and death would have serious, even deadly, consequences. Rumours, hearsay and the corpus delicti

Tory writers would later claim that rumours implicating the Catholics in Godfrey’s death were deliberately spread by Godfrey’s brothers and the political opposition. Roger L’Estrange placed sinister significance on the fact that the report that Godfrey had been ‘murther’d by Papists’ had mysteriously outpaced the regular post ‘Two or Three Hundred Miles up and down the Country’ even before the discovery of the body.35 Most contemporaries, however, appeared to share William Lloyd’s conviction that it was the Catholics who had first tried to misdirect the investigation.36 A pamphlet published shortly after the discovery of the body by the printer Nathaniel Thompson (who, interestingly, would later draw fire for his Tory and even pro-Catholic sympathies) condemned the ‘false Reports’ that Godfrey had committed suicide as an ‘inhumane’ attempt ‘to blast his Reputation’.37 Anyone who advocated non-conspiratorial explanations for Godfrey’s disappearance and, later, his death, ran the risk of being seen not only as maligning Sir Edmund’s character but as participating in a sinister cover-up. As we have seen, the duke of Norfolk immediately attracted suspicion for being overly ‘officious’ in passing along rumours that offered innocuous, if hardly flattering, explanations for Godfrey’s disappearance.38 As not only the head of a prominent recusant family, but also Titus Oates’s former employer – Oates had been the Anglican chaplain to Protestants in his household – Norfolk must have felt himself in a perilous position when the Popish Plot accusations broke in late September 1678. Shortly after Godfrey’s death, the ‘five popish 34

The London Gazette, 31 October–4 November 1678. These oaths asserted the English monarch’s authority over the Church of England and denied papal jurisdiction to depose Protestant rulers but, unlike the ‘Test’ required of office-holders after 1673, did not demand that the oath-taker explicitly reject the central Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation. The English Catholic community itself was divided about the propriety of taking these oaths: the controversialist John Sergeant believed they were permissible, but his views were rejected by the Roman Catholic establishment. See Malcolm V. Hay, The Jesuits and the Popish Plot (1934). 35 L’Estrange, 3:198. 36 Care, 107. 37 A True and Perfect Narrative of the late Terrible and Bloody Murder of Sir Edmundbury Godfrey (1678), 7–8. 38 The story of Godfrey’s marriage with the lawyer’s widow seems to have originated with Joseph Offley, who supposedly told one Peter Gamley on the Tuesday after Sir Edmund had gone missing that ‘you need not be troubled about Sir E. Godfry for he was marryed & in bed with his sister[-in-law]’ (Shaftesbury Papers, fol. 15).

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lords’, Petre, Belasyse, Powis, Arundell and Stafford, were arrested and put in the Tower; Stafford – Norfolk’s uncle – was executed for the Plot in late 1680. It is one of the minor mysteries of the Plot that Norfolk, almost alone of the Catholic peers, was never charged with involvement in the conspiracy. A contemporary theory that Oates spared Norfolk because of their former association seems highly improbable now and could hardly have been credible at the time, given that it was in his household that Oates had claimed to have heard the first ‘whisperings amongst the Priests … That there was some grand Design on foot’ and taken the resolution to infiltrate the Jesuit ranks to investigate and foil their plans.39 Godfrey’s sisters Jane Harrison and Sarah Pluncknett supposedly told Sir Edmund’s friend Mary Gibbon that the family ‘had great Reason to Believe that he was Murther’d in the Duke of Norfolk’s House’, claiming that his household had been dressed in mourning and that a coach and four draped in black had been seen coming back from Primrose Hill to Arundel House in the middle of the night soon after their brother’s disappearance.40 Mrs Harrison’s maid is also said to have urged Godfrey’s housekeeper that she could ‘safely Swear that the Papists kill’d him’.41 When a servant of Norfolk’s had an eight-by-two-foot chest transported by water to Vauxhall around the same time, a suspicious marble cutter wrote to the secretary of state Henry Coventry requesting that the contents be inspected to ensure that they were indeed paving stones instead of something ‘not warrantable’.42 Other rumours implicated the five Catholic peers committed to the Tower in late October: a story made the rounds that Godfrey had been murdered in the cellar of lord Belasyse.43 Even before any witness came forward, one Jesuit account reported that ‘the crowd pointed to Somerset House’ – the queen’s residence – ‘as the place of the murder’.44 William Collinson claimed that, while drinking ‘his Mornings Draught’ at the Feathers in Charing Cross (probably Godfrey’s own local), on Sunday 13 October, the day after Sir Edmund went missing, he was accosted with ‘Here’s brave News for you Papists: Sir Edmundbury Godfrey went from his House yesterday, and did not come home last Night &c.’ Soon after, ‘it was in All Peoples Mouths in that Quarter, that he was Murther’d by the Papists at Somerset House’.45 39

Care, 83. The double agent Edward Fitzharris told the minister of the Tower, Francis Hawkins, that he had been instructed by the Whig sheriffs Slingsby Bethel and Henry Cornish to accuse the earl of Danby rather than the duke of Norfolk, as originally planned, ‘because Dr Oates would rather spite the businesse then itt should do any harme to the Duke of Norfolk’ (BL Add MS 28043, fol. 59). 40 SP 29/423, fol. 9. 41 L’Estrange, 3:200. 42 Coventry Papers 11, fol. 225. 43 Shaftesbury Papers, fols 35–6. 44 BL Add MS 36770, De nupera Catholicorum in Anglia conspiratione epistolaris dissertation (1680), fol. 12v. 45 L’Estrange, 3:200.

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Whether Godfrey’s brothers deliberately spread such rumours to pass off his suicide as a murder is a question I shall take up in Chapter 3. It is however important to note that officials as well as court critics connected Godfrey’s disappearance with the Popish Plot allegations. Samuel Pepys’s clerk Samuel Atkins admitted that he had heard at the Admiralty office that Godfrey had been murdered by papists even before the discovery of the body.46 William Griffith, underclerk to the secretary of state Henry Coventry, wrote on Thursday 17 October that there was ‘great jealousy’ (i.e. suspicion) that Godfrey had been ‘made-way by the Papists, he having taken Oates his first examinations, & been very active since in prosecuting the discovery’. (Griffith concluded with a perhaps not entirely tongue-in-cheek resolution not to communicate any more ‘News of the Plott’ by letter, ‘lest I go after Sr. Edmund’.)47 On Tuesday 15 October, the clerk of the Privy Council Robert Southwell reported that Godfrey’s ‘being lost’ was ‘imputed to revenge, upon his having as a justice taken all these depositions from Oates before they came to the Council Board’. But at this point other possibilities were still being envisaged: the printing of a ‘public inquiry after him’ was, ‘upon some jealousy that he may be absented upon the score of debt’, delayed until the following day, 16 October, when the privy councillors were still able to laugh off Norfolk’s report of Godfrey being in bed with the widow Offley.48 But after the discovery of Godfrey’s body the very next evening, Thursday 17 October, sceptics and scoffers were silenced. Now Oates’s Popish Plot allegations not only ‘passed for gospel’,49 but suddenly the unexplained absences or unusual behaviour of London Catholics during the critical five-day period from 12 to 17 October 1678 became matter for active investigation.50 So, too, did rumours and gossip. On 25 October 1678, an apothecary named Gilsthrop told the Lords committee that he had heard one Mr Frith say at 3pm on Thursday 17 October that Godfrey’s body had been found with two stab wounds in his breast. Roger Frith, initially reticent, finally acknowledged that the Resident Salvetti, ambassador to the duke of Tuscany, had told him at 1pm on Thursday (hours before Godfrey’s body was found) that ‘the young Jesuits are grown desperate; the old ones would do no such thing’. Frith admitted repeating this to Gilsthrop but did not remember anything about ‘two wounds in his breast spoken by myself or anyone else’.51 This story – in addition to illustrating that even Catholics suspected the Jesuits of involvement in Godfrey’s death – demonstrates how the details and times of such conversations could be garbled in the retelling. Likely 46

Bod. Rawl A181, fol. 16. Palace Library, Gibson Papers, vol. 942, Letter from William Griffith to Benjamin Colinge, 17 October 1678. See also HMC 7th Report, 471. 48 HMC Ormonde, 4:459; BL Add MS 38015, fols 316–17. 49 HMC Ormonde, 4:462. 50 See for instance Shaftesbury Papers, fols 18–19, reporting on the suspicious behaviour of a Catholic lodger. 51 Lords MSS, 47–8. 47 Lambeth

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Salvetti had made this comment the following day, and Gilsthrop had confabulated the part about the two wounds, a detail that would have been common knowledge by 25 October. William Lloyd, in his funeral sermon for Godfrey, also alluded to rumours he had heard on the afternoon of Thursday 17 October that Godfrey ‘was found with his own Sword through his Body’ and that ‘he had two wounds … things [which] were found to be True some hours after’.52 Lloyd would later explain that his acquaintance Angus Adam and one Mr Oswald, a minister, were browsing in a bookshop in St Paul’s churchyard sometime between 1 and 2pm on Thursday 17 October, when a stranger in a grey suit burst in and told them that Godfrey’s body had been found ‘In Leicester-Fields, at the Dead Wall, with his own Sword run through him’. While the mysterious man in grey was never identified, Adam immediately informed Lloyd’s friend Gilbert Burnet, who sent word to Godfrey’s brothers, who in turn claimed to have ‘heard Nothing of the News’.53 Such stories have baffled students of Godfrey’s death ever since. The Victorian writer Andrew Lang would speculate that ‘rumour is correct once in a myriad times’, noting that ‘the report of the fall of Khartoum was current in Cairo on the day of the unhappy event’.54 But conspiracy theories admit no coincidence and, for contemporaries at least, these reports seemed to confirm the most paranoid suspicions that Godfrey had been murdered in town as part of an elaborate plot and that his body had been subsequently moved to the fields and brambles of Primrose Hill, then far outside of the urban area. The two men who discovered the body were William Bromwell, a baker, and John Walters (or Waters), a farrier. Sometime around 2pm on Thursday 17 October they spotted some gloves, a ‘stick’ and a belt and scabbard lying on or near the bank of a ditch described, variously, as ‘two fields’, ‘a stone’s cast’ or a quarter of a mile from their destination: the White House, near Primrose Hill (on or near the present site of the Lemonia, a Greek restaurant at the corner of Regent’s Park Road and Erskine Road). They gave the items a wide berth, naturally enough assuming that they ‘belong’d to some person that was gone into the Ditch to ease himself’.55 Upon arriving at the alehouse, they told the master of the house John Rawson about the things, and he offered them a shilling to go retrieve them. In the end, after waiting several hours for the rain to let up, the three men went together at about 5pm to investigate. Rawson, bending down, spotted a body lying face-down nearby ‘in a dry Ditch upon the South-side of Primrose-hill’.56 The three went to call upon a constable who returned with them and what was now a group of about a dozen people to the scene. Although 52 Lloyd,

Sermon, 24. L’Estrange, 3:88–9. 54 Andrew Lang, The Valet’s Tragedy and Other Studies (1903), 97. 55 Shaftesbury Papers, fol. 10; True and Perfect Narrative, 5; L’Estrange asserts that this initial discovery of the gloves, belt and stick was made closer to 3 or 4pm (L’Estrange, 3:97), and puts the discovery of the body and the summoning of the constable later as well. 56 Lords MSS, 47; True and Perfect Narrative, 5. 53

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it would have been by then about 6pm and quite dark – England was still using the older Julian calendar so 17 October would have been the 27th New Style and, without daylight saving time, the sun would have set before 5pm – it is likely the constable and the various neighbours who had accompanied him would have brought lanterns, part of the regular equipment of peace officers of the time.57 The constable, John Brown, immediately confirmed what they had all suspected: that the body was that of the missing Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey. A search of the body revealed six guineas, a half crown and four other gold coins in one pocket; in the other, two rings, one of them with a diamond, another guinea and two small pieces of gold and £4 sterling. There was a third ring on one of the dead man’s fingers. This considerable wealth in money and jewellery seemed to exclude robbery, although it was noted that the ‘Pocket Book’ in which the magistrate was known to take notes during examinations was missing (this was not, however, his copy of Oates’s testimony, which was later found in Godfrey’s home and turned over to the House of Commons).58 The constable then made the highly questionable decision to pull out the sword and carry the corpse to the nearby White House, first exhorting witnesses to take ‘good notice of the manner of his lying’: he had a Sword run into him just under his Left Pap, which came out upon the Right side of his Back, about Seven or Eight Inches; one of his Hands being doubled under, on which he seemed to Lean, the other Hand lying upon the Bank, his Hair Chamblet Coat being turn’d up over his Head; his Hat and Perriwig being among the Bushes over his Head, but no Band nor Cravat could be found about him; although when he went from Home, he had a large Lac’d Band on.59

The above description is from Nathaniel Thompson’s account, published in late October 1678. This pamphlet also notes that as part of the inquest, two surgeons had in the presence of the coroner’s jury examined the body, determining by means of a probe that there were ‘two wounds’, effectively ruling out the possibility that Godfrey had committed suicide by falling on his sword. This information is consistent with the evidence these surgeons gave several months later at the trial of Godfrey’s supposed murderers, where Zachariah Skillard testified to having found, upon his examination of the body at noon on Friday 18 October, ‘two punctures’ under Godfrey’s left ‘pap’ (nipple), one stopping at a rib, and the second passing through the body. Skillard and the second surgeon, Nicholas Cambridge, concurred that Godfrey did not die of these wounds because there was ‘no evacuation of blood’; that is, they were post mortem.60 The constable and numerous eyewitnesses at the scene testified that 57

J.M. Beattie, Policing and Punishment in London, 1660–1750 (Oxford, 2001), 181. True and Perfect Narrative, 6; Lords MSS, 2; CJ, IX, 519. 59 True and Perfect Narrative, 5. 60 True and Perfect Narrative, 6; State Trials, 7:185–6. 58

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there was little or ‘no blood, at all, there was no blood in the ditch’, although some watery blood was reported to have come out when the sword was removed from the corpse. These and other witnesses who had viewed Godfrey’s body also affirmed that ‘No blood was on his clothes, or about him’.61 The forensic evidence suggests that Godfrey had probably died on the Saturday he had gone missing. The surgeon Skillard estimated that the magistrate had been dead for four or five days, testifying that when they ‘ripped him up’ – i.e. made ‘two incisions’ with a probe – ‘the liquore that was in his body did a little smell’ and ‘the very lean flesh [the muscle] was so near turned into putrefaction, that it stuck to the instrument when we cut it’.62 The cause of death was widely accepted to be strangulation, evidenced by ‘a green circle’ or a ‘mark about an inch broad’ around Godfrey’s neck, and the fact that ‘the Blood [was] all settled in his Face’, which was swollen and, instead of being ‘palish or rather sallow’, as it was ‘in his life time’, was now ‘of a fresh colour’ or ‘ruddy’.63 There appeared to be evidence of a beating: Burnet and others reported that Godfrey’s torso was covered in bruises.64 At the trial of Godfrey’s supposed murderers on 10 February 1679, the surgeons testified that the ‘body did look black about the breast’, as though the dead man had been beaten ‘with some obtuse weapon’ such as hands or feet, and that the neck appeared to be broken or dislocated. In response to a leading question from the attorney general Sir William Jones as to whether Godfrey could have hanged himself, Skillard assured the court that ‘there was more done to his neck than an ordinary suffocation’; in other words, suicide by asphyxiation was impossible.65 Who would have killed Godfrey but not have taken his money? In the view of the lord chief justice Sir William Scroggs, the presiding judge at the trial of Godfrey’s accused murderers, the answer was clear: only papists ‘count theft sin but not murder’. As one of his colleagues on the bench volunteered: ‘they left [the money in his pockets], to let men think he murdered himself’. However, if the killers had intended to stage a murder as suicide they had done so very clumsily indeed. William Griffith speculated that they hoped that Godfrey’s body, in a ditch in a ‘by-place’ surrounded by ‘Bushes and Briers’ and ‘far out of the road-way’, would remain undetected ‘till after putrefaction had taken away all marks of any other violent death’ than that suggested by the sword through his body. But why then, as one contemporary newsletter wondered, would 61

State Trials, 7:185; Burnet, 2:154. State Trials, 7:186. 63 True and Perfect Narrative, 6; Burnet, 2:154; Sir Edmundbury Godfrys Ghost: or, An Answer to Nat. Thompsons Scandalous Letter from Cambridge, to Mr. Miles Prance, in Relation to the Murder of Sir Edmundbury Godfrey (1682), 5. William Griffith claimed that, in addition to Godfrey’s face being red, an ‘impression’ of a ‘cord about his Neck … was also very evident’ (Gibson Papers, Griffith to Conlinge, 19 October 1678). However, Griffith’s account was second-hand and contained some inaccuracies, as we shall see in Chapter 4. 64 Burnet, 2:154. Lords MSS, 46. 65 State Trials, 7:185. 62

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the murderers leave the gloves and other items in ‘an open place’ as though ‘serv[ing] as direction to find him’?66 This inconvenient detail, largely ignored at the time, seems to lend credence to conspiracy theories that the Catholics were framed for Godfrey’s murder. Other evidence pointed to murder. By all accounts, the shoes of the dead man were clean, despite the wet weather and muddy terrain. This, together with the tracks of a coach or cart ‘two fields off’ (coming and returning from ‘the Paddington way’, from the southwest), some scattered straw and a bent ‘bar’ or grate nearby, suggested that the body, possibly hidden under the straw, had been transported there from another location. And this must have been shortly before it was discovered, according to various people who claimed to have been in the area between the Saturday and Wednesday in question without seeing Godfrey’s effects – including a servant of the mother of one of the jurymen in the coroner’s inquest who had supposedly scoured the grounds on Tuesday for a lost calf, and several others who had hunted there.67 The sheer extent of traffic in this supposedly ‘lonely spot’ has aroused the suspicions of both Roger L’Estrange and the modern scholar Alan Marshall; for what it is worth, one contemporary claimed that the field near where Godfrey’s body was found was a passage-way between several nearby houses.68 Something that must have struck contemporaries, although it has received surprisingly little attention from later writers, was the fact that the White House was frequented by a club of Catholic tradesmen. One of the men present on the evening Godfrey’s body was discovered told the Lords committee that he had overheard the master of the house John Rawson (who himself denied being a Catholic) call both Bromwell and Walters ‘Papist dogs’. Needless to say, these two men were examined and re-examined by the Lords committee and bombarded with hard and suspicious questions: e.g. ‘why they should thinke a man was 3 howers at untrusse’ and what would he then be doing with a sword without a scabbard? Bromwell, obviously nervous, first denied but later admitted that he had said, upon first seeing the body, ‘Pray God it bee not Sir Edmund Godfrey’. For his part, Walters seemed to be only too willing to sell out his companion, volunteering that Bromwell had chosen their route that day through the ‘back’ or ‘hedge side’ even though it was ‘out of all ways [i.e. not direct] to the White house’. Moreover, he said, the ‘Baker’ (Bromwell) refused to pick up the gloves and, unlike ‘the Smith’ (Walters), never looked behind him to see if anyone emerged from the ditch after they had continued on their way.69 66

State Trials, 7:185; Gibson Papers, Griffith to Colinge, 19 October 1678; Newdigate Newsletters, 26 October 1678, L.c.698. 67 Burnet, 2:154; SP 29/366, fol. 305; Gibson Papers, Griffith to Colinge, 19 October 1678; True and Perfect Narrative, 7; Several Affidavits Lately taken upon Oath … Which further confirm the Testimony given, Concerning the Murder of Sir Ed. Bury Godfrey (1683), 50. 68 Marshall, 99; L’Estrange, 3:175; Les Conspirations d’Angleterre (Cologne, 1680), 333. 69 John Rawson, upon being questioned about the ‘clubbers’, told the Lords Committee that

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After ‘being found in contrariety when examined’, Bromwell and Walters would be committed to Newgate;70 speculation would swirl that they and/ or a third companion who had not continued to the White House had been involved in transporting the body to the ditch where it was found. Another ‘constant man at the popish club’ at the White House, a waterman by the name of Swanwick, also attracted suspicion for being ‘very busy & inquisitive’ about the coroner’s inquest.71 Last but not least, the list of ‘Popish clubbers’ given to the Lords committee included one ‘Mr Prince’, a silversmith in Holborn: the resemblance to the man who would later confess to having been an accomplice in Godfrey’s killing – Miles Prance, a Catholic silversmith (although living in Covent Garden) – was not lost on investigators. Indeed, when later questioned, Prance’s response that he had not seen John Rawson for a ‘twelvemonth’ seems a tacit admission that he had indeed been part of this ‘popish club’.72 Given so many apparently suspicious circumstances and coincidences – which would, of course, not have seemed at all coincidental to contemporaries – it is not surprising that the finger of blame pointed to the Catholics. The forensic and other evidence indicated foul play, while seeming to rule out either suicide or robbery. Godfrey had taken Oates’s deposition and (it was believed) was investigating the Popish Plot. The magistrate’s last known sighting and various rumours placed him in the Strand, close to Somerset House, the queen’s palace, and Arundel House, the town residence of the Catholic duke of Norfolk. His body had been discovered a short distance from an alehouse frequented by a ‘popish club’ by two men who were clearly believed to be Catholics. It was inevitable not only that the Catholics would be suspected of Godfrey’s death, but that the £500 reward offered for information leading to the conviction of his murderers would quickly flush out a venal witness only too eager to accuse them – as well as, at least implicitly, Charles II’s childless Catholic queen, Catherine of Braganza. Accusers and accused

The man who would successfully claim this reward came forward within a week of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey’s funeral with a story so incredible it would have been laughable had the stakes not been so high. He was a reputed robber and conman named William Bedloe (or Bedlow) who ingenuously presented his chequered past as additional corroboration of his testimony: ‘he had been a very great rogue, but that unless he had been so he should not have been able none of them were priests and that they ‘used to discourse freely’, rather than ‘whisper’; Lords MSS, 47; Shaftesbury Papers, fol. 9v, fols 37–37v. 70 HMC 7th Report, John Verney to Sir Ralph Verney, 11 November 1678, 471. 71 Lords MSS, Notes on committee meeting, 31 October 1678, fol. 15. 72 Bod. Rawl A136, fol. 376; Marshall, 102.

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to serve the public as well as now he does’.73 As Rachel Weil has illustrated, the Popish Plot created a space in which informers of obscure backgrounds and dubious reputations could undermine or even invert the traditional legal ‘relationship between credibility and character’, in which disgruntled servants (and lodgers) could, and did, swear away the lives of Catholics of respectable life and from genteel backgrounds.74 Bedloe, an old acquaintance of Oates, claimed to have been a Catholic convert and a former servant of lord Belasyse, one of the five ‘popish’ peers in the Tower on suspicion of the Plot.75 According to Bedloe, Godfrey’s murder had been masterminded by two Jesuits, one Father Le Phaire and Charles Walsh, and committed by a servant of Belasyse and several others, one of whom Bedloe later identified as Samuel Pepys’s clerk Samuel Atkins. With the exception of Atkins, ultimately acquitted because of a watertight alibi (and many attestations to his Protestantism), none of these other suspects were ever apprehended and there are doubts as to whether all of them even existed.76 Roger L’Estrange and modern writers like Alfred Marks who have excoriated Bedloe’s evidence as nonsensical have not exaggerated. In his testimony before the Lords committee on 8 November 1678, Bedloe claimed that Le Phaire had offered him £4,000 to ‘be one of the 4 or 5 who would kill … an old man, that belonged to a Person of quality who had taken some Examinations tending to the discovery of their design’, but that he had failed to meet up with the conspirators at the agreed-upon time. Shortly afterwards Bedloe supposedly encountered Le Phaire again by accident and the latter not only accepted his excuses for not having kept their appointment but confided in him that ‘the person who he was to help to kill was killed and his Boddy then lay in Somerset House’ and then asked for his help to carry it off. After being shown, by the light of a ‘dark Lanthorne’,77 a body which he claimed to have recognised as Godfrey’s, Bedloe again supposedly gave the other conspirators the slip. Yet even after having been thus twice stood up, the strangely forgiving and forthcoming Le Phaire later filled Bedloe in on the details of the murder. Supposedly, at about 5pm on Saturday 12 October, the conspirators had met up with Godfrey in the Strand and, on the pretence his help was needed to investigate a seditious meeting near St Clement Danes church, managed to lure him into the upper 73

HMC Ormonde, 4:474; Grey, Debates, 6:199. Rachel Judith Weil, ‘“If I did say so, I lyed”: Elizabeth Cellier and the Construction of Credibility in the Popish Plot Crisis’, in Susan Dwyer Amussen and Mark Kishlansky (eds), Political Culture and Cultural Politics in Early Modern England (Manchester, 1995), 190. 75 Most of the sources on Bedloe’s life, as Alan Marshall points out in his ODNB entry, are suspiciously picaresque. 76 Bedloe claimed that Le Phaire (or Le Faire or Le Fere) was an Englishman posing as a Frenchman, and there may have been a Catholic priest with a similar name, but there is no evidence that he was the queen’s confessor (as Bedloe claimed) or that he or Walsh were Jesuits; see John Gerard, ‘History “Ex Hypothesi” and the Popish Plot’, The Month: A Catholic Magazine, 102 (July–December 1903), 9; Lang, Valet’s Tragedy, 101–2. 77 A lantern with a sliding shutter so that the light could be obscured without being extinguished; see Figure 3. 74

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courtyard of Somerset House to wait for a constable to be summoned. The magistrate was then forced into a room and demanded at gunpoint to produce Oates’s examination. Upon Godfrey telling them the papers had already been sent to Whitehall and refusing to answer further questions, the conspirators knelt on his breast and suffocated him with a pillow, later finishing him off by strangling him with his own cravat. In answer to Bedloe’s question why they ‘carried him into the fields’, Le Phaire supposedly explained: ‘they had made a wound in his boddy & layd his sword by him, that it should seeme he had killed himself’.78 (Incidentally, this was inaccurate: the sword was found in, not beside, the corpse.) The motive Bedloe gave for the murder was more ludicrous still. In his interview with the king on 7 November, the day before he gave his testimony to the Lords committee, Bedloe claimed that the Jesuit conspirators (directed by lord Belasyse) supposedly wanted to seize the examinations Godfrey had taken from Titus Oates so that they ‘would never come to light’. When a bemused Charles II objected that both the ‘Partyes’ who had given the informations (Titus Oates and his mentor Israel Tonge) were still alive – he might also have added that this testimony was already in the hands of the Privy Council – Bedloe then claimed that the conspirators wanted to compare any subsequent iteration of the examinations with the first in order to point out discrepancies between them, so the Plot ‘would have been disproved and … not be believed’.79 Not only could Godfrey’s murderers have hardly produced documents they had thus obtained without incriminating themselves but, as John Kenyon has pointed out (and any Jesuit mastermind would have known), previously sworn depositions would have had little weight in common law courts, where witnesses were supposed to give their evidence ‘afresh’.80 William Bedloe’s evidence would change and grow and improve: he added to his list of conspirators several of the Catholic peers accused by Oates but absent in his testimony of the previous day (prompting Charles II to remark: ‘Surely the man has received a new lesson during the last twenty-four hours’).81 It also seems likely Bedloe made numerous claims too outlandish or seditious to be included in the depositions taken by the Lords committee or the evidence presented to Parliament. Not only did various manuscript papers, including one ‘dropt upon the Exchange’, claim that Catherine of Braganza and her 78

Bod. Rawl A136, fols 343–8. Coventry Papers 11, fol. 273. 80 Lang, Valet’s Tragedy, 74–5; Kenyon, 109. L’Estrange also claims that Bedloe had testified that he had been solicited to commit the murder in August, before Oates had given his depositions to Godfrey (L’Estrange, 3:41); however, Bedloe’s evidence to the Lords specifies that this was in early October 1678. 81 John Lingard, The History of England, 5th ed. (1849), 9:375; Pollock questions this account, but the substance of the king’s words is confirmed by Burnet, 2:158. Several details were not only added to what Bedloe had told the king the previous day, but contradicted his earlier claims; on the 7th, he had told Charles II that he had not seen Godfrey’s body. 79

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ladies in waiting danced or walked three times around Godfrey’s body, but one newsletter reported that Lady Mary Crane, daughter of the Royalist hero William Widdrington, had been arrested after ‘some discovery being made that shee danced about the corps of Sir Edmund Godfrey after he was so barbarously murthered’.82 Bedloe was also likely the source of a report that Godfrey’s body was hidden for several days under the high altar in the queen’s chapel in Somerset House.83 Other stories were more fanciful still, such as that of the ghost of Sir Edmund Godfrey appearing before the queen while she was attending mass.84 The anonymous author of a 1680 French account about the Plot made several claims that were demonstrably false but may well have been widely repeated: that a full autopsy was performed on Godfrey and his ‘gut was empty and shrunk, and that he been starved to death’; that ‘pins and needles [had been] thrust under his fingernails’; and ‘a note had been found written with a pencil on a dirty rag of paper attached to a pin on the inside of his shirt’ saying ‘that he was in the hands of his enemies, that they made him suffer a cruel death, that he did not know where he was, but he suspected he was in Somerset House’.85 Bedloe not only placed the murder in Somerset House but in late November (following the example of Titus Oates) went so far as to accuse the queen herself of complicity in the conspiracy against the king’s life. Those at court who knew Catherine of Braganza were offended at the ‘strange’ and unprecedented ‘liberty’ with which she was reflected upon, and were close enough to the king to know that he, too, disbelieved and objected to the accusations.86 This would mark the beginning of a real, if quiet, scepticism about the Plot on the part of the group that would later be called ‘Tories’. Yet in late December, Bedloe’s evidence about Godfrey’s death was seemingly corroborated by a second witness, the Catholic silversmith Miles Prance, who would accuse the three Catholics belonging to the queen’s household at Somerset House who would ultimately hang for the crime: Robert Green, Henry Berry and Lawrence Hill. Many who know little else about the case of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey may remember the canard that seems to have originated with Narcissus Luttrell – i.e. the strange and hence necessarily meaningful coincidence (what modern conspiracy theorists would call ‘synchronicity’) that the place where the body was discovered had supposedly been known in former times as ‘Greenberry Hill’, an amalgam of

82

Coventry Papers 11, fols 366, 412; BL Add MS 32509, fol. 62v; Bibliothèque Mazarine, ‘Affaires d’Angleterre, conspiration des papistes 1681’, 15450 [Res]/25, fol. 5v; Newdigate Newsletters, 25 January 1678/9, L.c.736. Figure 3 depicts not only the conspirators dripping wax on Godfrey’s body, but ladies dancing in the background. 83 Newdigate Newsletters, 16 November 1678, L.c.706; see also Wiltshire and Swindon History Centre, Arundell papers, 6 February 1679, 2667/25/1. 84 HMC Ormonde, 4:210. 85 Conspirations d’Angleterre, 333–4. 86 HMC Ormonde, 4:473–4, 4:468.

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the surnames of these three men.87 It is now clear that Miles Prance’s evidence was bogus: he initially denied any role in Godfrey’s death, and retracted his subsequent confession (extracted by ill-usage if not outright coercion) more than once, finally confessing to perjury in June 1686. Despite the attempt in the early twentieth century by John Pollock to argue that Prance was privy to a real conspiracy by Jesuits to murder Godfrey to protect the interests of the duke of York (we shall return to Pollock’s widely-debunked theory in Chapter 5), even he did not dispute the modern consensus that Green, Berry and Hill themselves were all innocent, victims of a gross miscarriage of justice. While neither William Bedloe (who died in 1680) nor Titus Oates (d. 1705) would ever recant their evidence, the latter would be convicted of perjury in early 1685, shortly after the accession of the Catholic James II had dramatically changed the political landscape. Later that same year, Oates’s former schoolmaster William Smith published a pamphlet claiming that he had often seen Oates and William Bedloe laugh together about ‘the business of Godfrey’. Once, in the company of Miles Prance, who silently looked on, ‘a little dull, as if displeas’d’, Oates supposedly told Smith that he believed ‘not a Word’ of the ‘Ridiculous Story’ that the Catholics had murdered the magistrate, saying: ‘Here is Bedloe, that knew no more of the Murder than you or I did. But he got the Five Hundred Pound, and gave this Blockhead’ (indicating Prance) ‘£30 of it’, having ‘pickt him up’ as ‘a Loggerhead fit for his purpose’.88 This account was eagerly credited by Tory and Catholic writers, even though Smith, an erstwhile crony of Oates, was not above suspicion himself (and his pamphlet contained several fantastical elements, such as stories of various Plot witnesses being haunted by the ghosts of the unjustly condemned). It is however important to emphasise that the story on the ground as it unfolded in late 1678 and early 1679 looked much different to contemporaries than it would later, with the benefit of hindsight. In late December 1678, Miles Prance’s evidence appeared to be the first real ‘break’ in the investigation of Godfrey’s death, providing what seemed to be a powerful confirmation of Bedloe’s otherwise incredible story that the magistrate was murdered by Jesuits and their agents in Somerset House.89 Bedloe, after supposedly ‘meeting accidentally’ with Prance after the latter had been taken into custody on suspicion of involvement in the Plot, pretended to recognise him as one of the men he had

87

‘It is remarkable that the place where sir Edmundbury Godfreys corps was found is in old leases called Green Bury Hill, being the names of the three persons condemned for that murther’ (Luttrell, 1:8). Roger North claims that this story is an ‘invention’ (Examen, 209). According to antiquarians, this mound (‘Little Primrose Hill’), adjacent to Primrose Hill, was later called Barrow Hill: Edward Walford, Old and New London, vol. 5, The Western and Northern Suburbs (1878), 287. There is a garbled reference to this coincidence in the 1999 film Magnolia. 88 William Smith, Intrigues of the Popish Plot Laid Open (1685), 25. 89 Kenyon, 150.

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seen with Godfrey’s body.90 (Roger L’Estrange would later claim that Prance had been ‘planted’ there for Bedloe to identify.)91 But Prance, a Catholic silversmith who had frequent business dealings with the queen’s household, links to the White House tavern and who had behaved suspiciously in the critical time period, was a likely suspect. He had reportedly slept away from home during the week that Godfrey was missing; his wife’s much lighter hair had just been shorn and made into a periwig for him (even though Prance, in the parlance of the time, normally ‘wore his own hair’); and, finally, he had recently hired a horse which was believed to have carried Godfrey’s body to Primrose Hill. What seems to have really happened is this: in late September or early October 1678, shortly after the arrest of the first group of Catholics accused by Titus Oates – the Benedictine lay brother Thomas Pickering, the Jesuits John Fenwick and William Ireland and the latter’s servant John Grove – Miles Prance had while in his cups in a coffee-house indiscreetly defended them as ‘very honest men’. Prance’s brief moment of courage (conspicuously absent thereafter) immediately made him a target of suspicion. Prance subsequently hid out at the house of a friend, the glass eye-maker William Boyce, in the evenings, and dithered about whether, in obedience to the recent proclamation, he should take the oaths of supremacy and allegiance or leave the city – this was why, he claimed, he had hired the horse and contemplated wearing a wig. Prance would be denounced by his lodger, John Wren, who owed him months of back rent, and whom Prance’s wife Mary had accused of having stolen a silver tankard.92 When interviewed, not only Wren, but other members of Prance’s household, including his wife, who was caught packing up the family valuables in a trunk, provided damning evidence against him. Mary Prance first denied and then admitted that she knew the priest Le Phaire, and said that Prance had been drinking in a back room with Pickering, Grove and Ireland the night before these three men were arrested. Mrs Prance also volunteered that her husband had been ‘abroad two nights when Sir Edmond B Godfrey was missing, and he might be as guilty as another man for anything she knew’. The maidservant claimed that her mistress had ‘feared’ her husband was not at the ‘tavern’ but ‘about worse business’, while Prance’s apprentice recalled that his master had come home suspiciously sober on the mornings after the evenings in question. Even Miles Prance himself stubbornly if inexplicably maintained the apparently incriminating claim that he ‘never lay out of his house the last two years but those three nights that Sir E. Godfrey was missing’.93 Indeed, it later emerged that they were all mistaken about the dates: Prance had in fact stayed out for several nights in a row almost

90

HMC Ormonde, 4:492; Newdigate Newsletters, 28 December 1678, L.c.725. L’Estrange, 3:53. Interestingly, John Evelyn seems to corroborate Bedloe’s version, rather than that of L’Estrange; see William Bray (ed.), Diary and Correspondence of John Evelyn (1906), 2:657. 92 Bod. Rawl A136, fols 375, 417. 93 Lords MSS, 375; Bod. Rawl A136, fol. 347. 91

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two weeks earlier, from 2–3 October rather than 12–13 October 1678.94 Prance may have simply been confused (he certainly did not benefit from legal advice); it may also be significant that the ten-day gap was the same as that between the Julian and Gregorian calendars, the latter being used on the continent and, hence, by many English Catholics. But it is likely that Prance hoped that William Boyce, the Protestant friend with whom he had stayed on those nights, would have provided him with an alibi. Boyce, possibly acting as a go-between with the Lords committee, appears to have been intent instead on persuading Prance to obtain a pardon by confessing and turning Plot witness. We shall discuss in Chapter 4 the question of whether Prance was actively suborned and tortured – according, at least, to the high bar of the late seventeenth century.95 Prance was arrested on 21 December and, although initially denying any knowledge or involvement in the conspiracy, changed his tune after the duke of Buckingham, the earl of Shaftesbury and other members of the Lords committee examining the Plot went on 23 December to Newgate to offer him a pardon in exchange for a confession.96 Prance began by making general accusations against people whom he surely knew had already been charged in the Plot: four out of the five Catholic peers who were by then in the Tower (Stafford alone was not named), as well as several priests in custody. For Godfrey’s murder specifically, Prance named two Irish priests, one Gerald or Fitzgerald and Dominick Kelly (who were never apprehended) and three working men with whom he was acquainted: Robert Green, a cushion layer in the queen’s chapel; Henry Berry, the porter at Somerset House; and Lawrence Hill, a servant of Dr Godwin, treasurer of the queen’s chapel. Prance may have chosen these three because they, too, as Catholics from the queen’s household, had already been rounded up as ‘usual suspects’. Robert Green, and probably the others as well, had been imprisoned in the Gatehouse after refusing to take the oaths of allegiance and supremacy – viewed by most Catholics as tantamount to a renunciation of their faith. Indeed, at the time of his arrest on 21 December 1678, Miles Prance told the Lords committee ‘that he is a Protestant now having lately taken the Oathes, but he was formerly a Papist’.97 The clerk of the Privy Council Sir Robert Southwell noted that although Green, Berry and Hill ‘den[ied] all very stoutly’ the charges, they were ‘not so credible in their tempers as Prance’, who was, moreover, ‘upon his oath’.98 94

L’Estrange, 3:66. This is confirmed also by the Whig writer of The Observator Prov’d a Trimmer (1685), 3, who otherwise takes issue with L’Estrange’s arguments. 95 By modern standards, the ‘cruel and hard usage’ to which Catholics imprisoned in Newgate during the Popish Plot were subjected would certainly qualify as such; see Elizabeth Cellier, Malice Defeated (1680), 7). The death rate amongst recusant prisoners in the Popish Plot years was much higher than amongst non-Catholics: Dom Hugh Bowler (ed.), London Sessions Records, 1605–1685 (1934), xxiii. 96 Parliamentary Archives, HL/PO/JO/10/1/382, ‘House of Lords Papers’, no. 8a. 97 State Trials, 7:204; Bod. Rawl A136, fol. 275. 98 HMC Ormonde, 4:491.

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This was an important point with contemporaries and, especially in criminal proceedings, worked powerfully to the disadvantage of defendants and their witnesses who, in contrast to those for the prosecution, were not permitted to give sworn testimony – in theory, to protect them from the spiritual dangers of perjury. This typically privileged the prosecutorial narrative, already enhanced by the exclusive right of prosecutors to deliver opening and closing statements denied the defence, who were in any case not permitted to have lawyers speak on their behalf in this period. In the Popish Plot trials the bench particularly belied its at least notional role to act as counsel to the accused, with judges as well as prosecutors regularly delivering inflammatory antipapist speeches aimed at undermining the credibility of all Catholic witnesses.99 In this climate, the presumption of Catholic guilt was so strong, any words or actions of the suspects seemed to confirm it. Thus it seemed like damning evidence when Robert Green was reported to have said, when first apprehended for Godfrey’s murder, ‘I am a Dead Man, or Words to that purpose’.100 The motive that Prance gave for the murder was as feeble as that provided by Bedloe – that Godfrey ‘was a great enemy to the Queen or her servants and that he had used some Irish men ill’ and that some unspecified reward had been promised by lord Belasyse.101 According to Prance’s testimony, Hill, Green and Gerald ‘dogged’ Godfrey for hours on the day he was murdered, at about 9pm luring him to the Watergate entrance of Somerset House by claiming his help was needed to break up a fight between two men. Then Green supposedly strangled him near the stables with a ‘twisted handkerchief’ and, aided by the other conspirators (except for Prance and Berry, supposedly keeping watch), ‘thumped him on the Brest & twisted his Neck until he Broke it’. The body was then hidden first in an outbuilding and then in several other places in Somerset House and, on the evening of Wednesday 16 October, carried off by a sedan chair and then on horseback to Primrose Hill, where the murderers impaled it with Godfrey’s sword.102 Using the journalistic ‘deadly parallel’ (opposing columns) to compare the inconsistencies of Bedloe and Prance’s depositions, the modern writer Alfred Marks has scathingly dismissed Bedloe and Prance’s evidence: the same man cannot have been murdered from two different sets of motives, in two different places, at two different hours of two different days, in two different ways, by two different gangs of murderers. The body cannot have been conveyed from Somerset House to Primrose Hill on two different days by two different methods of transport. 99

John H. Langbein, The Origins of Adversary Criminal Trial (Oxford, 2003), 52; Barbara J. Shapiro, ‘Oaths, Credibility and the Legal Process in Early Modern England’, Law and the Humanities, 6, 2 (2012). 100 Several Affidavits, 47. 101 Bod. Rawl A136, fol. 377. 102 Bod. Rawl A136, fol. 379; Newdigate Newsletters, 30 December 1678, L.c.726.

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It is however worth pointing out that most of these contradictions had been ironed out by the trial, where jurors saw the evidence of the two witnesses as broadly corroborative.103 Prance’s testimony now involved Godfrey’s body being moved on Monday 14 October to the room where Bedloe claimed to have seen it, along with Prance himself. The objection that Prance and Bedloe had named different conspirators was explained by the fact that Jesuits ‘usually went by several names’, and Bedloe now remembered the ‘Gerald’ invoked by Prance had been working with Le Phaire.104 And even those capable of following the tortuous intricacies of both Prance and Bedloe’s accusations were likely to have seen the differences in granular detail as reinforcing the simpler and more compelling narrative that the Jesuits had solicited a large number of Catholics to murder Godfrey: the men named by Prance had simply got to him first.105 The notion that the Catholic clergy could control their flock with assurances of pardon if they complied with their designs, and threats of damnation if they afterwards revealed the crimes they had been induced to commit, was core to the prosecution’s argument that the murder of Godfrey was ‘committed through zeal to a false religion, and that religion was a bond of secrecy’.106 However laughable to us today, Bedloe’s claim that all Roman Catholics of ‘any quality or credit’ knew of the Plot and ‘had received the Sacrament from their father confessor to be secret and assistant in the carrying of it on’ was a compelling Protestant talking point, tapping into anti-Catholic tropes dating from at least the Gunpowder Plot.107 Even what is now the strongest argument raised by the defence against Prance’s evidence – the fact that he had earlier recanted it – would also have looked different through the prism of contemporary anti-Catholic prejudice. On 29 December, Prance reportedly threw himself on his knees before the king in his closet, crying out that ‘he was innocent and they were all innocent’; shortly afterwards he told the Privy Council that his previous evidence was ‘a thing invented by him and a perfect lie’, he ‘never was Guilty of any man’s Blood’, and that he could not sleep because of ‘the story he had told’.108 L’Estrange later claimed that Prance ‘stood Firm to this Denyal, Against All Terrors and Temptations, from the 29th of December, to the 11th of the following January’, when he finally ceded to the unbearable torment of his heavy irons and his

103 Marks,

51, 48–50. Marks’s source appears to be the Tory Nathaniel Thompson’s 1683 summary of the discrepancies between Prance’s and Bedloe’s evidence, also in the ‘deadly parallel’ form (A Succinct Narrative of the Bloody Murder of Sir Edmondbury Godfrey). As Marks emphasises, Prance was initially vague about the day on which Godfrey was murdered: ‘at the latter End or the beginning of a week’ (Bod. Rawl A136, fol. 379). 104 State Trials, 7:184, 7:179. 105 Care, 103. 106 State Trials, 7:211. 107 Bod. Rawl A136, fol. 356. 108 HMC Ormonde, 4:494; Bod. Rawl A136, fol. 416.

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cold cell, but this was in fact patently false.109 Captain William Richardson, the keeper of Newgate, would testify that almost immediately upon his return to prison after being questioned by the Privy Council on 29 December, Prance begged him to go to the king to tell him ‘not only that what he had now said, was false; but that all which he had sworn before, was truth. And if his majesty would send him a pardon, he would make a great discovery’.110 Prance likely lost his nerve after being threatened with the rack by the lord chancellor,111 but he may also have been, like many others before and since, unable to read the king’s real views and preferences. The story of Prance’s speedy denial of his recantation was corroborated by other accounts, including that of Sir Robert Southwell, who claimed that Prance had admitted ‘he was induced unto [the retraction of his evidence] by one in prison, a servant to a priest, who whispered to him thro’ the keyhole that for what he had declared he would not only be hanged but damned too’. Other reports claimed that Prance had been repeatedly threatened with damnation by his wife and ‘other Papists’ if he persisted in his confession.112 Prance seems to have vacillated between retracting and doubling down on his confession from 29 December 1678 to 11 January 1679. A newsletter report from 4 January conceded that the ‘Reluctancy’ with which Prance had ‘confest againe’ may have ‘blurred’, or worked to the ‘disreputation to his testimony’, although it ‘agreeing with Mr Bedloe & a greate likelihood in it as to the circumstances will not invalidate it’. Two weeks later, the same writer was now fully convinced of the veracity of Prance’s evidence after the latter had ‘made a much larger confession’. It seemed that Prance could best demonstrate he had been ‘weaned from his Religion’ (and was hence now telling the truth) by making increasingly grandiose claims implicating more Catholic suspects. Claims that both Miles Prance and William Bedloe had converted to Protestantism, the latter supposedly requesting William Lloyd ‘to discourse & instruct him in the doctrine of the Church of England’, further enhanced their credibility.113 Thus, while Prance recanted at least twice, contemporaries would have viewed his evidence once he had got out from under the thumb of the priests and his Catholic wife as much more reliable than either his initial or subsequent denials. As late as 1682, there was a report that Prance was lured to a tavern in Drury Lane and then threatened at swordpoint to ‘renounce all that hee had said concerning Sir Edmondbury Godfreys murder and signe a Paper they produced ready drawne for that purpose’; Prance was supposedly rescued from

109 L’Estrange,

3:62. Trials, 7:178. 111 See discussion in Chapter 4. 112 HMC Ormonde, 4:494; Bod. MSS Carte 72, fol. 41; SP 29/411, fol. 64; Newdigate Newsletters, 18 January 1678/9, L.c.733; a similar story is reported in Conspirations d’Angleterre, 395. 113 Newdigate Newsletters, 4 January 1679, L.c.728; 8 February 1679, L.c.743; 18 January 1679, L.c.733; 9 December 1678, L.c.716. 110 State

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these ‘Attempters’ after crying out for help.114 This incident seemed not only to authenticate Prance’s confession, but reinforced the conviction that conspirators were still trying to cover up an ongoing Popish Plot. It should be emphasised, too, that contemporaries would have also viewed the case against Godfrey’s accused murderers as compelling. Henry Berry, the porter of Somerset House, had confessed to investigators that the queen had sent out orders not to admit visitors from 12 to 14 October 1678. A boy at the Queen’s Head Tavern corroborated Prance’s testimony that he, Kelly, Green and Hill had, while dining together on oysters and flounder, pulled out a piece of paper from which they read out Godfrey’s name. Godfrey’s maidservant Elizabeth Curtis also claimed that Robert Green had visited her master two weeks before his disappearance and spoke to him in French (Green in fact had admitted to speaking French), and that Hill had called on Sir Edmund on that fateful Saturday morning. Curtis claimed to have identified both Green and Hill in Newgate, where she said the latter was wearing the same clothes. While Gilbert Burnet reported that Elizabeth Curtis ‘distinguished’ Hill ‘in a crowd of prisoners at Newgate’ – not unlike a modern police line-up – Roger L’Estrange would later cast doubt upon this process. He claimed that Curtis (who, he claimed, was merely a charwoman rather than a regular member of the household) had been brought to Newgate, along with two other women who had been at the justice’s house that Saturday, Godfrey’s housekeeper Judith Pamphlin and her daughter, to identify the suspects. All three women initially denied recognising either Hill or Green but, as Hill later wrote to his wife, after ‘Two Grave Men like Justices’ had ordered him to be shaved and ‘Whisper’d’ some time with the women, Curtis apparently changed her mind. While Hill at his trial claimed that Curtis had not recognised him in prison and that he had an alibi for that Saturday, his denial was outweighed by what the jurors would have seen as overwhelming evidence. Indeed, while the defendants and their witnesses were treated badly, and doubtless rattled by the snide remarks of judges and prosecutors alike (e.g. that they had dispensations to lie to heretics, etc.), what would have stood out to contemporaries was that they were frequently caught in mistakes and contradictions, especially about dates.115 After the trial, more evidence appeared to confirm the prosecution narrative. In mid-February 1679, one newsletter confidently reported that another witness, the doctor Richard Needham, claimed that Green, Berry and Hill’s involvement in Godfrey’s murder had been spoken of by Catholics in Derbyshire before Prance’s arrest. In late March 1679, Stephen Dugdale, the former steward 114 Mark

Goldie (ed.), The Entring Book of Roger Morrice 1677–1691, vol. 2, ed. John Spurr (Woodbridge, 2007), 316. 115 State Trials, 7:193, 7:190; Bod. Rawl A136, fols 27–8; State Trials, 7:186–7; Burnet, 2:182; L’Estrange, 3:297, 3:141–2; State Trials, 7:197, 7:198–9. Joseph Ferrers reported to Sir Robert Southwell that Michael Godfrey had told him that Sir Edmund’s ‘Maide’ (Curtis) had not recognised Hill at Newgate, but remembered Green visiting her master two weeks before his disappearance, and speaking to him in French (BL Add MS 38015, fol. 236).

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of Lord Aston and a genteel and plausible witness, deposed that he had read a letter dated the evening of 12 October 1678 sent to the Jesuit Francis Evers in Staffordshire reporting that ‘This night Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey is dispatched’. When Dugdale worried this would expose the Plot, Evers supposedly assured him that not Catholics but some ‘lewd persons’ Godfrey had punished would be suspected for his murder.116 For many, Godfrey’s own words about being threatened and tailed in the weeks before his death were the most credible evidence that he had been murdered; it only made sense to connect the dots to the Popish Plot he was supposedly then investigating. At the trial of Green, Berry and Hill, Titus Oates testified that Godfrey confided to him on 30 September about the ‘affronts he had received from some great persons’ (whom Oates coyly refused to name, at least for the moment) ‘for being so zealous in the business’ of the Popish Plot, and that the magistrate had told him the week before he had gone missing ‘that several popish lords, some of whom are now in the Tower, had threatened him’. Oates claimed that Godfrey had said that he ‘was in fear of his life by the popish party’, ‘in continual danger of being hurt by them’, and that they had ‘dogged’ him for ‘several days’. When Oates asked why he did not take ‘his man’ – his clerk Henry Moor – with him for protection, Godfrey replied that ‘he was a poor weak fellow’ and brushed off Oates’s suggestion to ‘get a good brisk fellow to attend him’, saying that ‘he did not fear them, if they came fairly to work’.117 Modern readers will of course be inclined to reject out of hand the testimony of the notorious Titus Oates, a man whose name has become a byword for perjury. (We shall also see that Godfrey himself had an extraordinarily low opinion of Oates.) However, Oates’s evidence was, surprisingly enough, corroborated in many significant points by several much more credible witnesses. Thomas Robinson, Godfrey’s acquaintance for over forty years, had last seen his old schoolmate at the Westminster quarter sessions or vestry meeting on Monday 7 October, where the two had discussed the Plot. Godfrey acknowledged that he had indeed taken some examinations, but told Robinson that he had done so ‘very unwillingly, and would fain have had it done by others’. In answer to Robinson’s eager questions about whether the ‘depth of the matter were found out’, Godfrey replied mysteriously that he was ‘afraid … that it is not’, adding, ‘Upon my conscience, I believe I shall be the first Martyr’. Robinson, like Oates, then tried in vain to persuade his friend to hire ‘a man’ for his protection, Godfrey objecting that he did ‘not love’ being attended by a servant, finding it ‘a clog’, and that ‘I do not fear them, if they come fairly, and I shall not part with my life tamely’.118 While, as contemporary Catholics were quick to point out,

116 Newdigate

Newsletters, 15 February 1678/9, L.c.745; Bod. MS Carte 81, fol. 512. State Trials, 7:167–8. 118 State Trials, 7:168. 117

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Robinson did not say that the people he feared were the ‘papists’ specifically, the similarity to Oates’s testimony was nonetheless striking.119 Others of Godfrey’s acquaintance, including William Lloyd and Gilbert Burnet, recalled that the justice had made cryptic remarks to them in the weeks before his disappearance about having been threatened, and fearing that he would be ‘knocked on the head’. Burnet, too, claims to have urged Godfrey to hire a servant to accompany him, but to no avail, Godfrey saying, with grim humour that seems to have been typical of him, ‘that the servants in London were corrupted by the idleness and ill company they fell into, while they attended on their masters’.120 The testimony of Sir Edmund’s brothers is open to nearly as much doubt as that of Oates, but for what it is worth, Michael Godfrey told the Lords committee a week after the discovery of the body that his brother had told his (i.e. Michael’s) wife that ‘if any danger be, I shall be the first shall suffer’. Michael Godfrey would reiterate this story several years later, claiming his brother had said ‘he was very doubtful [i.e. he feared] there would be speedy Cutting of Throtts and was very confydent his would be the first’. Another one of Sir Edmund’s friends, Colonel George Weldon, reported that Godfrey had ‘often’ told him ‘he should be a sacrifice at one time or other’, and had shown him the pocketbook in which he kept notes of his investigations – the same that was widely remarked upon as being missing from his person when the body was found. It was at Colonel Weldon’s house that Godfrey reportedly met secretly with Edward Coleman, and this may explain why Weldon was not asked to give evidence at the trial of Green, Berry and Hill. After all, there were other possible explanations for Godfrey’s words that did not implicate the Catholics, which we shall explore in the following chapters.121 Contemporary Catholics such as Roger Palmer, earl of Castlemaine, noted inconsistencies in the prosecution testimony and the way in which Catholic defence witnesses were harried and hooted down, and points in their favour given short shrift: both he and L’Estrange would point out that the testimony of Charles II’s confidential servant, William Chiffinch, about Prance’s recantation had been abridged in the printed accounts of the trial. Castlemaine seems to have been the first of many sceptics to have pointed out that Somerset House, a hub of activity, was a very unlikely venue for such a murder.122 Charles II’s brother James supposedly claimed that Bedloe later amended his original testimony that Godfrey had been murdered at about 5pm to later in the evening after Charles II had informed him that he himself had been in Somerset House

119 Roger

Palmer, earl of Castlemaine, The Compendium: or, a Short View of the Late Tryals, in Relation to the Present Plot Against his Majesty and Government (1679), 18. 120 Burnet, 2:152–3. His biographer Richard Tuke notes that ‘faceteness [sic] and pleasancie of humour’ was ‘Natural [to] him’ (Memoires, 20). 121 Lords MSS, 47; BL Add MS 28047, fol. 120; Lords MSS, 48. 122 Compendium, 18. Castlemaine is best known for being the complacent husband of Charles II’s favourite mistress in the 1660s, Barbara Villiers, later duchess of Cleveland.

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paying a visit to the queen at the earlier time.123 And if Godfrey had been murdered in Somerset House, why all this rigmarole about carrying the body out in a coach, or a sedan chair, or on horseback, or some combination thereof: why not simply smuggle it down the private stairs to the water and pitch it in the Thames?124 Castlemaine also points out the absurdity that ‘this Knight [Godfrey] should be presently strangled (though strong and stout) by a feeble Antient Man [Green] without resistance or bustle, and with a Crevat also’. The unknown Jesuit author of a 1680 Latin manuscript history of the Plot makes a similar objection, describing Godfrey as ‘a tall, robust and muscular man’.125 It is notable that Castlemaine and others would characterise Green, fifty-four, as old and frail, but not Godfrey, who was almost three years his senior. (Godfrey’s clerk Henry Moor, about fifty, was similarly given the epithet of ‘old’ that acquaintances did not apply to his master.) Sir Edmund was a man with a reputation for being indefatigable and fearless in the discharge of his duties, who had on at least one occasion fought off with his sword a determined attacker who waylaid him in an alley. William Bedloe alone – who, in reality, had never seen Godfrey living or dead – described him as an ‘old man’. Those who knew Godfrey saw him as strong and vigorous – what we might call ‘fit’ today.126 And Castlemaine and other Catholic recusants did know Godfrey, as the following chapters will illustrate. When Godfrey’s sisters had insisted to their brother’s friend Mary Gibbon that he had been killed by ‘the papists’, Mrs Gibbon disagreed: ‘for she knew he had done many kindnesses to Catholics’ – and she was well placed to know, being one herself.127 Those who knew Godfrey well were aware that he was a more complicated man than his subsequent Protestant martyrology suggested.128 His modern biographer Alan Marshall has noted that Godfrey had come from a family whose lack of antipathy towards Catholics ‘marked them out as atypical’, and that Sir Edmund’s views were in this respect even ‘more liberal than those

123 J.S.

Clarke, The Life of James the Second, King of England, &c. Collected out of Memoirs Writ of his own Hand (1816), 1:527; MS Rawl A181, fol. 3. In fact, Charles II was at Newmarket from 1 October 1679 until the day before Godfrey’s body was found, Wednesday 17 October (SP 29/366, fol. 319). 124 Marks, 54–5. 125 Compendium, 70; De nupera Catholicorum, fol. 16. 126 Marshall, 33. Susannah Ottaway has emphasised that in the early modern period the continued ability to carry out one’s duties, rather than one’s years, distinguished the productive from the decrepit individual; see her The Decline of Life: Old Age in EighteenthCentury England (Cambridge, 2004). 127 SP 29/423, fol. 9. 128 For more on Godfrey’s iconography, see Claire Walker, ‘“Remember Justice Godfrey”: The Popish Plot and the Construction of Panic in Seventeenth-Century Media’, in Claire Walker and David Lemmings (eds), Moral Panics, the Media and the Law in Early Modern England (Basingstoke, 2009), 117–38; Hinds, ‘Horrid Popish Plot’, ch. 7.

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Figures 2 and 3. Images from John Gadbury. A True Narrative of the Horrid Hellish Popish-Plot, to the tune of Packingtons Pound, the first Part (1682), Huntington Library, San Marino, California. Figure 2 makes an ironic commentary both on Green’s feebleness and age, and the fact that Oates still lived to give his testimony; the view of the Thames in the background may be intended to suggest a more obvious place to dispose of a corpse. Figure 3 is a satirical depiction of ladies dancing around Godfrey’s corpse, a reminder that Somerset House was a very busy place (note dark lantern)

of his class’.129 In his funeral sermon, William Lloyd felt obliged to defend Godfrey from the charge that he was ‘a Papist or inclined that way’, explaining that Sir Edmund’s ‘compassion … for all men that did amiss, extended it self to all manner of Dissenters; and among them he had a kindness for the Persons of many Roman-Catholics’. However, Lloyd stressed, if he had been tolerant towards individual Catholics, Godfrey had ‘always declared a particular Hatred and Detestation of Popery’.130 Gilbert Burnet, another Anglican clergyman friend of Godfrey’s, claimed that ‘if few men … lived on better terms with the papists than he did’, this was because Sir Edmund did not want to prosecute Protestant dissenters: He was a zealous protestant, and loved the church of England; but had kind thoughts of the [Protestant] nonconformists, and was not forward to execute the laws against them. And he, to avoid being put on doing that, was not apt to search for priests or masshouses.131

129 Marshall,

5, 11. Sermon, 13. 131 Burnet, 2:152. 130 Lloyd,

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Many people in Godfrey’s circle knew, and still more would after his death learn, that the magistrate was not only personally acquainted with one of the accused Catholics, Edward Coleman, but he had secretly met with him to warn him of the danger that the Plot posed both to him and his master: the king’s brother James duke of York, the great patron and hope of English recusants. Southwell marvels that ‘there was so much friendship between Mr. Coleman and Sir Edmund’ that the latter ‘shewed’ him ‘papers’ that were widely, and probably correctly, assumed to be Oates’s informations.132 It is significant that Godfrey’s relationship with Coleman was never mentioned at the trial of Hill, Green and Berry. For Roger Palmer, earl of Castlemaine, this was proof of the innocence of the Catholics: For does not every body know, that Sir Edmund-bury-Godfrey was so far from being our Enemy, that he was a friend to all, a most kind one to many, and in this affair, so extraordinary and particular, That he no sooner receiv’d Oates his depositions, but he presently acquainted Mr Coleman with them, who went to Windsor and divulg’d the whole matter to all he knew … what Christians can be imagin’d so nonsensically stupid, as to lay their heads together, in relation to the Murther of a Person, who … had perform’d the utmost service on our Behalf, that Friendship it self could suggest?133

For most English Protestants, however, this connection to Coleman, far from excluding the Catholics as suspects, gave them a motive. John Evelyn was convinced that the magistrate was murdered ‘as was manifest by the Papists’ as he was ‘one who knew much of their practises, as conversant with Coleman, a Servant of the [duke of York]’.134 Just as Godfrey’s death was seen as a powerful confirmation of the reality of the Plot, the Plot itself was proved by the evidence of Coleman’s letters soliciting money from various papal and French agents to promote the Catholic cause and to dissolve the Long Parliament, the most damning of which were published in late November 1678. It was widely believed that Coleman had communicated to Godfrey a secret about the Plot so dangerous that it proved fatal to him. Thus the very ‘Mercy’ and ‘tender hearted’ charity which according to Lloyd characterised Godfrey’s attitudes towards Catholic recusants further contributed to his reputation as a Protestant martyr, treacherously betrayed by those to whom he had demonstrated so much Christian forbearance. At the trial of Robert Green, Henry Berry and Lawrence Hill in February 1679, the tide of belief in the Plot was nearly at its height; their conviction was a foregone conclusion. Although it is the poignant protest of Mrs Hill that now calls down to us through the centuries – that Prance knew ‘all these things to be as false as God is true; and you will see it declared hereafter, when it is too late’ 132 HMC

Ormonde, 4:464. 69. 134 E.S. de Beer (ed.), Diary of John Evelyn (Oxford, 1955), 4:155. 133 Compendium,

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– hers was then a voice in the wilderness. Lord chief justice Sir William Scroggs, the presiding judge, congratulated the jury on their verdict, telling them that he, too, would have found the defendants guilty, ‘if it were the last word I were to speak in this world’. According to the record that comes down to us from the shorthand writers, this shockingly partial speech elicited ‘a great shout of applause’.135 In the words of a contemporary newsletter, Green, Berry and Hill ‘had as faire a tryall as men could possibly expect & there were circumstances … which did much confirme the Testimony of Pranse & the other witnesses’ and ‘all men were well satisfied with the verdict but the papists who if an Angell should come from Heaven & tell them that Sir Edm: Godfrey were Murthered they would not believe it’.136 Yet it is important to note that, from late 1678 until the talented Tory propagandist Roger L’Estrange made what was a powerful – if flawed – case for suicide in 1688, most Catholics, no less than Protestants, believed that the evidence precluded any conclusion but that Godfrey had been murdered: by whom, though, was the question. The French Catholic Antoine Arnauld invoked ‘the famous cui bono’ argument also raised by William Lloyd but reached diametrically different conclusions: the so-called Plot was a ‘diabolic fable’ invented by Oates, and Godfrey had been murdered by the ‘Presbyterians’ to implicate the Catholics therein.137 The anonymous Jesuit author of a 1680 treatise on the Plot was adamant that the death of ‘this noble man’ was not a suicide, dutifully enumerating all of the evidence pointing to premeditated murder, but returning (perhaps inevitably, as the account was in Latin) to the question of cui bono Godfredi mors? Godfrey’s death, far from benefiting the Catholic community, was in fact ‘ruinous’ to them, as even those of the ‘meanest understanding’ would have realised that this would ‘raise the whole kingdom against them’.138 The Catholics had nothing to gain and everything to lose – as in fact the event would prove – from Godfrey’s death. But even for the vast majority of those English Protestants who believed that Green, Berry and Hill were guilty, the questions and even the investigation into Godfrey’s death did not end with their conviction or execution. There were constant reports of those accused of the Popish Plot confessing and implicating others or adding to their earlier testimony. Rumours of new witnesses or arrests in Godfrey’s death were constantly surfacing; just after the conviction of Green, Berry and Hill, one newsletter reported that the duke of Norfolk had been prevented from leaving the country on suspicion of his involvement.139 Green, Berry and Hill had to refute persistent rumours that they had either secretly confessed or that their written statements had been written by or dictated to them by Jesuits. At their execution on 21 February 1679, both Robert Green and 135 State

Trials, 7:210, 7:221. Newsletters, 15 February 1678/9, L.c.746. 137 Apologie pour les Catholiques (Liège, 1680), 461, 172, 205. 138 De nupera Catholicorum, 11v. 139 Newdigate Newsletters, 16 January 1678/9, L.c.732; 15 February 1678/9, L.c.747. 136 Newdigate

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Lawrence Hill ‘continued their former resoluteness, still stubbornly denying the fact even to the very last’. In his dying speech, Hill told spectators: ‘There is a Report up and down, that I have Confessed the Murther of Sir Edm. Godfrey to Dr. Lloyd; I do deny it’.140 There were particularly persistent rumours that Henry Berry, who had been raised Protestant and whose conversion to Catholicism to work at Somerset House seems to have been opportunistic, would renounce in one fell swoop his protestations of innocence and his popery and accept a pardon in exchange for becoming a Plot witness. One newsletter reported that William Lloyd’s ministrations had so much ‘wrought upon’ Berry that he had ‘discovered the whole’ of his complicity in Godfrey’s murder. While it is true that Berry did indeed return to the Church of England and was respited for a week in the hope that he would confess, he too went to his death denying any involvement in the crime. Perhaps even more significantly, William Lloyd, whose indictment of the Jesuits as the killers of Godfrey opened this chapter, privately expressed his doubt about the guilt of the three men who were hanged for Godfrey’s murder. While Lloyd did petition for a reprieve for Berry, this was not because he promised to ‘make great discoveries’, as was widely rumoured, but because Lloyd believed that Berry and his two co-accused, Hill and Green, were all innocent.141 But this was not because Lloyd doubted the existence of the Popish Plot, or even that Godfrey had been murdered by papists, only that he believed that the true (Catholic) authors of the crime were still at large. The investigation of Godfrey’s death was, indeed, a ‘Bottomless Pit’: the thirst for vengeance – or even what we might today call ‘closure’ – had been whetted rather than quenched by the execution of these three ordinary men convicted of his murder. Like all conspiracy theories, the Popish Plot rested upon the premise that what had been hitherto revealed was only the tip of a vast conspiratorial iceberg, an elaborate network involving not only shadowy English Jesuits but some of the greatest in the land. The same climate of suspicion and alarm that created a moral panic about Catholics also reflected and perpetuated a conviction both that the conspiracy was larger than had yet been revealed and that the government’s efforts to combat it were insufficient, perhaps suspiciously so. The following chapter will discuss how the distrust so rampant in the court of Charles II in the 1670s and 1680s created an atmosphere in which conspiracy theories proliferated: one in which not only Charles II’s chief minister and brother but even the king himself were suspected of having a hand in Godfrey’s death.

140 Tuke,

124–7; A True Relation of the Execution of Robert Green, and Laurence Hill (1679), 8; Compendium, 19; State Trials, 7:227. 141 Newdigate Newsletters, 27 February 1678/9, L.c.752; HMC Ormonde, 4:325, 4:329.

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2 An Inside Job? The Earl of Danby and Other Court Suspects The moral panic ignited by the death of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey in October 1678 persisted even after his supposed murderers, Robert Green, Henry Berry and Lawrence Hill, were safely under lock and key. In January 1679, the French ambassador Barillon reported that three thousand daggers, each inscribed with Godfrey’s name and the day of his death, had been purchased by the wives of ‘people of quality … to defend themselves from the massacre with which the Protestants claim to be threatened if the Catholics were the masters’. The countess of Shaftesbury and other timorous ladies supposedly secreted ‘little pocket pistols’ in their fur muffs to defend themselves against papist attacks.1 The then chief justice of the Common Pleas Francis North (older brother to Roger) described how the ‘Murder and Exposing’ of the magistrate’s body to public view had stirred up the ‘Violence & Rage’ of the people to such a ‘Height against the Papists that No Reason could be heard but Every foolish story against them passed for Gospel’. But Catholics were not the only suspects. In addition to reports that traced Godfrey’s last movements to Somerset House or Arundel House, ‘it was whispered that he was seen last at the Cock-pitt’ in Whitehall, residence of the Anglican lord treasurer, Thomas Osborne, earl of Danby, where the magistrate had been ‘threatned by the E[arl]’, and ‘one Christian’ – the minister’s servant – was ‘suspected in the business’.2 Just as in modern times the theory of a lone shooter, in the person of the obscure misfit Lee Harvey Oswald, was woefully incommensurate with the scale of emotion unleashed by the 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy, so too the execution of three ordinary working men for Godfrey’s murder was, for contemporaries, anticlimactic and deeply unsatisfying. In both cases, conspiracy theories of appropriate grandiosity filled the void. The fact that Green, Berry and Hill had resolutely maintained their innocence – despite a stream of hopeful rumours that they had or were about to confess – fed suspicions not so much that justice had erred but that the true masterminds of the crime 1

Baschet 142, Barillon to Louis XIV, 16/26 January 1679, fol. 27v; Thomas Bruce, 2nd Earl of Ailesbury, Memoirs of Thomas, Earl of Ailesbury, Written by Himself (Westminster, 1890), 1:29. 2 BL Add MS 32518 Guilford Papers, vol. 1, ‘Instructions for a treatise to be wrote for undeceiving the people about the late popish plott’, fol. 151v.

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remained at large, still pulling the strings. There were from the first whispers that Godfrey’s murder was part of a cover-up orchestrated by the court to suppress the investigation of the Plot, rumours that inevitably trended upwards to the duke of York and even the king. But the suspicions first came home to roost with the king’s chief minister, the earl of Danby, who had indeed believed – foolishly, as it turned out – that he could exploit Titus Oates’s allegations for his own political purposes. The term ‘moral panic’ was originally coined by 1960s British sociologists in reference to respectable fears about the countercultural threat supposedly posed by ‘mods’ and ‘rockers’ to the moral fabric of society.3 Moral panics typically feature anxieties and outrage about a perceived social danger exaggerated and heightened by the media or other ‘moral entrepreneurs’; they tend to scapegoat marginalised groups (‘folk devils’) invested with malevolent powers disproportionate to their numbers: Jews, witches, freemasons, Jesuits. Scholars of early modern Britain have fruitfully applied the concept to the burgeoning late Stuart public sphere, with its coffee-houses and vibrant – and partisan – culture of manuscript and printed news.4 But while fears relating to Godfrey’s death, and to the Popish Plot more generally, surely qualify as a ‘moral panic’, the anxieties that sparked the crisis of 1678–81 were anything but insubstantial or illusory, as the term so often implies. Rather, such fears were rooted in longstanding, and well-informed, suspicions about secret Anglo-French diplomacy and crypto-Catholicism at court. Even if emotion, rumour and suspicion were inseparable from the news culture and politics of late seventeenth-century England, the speculation about Godfrey’s death was not wholly irrational or without evidentiary basis. Oates’s Popish Plot allegations were seemingly verified not only by the suspicious death of the magistrate to whom he had sworn his evidence, but also the incriminating correspondence of the former secretary of the duchess of York, Edward Coleman, with various French and papal agents. Coleman, a zealous Catholic convert, was believed to be working for James in the aim of soliciting money to obtain toleration for their co-religionists by facilitating the dissolution of the intolerantly Anglican Cavalier Parliament.5 Several of Coleman’s most damning letters (one supposedly written by the ‘special Command and Appointment’ of the duke of York) were published in late 3

‘Moral panic’ was coined by Stanley Cohen and Jock Young; ‘moral entrepreneur’, by Howard S. Becker. 4 Claire Walker and David Lemmings (eds), Moral Panics, the Media and the Law in Early Modern England (Basingstoke, 2009). 5 See John Miller, ‘The Correspondence of Edward Coleman, 1674–78’, Recusant History, xiv (1977–78), 261–75. As Andrew Barclay has pointed out, Coleman was never the secretary of James duke of York but rather of his duchess: ‘The Rise of Edward Colman’, HJ, 42 (1999), 124. Nonetheless Coleman himself referred to the duke of York as ‘mon maistre’ to his correspondents, who in turn viewed him as working for James, ‘your great Master’ (Treby Papers, 1583, 1451). Roger North characterises Coleman as James’s ‘secretary’ (Examen, 200).

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November 1678. In one often quoted sentence, Coleman solicited the assistance of Louis XIV’s confessor, Père de la Chaise, in a ‘mighty worke’ consisting of ‘no less than the Conversion of three Kingdoms’ and ‘the utter subduing of a Pestilent Heresie’ – i.e. British Protestantism, Anglican and Presbyterian alike. While James was not mentioned by name, there could be no doubt he was the ‘Prince’ trumpeted by Coleman as ‘zealous of being the Author and Instrument of so glorious a Worke’.6 These revelations were political dynamite, implicating the Catholic heir to the throne in secret (and illegal) proselytising efforts and negotiations and collusion with France. As such, they would help detonate the greatest political crisis of Charles II’s reign and the most serious challenge to the monarchy since the Civil War. While the larger political narrative of what traditionally has been called the Exclusion Crisis has been told many times, the critical role of conspiracy theories about Godfrey’s death in precipitating and sustaining this crisis has been largely neglected. This chapter reveals how suspicions about the court’s involvement in Godfrey’s death formed an important backstory to the larger political reckoning about the succession, the religious settlement, and fears of French influence and arbitrary government.7 Such accusations constituted a powerful, and versatile, weapon of the opposition – one that succeeded in smearing the Anglican earl of Danby, for all of his support from the bishops and what might be called the ‘high church’ party, as ‘popishly affected’.8 Danby would languish in the Tower of London for almost five years, charged (among other things) with attempting to suppress the investigation of the conspiracy; in 1681, a grand jury would even return an indictment against him for the murder of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey. The notion that Danby, a career politician who would go on to occupy high office under William III, ordered Godfrey’s assassination may strike the modern reader as absurd. However, these accusations were taken both literally and seriously not only by the opposition but by the larger public, and were not as far-fetched or disingenuous as may first appear.

6

Mr Coleman’s Two Letters to Monsieur l’Chaise, the French King’s Confessor… which the House of Commons desired might be Printed … (1678), 21. A reward was offered for the apprehension of the printer of this incendiary pamphlet: Mark Knights, Politics and Opinion in Crisis, 1678–81 (Cambridge, 1994), 180n. 7 Some scholars have objected to the designation ‘Exclusion Crisis’ as too narrowly defined; Jonathan Scott and Gary de Krey prefer the broader ‘Restoration Crisis’, as the crisis extended beyond strictly constitutional issues and continued after the dissolution of the Oxford Parliament in March 1681. However, even if the project of excluding James duke of York was only one agenda pursued by the opposition (Knights, Politics and Opinion), the succession was central to the larger crisis; see Tim Harris, Restoration: Charles II and His Kingdoms, 1660–1685 (2005), 148. 8 While the term ‘high church’ is anachronistic, Danby commanded firm support from the ‘episcopal’ and Cavalier party; see Mark Goldie, ‘Danby, the Bishops and the Whigs’, in Tim Harris, Paul Seaward and Mark Goldie (eds), The Politics of Religion in Restoration England (Oxford, 1990).

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A constitutional and conspiratorial crisis

When the news of Titus Oates’s allegations first broke in late September 1678, many observers believed that the Plot was ‘a Court stratagem’ concocted by the lord treasurer, ‘a trick to get money from Parliament’ and neutralise his critics there. In his first report to his master Louis XIV on the Popish Plot, Barillon noted that, while Charles II scoffed at it, his brother characterised it as an ‘atrocious calumny’ against the Catholics, and both viewed Oates as a rogue, Danby and his supporters seemed to encourage belief in the conspiracy. According to Francis North, it was seen as ‘a stratagem, to pretend fears & dangers to keep up the army that had bin raised’, ostensibly to fight France, but which many of Charles II’s subjects feared was intended to make the king absolute.9 This was the view of several MPs with whom Gilbert Burnet discussed the affair in those early days. Another acquaintance, George Savile, viscount (later marquess of) Halifax, shrewdly predicted that Danby’s ‘design’ would blow up in his face: ‘considering the suspicions all people had of the duke [of York]’s religion, he believed every discovery of that sort would raise a flame, which the court would not be able to manage’.10 The fire was indeed soon burning out of control. When Parliament met on 21 October, four days after the discovery of Godfrey’s body, ‘all of Oates’s evidence was now so well believed’, wrote Gilbert Burnet, ‘that it was not safe for any man to seem to doubt of any part of it’. Now ‘the country party were masters’ and the prosecution of the plot an outlet for years of pent-up resentment.11 As the clerk of the Privy Council Robert Southwell noted several weeks later, ‘a strange coincidence of things’ had conspired to ‘raise the present indignation to the height it is’: the long-delayed and anticipated meeting of a stormy Parliament, frustrated by years of prorogations; Oates’s informations; Coleman’s letters; Godfrey’s death; Bedloe’s evidence; and the pope-burning celebrations of 5 and 17 November. ‘All these things … show as if the four winds had broke loose together upon [the Catholics], so that in all probability they are like to be sunk beyond the power of doing mischief hereafter’.12 Calls to get to the bottom of the Plot and avenge Godfrey’s murder dovetailed with attacks on high-ranking Catholics. In addition to the ‘five popish lords’ accused by Oates, who were arrested and committed to the Tower, all Catholic peers were expelled from the Lords in late October (Catholic MPs had been effectively excluded by the Test Act in 1673), and there were ominous rumblings against both the

9

BL Add MS 32509, fol. 59v; HMC Ormonde, 4:457; Baschet 141, Barillon to Louis XIV, 1/10 October 1678, fol. 33; BL Add MS 32518, fol. 151. This was one of the most important aggravating factors in public opinion; see John Miller, Charles II (1991), ch. 10, ‘An Army without a War’. 10 Burnet, 2:145. 11 Burnet, 2:154–5. 12 HMC Ormonde, 4:470–1.

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queen and the duke of York for their supposed involvement in the conspiracy.13 As it happened, though, the brunt of the attack fell first on the king’s Anglican minister, Thomas Osborne, earl of Danby. The loyalist Southwell had not been overly concerned about measures against the Catholics, whom he believed had hitherto enjoyed too much ‘indulgence’; however, in early December he noted with more alarm that the ‘wind sprang up afresh’, but now against the court. People were grumbling that ‘Whitehall spoke very slightly of the Plot, as if there were no such thing, and that the witnesses were under discouragement and so no new ones likely to come in’. Some spoke ‘meanly’ of the lord chancellor Heneage Finch, who was suspected of discouraging William Bedloe from testifying that Godfrey had been murdered at Somerset House. Among these was Lady Danby, who ‘talks as ill of him as anybody, and saith there’s none but her husband stands up for the Protestant religion’. But ‘all others’ singled out Danby as the main court culprit.14 In Parliament ‘there were sharp reflections and aggravations against those who (behind the curtains) divert the public counsels from any good issue, and particularly hinting at the misprision of those who had concealed the treason of this Plot for six weeks’ – i.e. the lord treasurer.15 Southwell had no great love for Danby, but saw in this new attack on the government troubling parallels with the lead-up to the Civil War scarcely a generation earlier. The resolution of the Commons to impeach Danby in December 1678 ‘gave infinite distraction and disquiet … as if we were perfectly at 1641 with the case of the Lord Strafford in view and all the train of consequences that attended’.16 Southwell reported that the former ambassador to France, Ralph Montagu, ‘who is become a declared enemy to his Lordship [Danby]’, had revealed to several MPs letters written to him from the lord treasurer which those ‘learned in the law do think’ contained ‘matters for an impeachment of a great strain’.17 And, indeed, these letters, produced in Parliament to great dramatic effect on 19 December, would prove that Danby had solicited money from Louis XIV on behalf of his royal master, who had countersigned them (even if this part of the transaction was passed over in silence). To save his minister, brother and, not least, to prevent embarrassing disclosures on his own account, Charles II prorogued Parliament on 30 December 1678. This decision to cut short the session while there was still so much unfinished business – not just in regard to Danby, but also the Plot (a new witness, Stephen Dugdale, had come forward only days before) – was met with resentment and frustration, and not only from the opposition.18 Newsletters 13

Kenyon, 82–3, 89. HMC 7th Report, 471. 15 HMC Ormonde, 4:487–8. 16 HMC Ormonde, 4:488. Charles I’s chief minister Thomas Wentworth, earl of Strafford, was convicted by parliamentary attainder and executed in May 1641. 17 HMC Ormonde, 4:490. 18 Knights, Politics and Opinion, 193, see also 199. 14

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written to the undersecretary of state Sir Joseph Williamson in January 1679 related that the coffee-houses were abuzz with complaints that the prosecution of the Plot had grown ‘cold’ since the prorogation, and that this ‘coldness proceeds from the zeal and activity of a great person’. Even ‘many good persons’ bearing ‘loyal affection’ to the king were distracted by ‘jealousies and fears’ relating to rumours of a court cover-up. The news of Prance’s recantation, the day before the prorogation, could only have added to the general paranoia. Some do not scruple to say that there were no reasons to be given for [the prorogation] but that it was done in favour to the plotters, for, had Parliament sat six days longer, both the plot and the murder of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey would have been fully laid open.19

When a new Parliament finally met again in March 1679, the lawyer and MP Francis Winnington resumed the attack against Danby, asking how it was that Green, Hill and Berry were hanged for Godfrey’s death but ‘he escape that soe bitterly discouraged and menaced him’ and ‘would have stifled & turn’d [the Plot] on others’.20 The conspiratorial narrative had changed: Danby, hoist with his own petard, was now accused, not of inventing the Plot, but of having attempted to suppress it. While the irony, not to mention the political opportunism, was only too apparent, there was at least some plausibility to the charges. The Popish Plot allegations had been first revealed to Charles II on 13 August 1678 by Titus Oates’s mentor and original collaborator, the Anglican clergyman Dr Israel Tonge. When Tonge showed Charles the forty-three heads of accusations, the king – with his usual aversion for administrative ‘Trouble’ – asked for a ‘brief account … because the papers were tedious’. Growing impatient with the convoluted response, Charles II referred the business and the weighty papers alike to the lord treasurer, who met with Tonge the following evening.21 The fact that so much time elapsed between Danby’s original meeting on 14 August with Tonge and Oates’s appearance before the Privy Council on the afternoon of 28 September gave rise to suspicions that the minister had tried to suppress their evidence. In the interim, Oates and Tonge had twice (on 6 and 27 or 28 September) sought out the justice Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey to swear to the depositions before him. As Gilbert Burnet pointed out, ‘this seemed to be done in distrust of the privy council, as if they might stifle [Oates’s] evidence; which to prevent he put it in safe hands’. Burnet also reported that Godfrey was then ‘chid’ – the implication is by Danby – ‘for his presuming to meddle in so tender a matter’.22 At the trial of Green, Berry and Hill, Titus Oates claimed that several ‘great persons’ had threatened Godfrey, one objecting that the magistrate had been 19

SP 29/411, fols 32, 56. Bod. MS Carte 72, 22 March 1679, fol. 456v. 21 SP 29/409, fol. 84; HMC 14th Report, Appendix, Part IV (1894), 106. 22 Burnet, 2:152. 20

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too ‘zealous’ in the investigation of the Plot, and another that he had been ‘too remiss’.23 This was corroborated by a much more credible witness, the duke of Ormond’s steward Richard Mulys, who told the House of Commons that the magistrate had told him, five or six days before he had gone missing, that he ‘[lay] under ill Circumstances: some great men blame me for not having done my Duty; and I am threatened by others, and very great ones too, for having done too much’.24 If one of these great men was the duke of York – anxious to have the Plot investigated and debunked – the other was surely the earl of Danby. This was the plain implication of Castlemaine’s claim that ‘most People had heard, That [Godfrey] had bin very much threatned by Great Persons, that were not Papists’. Roger North cited a journal entry from 27 April 1684 that he had been ‘informed at Windsor’ – i.e. by one or both of the royal brothers – that Danby had ‘sent for Godfrey, and threatened him’ for having told Edward Coleman about Titus Oates’s informations.25 North argued that it was only ‘common Sense’ that Godfrey would have been in more danger from the earl of Danby, a ‘known Fautor’ (patron) of the Plot, than from the duke of York, whom he had done ‘friendly Offices’ – including warning him of Oates’s accusations. Tories such as North suspected that the Plot had all along been an oppositional scheme ‘designed to disjoint, and set at Variance, the great ones at Court’ and cause a ‘clashing between the Earl of Danby and the Duke of York’.26 If so, Danby fell eagerly into the trap set for him, pursuing an anti-Catholic line with all the more vigour as he hoped to divert suspicion from himself. In late December 1678, Barillon reported that Danby’s supporters were spreading rumours that Godfrey had been killed at Somerset House and that Danby was preparing to abandon the duke of York and seek a rapprochement with Shaftesbury.27 In mid-January, Barillon speculated that Danby was willing to sacrifice not only James but even the king to save his life and estate, and that he wished to establish William of Orange as successor to the throne.28 Many older accounts of the Exclusion Crisis have simply taken it for granted that in late 1678 Parliament was already forming into the two armed camps later known as Whigs (those who would oppose the government and advocate for exclusion) and Tories (those who would support the royal prerogative and the hereditary succession).29 In fact, the truth was much more complicated: politics was an intensely personal business, with factional interests and private

23

State Trials, 7:167–8. CJ, IX, 520. 25 Compendium, 18; Examen, 174. 26 Examen, 200–1, 174. 27 Baschet 142, Barillon to Louis XIV, 27 December 1678/5 January 1679, fol. 9v. 28 Baschet 142, Barillon to Louis XIV, 16/26 January 1679, fol. 25v. 29 The classic account is J.R. Jones, The First Whigs: The Politics of the Exclusion Crisis, 1678–83 (1961). 24

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enmities not always falling neatly along later party lines.30 In the autumn of 1678, the court itself was divided between Danby and his followers and those who supported the duke of York.31 While fears of popery in high places was endemic amongst the political classes, another factor that united people of all stripes was dislike for the lord treasurer. Frances Winnington, who essentially accused Danby of involvement in Godfrey’s murder in the speech quoted above, had a personal animus against the treasurer – and he was in good company. While Winnington would go on to be a leading Whig lawyer, he would vote against the first Exclusion Bill; many others who delighted in Danby’s fall would subsequently be seen as Tories.32 Charles II, after proroguing the long-serving ‘Cavalier’ or ‘Long Parliament’ on 30 December 1678, finally dissolved it on 24 January 1679, triggering the first general elections since 1661. Charles’s hopes of a new Parliament being more amenable were sadly misplaced. The Habeas Corpus or 1st Exclusion Parliament, which met in March 1679, went on the attack against Danby, who resigned as treasurer and was consigned to the Tower and to a state of legal limbo, pardoned by the king, but still impeached by a Parliament that refused to acknowledge royal jurisdiction in his case.33 When in May 1679 the Commons introduced an Exclusion Bill aimed at the duke of York, Charles rinsed and repeated, first proroguing and then, in July 1679, dissolving Parliament. He then repeatedly delayed the meeting of the 2nd Exclusion Parliament until late October 1680, where the bill that would have barred the Catholic duke of York from the throne was defeated in the Lords the following month. But even if the problem of the succession was increasingly the focus of the political opposition, Godfrey’s death was not forgotten. It would be resurrected as an oppositional issue just before and after the Oxford (or 3rd Exclusion) Parliament in March 1681, as the turncoat court agent Edward Fitzharris claimed to have evidence that Godfrey’s murder was ‘consulted at Windsor’ – i.e. ordered by Danby and/ 30 Knights,

Politics and Opinion, 25–8, 52, 144; Harris, Restoration, 179. Even though Andrew Swatland notes the continuity in both personnel and issues between the early Court and Country and Tory and Whig groups, he agrees that most of the crisis of 1679–81 was rooted in personal dislike of Danby: The House of Lords in the Reign of Charles II (Cambridge, 1996), 263, 222. 31 Danby did however vote for the proviso excepting James from the Test which effectively barred Catholic peers from the Upper House. Andrew Browning believes that, by early December 1678, the alliance between the duke of York and Danby, ‘which had been seriously shaken, was fully restored’; however, Danby would later maintain that James had never forgiven him his vigorous prosecution of the Plot, especially the seizure of Coleman’s papers, earlier in the autumn; see Andrew Browning, Thomas Osborne, Earl of Danby (Glasgow, 1944), 1:299, 1:294; BL Add MS 28042, fol. 32v; 28043, fol. 69. 32 Knights, Politics and Opinion, 123, 358; Harris, Restoration, 179. 33 The Commons complained the king’s pre-emptive and generic pardon, granted without Danby’s either confessing or having been tried, was setting a dangerous precedent, ‘defeat[ing] the whole Use and Effect of Impeachments’: a violation of the prosecutorial and ‘Judicatory Power’ of the Commons and Lords, respectively (LJ, XIII, 592).

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or by the duke of York (or even the king). Many contemporaries suspected that it was the threat of Fitzharris’s testimony, even more than a new Exclusion Bill, that precipitated the hasty dissolution of the Oxford Parliament by the king, a mere week after it had convened.34 While we know that the Popish Plot would prove a boon to the political opposition, this chapter will demonstrate that it was Danby who first tried to harness Titus Oates’s accusations to his own antipapist and self-serving agenda. The political disaster for the government that unfolded in early 1679 was thus a self-inflicted wound, one in no small part aggravated by Danby’s own grasping and abrasive personality. According to Roger North, Danby’s fatal mistake was not only his eagerness to exploit ‘a design of which he did not know the bottom’ – holding ‘a wolf’ (the Plot) by the ears until ‘it bit him’ and ‘pulled [him] down at last’ – but ‘in thinking a lord treasurer that had enriched himself and his family, could ever be popular. And the plot went so far against him that he was within an ace of being accused of Godfrey’s murder.’35 The following two sections will discuss how and why Danby was both so distrusted and detested and such a good suspect in Godfrey’s death, and what we can reconstruct of his machinations behind the scenes. Thomas Osborne, earl of Danby

Thomas Osborne, earl of Danby, Charles II’s principal minister from 1674 to 1679, was something of a parvenu who owed both his earlier and later successes and reverses, including his imprisonment in the Tower of London from April 1679 to February 1684, to his industry and ambition. His many rivals and enemies sneered at his relatively obscure social origins – the fact that he was the son of a baronet. Danby’s great-grandfather Edward Osborne, an apprentice to a rich clothworker, had saved his master’s daughter from drowning after she had fallen in the Thames; later, in the manner of Dick Whittington, he went on to marry her and to inherit most of her father’s wealth and to become an alderman, sheriff and then, in 1583, Lord Mayor of London.36 Danby’s own career would be characterised by dramatic changes in fortune and narrow escapes. Allegedly, the young Thomas Osborne survived the collapse of a chimney that killed his elder brother because, instead of attending to his studies with their tutor, he had been playing under the table with the family cat.37 As Sir Thomas Osborne, lord Latimer, earl of Danby and marquess of Carmarthen, 34

The Examination of Edw. Fitzharris, Relating to the Popish Plot. Taken the Tenth day of March 1680/1 (1681), 12; John Hawles, Remarks upon the Tryals of Edward Fitzharris (1689), 5; Luttrell, 1:81. 35 Roger North, The Lives of the Norths, ed. Augustus Jessop (1890), 1:211. 36 Browning, Thomas Osborne, 1:3. Danby’s ancestor happened to see the girl fall from an upper floor as he was looking out his window below. 37 Browning, Thomas Osborne, 1:10; Mark Knights, ODNB entry.

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he would weather many political storms and eventually rise to the rank of duke of Leeds under William III. As first lord of the Treasury, Danby held the same office as the man widely acknowledged as the first prime minister in the modern sense of the word, Sir Robert Walpole (prime minister from 1721 to 1742), as well as by almost all of his successors. Chief ministers before 1721 have been seen as falling short of that definition, as they owed their power primarily to the favour of the monarch, and could not themselves command the confidence or acquiescence of Parliament (something that was, moreover, best done from the Commons, as Walpole demonstrated). Danby had his own faction in the Lords, particularly the bishops, and supporters among the placemen in both houses, but this support was always dependent on the cooperation of other interest groups; in the autumn of 1678, the lord treasurer was increasingly isolated and vulnerable. Danby seemed to have cemented his ties to the monarchy at least on 19 September 1678, however, when his daughter Bridget married one of the king’s illegitimate sons, Charles FitzCharles, the earl of Plymouth. In the troubles that followed, Danby would not hesitate to call upon his son-in-law, but Plymouth’s influence with the king seemed to be limited and, in any case, was cut short after his untimely death from dysentery in October 1680, while on campaign in Tangier. Although, as will become evident, Danby was anything but blindly deferential to the king, he was a natural crown servant in that he was both an indefatigable administrator and an upholder of the royal prerogative, if only to expedite the business of governing. In this respect he pursued what an earlier generation of oppositional critics would have referred to as a policy of ‘thorough’ (indeed, Danby’s father had been a friend and ally of Charles I’s ill-fated chief minister, the earl of Strafford). However, Danby’s staunch and intolerant Anglicanism – which again would have been well suited to the Laudian preferences of Charles I – was often at odds with the irenic, not to mention reputedly crypto-Catholic, impulses of his king.38 However little good it may have done them, Charles II was grateful for the loyalty of Catholics during the Civil War, and (when politically expedient, at least) indulgent towards Quakers and other Protestant sectarians.39 In contrast, Danby had consistently opposed religious toleration for both Catholics and Protestant dissenters. Unlike his cosmopolitan and Francophile erstwhile patron (and, later, enemy) the duke of Buckingham, Danby was not particularly well-educated or well-travelled and – most unusual 38

Despite the traditional association between the royal brothers and anti-Puritan ‘Cavalier’ policies, Charles II and James often tilted against Danby’s attacks on Protestant dissenters, as well as against Catholics (Goldie, ‘Danby, the Bishops and the Whigs’, 75). 39 As Ronald Hutton has argued, Charles II’s religious policy was consistent insofar as – whatever his own inclination towards toleration – he privileged loyalty and the stability and authority of the monarchy, and was willing to crack down on both Catholics and Protestant dissenters when politically advantageous or necessary: ‘The Religion of Charles II’, in R. Malcolm Smuts (ed.), The Stuart Court and Europe: Essays in Politics and Political Culture (Cambridge, 1996), 240–4.

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for a seventeenth-century statesman – did not speak or write French with any facility.40 It is unclear how much of Danby’s self-presentation as an enemy to ‘the French interest’ may have originated in a desire to pass off his deficiencies as virtues, but clear enough that this antipathy was genuine and heartily requited by the French.41 Danby’s grasping and overbearing personality, as much as his power and ambition, made him many enemies. One of these, the earl of Shaftesbury, characterised Danby as ‘proud, ambitious, revengeful, false, prodigal and covetous to the highest degree’.42 A more impartial observer, the diarist John Evelyn, described him as ‘a man of excellent natural parts, but nothing generous or gratefull in him’.43 Queen Mary confided to her memoirs that, despite her obligations to her minister, he was ‘of a temper I can never like’.44 Even among the courtiers and loyalists who would in a few years be termed Tories, the lord treasurer had more rivals than friends. Danby had risen to high office after hounding Charles II’s previous chief minister, the earl of Clarendon, into exile, and many of the latter’s supporters (not to mention his sons Henry and Laurence Hyde) viewed Danby’s fall with undisguised satisfaction. As Robert Southwell wrote to the duke of Ormond in January 1679: ‘you will see how the Earl of Danby is turned upon fortune’s wheel, and how the prosecution of the Earl of Clarendon is come home to him’.45 Danby’s long imprisonment was also seen as a ‘just retaliation’ for the ruthlessness with which the treasurer had prosecuted Shaftesbury – who spent a year in the Tower after he and three other lords, citing a medieval statute, had denounced Charles II’s repeated prorogations of Parliament as illegal in 1677.46 This also sealed the rift between the lord treasurer and another of the renegade lords, George Villiers, 2nd duke of Buckingham, once Danby’s patron but now an implacable and dangerous enemy. In the summer of 1678, Danby was anticipating a stormy upcoming parliamentary session, and a likely impeachment attempt.47 The enemy that Danby most dreaded was not Shaftesbury, who in retrospect we know would be the most prominent leader of the opposition, but Buckingham – who seemed to have insinuated his way back into Charles II’s favour (and whose jokes at the expense of Lady Danby were reportedly well received by the king). ‘Events began to bear an ominous resemblance to those which had preceded the 40 Browning,

Thomas Osborne, 1:15. Examen, 529, 531–2. 42 Quoted in W.D. Christie, A Life of Anthony Ashley Cooper, First Earl of Shaftesbury (1871), 2:312. 43 E.S. De Beer (ed.), The Diary of John Evelyn (Oxford, 1955), 4:20. 44 Quoted in Browning, Thomas Osborne, 1:478. 45 HMC Ormonde, 4:500; see also Laurence Echard, History of England (1718), 3:532. 46 Burnet, 2:108. 47 Danby’s earlier attempt in 1675 to introduce a ‘non-resisting Test’ which would have given Anglicans a monopoly of public office had united Halifax, Shaftesbury and Buckingham in opposition and led to articles of impeachment being drawn up against him. 41

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fall of Clarendon’, with Charles II’s current maîtresse en titre, the duchess of Portsmouth, plotting the treasurer’s downfall, just as a decade earlier Barbara Castlemaine had clamoured for the head of the king’s previous chief minister.48 As his biographer Andrew Browning has noted, it would have been perfectly in character for Danby to seize on the Plot as an opportunity to steal a march on his opponents. The previous spring the treasurer had privately wished for ‘some small insurrection’ which would enable the crown to obtain ‘armes and money by the consent of the people, who would otherwise not give the one and bee jealous of the other’.49 The embattled minister would not have been able to resist the opportunity presented by the Plot. The fatal blow, as we have seen, was in the end struck by Ralph Montagu, whom Danby had crossed by thwarting his ambitions of becoming secretary of state. Montagu, an unscrupulous roué even by the standards of the Restoration, had recently lost his post as ambassador to France after a squalid falling-out with Charles II’s former mistress Barbara Palmer, duchess of Cleveland, and subsequently sought his revenge by plotting with the French ambassador Barillon to bring down the lord treasurer.50 Danby’s attempt to neutralise Montagu by ordering his arrest and the seizure of his papers was thwarted by the latter’s precaution in squirrelling away the most compromising letters. Whether or not this ‘criminal Correspondence’ with France had been deliberately intended as a kind of ‘fire-ship’ to entrap the lord treasurer (as Roger North believed), the letters exposed the embarrassing fact that Danby was treating for secret subsidies from the same enemy he had been raising money and troops from Parliament to fight.51 The treasurer, who had consistently promoted a policy hostile to France, seems to have been reluctantly drawn into these transactions at the insistence of Charles II, fearing that if he did not cede, others would take his place both at the negotiating table and at the king’s right hand. Thus it was the keenest of all ironies, against which Danby frequently railed, that he – an enemy of the French interest, and an architect of William of Orange’s popular ‘Protestant’ marriage to the duke of York’s eldest daughter Mary – should be brought down by the patriotic opposition in the English Parliament working secretly with the French. If they shared a common goal – the dissolution of the intolerantly Anglican Cavalier Parliament – Danby was so generally despised that court insiders like

48 Browning,

Thomas Osborne, 1:240–1. Quoted from a memorandum of 4 April 1677 in Browning, Thomas Osborne, vol. 2, Letters, 2:68–9; see also Marshall, 71. 50 Reputedly, Montagu and Cleveland had been having an affair which ended badly after Montagu seduced the duchess’s seventeen-year-old daughter with Charles II, Anne countess of Sussex. Cleveland avenged herself by reporting back to the king the ways in which Montagu had insulted him and his brother, characterising James as a ‘wilful fool’ and Charles as a ‘dull governable fool’: Henry Sidney, Diary of the Times of Charles the Second, ed. R.W. Blencowe (1843), 1:68–9n; Miller, Charles II, 301. 51 Examen, 529. 49

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the duchess of Portsmouth (Charles II’s mistress) and the earl of Sunderland also eagerly joined in his ruin.52 The accusations against Danby with regard to Godfrey’s death similarly made for strange political bedfellows. In early November 1678, before the Somerset House narrative had made great inroads, Barillon reported that an anonymous letter was read in the House of Lords implicating two of Danby’s servants ‘and confidants’, Sergeant John Ramsey and Edward Christian, in Godfrey’s death. The author was probably Henry Payne alias Nevill, a Catholic pamphleteer who appears to have been working for the Catholic midwife Elizabeth Cellier and her patron Elizabeth Herbert, countess of Powis, wife to one of the ‘five popish lords’ imprisoned in the Tower.53 According to Barillon, ‘This letter has inspired credence or contempt depending on the different dispositions of those who have heard it, but it has created much noise amongst the public’.54 The reading of the paper apparently prompted the duke of Buckingham to claim that he knew something about the death of Godfrey, asking for the help of other peers in the investigation (Winchester and Halifax volunteered). The clear implication is that Buckingham had set his sights on his enemy Danby as a suspect in Godfrey’s murder.55 This letter was almost certainly an early manuscript version of Payne’s pamphlet, Some Reflections Upon the Earl of Danby, in Relation to the Murther of Sir Edmondbury Godfrey, subsequently published in June 1679.56 The earlier manuscript had been distributed to various coffee-houses and other public places, as well as to MPs; several copies, varying in minor details, still exist – two of them in Danby’s own papers.57 These libels claimed that Godfrey had waited on the treasurer at the Cockpit in Whitehall on the morning of the day he had gone missing, that he was in a meeting with him at 1pm and ‘at the Lady Cook’s Chamber’ (Danby’s daughter) at about 2pm.58 Godfrey was then supposedly last seen at the privy stairs about to ‘take water’ – i.e. cross the Thames by boat – with Danby’s servant Edward Christian. Payne invoked William Lloyd’s ‘cui bono’ as the ‘most proper way’ of identifying Godfrey’s murderer, claiming that Danby had more reason than anyone to ‘wish’ the magistrate ‘out of the way’. Godfrey had supposedly ‘received several severe expressions, and much 52

William Temple, Memoirs (1709), 342; Dalrymple, 2:390–1. Paul Hopkins, ODNB entry, ‘Payne, Henry [alias Henry Nevill]’; as Hopkins points out, Payne denied being a Catholic when questioned by the Privy Council. 54 AAE 131, Barillon to Pomponne, 28 October/7 November 1678 fols 173–173v. 55 AAE 132, Barillon to Pomponne, 1/11 November 1678, fol. 189. 56 Andrew Clark (ed.), The Life and Times of Anthony Wood, Antiquary, of Oxford, 1623–1695, described by Himself (Oxford, 1891–99), 2:446. 57 BL Add MS 28047, fols 287–8; BL Add MS 28047, fols 4–5. See also Bod. MS Carte 72, fols 464–5. There was a long tradition of dropping manuscript letters ‘in prominent places or at particularly busy times in order to maximize their impact and readership’: James Daybell, ‘The Scribal Circulation of Early Modern Letters’, HLQ, 79 (Autumn 2016), 374. 58 Lady Anne was married to Robert Coke, a great-grandson of the famous jurist. 53

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ill language from Lord Danby’ for having told Coleman (and through him, James) about Oates’s informations, because the treasurer ‘did not desire to have it known’ that he had been privy to the Plot ‘long before the time he had pretended to have heard of it from the King’ in August 1678. In other words, it was Danby who ‘was the original inventor’ and ‘procurer of Witnesses’ for the Plot. His motive: ‘to ruine the Duke of York, and destroy all the Papists, for purposes of his own’; i.e. to ‘justifie the keeping up of an Army, against the Opinion of Parliament, and escape the Impeachment, he could not but expect at their meeting’.59 In a later pamphlet, Payne specified that the treasurer had, ‘upon several meetings and applications to him, revil’d [Godfrey] (though a Gentleman as well born as himself) – with the foul and opprobrious names of Rogue, Knave and medling Rascal’. Godfrey supposedly complained of this ‘to divers Persons of Quality’, including Sir John Banks and Richard Mulys, who were present at Danby’s house that fatal Saturday, as well as ‘twenty other people of business that waited with him that day’. Godfrey’s friend Lady Pratt apparently confirmed this report to the Privy Council, the truth of which had not only been acknowledged ‘by the King himself in open Discourses’ but ‘by a great Countess, Danby’s own Relation’ (his sister-in-law, the countess of Lindsey) and even Danby himself.60 It is significant that, in all of Danby’s own private papers, in which he fulminates against the injustice of the accusations against him, he never denies this particular charge. The inescapable conclusion is that Godfrey did indeed visit Danby on the day he disappeared. According to the notes taken by Sir Joseph Williamson scarcely a week later, the last sighting of the missing magistrate was at ‘Cooke’s. L[ord] T[reasurer’s] daughter after one, about near two’.61 Payne and his Catholic patrons were clearly attempting to float a theory about Godfrey’s death that would appeal to the political opposition; perhaps Buckingham – deep in French intrigues – had taken up the invitation. This initiative subsequently fizzled out, possibly because Montagu’s letters made the charges superfluous or because the claim of Danby’s supposed hatchet man Edward Christian to have been in Lincolnshire at the time in question withstood scrutiny.62 But the mud stuck. The Jesuit John Warner noted that ‘Many people … used to point to Danby as responsible’ for Godfrey’s murder, claiming they had seen him going into the lord treasurer’s house at the Cockpit on the day he disappeared, ‘whereas nobody saw him come out’.63 59

Henry Payne, Some Reflections upon the Earl of Danby (1679), 3, 2, 3–4. An Answer to the Earl of Danby’s Paper Touching the Murther of Sir Edmondbury Godfrey (1680), 2; Some Reflections, 2. The countess of Lindsey is identified by name in the manuscript version in BL Add MS 28047, fol. 5v. 61 SP 29/366, fol. 305. 62 Edward Christian, Reflections upon a Paper Intituled Some Reflections upon the Earl of Danby, in relation to the Murder of Sir Edmund-bury Godfrey (1679), 2; Timothy Touchstone His Reply to Mr. Christian’s Letter (1679), 2. 63 John Warner, The History of the English Persecution of Catholics and the Presbyterian Plot, ed. 60

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The Oxford antiquary Anthony Wood even reported in March 1679 that Danby had resigned as treasurer ‘because impeached of the murther of S[ir] Edmund Berry Godfrey’.64 There is an anonymous French manuscript account in the Bibliothèque Mazarine in Paris about the origins of the Popish Plot which is surprisingly well-informed about Anglo-French secret diplomacy and the intrigues of Danby, Montagu and others. As it has thus far escaped the notice of scholars, I shall cite the part dealing with Godfrey’s death at length. The unknown author claimed that Danby, knowing that Montagu was plotting his downfall, deliberately manufactured a popish plot in order to divert the wrath of Parliament from himself to the duke of York and the Catholics. Although Charles II was supposedly ‘aghast [eut horreur] at this advice and did not at first want to consent to it, he finally allowed himself to go along with it provided no other harm would be done to the papists but imprisonment’. The time approached when Parliament would meet, and people scarcely believed in the conspiracy anymore because Sir Godfrey, having examined Mr Oates, had found that he was a witness suborned by lord Danby. He had even told Mr Coleman, his friend who was afterwards executed, that the Catholics were ruined because Danby had suborned a witness against the [Catholic] nobility and the duke of York, and that in examining this witness he had found that it was Danby that had instructed him for a considerable time in a place called Lambeth where he had lodged Oates. Mr Coleman, much affected by this discourse, went posthaste to speak to the king and to the duke of York, and meeting Danby by accident in the court he complained to him of his injustice and told him that he did not deserve to live for having mounted so pernicious a trap [embuscade] for the Catholics and the king’s own brother.

When asked where he had obtained his information, Coleman responded that it was Danby’s own doing – ‘by having his false witness examined’. Danby went to seek out the king, told him of the affair, and begged him to have Coleman arrested which was immediately carried out, and he was so narrowly guarded that he could have communication with no one until his death. Papers belonging to him that they claimed to have found in his house were published in which he hoped to make the king absolute and even introduce a toleration.

The writer claims that after ‘Sir Godfrey was brutally murdered [massacré] in his [i.e. Danby’s] house for having told Coleman of this affair’, Danby then produced another perjured witness, William Bedloe, to deflect suspicion from himself. Bedloe’s ‘fable’ that Godfrey had been murdered at Somerset House and ‘that his body was hidden for four days and that numerous people of quality T.A. Birrell, trans. John Bligh (1953), 1:205. 64 Clark, Life and Times, 445.

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and Catholics had seen it with a lantern and that they had danced around him … passed for truth among the common people’. However, ‘reasonable people believed that he had been murdered by order of Lord Danby for having said that it was he who had instructed the first witness to persecute the Catholics so that no one would think to look into his negotiations with France’.65 This French account concurs in some important respects with Payne’s version, both claiming that Danby had ‘divers secret meetings’ with Tonge and Oates at ‘Fox Hall’ (Vauxhall) in Lambeth long before the king had been apprised of the plot in August 1678.66 To rebut this charge of misprision (i.e. concealment) of treason, Danby had a pamphlet published on 12 July 1679 stating that he had first learned of the affair from Charles II, who had entrusted the matter to him.67 In an account published several months later, Danby claimed that he had been keen to make the plot public, but had faced resistance both from Tonge, who did not want Oates’s cover as a secret Jesuit operative blown, and the king – sceptical of the Plot from the beginning, and reluctant to ‘alarm all England, and put thoughts of killing Him into Peoples heads, who had no such thoughts before’.68 Danby thus had apparently disregarded Charles II’s wishes when he collaborated with Tonge in an attempt to intercept several treasonable letters Oates claimed had been sent to the duke of York’s Jesuit confessor Thomas Bedingfield at Windsor.69 But Bedingfield foiled these plans when he somehow retrieved his own mail from the post office on 1 September 1678. Alarmed by these five letters, purportedly from his Jesuit colleagues, but full of seditious designs and in strange handwriting riddled with spelling mistakes and other suspicious errors, Bedingfield immediately brought them to James’s attention. While it is unclear exactly when James knew about Oates or the substance of his allegations, these obviously forged letters aroused his suspicions that some skulduggery was afoot.70 An Anglican plot? Israel Tonge’s ‘very honourable friends’

Even James, who had little reason to be charitable towards Danby, did not believe that the former lord treasurer was ‘the first raiser of that Devil’ – the 65

Bibliothèque Mazarine, Affaires d’Angleterre, conspiration des papistes (1681), 15450/25, 4v–5v. A reference to Shaftesbury being committed to the Tower of London dates this as having been written after early July 1681. 66 Bod. MS Carte 72, fol. 464v; BL Add MS 28047, fol. 5r. According to the last paper, this was later known by neighbours as the ‘Plotting House’. 67 J.B., A Compleat and True Narrative of the Manner of the Discovery of the Popish Plot (1679), 1. 68 An Impartial State of the Case of the Earl of Danby in a Letter to a Member of the House of Commons (1679), 15. A manuscript draft of this pamphlet is in Danby’s papers: BL Add MS 28043, fol. 157. 69 Father Thomas Mumford, alias Bedingfield; he was imprisoned for the Plot and died in prison 21 December 1678. 70 Kenyon, 58–9.

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Popish Plot. However, he was convinced that ‘he might have laid him sooner if he pleas’d’ if he had not opposed his attempts to bring the matter expeditiously before the Privy Council. James complained in his memoirs that Danby resisted pressure from him, the duke of Lauderdale and ‘all honest men’ to ‘sift those informations to the bottom before the meeting of Parliament’, which would have ‘laid open the Vilany of the first informers and prevented the coming in of others, who were tempted by the great offers of reward’.71 Gilbert Burnet also believed that Danby ‘handled the matter too remissly: for, if at first the thing had been traced quick, either the truth or the imposture of the whole affair might have been made to appear’.72 It seems likely, as the Catholic historian John Lingard argued, that far from wanting to suppress the Plot, Danby wanted to monopolise and ‘protract’ its investigation until the meeting of Parliament, where ‘he hoped to convert it into a shield of defence for himself against the impeachment with which he was threatened’.73 Three questions are critical to understanding Danby’s role in the gestation of the Plot and how and why – and when (as we shall see, timing was everything) – Godfrey ran afoul of both him and the duke of York. First, how did Tonge and Oates come to swear their evidence before Godfrey not once, but twice? Second, how and when did Oates’s original forty-three articles, presented by Tonge to the king on 13 August, expand to seventy-one and then to eighty-one heads of accusations? Finally, when did Godfrey warn Coleman about Oates’s allegations? The main source for these questions is Israel Tonge’s papers, taken from his house several months after his death in February 1681, including his ‘Journall of the Plot’.74 In them, Tonge recounts how he obtained an interview with Charles II by means of his friend Christopher Kirkby, who had some acquaintance with the king in his capacity as a court chemist, and how he brought Oates’s evidence before Danby, Godfrey and, finally, the Privy Council. Dr Israel Tonge, an Anglican clergyman in his late fifties, has generally been dismissed as a crackpot, a hapless tool of Titus Oates, who quickly overshadowed him as principal Plot witness. Robert Southwell spoke of how Tonge’s ‘crazy reputation’ at first caused his allegations to be ‘altogether smiled at’; later, when they were taken seriously, this ‘so lifted [him] up’, in Gilbert Burnet’s words, ‘that he seemed to have lost the little sense that he had’.75 Tonge had 71

J.S. Clarke, The Life of James the Second, King of England, &c. Collected out of Memoirs Writ of his own Hand (1816), 1:546, 518. 72 Burnet, 2:147. 73 John Lingard, History of England, 5th ed. (1849), 9:352. 74 SP 29/409, fols 42–70, 72–121. This includes both a longer version transcribed in Douglas Greene (ed.), Diaries of the Popish Plot (New York, 1977), 1–49, and there is also an earlier, partial draft. These papers also form the basis for the account attributed to Kirkby, A Compleat and True Narrative of the Manner of the Discovery of the Popish Plot to His Majesty (1679). Kirkby’s narrative is sandwiched between two sections obviously commissioned by Danby, exonerating him of having covered up the Plot. 75 HMC Ormonde, 4:455; Burnet, 1:151.

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an obsession with popish arson plots and a monomaniacal hatred for Catholics, whom he blamed for the Great Fire of London in 1666 that had destroyed his parish church (St Mary Staining) and, in the view of modern historians, left him ‘permanently unhinged’.76 Tonge had a persecution complex about the Jesuits, who he believed had tried to prevent him from publishing and then later plotted to assassinate him for his translation of a French work critical of their practices (The Jesuits Morals). Yet for all of his pathologies he was by no means mentally deficient – and, unlike the self-styled ‘Dr’ Oates, Tonge’s doctorate in divinity from Oxford was at least genuine. The Jesuit provincial John Warner attributed to Tonge the composition of the Plot narrative, loosely plagiarised from earlier anti-Catholic tracts such as those by Andreas ab Habernfeld and William Prynne, ‘a task’ he viewed as ‘beyond the capacity of Oates’.77 Tonge doubtless sincerely believed in the reality of a popish plot; he may well have been, as many writers have assumed, Titus Oates’s dupe and thus may not have actively connived at Oates’s perjuries or even known they were such. But Tonge was certainly capable of writing an account which advanced his own particular agenda – that is, to prove the reality of the Plot and the accuracy of his own predictions, while demonstrating that Danby had known that the conspiracy truly existed but had been suspiciously remiss in prosecuting it. As such, it is hard to sort out his wishful thinking from reality. It is also certain that Tonge would not have scrupled at small deceptions to advance so worthy, and urgent, a cause (in fact, he admits in his ‘Journall’, to having lied to the king, telling him that he had discovered Oates’s informations in the wainscot under his door and did not know the identity of the author).78 Tonge’s papers make it clear that the treasurer actively collaborated with him, even if he also seems to have vacillated and drawn back on several occasions, only to return later to the charge – a pattern that is also discernible in Danby’s subsequent dealings with informers. Tonge claimed that after the Jesuits supposedly got wind of his disclosures to the king about the Plot in early September, he concluded – after consulting with a ‘Reverend friend’ (more on his identity in a moment) – that it would be a wise precaution to have Oates give his informations on oath.79 But the real reason seems to have been that, after James had brought the forged letters sent to Bedingfield to his attention, ‘the Kinge would not heare any farther informations but declared that he took all the busenesse to be a mere fourbe’ (an imposture).80 When Kirkby returned to court, Danby pretended not to 76

Kenyon, 45–6; see also Alan Marshall’s ODNB entry for Israel Tonge. History of the English Persecution, 1:196. See also L’Estrange, 2:49, 2:58; W.C. Abbott, ‘The Origin of Titus Oates’ Story’, English Historical Review, 25 (January 1910), 126–9; Alastair Bellany and Thomas Cogswell, The Murder of King James I (New Haven, 2015), 514–15. 78 SP 29/409, fol. 83. 79 SP 29/409, fols 57v, 107v. 80 SP 29/409, fol. 109A. 77 Warner,

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recognise him and ‘his Majesty gave him no occasion to speake any thinge at all of the plot, whereby he understood that he had noe desire to be informed any further of it’.81 Tonge and Oates then called several times on the undersecretary of state, Sir Joseph Williamson, in order to swear the informations before him, but met with ‘a rude repulse and noe admission’. Tonge, ‘at a losse’ because he knew no justice of the peace in Westminster, sought the advice of ‘some very honourable friends’, who recommended Godfrey, and promised to ‘interceade’ with him on his behalf – a service which became necessary when the magistrate ‘made some difficulty of the matter’ on his first meeting with Tonge on 5 September. The next day, 6 September 1678, Godfrey was persuaded by these mysterious friends to meet again with Tonge and Oates, but ‘was not very forward to take his deposition but desired him rather to goe to some other’. The justice only reluctantly complied when he was assured that the evidence involved ‘felonious matters’ such as ‘fireing houses and towns’, Oates telling Godfrey that the Jesuit lay brother John Grove had been guilty of arson in the recent Southwark fire. Godfrey was immediately sceptical, pointing out that ‘he knew Groves [sic] very well’ and that the latter had ‘surfeited’ and ‘overtoyled himself’ in his ‘commiserating diligence’ in rescuing his neighbours’ goods from the flames.82 Some writers have read sinister meaning into the selection of Godfrey as the magistrate to hear Oates’s evidence, speculating that he may have been uniquely vulnerable to pressure or blackmail. While we shall return to such theories in Chapter 4, it seems unlikely that there was any particular significance to this choice: Godfrey was an active Westminster justice, often dealing with court business, and his house on Hartshorn Lane was very close to secretary Williamson’s Charing Cross residence. As to the identity of the mysterious ‘honourable friends’, Alan Marshall has suggested that this may have been a reference to Danby’s servant Thomas Lloyd, who had carried messages between Tonge and the lord treasurer.83 Yet even if confidential servants of noblemen and high officials were certainly gentlemen, the implication is that Tonge’s patrons were of higher social stature. Danby himself may have been one of these ‘friends’, or at least connected to them: Godfrey’s friend Thomas Wynnel later deposed that Oates and Tonge had come to Sir Edmund by the ‘Direction’ of the same ‘Publique Minister’ to whom the evidence had already been confided.84 Stephen Knight has argued that these ‘honourable friends’ had links to the republican Green Ribbon Club. He and other modern writers have had a tendency to assume that Tonge, by virtue of his fanatical anti-Catholicism and his association with Oates, whose father had been an Anabaptist preacher, must have had ‘Puritan’ (read antimonarchical) leanings.85 Yet Tonge claimed that 81

SP 29/409, fol. 110r. SP 29/409, fols 58–59e. John Grove was executed for the Plot in January 1679. 83 Marshall, 77. 84 L’Estrange, 2:187. 85 Knight, 248–9. Kenyon describes Tonge as an ‘old Puritan’, ‘a mental casualty of the Civil 82

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his background was royalist and his ‘honourable’ or ‘reverend’ friends – he used the terms interchangeably – seem to have been Anglican prelates. Tonge made repeated reference to a ‘reverend learned & pious friend’ who had advised him from the beginning. In a postscript in which he laid out his royalist credentials, Tonge effectively identified this ‘very Honourable person’ as ‘his auncient acquaintance’, Thomas Barlow, bishop of Lincoln, whose ‘auditor’ or student he had been in Oxfordshire.86 Barlow was that rare – if not entirely mythical – beast: a royalist episcopalian who was also a doctrinal Calvinist and ardent anti-Catholic (and who may hold the dubious distinction of being the last Anglican bishop to maintain in print that the pope was the antichrist).87 This original Anglican sponsorship of the Plot helps explain what happened next. In his entry for 10 September 1678, Tonge wrote that Kirkby and Oates, indignant that ‘the discovery was neglected as wel as themselves’, threatened to ‘betake themselves’ to their connections in London and ‘discover’ and ‘allarme & engage the whole Citty with it’. Tonge supposedly dissuaded them by promising to ask for the help of ‘his friends the Bishops’, who were already ‘acquainted with’ the Plot.88 Tonge explicitly identifies one of them as the bishop of London, Henry Compton. Like Barlow, Compton was a fiery anti-Catholic, and would later go on to play a prominent role in the investigation and prosecution of the Plot. While it was logical enough that Tonge would seek the help of his ‘Diocesan’ or superior, the fact that Compton was also a client and close ally of the treasurer is unlikely to be a coincidence; he was also a member of the Privy Council. Both men not only had a mutual interest in embarrassing the duke of York and the Catholic faction at court, but a common enemy: Edward Coleman. Only two years previously, Danby and Compton had joined forces to have Coleman (who Charles II agreed was ‘an ill man, very busy’) dismissed from the duchess of York’s service for writing newsletters leaking sensitive military and diplomatic information. The fact that Coleman had remained in James’s entourage sat ill with both Danby and Compton, the latter blaming both him and the duke for thwarting his ambitions to become archbishop of Canterbury.89 Danby, although unable to openly countenance a Plot that the king had denounced as a sham, was clearly unwilling to abandon it while he thought there might be some advantage to himself. He may well have been galvanised by Tonge’s threat to take his story to the City – where Danby’s rival Buckingham Wars’ (Popish Plot, 45–6); James and Ben Long, as a ‘half-mad ex-Puritan’ (The Plot Against Pepys (2007), 20). Tonge himself claimed to have taken up arms for Charles I and that he never took the Covenant (SP 29/409, fol. 115). 86 SP 29/409, fols 46, 58, 107, 115. 87 John Spurr, ODNB entry on Thomas Barlow. 88 SP 29/409, fol. 110. 89 Miller, ‘Correspondence of Edward Coleman’, 270; Barclay, ‘Rise of Edward Coleman’, 127–8. Danby was also convinced that Coleman had written a pamphlet attacking him (Baschet 141, Barillon to Louis XIV, 3/13 October 1678, fol. 14v.

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(whom Charles II sarcastically dubbed ‘Alderman George’) commanded a considerable following.90 In his journal, Tonge claimed that he threatened to appeal to the bishop of London if the treasurer did not bring the matter before the Privy Council. While this should be taken with a grain of salt, Danby may well have been persuaded by his friend Compton to foil what both men would have seen as genuine plotting on the part of Coleman. According to his journal, Tonge met with Danby and Compton at the bishop’s London house repeatedly in mid-September. It could have been then, and there, that Danby himself took a hand in feeding incriminating information to the would-be whistle-blowers. Tonge reported that it was Danby himself who had dropped the pointed hint that ‘Coleman must needs be busy in the plot if any were on foot’.91 This may seem like an astonishing admission for Tonge to make, even if he was quick to add that Oates himself had raised Coleman’s name without any prompting several days later. Tonge’s intention in flagging Danby’s suggestion of Coleman’s name was however not to cast doubt on Oates’s evidence, but rather to prove that the treasurer had all along known of the existence of the Plot he would later be accused of trying to cover up. Tonge obviously regretted having ‘vindicated his Lordship thereby to Parliament tho mistaken’, noting defensively that he did not discover until August 1679 that Danby had not communicated the evidence he and Oates passed along to him to the bishop of London. Thus Tonge represented Danby not as attempting to suborn him, but rather as sounding out ‘whether Mr Oates knew & had certain intelligence of the plots on foot’.92 The importance of this reference to Coleman – which appeared, in article 44, as a charge that he had passed along ‘private Intelligence’, as well as ‘Secrecies’ obtained from parliamentary and Privy Council clerks, to the French king’s confessor – cannot be overstated. For all of Titus Oates’s effrontery and talents as a liar, the Plot would have come to nothing without Coleman’s letters, which would provide the only independent and seemingly solid corroboration of the Popish Plot allegations. It was much more than a mere ‘lucky shot’: Danby (and Compton) would have been privy to rumours of Coleman’s secret negotiations with Père de la Chaise and others.93 Barillon reported that it was suspected that Oates had been suborned (suscité) by both Danby and Compton in order to shore up their own authority at the expense of the duke of York. It was the treasurer, as Tonge acknowledged, who had personally inserted an order for Coleman’s papers to be seized when he saw that it had been omitted from the 90

Baschet 133, Courtin to Louis XIV, 13/23 July 1676, fol. 32. SP 29/409, fol. 92. 92 SP 29/409, fols 92, 110. 93 LJ, XIII, 320; Kenyon, 70; Browning also refers to the accusation against Coleman as ‘one of [Oates’s] luckiest shots’ (Thomas Osborne, 1:294). In his papers, Danby writes that ‘a worthy Prelate’ (Compton) could vouch for his role in Coleman’s earlier dismissal for his ‘negotiations’ with ‘Papists’, noting that ‘this foreknowledge of Colemans activeness of that kind was the cause of my getting the warrant for seizing his papers in so particular a manner as itt was done’ (BL Add MS 28043, fol. 35). 91

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arrest warrant – a point Danby himself stressed in his own papers as evidence of his zealous prosecution of the Plot, and something for which the duke of York never forgave him.94 When did Tonge and Oates add Coleman’s name to the articles? Kenyon believes it was before they first brought their evidence to Godfrey on 6 September, while John Miller thinks that Oates’s first deposition did not mention Coleman.95 Tonge himself dates his discussion of Coleman with Danby to 21 August, but there is reason to be sceptical of this. The fact the charges against Coleman, supposedly working with one ‘Smith’ (likely the only person originally named), were in article 44, as though the first added to the original forty-three delivered to the king on 13 August, is suspicious in itself. Tonge simultaneously (and implausibly) acknowledged that Oates’s articles had ‘augmented at severall times that it increased to 80 & odd articles’ and implied the two versions of the informations sworn before Godfrey were the same length, ‘above 70 Articles’, despite the three-week interval between them.96 Given Tonge’s obsessive temperament (in L’Estrange’s words, he was ‘hardly ever without a Plot in his Head, and a Pen in his Hand’), it is all too likely he would have spent this time adding to as well as altering the articles – much as he had clearly revised his journal after the fact to reflect his later conviction that Danby had secretly undermined the investigation of the Plot.97 My own belief is that Coleman’s name was added sometime in the second week of September, when Danby and Compton were putting their heads together in meetings with Tonge. In this scenario, then, Tonge had instructed Titus Oates to add the accusation against Coleman to his Popish Plot informations at the urging of these two Anglican allies, Danby and Compton. What is clear is that by mid-September, Tonge was becoming more and more frustrated that the Plot had not yet been made public and that both Compton and Danby continued to ‘observe a prudent reservedness & shew little countenance to the Dr [Tonge] either in the privy Councel or other publique place’. On 19 September, Tonge sent a message to the king via Danby’s servant Thomas Lloyd with what he presented as compelling new evidence: a fire that had broken out at ‘Limas [Limehouse] Hole’98 the previous day had been 94

Baschet 141, Barillon to Louis XIV, 28 October/7 November 1678, fol. 41v; SP 29/409, fol. 92; BL Add MS 28042, fol. 32. James seems to have been equally incensed at the earl’s continuing association with his enemy Henry Compton, whose part in Coleman’s arrest he surely suspected (HMC 14th Report, H. Goodrich to the earl of Danby, 19 August 1679, 416). 95 Kenyon, 58–9; Miller, ‘Correspondence of Edward Coleman’, 271. 96 SP 29/409, fols 80, 118, 58, 108, 70. 97 L’Estrange, 2:3. 98 The riverside district north of Millwall, on the Isle of Dogs. In his papers, Tonge cited Sir John Kirke, foreman of the jury of the defamation trial of Thomas Knox and John Lane, who had charged Oates with sodomy, as saying that Godfrey, who had earlier believed ‘as Lord Danby told that it was a foolish frivolous discovery’, had ‘willingly’ taken the second set of informations after the Limehouse fire supposedly proved the Plot (SP 29/409, fol. 5).

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predicted in one of the ‘above 70 articles’ sworn before Godfrey on 6 September (somewhat suspiciously, in the 71st article). This news was supposedly delivered while the treasurer was in Wimbledon celebrating the marriage of his daughter to Charles II’s son, the earl of Plymouth. Tonge seems to have even tried to crash the nuptial festivities: he wrote that he saw the king and his brother there in a coach, and claimed it was then that Charles first heard Oates’s name in connection with the Plot, implying that the king had read or at least enquired into the letter Tonge had sent about the fire. Presumably Tonge was trying to put pressure on Danby and to attract the attention of the king.99 Several days later, Tonge would divulge the Plot to Gilbert Burnet, a rising clergyman at court. Burnet confided the matter to his friend William Lloyd, who notified the secretary’s office, where he discovered that Tonge’s allegations were already known and viewed as frivolous.100 Tonge and Oates were finally called to testify before the Privy Council on 27 September, probably after a confidential meeting of the Committee for Foreign Affairs that evening.101 At any rate, Tonge arrived too late and was told to come back the following day. According to Tonge’s journal, he and Oates went early the next morning, 28 September, to swear their evidence again before Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, but ‘those depositions are by Mistake dated the 27th day’ (and this is indeed the date on one of the genuine copies of the informations, at the Bodleian).102 Much hinges on this careless error, if error it was – for it seems unlikely that a justice of the peace would let a mistake of this sort pass. Tonge’s clear implication is that he and Oates visited the magistrate the morning of their appearance before the Privy Council because they were fearful that they might be thrown in prison and their evidence suppressed. However, if Tonge was lying about the date – if the information was brought before Godfrey on the 27th, before they had been summoned to the Council, rather than the morning preceding their attendance there on the 28th – this could shed new light on what happened afterwards. In other words, instead of having given a second deposition to Godfrey because they knew they were to be called in for questioning, Tonge and Oates may well have been summoned by the Privy Council as a result of this second visit to the magistrate. Roger Castlemaine believed that Godfrey was able to prove that Oates was not only perjured but suborned: ‘For he was able, and he had also courage to confront Oates, and consequently to Witness how impudently, and beyond all measure he had now deviated from his former Depositions’.103 Had Godfrey noticed important discrepancies or additions in the new version of the 99

SP 29/409, fols 63, 57. It is even possible that the conversation may have been occasioned by the bridegroom himself, who had carried Tonge’s copy of the forty-three articles from the king to Danby the previous month. 100 Burnet, 2:145. 101 CSPD, 425; Kenyon, 62. 102 Bod. Rawl D 720, fols 172–92. 103 Compendium, 69.

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charges sworn before him – such as the accusation against Coleman? While the informations brought to Godfrey on 6 September do not survive, and it is impossible to know how much those had grown from the original forty-three articles, the deposition sworn by Oates on the 27th (or the 28th, as the case may be) consists essentially of the same eighty-one articles given to the Lords in November.104 Kirkby and Tonge claimed that when the latter and Oates had first visited Godfrey on 6 September, the magistrate, upon being assured that the king already had a copy, ‘rested satisfied without reading’ the informations, merely witnessing Oates’s affidavit ‘that the Matter therein contained was True’. Thus, they maintained, Godfrey did not see the substance of the accusations until their second visit when Tonge, ‘though unwilling’, was persuaded by the ‘importunity of Mr Oates & the Justice’ to leave behind a copy.105 Contemporaries as well as modern historians have been sceptical that Godfrey would have accepted Oates’s earlier evidence without at least reading it.106 One of Henry Payne’s manuscript libels claimed that when Tonge and Oates first asked Godfrey to witness their evidence sight unseen, he sent them away: ‘if I am a magestrate I am fit to Reede what I sware men too: if not I will not sware you’. When they returned ‘two Days after’ (presumably on 6 September), Godfrey not only read the articles but threatened them with gaol until they revealed that Danby was privy to the informations.107 Roger North and Robert Southwell claimed, and this is corroborated by an entry in the Privy Council register, that Godfrey had indeed insisted on reading the charges and obtaining a copy – but it is not entirely clear whether they might be conflating Oates’s two depositions before the magistrate.108 On balance, though, it appears likely that even if Tonge had not left Godfrey a copy of the informations on 6 September, Godfrey had read the first version closely enough for his friend Coleman’s name to have jumped out at him if it had been there. While all accounts agree that Coleman had been warned by Godfrey, when this occurred is less clear. It is generally assumed that Godfrey spoke to Coleman about the charges before Tonge and Oates’s second information, if only because the duke of York had got wind of the Plot by the time the two appeared before the Privy Council on 28 September. Indeed, James’s determination that the matter be investigated was the reason for their summons. However, James’s suspicions that there was a plot to entrap the Catholics had already been aroused by the forged letters to his confessor in early September; nor had Israel Tonge’s behaviour been particularly discreet, as we have seen. Tonge himself claimed in a journal entry for 10 September that Godfrey had revealed the Plot 104 Kenyon,

62; Bod. Rawl D 720, fols 172–92. Compleat and True Narrative, 3. This was also the version in Care, 89, 91; SP 29/409, fol. 117. 106 Marshall, 75. 107 BL Add MS 28047, fol. 5v. 108 Examen, 174; PC 2/66, 28 September 1678; BL Add MS 38847, Southwell’s Council Board narrative, fol. 201v; HMC Ormonde, 4:457. 105 Kirkby,

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to Coleman and that Oates was as a result in mortal danger. This was almost certainly inserted later on the basis of second-hand information (interestingly, an entry dated two days later mentions the evidence of William Bedloe, who did not come forward as a witness until 1 November 1678). Nor does it hold water: not only does it contradict Tonge’s own claim that Godfrey had not read the earlier iteration of the informations but it made no sense that they would return to Godfrey several weeks later if they knew that he had betrayed them to the duke.109 In his memoirs, James wrote that Godfrey had sent ‘an account of Oates’s and Tonge’s depositions’ to Coleman ‘assoon as he had taken them’.110 However, he implies (as does Roger North) that Godfrey had only taken the informations once. Gilbert Burnet appears to have assumed the same thing, but dates the meeting between Godfrey and Coleman to sometime between the latter being put under house arrest, on 29 September, and his committal to Newgate on 4 October.111 The most compelling and probably the only reliable evidence that we have on this point comes from Godfrey’s friend Colonel George Weldon, taken about a week after Sir Edmund’s death. Weldon informed the Lords committee that Edward Coleman, under the false name of ‘Mr Clark’, had secretly met with Godfrey at his house on the evening of 28 September, and that the two had sat reading papers together – almost certainly, Oates’s accusations.112 This meeting might well have been a follow-up to the message (referred to by James) that Godfrey would have sent him the previous day (on the 27th), if indeed he had seen the second iteration of the informations then. This, then, could explain Tonge’s sudden summons before the Privy Council, probably later in the day on 27 September. If Godfrey’s warning to Coleman was later than has usually been believed, this may help explain why, although he apparently burned his more recent correspondence, he overlooked a packet of his letters from 1674–76 – a fatal error, as we have seen.113 If, as I think is likely, it was only on the morning of 27 September, after seeing new accusations against Coleman that had not been there in the earlier version of the articles, that Godfrey sent a warning to his friend, this could also explain why the duke was angry with Godfrey: for having kept to himself details about a trumped-up plot against the Catholics for weeks. Godfrey’s obvious defence – that Danby was apprised of the matter – would have set off a chain reaction and explains why he then received a dressing down 109 SP

29/409, fols 60, 61; this last point is raised in Danby’s defence in an addition to Kirkby’s Compleat and True Narrative, 4. 110 Clarke, Life of James the Second, 534. 111 Burnet, 2:152. 112 Lords MSS, 28. 113 Coleman’s secretary, Jeremy Boatman, confessed to the Commons Committee of Secrecy that his master had taken away ‘a great book … full of copies of letters’, which he later learned ‘was burned by [Coleman] on his command’. Another book ‘half full’ of copies of letters was later taken from the house during the search (Treby Papers, 1603).

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from the lord treasurer. It is significant, as Alan Marshall has pointed out, that Godfrey was never called to give testimony before the Privy Council, despite the fact that Joseph Williamson suggested that he should be questioned.114 It is hard to imagine this was simply an oversight – almost certainly, Danby would have brought all of his influence to bear to prevent Godfrey from disclosing information that would have made it clear that he was disobeying the king’s directives, conspiring against the heir to the throne and, likely, suborning witnesses. Thus, while it is highly unlikely that Danby actually had Godfrey murdered – if only because many witnesses could apparently attest to the fact that the justice had visited him on the day he went missing, and that the two had had words – he clearly did have reason to wish the meddling magistrate out of the way. Plots and counterplots: Danby in the Tower

In his nearly five years in the Tower, Danby busied himself writing memoranda, petitions and drafts of speeches he was never able to deliver, instructing family members and his remaining allies in very detailed ways and penning officious and surprisingly assertive letters to the king – in short, what we might call ‘micromanaging’. Much of this vast body of manuscript material, which has gone largely unexamined by scholars, focused on the injustice and the absurdity of the charges against him.115 A frequent refrain, in which the indignation seems to ring sincere, is why he would want to murder Godfrey: ‘to what End? What could my designe be? … I believe itt is not in the witt of man to devise one reason why I should do the man the least harme’.116 But Danby’s papers also testify to his inability to refrain from meddling and his boundless capacity for intrigue. In August 1679, he lamented the king’s failure to use the recent Covenanter rebellion in Scotland to make ‘a counterplot to that here’, frustrated and baffled that Charles continued to give open countenance to advisers who preferred to make ‘Oates his Plott last seaven yeares longer, rather then [sic] find out any Counter plots for his Majestys service’.117 If his imprisonment did not cure Danby of scheming, it also made him vulnerable to the accusations of the very Popish Plot witnesses he had initially hoped to use to his political advantage. During the impeachment proceedings 114

CSPD, 426; Marshall, 86. his biographer Andrew Browning has transcribed only a few letters from this ‘enormous … mass’ of papers produced by Danby while in the Tower (Thomas Osborne, 2:82), now largely comprising three volumes in the British Library: Add MS 28043, 28047, 28049, containing his memoranda, notes and depositions of witnesses and correspondence, respectively. There are also several volumes containing copies of documents and other reference material Danby consulted during this time (Add MS 28045, 28046, 28048). 116 BL Add MS 28043, fol. 42. 117 BL Add MS 28049, fol. 62. 115 Even

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against Danby in March 1679, Oates testified to Parliament that, shortly after the prorogation at the end of December 1678, he had crossed the treasurer’s path while walking through the privy gardens at Whitehall and overheard him saying to some men in his company: ‘There goes One of the Saviours of England; but I hope to see him hanged within a Month’.118 Oates also supposedly added that ‘A great man’ – who could only be Danby – had ‘sayd to Sir Edmondberry Godfrey: God Damn me what had you to doe to meddle with this businesse he had better to have sopt his bread in T[ur]d then to have done itt’.119 More damaging (and plausible) was William Bedloe’s claim that Danby had attempted to suborn him. Bedloe claimed that Danby had summoned him to ‘his closet’ where ‘My Lord asked him whether my Lord Shaftesbury or the Duke of Buckingham had desired him to witness any thing against them & who they were in the house of comons were his enemies’, promising that if he told him, ‘he would reward them more then the house of Comons were able to doe’ and would make him ‘rich’ if he recanted his previous evidence and went ‘beyond sea’.120 For all that Bedloe was a liar, his accusations would have seemed perfectly credible to contemporaries; indeed, Danby’s own papers make it clear that he had frequent dealings with informers and rogues. At about this very time, Danby was providing money to Thomas Knox, a servant of his younger son, lord Dunblane, to encourage Titus Oates’s servants John Lane and William Osborne to swear sodomy against their master.121 Danby’s older son, lord Latimer, spent much of April striving to have the witnesses sworn, but was rebuffed at every turn by officials either unwilling to exert themselves for the disgraced minister or ‘doubt[ing] a cheat’.122 The affair predictably backfired on Danby when the Lords committee investigating the Plot had Lane and Osborne interrogated by two magistrates friendly to the opposition, ultimately resulting in their conviction (along with Knox) for a ‘conspiracy to defame and scandalize Dr Oates’ and to discredit the Plot.123 Not one to learn from his mistakes, Danby was later implicated in the subornation of witnesses to swear charges of ‘Sodomy & buggery’ against his enemy the duke of Buckingham, a sordid and ‘perplext’ affair in which ‘the mud flew in all directions’ (in Alan Marshall’s apt phrase), and which resulted in the arrest and imprisonment of the earl’s servant Edward 118 Grey,

Debates, 21 March 1679, 9:9; LJ, XIII, 472. Add MS 28047, fol. 53v. 120 BL Add MS 34195, fol. 73; there is a similar version in BL Add MS 28047, fol. 54v; both correspond with the account in Grey’s Debates, but add more detail. 121 BL Add MS 28049, fols 42–3; HMC 14th Report, 495. 122 HMC 14th Report, 406–7. Danby urged his son to call upon his brother-in-law Plymouth to intercede with the king to have the informations taken; this went nowhere, Charles II only relaying that they go to a justice of the peace. 123 State Trials, 7:775. Osborne, who supposedly had been ‘oblig’d in conscience to serve’ the earl because of their surname (BL Add MS 28049, fol. 26v), confessed ‘that he was drawne’ into swearing against Oates ‘by the earl of Danby &c’ (Newdigate Newsletters, 11 December 1679, L.c 872). 119 BL

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Christian.124 Seemingly unable to control his impulse to impose a direction on events, Danby was in May 1681 still trying to get the Privy Council to hear the evidence of one John Bury, who promised to testify to Buckingham’s ‘false practices’ against him, despite being ‘advised not to meddle with itt for that itt selfe might bee a Trapan’.125 As far as Bedloe was concerned, Danby claimed that he ‘was never with mee but thrice’. Danby admitted to having met with him once in his ‘closet’, but only for ‘ten minutes’ – not long enough for the ‘discourse’ Bedloe described, which would have ‘take[n] up att least an houre’. He met with him a second time in his drawing room, while Henry Compton was there; and a third time in his dining room on 13 February 1679, when ‘a good deal of Company’ were present. Bedloe then supposedly told him ‘there were men tampering with him to get him [to] sweare against mee but hee was not such a man as they took him for but on the contrary hee could [attest to the fact] that the papists had taken me [Danby] always for their Enemy and particularly a great man’. Bedloe refused to disclose the name of the ‘great man’, assuring Danby that he ‘should know all before the Parliament sate’. Danby added that Bedloe had in mid-March 1679 asked to speak privately with his brother-in-law Charles Bertie, ‘who told him hee had no place to retire into but the close stoole room where they did go & Bedlow told him’. Here the sentence terminates abruptly without end punctuation, as though the name of the ‘great man’ that could only be whispered in the toilet could not be committed to paper – Danby adding that Bertie could testify to the story, as could two lords whom he had told ‘the next day’.126 That Danby was toying with the idea of accusing the duke of York to save his own skin should not be surprising, given his earlier dealings with Tonge and his role in Coleman’s arrest. Nor would there have been any real conflict, in his mind, between self-interest and genuine conviction. Although Danby surely knew Oates and Bedloe were perjured rogues, he not only consistently asserted the reality of the Popish Plot but cited as evidence of his innocence the fact that his name had not been included in Oates’s accusations – writing, probably in late 1679, that ‘the said Doctor’ (Oates) had still not charged him with anything ‘to this very houre’.127 Not unlike members of the political opposition, Danby was doubtless able to square the circle by seeing Coleman’s schemes – and, by extension, those of the duke of York – as proving the reality of a, if not the, popish plot. Like William Lloyd, Danby would continue to cling to the anti-Catholic conspiracy theory that James II’s son and heir was in fact a fraud, ‘a warming-pan baby’, even after the Revolution – a fiction that,

124 BL

Add MS 28047, fol. 72; Newdigate Newsletters, 12 April 1680, L.c.924; Alan Marshall, ODNB entry for Colonel Thomas Blood. 125 BL Add MS 28043, fols 50, 46v. 126 BL Add MS 28043, fols 65–6. The lords were John Granville, 1st earl of Bath, and Richard 1st baron Arundell of Trerice, supporters of Danby. 127 BL Add MS 28043, fol. 73v.

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by maintaining the sanctity of the legitimate succession, was more attractive to Tories than to Whigs.128 If Danby had too prosaic a mind to reflect on the irony that he was imprisoned in large part for events he himself had set in motion, he dwelt constantly on the injustice of being accused of being ‘popishly affected’ and ‘in the French interest’ by the same men who were secretly working with the French to ruin him.129 Danby continually railed that he had ‘always ben thought an Enemy to France & their interest as is well known to many and particularly to Mr M[ontagu]’ and was ‘the first that was ever accused for things to which I am the most opposite enemy in the nation’ – ‘either popish or French government’.130 His accusation that various MPs, including the future Whig martyr William lord Russell, had secret dealings with the French was (although true) disbelieved upon the latter’s indignant denial.131 Danby’s memoranda constantly attack his enemies for themselves being ‘popishly affected’. While ambassadors to France, Danby claimed, Sunderland and Montagu went frequently to Catholic mass, ‘and not only out of curiosity’. Sunderland had assured the duke of York of his ‘good inclinations to bee of that Religion’ (indeed, he converted during James II’s reign), while ‘Mr Montagu himself’ was ‘a Papist’ and his secretary a Frenchman and a spy. The duke of York, when trying to persuade Danby to convert to Catholicism several years earlier, not only invoked the example of the earl’s (then) ‘friend’ Buckingham, but told him ‘I might have the Example of a greater man if that would serve’ – clearly, Charles II himself. To this Danby supposedly replied ‘that was not a thing to bee done by Example’.132 If Danby was here, if only in his unpublished notes, venturing out on thin ice, he usually focused on attacking the duke of York (and Buckingham) rather than the king. In an undated memorandum, probably from 1679, he declared: ‘[I] Shall be no Informer but to speake freely in my place in Parliament what I knew to have been the chief causes of the misfortunes of this Kingdome as to popery & the French interest amongst us’. It was not he, but rather James and Buckingham, who had urged the king ‘to throw off’ the ‘bondage’ of ‘Parliament’, Buckingham swearing that ‘there was no way of governing the Parliament but as Cromwell did governe them’ – i.e. by a standing army: ‘wee must now come to the French government or nothing, and swore hee would not bee without his share in it’. As for the duke of York, Danby claimed that on ‘many … occasions’ he had ‘indeavoured to persuade the king to govern by force’, at which Charles II signalled his disapproval to Danby, saying ‘his

128 Browning,

Thomas Osborne, 1:382; see Rachel J. Weil, ‘The Politics of Legitimacy: Women and the Warming-Pan Scandal’, in Lois G. Schwoerer (ed.), The Revolution of 1688–1689 (New York, 1992), 70–1. 129 CJ, IX, 562. 130 BL Add MS 28043, fol. 91v; BL Add MS 28042, fol. 32v. 131 Haley, 490. 132 BL Add MS 28043, fols 35, 2; BL Add MS 63650, fol. 31; BL Add MS 28042, fols 29, 31v.

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Brother had now shew’d barefac’d what he would be att and seem’d to be much displeased with him for itt’.133 Throughout, Danby’s defence was that he was a victim of the Popish Plot: that ‘the Endeavours to ruine & bring in question the life of the Earl of Danby about the murder of Sir Edmund Godfrey have always been all from Papists and some as itt seems of great quality’. Here Danby may have meant not only the ‘Popish Lords’ in the Tower (with whom, he stressed, he refused even to converse during their mutual imprisonment) but also the duke of York. Writing up notes in the late spring of 1681 for a defence he was never permitted to give, Danby enumerated three ‘popish stratagem[s]’ against him. First was the libel campaign by Henry Payne claiming that Edward Christian had murdered Godfrey on Danby’s orders. Second and third were the evidence of two ‘Irish Papists’: Edward Fitzharris, upon whose testimony Danby was indicted for Godfrey’s murder in May 1681; and James Magrath, who the same month visited Danby in the Tower with a story about Godfrey having hanged himself, which the earl saw as an attempt to entrap him.134 After the incident of Magrath, who was quickly discovered to be working for the ‘popish midwife’ Elizabeth Cellier and Lady Powis, Danby’s claims of being framed by Catholics seem to have gained traction even amongst ‘Presbyterians’. In April 1682, Roger Morrice reflected that attempts to pin Godfrey’s murder on Danby, like the theories of suicide, were intended ‘to bury the Plott, that so there might be no outcry against Popery’ and ‘so to lay it off the Papists’.135 Danby may have been paranoid, but this did not mean that people were not out to get him. There are several letters in Danby’s papers apparently from shady former associates trying to extort money from him.136 One of these was Thomas Knox, who had been involved in the attempt to discredit Oates’s evidence by inciting his servants to accuse him of sodomy. While Danby claimed ‘he had never spoken to Knox, unless by accident as hee might do with any inferior servant in the house’, the paper trail suggests he and his son Latimer had made extensive use of his services.137 Unbeknownst to them, Knox, who had supplied Danby with a copy of Payne’s manuscript libel, was secretly working for the Catholic ‘Tower Lords’ and had at one point been lodged in Powis House.138 In an undated letter to Danby’s steward Mr Bladen, Knox made a pointed reference to one Mrs Downing, who claimed to have seen Oates and Tonge meet regularly with ‘my Lord Treasurer’ and his servant Thomas Lloyd in Lambeth in mid-June 1678, before the king had learned of the Plot. Knox professed to be ‘startled’ at her story, which ‘does seeme as yet to me extreamly ridiculous, 133 BL

Add MS 28942, fols 30v–33v. discussion in Chapter 3. 135 BL Add MS 28043, fols 75v, 69v, 75v; The Entring Book of Roger Morrice 1677–1691, vol. 2, ed. John Spurr (Woodbridge, 2007), 315. 136 See, for instance, John Hebdon’s letters to Danby: BL Add MS 28053, fols 146, 142, 199. 137 BL Add MS 28043, fol. 73v; BL Add MS 28047, fols 47–8; BL Add MS 28049, fol. 26. 138 BL Add MS 28049, fol. 196v; SP 29/409, fol. 5; BL Add MS 34195, fol. 79. 134 See

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and malitious, yet I doe not doubt but there may be some use made of it to my Lords advantage’.139 This seems less of a friendly tip than a threat of blackmail, as does another letter that Knox sent to Danby after escaping from prison to Paris in April 1681. In it, he complained of his ‘Extreame necessity’ and made references to temptations he had received ‘to Turne Villan’, adding ominously that he ‘hope[d] I have more Grace then [sic] for a Pension to sell my Master’.140 Although Danby presented the business of Fitzharris in 1681 as another papist plot against him, the real story, to the extent it can be reconstructed, was much more complicated. Fitzharris was a royalist double agent hired by the king’s mistress, the duchess of Portsmouth, to plant a seditious libel on the opposition. However, the plan backfired when Fitzharris was betrayed by an accomplice and himself apprehended in possession of the libel. Upon being questioned by the two Whig sheriffs of London and Middlesex, Fitzharris flipped, confessing to a general Plot narrative amenable to the opposition. Fitzharris’s original deposition, sworn on 10 March 1681, did not name Danby, only claiming that the duke of York’s servant Lawrence Dupuy had told him that Godfrey’s ‘murder was consulted at Windsor’ and ‘done much in the manner as Prance had related it’.141 The House of Commons published this examination on 25 March and impeached Fitzharris in hopes he would make more damaging revelations against the court, hopes that were dashed by the sudden dissolution of the Oxford Parliament on 28 March. The accusations against Danby for Godfrey’s murder in May 1681 were part of a last-ditch effort by Fitzharris and his Whig allies, respectively, to delay his trial at common law (for the libel) and to resuscitate the attack on the government.142 On 16 May 1681, a Middlesex grand jury – whose foreman was none other than Michael Godfrey – brought in an indictment against Danby for Sir Edmund’s murder.143 Fitzharris testified that he had overheard the earl threatening the justice – saying ‘That now he would make Godfrey’s Heart ake’ – and that afterwards James’s servant Dupuy had told him that ‘the Earl had sent Godfrey on an Errand, from which he would never return’ (or, in another version, ‘he had put him on a dead mans arrand’). The murder had supposedly 139 BL

Add MS 28049, fol. 41v. Bladen was in 1686 accused by Danby’s daughter Lady Plymouth of embezzling money from her (HMC Ormonde, 6:455). 140 BL Add MS 28049, fol. 196v. 141 Examination of Edw. Fitzharris, 11–12. 142 BL Add MS 28043, fol. 59; The Confession of Edward Fitz-Hayrs Esq (1681), 2; Andrea McKenzie, ‘Sham Plots and False Confessions: The Politics of Edward Fitzharris’s Last Dying Speech, 1681’, in Brian Cowan and Scott Sowerby (eds), The State Trials and the Politics of Justice in Later Stuart England (Woodbridge, 2021), 113–34. 143 There were three Middlesex grand juries (one for each of the three hundreds in the county), and Michael Godfrey was the foreman of one of the secondary ones, Enfield (Entring Book, 2:277). Godfrey ‘would fain have excused himself, alleging that evidence might come in relating to his brother’s death which might render him an improper juryman’, but the judge, Sir Thomas Jones, said ‘the cause was not tanty, nor was it more than imaginary yet, so that he submitted and was sworn’ (HMC Ormonde, 6:52).

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been ordered by Danby, the duke of York and the queen after ‘a Counsult was held at Windsor and another at St James’.144 Fitzharris’s accusations against Danby, singled out in part because his royal pardon did not cover the crime of murder, were nakedly opportunistic and (in Burnet’s words) ‘very gross’. Fitzharris had apparently first claimed to have overheard the earl threatening Godfrey at Windsor, but then, when the judge instructed the grand jury that this was out of the jurisdiction of Middlesex, promptly claimed to ‘have heard him say the same thing at Whitehall’.145 Needless to say, Danby was not idle, sending out agents who grilled the grand jurymen about why they had brought in an indictment against him on the ‘single & uncertain Evidence of Mr Fitsharris’. Danby managed to obtain second-hand testimony from two jurors who claimed ‘there was such a crowd’ and such noise that ‘they could not hear the Evidence themselves’, and that they were ‘imposed upon’ to find a true bill.146 Others, when pressed, claimed that they had indicted him not on Fitzharris’s evidence, ‘but upon what Mr Michael Godfrey deposed’.147 Danby also sent out intermediaries to pressure Michael Godfrey, who tersely relayed that he had deposed nothing against Danby, and had no other grounds to suspect him ‘but the information of Fitzharris but that hee would prosecute any man living whilst hee was worth a groat to found out the murder of his brother’.148 The earl eagerly recorded a rumour that Michael Godfrey had told Sir Samuel Clark, a clerk of Chancery, that his brother had been threatened by ‘a great man but that to his knowledge hee did not name my Ld Danby for that hee knew who itt was his brother did name’.149 Clearly, Danby would have been very happy to join Godfrey’s brothers in throwing the duke of York under the bus. Yet they seem to have stubbornly resisted all of the earl’s overtures. Danby lamented: ‘I did never wonder to find my self branded with this crime so often by Papists but must truly admire to find itt from any protestant and especially from men’ – i.e. Michael and Benjamin Godfrey – ‘who … I did both promote & did effectually indeavour to serve as much as lay in my power’. Although he had always viewed ‘their Brother to bee an honest man and [had] ever a kindesse for him … I fear his brothers do not inherite his virtues’.150 144 Echard,

History of England, 630; Newdigate Newsletters, 17 May 1681, L.c.1077; Bod. MS Carte 222, fols 307–8; Entring Book, 2:277. The fact that there had been a Jesuit consult at St James hosted by the duke of York was unlikely to have been a coincidence, an inconvenient and incendiary secret which will be discussed in Chapter 5. 145 Examen, 224–5; Danby cited, as proof of his innocence, that if he had killed Godfrey, he would have had murder ‘inserted in my pardon’ (BL Add MS 28043, fol. 43v); Burnet, 2:278–9. 146 BL Add MS 28043, fol. 53. 147 BL Add MS 28047, fol. 285. 148 BL Add MS 28043, fol. 46; see also BL Add MS 28047, fol. 120. 149 BL Add MS 28043, fol. 45. 150 BL Add MS 28043, fol. 43v.

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Danby frenetically petitioned to take his trial on these charges so he could clear himself, criticising the secretary of state’s too ‘superficial’ investigation of these ‘subornations’, and warning that the accusations against him were but ‘a step’ to those against ‘much greater persons then my selfe’.151 None knew that better than the king: in late May 1681, another Irish witness, Bryan Haynes, supposedly replied – when asked if the duke of York had been at the ‘consult’ that ordered Godfrey’s death – that ‘there was a greater person than he in the consult, the greatest man in the kingdom’. But Charles II was determined that the disclosures of Fitzharris, a man he was believed to have hired to plant incriminating documents on his political enemies, should be kept to a minimum.152 As Danby’s son Latimer predicted, all ‘his Majesties kind promises’ would amount to nothing, as Danby could not ‘bee tried because itt would reflect on [the queen and duke of York] if hee were & they not’. And, indeed, Fitzharris was swiftly tried and convicted at the King’s Bench for the libel and safely ‘hang’d out of the way’ in early July 1681.153 There was little love lost between the king and his fallen minister. Danby and his son Latimer murmured about the ‘frailty of Princes’ – Charles II’s unwillingness to lift a finger to have his former treasurer released from the Tower.154 One of Danby’s allies, the earl of Bath, lamented that the king was ‘so regardless of his servants’ that ‘there is little appearance of any thing but ruin to those who faithfully serve’ him.155 John Robartes, 1st earl of Radnor, confided to Bath that he was horrified at the dissimulation of Charles II, who professed concern for Danby but seemed perfectly at ease with the earl’s enemies: ‘the king is too artificiall for mee, I guess att none of his intentions, nor will I expose my self to be used as my lord Danby has been’.156 The speed with which Danby was released on bail in February 1684, when the risk of his testifying before Parliament was practically nil, is eloquent of how little Charles II had desired to free his minister earlier. Upon their first meeting after his release, the king was polite, but noncommittal: he would never trust his former minister again. Danby wrote to his wife with some bitterness that ‘the King is just as formerly, very kind in words, but nothing more’.157 Danby’s own papers suggest that Charles was wise to keep him locked up. In them Danby complained that it was the king that ‘sent in business of the Plott to mee & commanded me to write the Letters’, bemoaning the injustice of being ‘made a state sacrifice’ when he had ‘done nothing but by directions from his Majesty under his hand’: ‘it is without example and beyond the case of my Lord 151 BL

Add MS 28049, fol. 192; BL Add MS 28043, fol. 50v. 29/415, fol. 376; BL Add MS 32519, fol. 13. 153 BL Add MS 34195, fol. 95; Pacquets of Advice from Rome (6 May 1681). 154 HMC 14th Report, 408. See also J.R. Jones, Charles II: Royal Politician (1987), 133; Miller, Charles II, 229. 155 HMC 14th Report, 413. 156 BL Add MS 28049, fol. 62v. 157 Browning, Thomas Osborne, 1:360, 2:123; HMC 14th Report, 444. 152 SP

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Strafford’. He mused pointedly: ‘Strange that itt shall bee an offence to use the kings name in defence of those things wherein hee must tell a lie if hee does not use itt’. As for Oates’s evidence, Danby stressed that it was the king that gave him ‘the first intimation of the plot & commanded him not to proceed in it otherwise or faster than his Majesty should command him’.158 Danby proudly acknowledged having reported to Tonge all of the duke of York’s attempts ‘to invalidate all hee said to the King’. Danby had not only been ‘remarkably serviceable’ in the seizure of Coleman’s papers, but insisted that he would have made the Plot public much earlier ‘if his Majesty had permitted’ or if ‘the Informer’ (Oates) had not been convinced that ‘much of the discovery would faile’ if it were ‘declared att the Councill table’. Danby vowed that ‘whenever I am free and under the protection of a pardon I thinke itt my duty to tell the House’ how many ‘threats’ he had endured from the duke of York for revealing the Plot to Parliament. Danby claimed that James had urged that the witnesses should be tried in the common law courts, noting (without irony) that he had ‘bid mee look to itt if ever itt was brought to the Parliament’.159 Tory historians such as Laurence Echard emphasised the poetic justice of Danby’s long imprisonment, seeing it as a fit punishment for a minister who had disobeyed his master’s ‘express Commands … not to make any Discoveries to Parliament’ about the Plot. Such accounts highlight both Charles II’s laudable scepticism about the Plot and his powers of foresight (telling Danby, ‘you shall find that you have given the Parliament a handle to ruin your self, as well as to disturb all my Affairs; and that you will live to repent it’). As events were unfolding, however, the king’s real beliefs and intentions were, as always, fluid and unclear.160 After first hearing of Oates’s revelations, Charles apparently ordered Danby to tell his brother nothing of them.161 When they did break, far from heeding James’s pleas to nip them in the bud, he left for the horse races in Newmarket while the witnesses were still being questioned by the Privy Council – an error in judgement that would have fatal consequences for many innocent Catholics. Whether this negligence was deliberate or merely careless is unclear, but after the Plot did come before Parliament, Charles II certainly had reasons to use his minister as a fall guy. He made a speech exonerating him (‘As for his concealing the plot he could not be guilty of that, for he knew nothing of it but what he had from me, and as for the letters he is accused of he wrote them by my particular command’)162 but otherwise seemed content to let Danby twist in the wind. Danby’s biographer Andrew Browning believed Charles II’s awarding his former minister a marquisate after he had resigned the treasurer’s staff was intended less as a consolation prize than as ‘a red rag in the face of a bull’: a way 158 BL

Add MS 28043, fols 91v, 11, 90; BL Add MS 28049, fol. 81. Add MS 28043, fols 69, 146; BL Add MS 28042, fol. 33. 160 Echard, History of England, 472; Lingard, History of England, 9:360. See also Paul Rapin de Thoyras, History of England, trans. N. Tindal (1731), 14:135; Temple, Memoirs, 342. 161 Burnet, 2:147. 162 HMC 14th Report, 404. 159 BL

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to ensure that Danby’s enemies would not relent – and they did not.163 Charles II certainly did not want Danby to take his trial because of what it would reveal. Most obviously, it would bring to light what everyone knew, but could not voice openly: that Danby’s secret negotiations with France were his own.164 Whether Charles II was Machiavellian or incompetent, a master of dissimulation or merely irresolute and weak, devious or simply indolent, even his own ministers and intimates found it difficult to read his true motives and intentions and to predict his behaviour.165 In retrospect, we know that Charles II refused to divorce his queen or abandon his brother or even, ultimately, his minister, but contemporaries were far less certain. If the cynical king notoriously trusted no one, this was a two-way street. Distrust reigned at the court of Charles II, providing fertile soil for conspiracy theories. This chapter has not only demonstrated that the earl of Danby made a surprisingly credible suspect in Godfrey’s death, but that he himself subscribed to the same belief in the reality of a Popish Plot as his enemies who impeached him and attempted to prosecute him for murder. His attempts to defend himself – which clearly would have included accusing James duke of York, if it had proved to be politically expedient – were firmly within this conspiratorial paradigm. The attack on Danby described in this chapter was, of course, very much in the time-honoured tradition of scapegoating the minister for the unpopular policies of a master who, in the era of the personal monarchy, could not be criticised more directly. (A statute of 1661 explicitly disqualified from public office anyone who accused the king of being a Catholic.)166 ‘Plot talk’ could both harness public outrage to oppositional agendas and launch serious challenges to authority while seeming to maintain the decorum of the underlying principles. As such, the charges against Danby in regard to Godfrey were certainly opportunistic, but we should not see them as disingenuous or instrumental only: the complete breakdown of trust at the court of Charles II made anything possible, anything believable. The succession crisis of 1679–81 was not just a 163 Andrew

Browning, Thomas Osborne: Earl of Danby and Duke of Leeds (1913), 43. Danby was not able to claim the title of marquess of Carmarthen until the reign of William III. 164 Henry St. John, 1st viscount Bolingbroke, A Dissertation upon Parties, 5th ed. (1739), 38. 165 Charles II’s biographers have differed as to what degree his dissimulation was a political asset or a liability; for most to least favourable views on this question, see Jones, Royal Politician; Miller, Charles II; and Ronald Hutton, Charles II, King of England, Scotland and Ireland (Oxford, 1989). Scholars themselves have struggled to locate the genuine, ‘non-performative self’ of this ‘supreme performer’: Jenny Uglow, A Gambling Man: Charles II and the Restoration, 1660–1670 (2009), 4–5. For Hutton, he was ‘a monarch in masquerade’, ultimately characterised by his ‘unreachability’ (Charles II, 458); for Rachel Weil, he was a master of ‘the mixed signal’, his ‘real intentions … perpetually obscure to contemporaries, and indeed to later historians’: ‘The Female Politician in the Late Stuart Age’, in Julia Marciari Alexander and Catherine MacLeod (eds), Politics, Transgression, and Representation at the Court of Charles II (New Haven, 2007), 183. 166 13 Car. 2, c. 1, ‘An Act for Safety and Preservation of His Majesties Person and Government against Treasonable and Seditious practices and attempts’.

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climacteric of anxieties about the political dangers of domestic and international Catholicism. It was above all a crisis of confidence in leaders – up to and including the king – whose secrets were believed to be so scandalous and whose methods so unscrupulous that they could be plausibly suspected of resorting to murder to cover their tracks.

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3 ‘The Devil in his Clothes’: Suicide Theories, Then and Now In the third volume of his Brief History of the Times (1688), The Mystery of the Death of Sir E.B. Godfrey Unfolded, Roger L’Estrange tells a story to demonstrate how dangerous it was in the autumn of 1678 even to suggest that Sir Edmund had committed suicide. On the evening of Thursday 17 October, Captain Thomas Paulden was at Mrs Duke’s coffee-house in Northumberland House near Charing Cross (only steps from Godfrey’s home in Hartshorn Lane) when he heard the news of the discovery of the body. Paulden deposed that several of the ‘Horsemen’ who had accompanied the constable and others to the scene told him that, judging from the posture of the dead man, Godfrey had ‘fall’n upon his own Sword’. At this, however, the crowd of people gathered around began to mutter, ‘These are the Rogues that Murther’d him Themselves, and would make People believe, that he did it himself’. The message was clear: those harbouring doubts that Godfrey had been murdered, and by the Catholics, had best keep their opinions to themselves. According to L’Estrange, ‘The Belief or Dis-belief to this Story was at This Time become Effectually the Test of a Protestant, or a Papist; and the Credit of it Promoted by All ways Imaginable by Reports, and Post-Letters’ and enforced ‘By Menaces, Promises and Extreme Cruelties’.1 Roger L’Estrange was a gifted propagandist whose version of events and arguments – including his insistence that Godfrey committed suicide – have profoundly influenced all subsequent accounts.2 This was in part due to his enhanced authority as official investigator: in 1686, James II, anxious to debunk the Plot, gave him carte blanche to re-open the investigation into Godfrey’s death.3 But, even more importantly, this was because of the scores of witness statements he obtained, both from ‘true copies’ of original depositions handed over by authorities and from new interviews with surviving witnesses. For most of this evidence, later lost or destroyed, L’Estrange is the only source, even 1

L’Estrange, 3:201–2. For more on L’Estrange as a propagandist, see Peter Hinds,‘The Horrid Popish Plot’: Roger L’Estrange and the Circulation of Political Discourse in Late Seventeenth-Century London (Oxford, 2010). 3 L’Estrange, 3:vii; SP 44/336, fol. 364. 2

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if – as scholars acknowledge – a highly partisan and problematic one.4 While L’Estrange boasted of omitting none of the witness depositions from his Brief History, he reproduced few of them at length, choosing instead to weave together different snippets at different times to make the case that Godfrey had killed himself. As we shall see, L’Estrange was an overbearing and tendentious interrogator who was selective both in the information he elicited and in the way he edited it afterwards: a journalistic pioneer of ‘cut and paste’.5 L’Estrange casts a long shadow over the debate: his suicide thesis was favoured by nineteenthcentury Catholic historians such as John Lingard, and variations thereof have dominated in modern times. Two out of the three twentieth-century book-length studies of Godfrey’s death – Alfred Marks’s in 1905 and Alan Marshall’s in 1999 – have subscribed to suicide arguments, both – especially the former – relying heavily on L’Estrange’s evidence. However, it is important to remember that, before L’Estrange’s outsized intervention in 1688, the theory of suicide had been mooted and, apparently, thoroughly debunked by contemporaries. Godfrey’s friend Mary Gibbon – whose evidence was key to L’Estrange’s case – appears to have initially lent her support to the report that the justice had hanged himself. In May 1681, she seems to have been involved in what was seen as a crude attempt to entrap the earl of Danby by offering to procure witnesses to swear to this version of events. In June 1682, the Tory printer Nathaniel Thompson and two Catholics or Catholic sympathisers, John Farwell and William Payne, were convicted of libel after publishing several pamphlets claiming that Godfrey had committed suicide by falling on his sword at Primrose Hill. In neither case was the forensic evidence convincing. In the first instance, seventeenth-century men and women would have been perfectly able to distinguish between the marks left on someone who had been hanged and someone who had been garrotted. As for Thompson, Payne and Farwell, their evidence – and, as we shall see, it was much the same as that later used, if to much better effect, by L’Estrange – was literally laughed out of court. This chapter will revisit these ill-fated early attempts to establish a case for suicide and re-examine L’Estrange’s (and other historians’) arguments in light of his own and other evidence. We shall then address three principal questions: first, does the forensic evidence support suicide? Second, what was Godfrey’s state of mind in the weeks leading up to his death? Third, what can we reconstruct of Godfrey’s last movements on that fatal Saturday, 12 October 1678? 4

As Pollock points out, most of the informations cited by L’Estrange are undated, and he seems to have destroyed all the evidence (Popish Plot, 92n). Andrew Lang believes that L’Estrange’s evidence ‘must be regarded with suspicion’ (The Valet’s Tragedy and Other Studies (1903), 59). See also Marshall, 137; Hinds, ‘Horrid Popish Plot’, ch. 7. 5 Joad Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge, 2003), 324; Helen Pierce, ‘The Devil’s Bloodhound: Roger L’Estrange Caricatured’, in Michael Hunter (ed.), Printed Images in Early Modern Britain: Essays in Interpretation (Farnham, 2010), 237–54; Hinds, ‘Horrid Popish Plot’, 43; Marshall, 137–9, and his ODNB entry for Godfrey.

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Early suicide theories

There was speculation that Godfrey had committed suicide from the very beginning. It may have been indiscreet in the weeks following the discovery of the body, when emotions were running high, to suggest that Godfrey had been melancholy, or that ‘Distraction’ – what we now call mental illness – ran in his family, but clearly numerous people did. Otherwise, in his funeral sermon, William Lloyd would not have had to confront the rumours that Sir Edmund’s father had killed himself (he had not, although Lloyd had to concede that Godfrey senior had gone through a bad patch in midlife).6 The hypothesis that the justice had ‘hanged himself; and his relations, to save his estate, run him through’ was also raised – again, if only to be debunked – at the trial of Green, Hill and Berry for Godfrey’s murder in February 1679.7 In theory, those adjudged by a coroner’s jury of being felo de se (a suicide) were denied burial in hallowed ground, and their estates forfeit to the crown. By the late seventeenth century, it had become routine for coroner’s juries to report that the deceased had no goods (regardless of the actual value of the estate) and it was also becoming more common for them to return the verdict that the suicide had been not of sound mind (non compos mentis); i.e. not criminally responsible. Nonetheless, there was an undeniable stigma still attached to suicide: not only was it a crime (‘self-murder’) but even the despair with which it was associated was traditionally believed to be diabolical in origin.8 If Sir Edmund had indeed committed suicide, his brothers may well have wanted to cover it up, regardless of whether they would have inherited his goods. The French ambassador Barillon seemed to take for granted that Godfrey was a ‘fanatic’ who had fallen prey to the suicidal melancholy to which the English were naturally prone. Just after the discovery of the body, James duke of York wrote a letter to William of Orange – his nephew, son-in-law and the man who would supplant him on the throne in ten years’ time – declaring that there were ‘several … very probable … circumstances’ pointing to suicide. While the justice’s death was ‘laid upon the Catholicks’, such charges were groundless, ‘for he was known to be far from being an enemy to them’. James predicted, accurately enough, that the business would ‘cause … a great flame in the Parliament’ when it would meet the following Monday, ‘for those disaffected to the government 6 Lloyd,

Sermon, 17. The claim that Godfrey’s father had committed suicide was repeated in John Warner, The History of the English Persecution of Catholics and the Presbyterian Plot, ed. T.A. Birrell, trans. John Bligh (1953), 1:205; John Lingard, The History of England, 5th ed. (1849), 9:361; and R. de Courson, The Condition of the Catholics under Charles II, trans. F. RaymondBarker (1899), 48. 7 State Trials, 7:185. 8 Michael MacDonald and Terence R. Murphy, Sleepless Souls: Suicide in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1990), 115–23, 52. See also R.A. Houston, Punishing the Dead? Suicide, Lordship, and Community in Britain, 1500–1830 (Oxford, 2010); K.J. Kesselring, ‘Felony Forfeiture in England, c.1170–1870’, Journal of Legal History, xxx (2009).

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will inflame all things as much as they can’.9 In this Parliament and the still more fiery one that succeeded it, belief both in Godfrey’s murder by the papists and in the larger Plot would become (in Roger North’s words) ‘a creed’.10 In March 1679, the MP Edward Sackville was expelled from the House, stripped of his office and thrown in the Tower of London after he was overheard in a coffee-house saying that Oates and Bedloe were ‘perjured rogues’ and ‘there was no more truth in the Plot, than in the killing of Sir Edmundbury Godfrey; for it was the opinion of the best of the land, and the King believed that [Godfrey] had killed himself, and was not murdered’.11 A few weeks later, one James Douglas was indicted at the Old Bailey for voicing the seditious opinion that Godfrey ‘hanged himself and his brothers conspired to make it believed that he was murdered to save the estate’.12 But belief in Godfrey’s murder was rooted in more than just political correctness. The many people (possibly hundreds) who had actually seen the body, regularly on public display from the evening of 17 October to the funeral two weeks later, were genuinely convinced that suicide was an impossibility. They could not reconcile Godfrey’s extensive wounds – what appeared to be bruising, marks of strangulation, and not one but two sword wounds, apparently inflicted post mortem – with any scenario but murder. As William Lloyd, after seeing Godfrey ‘strangled as well as thrust through’, concluded: ‘no man could kill himself both ways’.13 Charles II, initially of the opinion that Godfrey had committed suicide, had supposedly been convinced otherwise after Lloyd had described to him the condition of the body.14 Mary Gibbon would later report being asked pointedly by Godfrey’s sister Jane Harrison, when they were viewing the body in Hartshorn Lane, ‘If she did not Now Believe that the Papists had Murther’d him?’ Gibbon responded ‘That she did not Believe it; for to her … Knowledg, Sir Edmund had done many kindnesses for some Papists, that had Liv’d with her’. Significantly, while Gibbon denied that the Catholics had killed her friend, at the same time she did not, and apparently could not, contradict the evidence before her eyes that he had been murdered.15 It is worth noting that most contemporary Catholics rejected the theory of suicide. John Warner, who became the English provincial (Jesuit superior) after his predecessor Thomas Whitbread was executed for the Popish Plot in 1679, throughout referred to Godfrey’s death as a murder. His Jesuit correspondents in the Annual Letters shared his conviction that Godfrey had been killed, even if they (like Warner) were adamant that Catholics were not the culprits.16 This 9

Baschet 141, Barillon to Louis XIV, 21/31 October 1678, fols 33–33v; Dalrymple, 2:247. BL Add MS 32509, ‘Oates Plot’, fol. 48. 11 Grey, Debates, 7:51. 12 Dom Hugh Bowler (ed.), London Sessions Records, 1605–1685 (1934), 235. 13 Lloyd, Sermon, 26. 14 Burnet, 2:154. 15 L’Estrange, 3:199. 16 Warner, History of the English Persecution, 1:205; Rev. John G. MacLeod, ‘Some Truths 10

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was also the view of an anonymous 1680 Latin manuscript history of the Popish Plot in the British Library, which has so far escaped the notice of historians. The author, evidently an English Jesuit, lamented the death of ‘this noble man’ and insisted that the Catholics could have had no part in it, despite ‘markings on the body’ which appeared to point to them (this seems to be a reference to the white wax droplets found on Godfrey’s clothes). However, the description of the body – to the left of which was this unambiguous gloss: ‘that death was not a suicide’ – conformed exactly to the Protestant narrative. Godfrey’s body was found, miserably lacerated, in a field outside the London city bounds, his body pierced with a sword, although there was no blood, although the ground wasn’t stained with blood, his breast beaten black and blue, with (I believe) the marks of a ligature around his neck; his purse was found on him full of money … it is agreed that the body was carried to this location not long before and that therefore, it could not have been there for very long.

Interestingly, this writer seemed to credit the rumours that Sir Edmund had died several days after he had gone missing, something he (wrongly) assumed had been confirmed by the coroner’s inquest: ‘Godfrey’s body when it was discovered was so dry, that I cannot believe him being dead for more than twenty hours. Opening his chest the surgeons found that the ligature of the flesh was firm, and the blood in the veins was not corrupted either.’ Thus the Jesuit author lamented the fact that Prance’s false claims that Godfrey had been kept captive in Somerset House for several days ‘without bread and water’ nonetheless seemed ‘rather plausible’, given that evidence pointed to his having been ‘murdered recently’.17 In contrast, the anonymous author of Les Conspirations d’Angleterre (1680) who, judging from context, seems to have been a Huguenot or French Protestant, genuinely believed that Godfrey had been held captive, starved and even tortured in Somerset House. The author, while credulous enough in regard to wild stories about pins being shoved under Sir Edmund’s fingernails by sinister Jesuits, was intensely suspicious of the rumours of Godfrey having committed suicide, believing they had been deliberately spread by ‘the partisans of the prisoners’ – Green, Berry and Hill. Moreover, it was (he claimed) ‘a kind of death, which had never been practiced in that country amongst those who weary of living’.18 Hanging was by far the most common method of suicide in late seventeenth-century England for men in general (as drowning was for about the “Popish Plot”’, The Month and Catholic Review, 37 (November 1879), 397. 17 BL Add MS 36770, De nupera Catholicorum in Anglia conspiratione epistolaris dissertation (1680), fols 11v, 16v, 17. 18 Les Conspirations d’Angleterre (Cologne, 1680), 333–4, 332. The author, who claimed to have attended Godfrey’s funeral, complained in his account of the dangers of the antipapist festivals of 5 and 17 November for both Catholics and ‘for all foreigners who are for the most part suspected of being Catholic’ (340).

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women). While gentlemen and aristocrats were less likely to hang themselves than their plebeian counterparts, generally opting to shoot themselves or to open their veins with knives or razors, falling on one’s sword was relatively uncommon – despite its associations with honourable Romans such as Brutus – as it normally required a second to hold the weapon in place.19 Mary Gibbon was almost certainly one of the ‘partisans’ referred to by the author of Conspirations d’Angleterre. She was a Catholic, an old family friend and (she claimed) a close confidante of Godfrey. Her daughter, also named Mary, had served in the household of Edward Coleman. Key to Roger L’Estrange’s suicide argument was Gibbon’s evidence of a conversation she had with Godfrey about the Plot a little less than two weeks before he went missing, in which the justice expressed his anxieties about having received Tonge and Oates’s informations. The historian Alan Marshall believes that Gibbon’s testimony has ‘the ring of truth’ and has not received enough attention.20 Certainly, as a Catholic and someone who was vocal in her scepticism about the Plot, Gibbon’s views were not welcome or encouraged in the late 1670s. Shaftesbury’s secretary Thomas Stringer recorded that the Lords committee examining the Plot had ordered her in for questioning but his notes of this interview do not survive – perhaps not surprisingly, if we can credit L’Estrange’s version of the hostile exchange that ensued.21 Given the antipapist hysteria of late October 1678, Gibbon’s claim that the coroner who conducted the inquest into Godfrey’s death showed no ‘Particular Desire to be Enform’d’ about ‘Sir Edmunds Melancholy’ is likely enough.22 However, it is equally possible that too much, rather than too little, has been made of Gibbon’s decidedly partisan take. Her version of that last conversation with Godfrey – given first to several officials in October 1678 and then again in March 1683, and finally to L’Estrange during his investigation from 1686 to 1687 – evolved and changed over time. Was her initial evidence scripted, altered and/or partially suppressed or did she exaggerate and confabulate after the fact, or both? The undersecretary of state Sir Joseph Williamson took only these very cursory notes from his interview with Gibbon on 20 October 1678: About a fortnight since Sir E. Godfrey asked her, if she did not hear he was to be hanged for not discovering the plot &c. The 6 Sept. last had taken it. Believed that surely there was a plot. That Oates had sworn largely so as to confirm the truth of what he said.23

The deposition she gave about the same time to the coroner John Cooper is one of the few reproduced in its entirety in L’Estrange’s Brief History: 19

MacDonald and Murphy, Sleepless Souls, 247, 185. Marshall, 87. 21 Shaftesbury Papers, fols 44r, 62r; L’Estrange, 3:101. 22 L’Estrange, 3:325. 23 SP 29/366, Notes by Williamson, 20 October 1678, fol. 305. 20

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… That about a fortnight last past, in an Afternoon, Sir Edmundbury Godfrey came to her House in Old Southampton Buildings, and upon Discourse with her, ask’d her if she did not hear that he was to be Hang’d, for not discovering the Plot against his Majesty, for that [he] had taken the Examination of one Otes and one Tong, touching the same, the 6th day of September, and had not Discover’d it to any Person living; whereupon [Mary Gibbon] asked the said Sir Edmundbury Godfrey why he had not acquainted the Duke of York, or the Lord Chancellor, or the Lord Treasurer with the same; and then [she told Godfrey], that she Suppos’d that what he then said was but in Jest, touching his being Hang’d, Whereupon he reply’d, that he had not told Sir William Jones [the attorney general] thereof, although he had been at [his] House Several times since; and then told [her], that the King and Councel knew of the Plot, before his Majesty went to Windsor, which was about a Month before he took the said Examination. Whereupon this Enformant ask’d him if he thought there was Really any Plot intended against his Majesty? To which he reply’d, that surely there Was, but that Otes had Sworn Somewhat more then was True, and therefore the Papists would find so much favour as to have All things that Otes had Sworn, to be thought Lyes …

Their conversation was then cut short when Gibbon’s brother knocked on the door, at which point Godfrey took his leave of her, telling her he was on his way to talk to the lord chief justice Sir William Scroggs ‘about bus’ness’.24 Gibbon would never see him again alive. On 22 March 1683, as the Tory Revenge was in full swing, Mary Gibbon gave her deposition again, this time to the secretary of state Sir Leoline Jenkins. Here she specified that the conversation took place on ‘the Tuesday sennight before’ Godfrey’s disappearance – that is, 1 October 1678. She stressed Godfrey’s furtiveness: he had ‘desired to speak with her privately and went into another room, where he bolted the door and asked, if she did not hear the news which was all over the town that he was to be hanged … because he had not discovered the plot’. When Gibbon questioned him further, ‘He answered, Oates had outswore himself and so it would come to nothing’.25 Gibbons later told L’Estrange that some details had been left out of her initial deposition to Cooper, claiming that she had signed it without reading it, as she was ‘in Great Distraction’ and ‘Confusion’ and had forgotten her glasses. The most significant of these omissions was her description of Godfrey’s mental state (to which we shall return), but she also claimed that the justice had confided to her ‘that Otes had Forsworn Himself’.26 We see here a linear progression from there ‘surely’ being a ‘plot’ and Oates having ‘sworn largely to confirm the truth’ thereof, to his having sworn to ‘somewhat more than was true’ or ‘outswore himself’, to his being foresworn or perjured. 24

L’Estrange, 3:322–3. Gibbon claimed that she gave this deposition to Cooper on 20 October 1678 (SP 29/423, fol. 9v). 25 SP 29/423, fol. 9; this is also reproduced in L’Estrange, 3:328. 26 L’Estrange, 3:325, 3:324.

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Mary Gibbon’s genuine conviction that the Catholics accused of Godfrey’s death were innocent may have over time caused her, consciously or unconsciously, to embellish her testimony in ways that would have supported the thesis of suicide. Given that Gibbon’s daughter had been employed by Edward Coleman, it is not far-fetched to speculate that Mrs Gibbon senior may have been an agent of Coleman’s own master, the duke of York, much in the same way the ‘popish midwife’ Elizabeth Cellier was working for the countess of Powis in the interests of the Catholic lords in the Tower. Indeed, in November 1678 Gibbon had landed ‘in trouble’ with the Lords committee investigating the Plot for having written a paper, supposedly at the instigation of James’s confidential servant, his barber Lawrence Dupuy, claiming that Godfrey had hanged himself.27 There is some indication that Gibbon’s evidence was opportunistic – that is, that she was willing to corroborate any narrative that exonerated the accused Catholics. Henry Nevill Payne’s manuscript libel accusing the earl of Danby of Godfrey’s murder, which seems to have circulated as early as November 1678, specifically called upon ‘Mrs Gibings’ to be examined so that ‘Godfreys Blood be Avenged’.28 On 25 May 1681, a stranger visited the earl of Danby in the Tower, claiming to have information which could be of ‘great service’ to him. He was James Magrath, ‘one of the “tribe of the Mack Shams”’29 – Irish witnesses who came to London to make their fortunes in the waning days of the Plot. Magrath asked Danby if he intended to stand trial on Fitzharris’s recent indictment for Godfrey’s murder: a sensitive point with the earl, who retorted sharply that ‘I thought his question very improper for one who pretended to give Information, but I said itt should not bee my fault if I was not tried’. Magrath then told him that ‘hee beleeved there were those who could make itt appear that Sir Edmund Godfrey had killed himself’. Upon Danby’s asking him where he had heard this story, he claimed that ‘hee had itt from one who had heard one Mrs Gibbons say so, and that shee could prove itt, and that one More’ – Godfrey’s ‘Clark’ Henry Moor – ‘did cutt him down when hee had hanged himselfe’. Perhaps the earl had finally learned caution; perhaps it was the Irish accent of his informant that aroused his suspicions. He quickly put Magrath into the custody of the constable of the Tower, who brought him in for questioning by the secretary of state.30 A search of Magrath’s person turned up a letter from the Catholic activist Elizabeth Cellier, confirming Danby’s conviction that Magrath’s visit was a ‘Trapan’ – yet another ‘popish stratagem’ cooked up against him by lord and 27

Luttrell, 1:90–1; this was supposedly the reason why Gibbon was questioned by the Lords committee investigating the Plot in November 1678 (L’Estrange, 3:101). 28 BL Add MS 28047, fol. 5v. Barillon mentions a letter accusing Danby’s servants Christian and Ramsey being read out in the House of Commons in early November 1678 (AAE 131, Barillon to Pomponne, 28 October/7 November 1678, fols 173–173v). 29 Haley, 647; see also CSPD, 1680–81, 293–4; Luttrell, 1:90; State Trials, 8:1390–1. 30 BL Add MS 28043, fols 49–49v.

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Lady Powis and other prominent Catholics such as the Lady Abergavenny31 ‘to take the matter off from themselves’ and to ‘[indeavour] to destroy mee’.32 It is indeed possible that Cellier and her patrons were trying to entrap Danby rather than to recruit him as an ally, given that they had earlier been active in dispersing the libel that he had ordered Godfrey’s murder. Narcissus Luttrell reported that Magrath named ‘Mrs Gibbons’ as having been involved in this ‘intreague’, as well as others pushing the suicide theory.33 As for Danby, he subscribed to a kind of ‘horseshoe’ conspiracy belief that his enemies from both sides of the religious and political spectrum were secretly working in concert: ‘all the contrivances against mee have com’d from the Papists, and been abetted by that Factious party, which would not only destroy mee, but the king himselfe & the government, if they could …’34 Magrath’s allegations were vehemently denied by Godfrey’s clerk Henry Moor (in retirement in the Isle of Ely) as ‘False and Notorious Lies’ in a deposition dated 28 June 1681.35 They were also unconvincing in terms of the physical evidence. As modern medical experts have pointed out, the circular mark described by contemporaries as being under Godfrey’s collar did not correspond with hanging, which would have left marks rising from the jaw up behind the ears.36 Instead, the balance of opinion was that Godfrey had been strangled by a cord or cloth ligature – possibly the ‘band’ or cravat which he had been wearing the day he disappeared and which was absent from his body. In regard to the forensic evidence, the freshest testimonies should be the most reliable. As modern cognitive science has demonstrated, memory is malleable, shaped by preconceptions, bias and suggestion and accumulating inaccuracies over time: it is striking that the suicide theories seemed more plausible as immediate recollections faded.37 Shifting political currents were also a factor. As the credit of the Plot began to falter and the ‘Tory Revenge’ gained momentum after about 1681, some Catholics and their sympathisers were emboldened to question the narrative that Godfrey had been murdered in Somerset House. In February and March of 1682, the Tory printer Nathaniel Thompson and John Farwell and William Payne (brother to Henry Payne) published two pamphlets arguing that 31

Anne Nevill née Gifford, dowager of George Nevill, 11th baron Abergavenny. BL Add MS 28049, fol. 183. 33 Luttrell, 1:90–1. 34 BL Add MS 28049, fols 186–7, 185. 35 This is reprinted in Several Affidavits Lately taken upon Oath by divers of His Majesties Justices of the Peace. Which further confirm the Testimony given, Concerning the Murder of Sir Ed. Bury Godfrey (1683), 4. 36 See the opinion of the forensic pathologist Keith Simpson, first interviewed in Nesta Pain’s broadcast, Who Killed Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey?, BBC Home Service, 16 September 1952, and then questioned in 1976 by Stephen Knight (239). 37 See for instance Elizabeth F. Loftus, ‘Eavesdropping on Memory’, Annual Review of Psychology, 68, 1 (2017), 1–18. As Andrew Lang points out, ‘the early evidence ought to be best’ (Valet’s Tragedy, 60). 32

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Godfrey had committed suicide on the day that he went missing by falling on his sword near Primrose Hill.38 Thompson, Farwell and Payne were naturally suspected of being Catholic agents in cahoots with ‘Mrs Cellier, Mrs Mary Gibbon and the Newgate priests’. In June 1682, after Godfrey’s brothers Michael and Benjamin pressured officials to take action, the three men were charged with libel (a misdemeanour) for having impugned Prance and Bedloe’s evidence.39 The political climate may have been changing but what the Tory Roger North would refer to as the ‘reign of Ignoramus’ – metropolitan juries packed with Whig sheriffs who zealously prosecuted the Popish Plot yet refused to return criminal indictments against the court’s opponents – was not yet over.40 As recent scholars have pointed out, it was not the dissolution of the Oxford Parliament in March 1681 but rather the shrieval elections of the autumn of 1682 that finally put paid to Whig resistance in the City.41 Until then, the sheriffs of London and Middlesex who empanelled both grand and petty (trial) juries were both Whigs. One of them, Thomas Pilkington, had been instrumental in ensuring the most famous ‘ignoramus’ verdict of all, that of the earl of Shaftesbury in November 1681; he was also a fierce enemy of the duke of York, whom he had openly accused of firing the City of London in 1666. Given the partisan sheriffs and jury, the conviction of Thompson and the others was a foregone conclusion. But it must be said that their case was strikingly weak. While one witness confirmed the defendants’ claim that there were ‘gobbets of blood’ at the crime scene, others were equivocal, only reiterating (as earlier observers had done) that some watery blood had come from the body after the sword was removed. One witness did testify to having seen some blood in the ditch, but added that ‘it looked to me more like blood that was laid there, than anything else’.42 Others 38

[John Farwell], A Letter to Miles Prance in relation to the murder of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey (1682); ‘Trueman’, A Second Letter to Miles Prance, in Reply to the Ghost of Sir Edmund-bury Godfrey (1682). Doubts about Prance’s evidence and Godfrey’s murder had first been raised in January 1682 in Thompson’s weekly newspaper, The Loyal Protestant and True Domestick Intelligence. See also Peter Hinds, ‘“Tales and Romantick Stories”: “Impostures”, Trustworthiness and the Credibility of Information in the Late Seventeenth Century’, in Beth Lynch and Anne Dunan-Page (eds), Roger L’Estrange and the Making of Restoration Culture (Aldershot, 2008), 94–5. 39 Sir Edmundbury Godfrys Ghost: or, An Answer to Nat. Thompsons Scandalous Letter … to Mr. Miles Prance (1682), 2; CSPD, 1682, 146. 40 Roger North, The Lives of the Norths, ed. Augustus Jessop (1890), 1:247. If a grand jury returned a billa verra, or true bill, the accused would go to trial; otherwise, they would be discharged for want of evidence, conveyed by the Latin ignoramus: ‘we do not know’. See also Gary S. de Krey, London and the Restoration, 1659–1683 (Cambridge, 2005), 223–4. 41 Mark Goldie, ‘Roger L’Estrange’s Observator and the Exorcism of the Plot’, in Lynch and Dunan-Page (eds), Roger L’Estrange, 73; de Krey, London and the Restoration, 223–4. 42 State Trials, 8:1379. Interestingly, several years earlier the author of the Conspirations d’Angleterre had reported ‘That in truth blood had been found close to the body, but that it has been observed that this blood had been brought there, not appearing to have spread

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were clearly reluctant to come to the stand and gave at best half-hearted support to the contention that Godfrey’s body had been ‘flyblown’, with decomposition well underway – an attempt to counter rumours that he had been murdered days after going missing and his body subsequently moved. John Rawson, the master of the White House tavern, weakly ventured that ‘there was something like flyblows, but I can’t say there were fly-blows’. When asked if there were flies, his reply (that he had seen none) elicited laughter; the mirth seemed to stem in part from the fact the weather had been ‘Snowy and Tempestious’ at the time. Others volunteered evidence which only served to corroborate the original murder narrative: Godfrey’s face was livid, suggesting he had died of asphyxiation; there were two wounds ‘within an inch and a half of another’ on his chest and no blood on his clothes apart from a little on his ‘back-part’ from when the sword had been pulled out.43 The papers printed by Thompson had elicited a scathing rebuttal (Godfry’s Ghost) which, along with several other pamphlets published after the trial, reproduced a number of older and newer witness depositions about the case that supported Prance and Bedloe’s narratives. They included the informations by the constable and others who had been first on the scene that ‘there was no blood at all’ there or on Godfrey’s clothes and that the dead man’s face had been swollen and red.44 New statements by numerous people who claimed to have hunted or searched the area where the body was found between 12 and 16 October, but who had seen no sign of it, now found their way into print. There had been some earlier evidence for this, even if Alan Marshall is rightly suspicious of how ‘such a lonely spot’ became so ‘crowded’ over those few short days. One story that was both novel and particularly dubious was a deposition by John Oakley, the servant of one of Godfrey’s neighbours, who claimed to have seen Sir Edmund talking to several men at the Watergate at Somerset House at about 9pm on that fateful Saturday 12 October. Various family members and a fellow servant attested to his having reported this to them at the time. An even wilder story was told by Richard Spence, who claimed that on the evening of 10 October 1678 he was attacked by a gang of five or six men near the Watergate of Somerset House, who dragged him away until one of them ‘cryed out … this is not he’ and released him. Although dark enough for such a mix-up, there was apparently light enough for Spence to recognise one of his assailants as Lawrence Hill, whom he supposedly knew well.45 Much of this new evidence in the way that it would have exited an injured body’ (133). This was likely less evidence of a frame-up than a testament to the number of people who eagerly scoured the site where Godfrey’s body was found for signs of a sinister papist mise-en-scène. 43 State Trials, 8:1380, 1383; Sir Edmundbury Godfrys Ghost: or, An Answer to Nat. Thompsons Scandalous Letter from Cambridge, to Mr. Miles Prance, in Relation to the Murder of Sir Edmundbury Godfrey (1682), 5. 44 Godfrys Ghost, 1. 45 Several Affidavits, 43, 50. Two pamphlets published shortly after the discovery of the body mentioned that the owner of the field had searched the area for a lost calf on Tuesday 15

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was clearly confabulated: witnesses conflating earlier sightings of Godfrey with the day he had gone missing, or superimposing later embroidered or fabricated memories over older ones. Some, like Spence, may have simply been lying. But contemporaries like Narcissus Luttrell were convinced: ‘It is remarkable to see how the papists stirring this businesse has given fresh proof of the Murther of sir Edmondbury Godfrey’.46 Most devastating of all was the evidence of Thompson’s own earlier pamphlet from October 1678, which squarely contradicted the claims he published in 1682. Not only did he then report on the cleanness of Godfrey’s shoes, that there was ‘not one drop of blood to be found’, etc., but he explicitly dismissed rumours of suicide as ‘false Reports’ deliberately intended to ‘blast’ the reputation of the dead man.47 As the author of Godfry’s Ghost pointed out, this was the version of events ‘Printed upon his own View and knowledge, and whilst the Circumstances were fresh in every bodies memory’. (Significantly, this author also claimed that Roger L’Estrange had refused to license the 1678 account, fearing that in so doing ‘He might Offend some Great Persons at White-Hall’.)48 In short, Thompson’s attempt to float a suicide theory for Godfrey’s death was a débâcle for the Catholics. So much so, Roger North later speculated that some witnesses had volunteered their informations only to entrap Thompson’s Catholic patrons. ‘For the Papists fastened greedily on the false Defence, and, thinking clearly to disculpate themselves, gave it out boldly that Godfrey killed himself’ – only for it to be ‘triumphantly demonstrated’ at their trial and afterwards in print with ‘Glee and Fulness of Evidence … that the Knight did not kill himself. And then, O then it was plain that he was killed by the Papists, and these Men were Stiflers of the Plot, which was now made as clear as the Sun’.49 Roger L’Estrange’s crime scene investigation

While L’Estrange’s theory of Godfrey’s death would in fact vary little from that put forward so disastrously by Thompson, Payne and Farwell in 1682, his arguments have carried more weight both because of the confidence of his assertions and the finesse with which he marshalled his evidence – not to mention the fact that he foiled the efforts of all future fact-checkers by apparently destroying October, two days before the discovery of the body: A full and certain Relation concerning the Horrid Plot of the Papists and the Barbarous and Bloody Murther of Sr. Edmund-Bury Godfrey (1678), 6; Nathaniel Thompson, A True and Perfect Narrative of the late Terrible and Bloody Murder of Sir Edmundbury Godfrey (1678), 7. See also Marshall, 99; The Tryal of Nathaniel Thompson, William Pain and John Farwell (1682), 33–4. 46 Luttrell, 1:201. 47 True and Perfect Narrative, 7–8. 48 Godfrys Ghost, 6. 49 Examen, 203.

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it afterwards.50 The eight years or so that had elapsed between Godfrey’s death and L’Estrange’s investigation had witnessed a dramatic transformation of the political landscape, as the Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis were succeeded by the Tory Revenge and then the accession of the Catholic James II in 1685. It is true that many who feared to express doubts about Godfrey’s murder by the Catholics in 1678 or 1679 or even 1682 may in 1686 and 1687 have been more forthcoming with L’Estrange.51 Yet some witnesses had died, and the memories of others had been impaired and corrupted both by bias and subsequent reports. And then those memories were filtered, very selectively, through L’Estrange’s Tory lens. As even those writers who have found many of his conclusions convincing have acknowledged, L’Estrange was a highly partisan source.52 His principal, and explicit, aim was to discredit the ‘Pretended Plot’ by debunking Godfrey’s ‘Pretended Murther’, as ‘the Bus’ness of Sir Edmundbury Godfrey’ was ‘the Only Leg the Plot had now left to stand upon’.53 Like Thompson, Farwell and Payne, L’Estrange claimed that Godfrey had killed himself by falling on his own sword at Primrose Hill. L’Estrange had also first floated this theory around the same time as they had, in April 1682 publishing a story in his newspaper, the Observator, about ‘a Person that came into a Barbershop’ on the Tuesday before the justice’s body was found, announcing (‘Loud, and openly’) that ‘Edmund-bury-Godfrey is found’ and ‘that he had Kill’d himself upon Primrose Hill’.54 This person, needless to say, was never seen again. The story bears an astonishing resemblance – in form, if not in substance – to that reported by William Lloyd in the immediate wake of Godfrey’s death. According to Lloyd’s friend Angus Adam, a mysterious man in a grey suit had burst into a bookshop in St Paul’s churchyard in the early afternoon of Thursday 17 October 1678, telling him and his companion that Sir Edmund’s body had been found ‘in Leicester-Fields, at the Dead Wall, with his own Sword run through him’ and ‘that he had two wounds about him’.55 It is hard not to suspect that the dating of L’Estrange’s story (to Tuesday 15 October rather than Thursday 17 October) was calculated to refute the claim implicit in Lloyd’s: that Godfrey had been murdered elsewhere and his body later moved and (clumsily) staged as a suicide. In other words, L’Estrange was making a case that the body had been at Primrose Hill days earlier and, hence, all along. While L’Estrange is unlikely to have invented witness testimony out of whole cloth, it is difficult not to suspect him of shady curation of the evidence. He seldom provided dates or other information for his sources, often citing 50

Pollock, 92n. Marks, 76. 52 Marshall, 137. 53 L’Estrange, 3:8, 3:xiii. 54 Observator, no. 123, 15 April 1682. 55 L’Estrange, 3:88–9; Lloyd, Sermon, 24. Significantly, L’Estrange does not repeat the report that the body had been found with ‘two Wounds’, something which Lloyd explicitly reiterated in their correspondence in 1686, as we shall see in Chapter 5. 51

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short extracts or ‘Parcels’, rather than whole depositions or extended passages; hence, it is only too likely that some expressions attributed to witnesses have been taken out of context.56 He conveniently overlooked the fact that his star witness Mary Gibbon had earlier lent her support to the forensically untenable theory that Godfrey had hanged himself. Despite making most of the same arguments, L’Estrange avoided explicitly associating himself with Nathaniel Thompson’s earlier attempt to make the case for suicide. He did however allude to the evidence presented at the libel trial, complaining of how ‘the very Fancy of Fly-blows’ – i.e. insect activity on Godfrey’s corpse – ‘at that time of Year was Laugh’d at, and Hiss’d out of all Company, and Credit’. L’Estrange claimed that several weeks later that same year he had dined at the house of a ‘Noble Person’ at whose ‘Side-Board’ he witnessed ‘Swarms’ or ‘Thousands of Flies’. L’Estrange’s characteristically hyperbolic argument is rather forced: even in an age before central heating, it seems disingenuous to compare the outdoor temperature in London in late October during the ‘Little Ice Age’ to that of the dining hall in a wealthy (if, apparently, insalubrious) residence.57 As we have seen, contemporaries believed that Godfrey had been murdered elsewhere, and his body only recently transported to the ditch near Primrose Hill. This was based both on the fact that a number of people claimed to have hunted in or searched the area between Saturday 12 and Wednesday 16 October without seeing the body, and that the weather had been wet and the surrounding area very muddy while the shoes of the dead man were clean and his clothes dry. There were also what appeared to be tracks of a cart and scattered straw and signs that a grate had been forced nearby.58 L’Estrange had ingenious explanations to account for some of this evidence – he claimed, for instance, that Godfrey’s shoes had been wiped clean by the grass as he walked. But his usual mode was simply misdirecting the reader’s attention from the existing narrative by creating a new one. L’Estrange claimed that the ditch where Godfrey was found was ‘so Cover’d with Bushes, and Brambles … that it was a hard matter to see the Body, till one were come just upon it’.59 In other words, the corpse had lain there unseen from sometime on Saturday 12 October until its discovery by Bromwell, Walters and Rawson in the late afternoon of Thursday 17 October. Here, however, L’Estrange conveniently overlooked the gloves, stick, belt and scabbard that had been lying in the open close to the body, as though to advertise its presence. If the place really was, as one contemporary

56

L’Estrange, 3:290. Marshall notes that L’Estrange sometimes ‘tidied up’ depositions. In most cases the original no longer exists for comparison (204n). 57 L’Estrange, 3:261. 17 October Old Style would have been 27 October by the modern Gregorian calendar. 58 SP 29/366, fol. 305; Lambeth Palace Library, Gibson Papers, vol. 942, William Griffith to Benjamin Colinge, 19 October 1678. 59 L’Estrange, 3:261, 3:213.

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claimed, a thoroughfare between several nearby houses, surely these items would have been spotted earlier?60 One of L’Estrange’s central, and strongest, arguments was that the crime scene had been compromised by the constable’s highly questionable decision to move the body shortly after asking witnesses to commit the circumstances to memory. We are thus left relying on accounts of the position of the body that were even more subjective than would have been the norm before modern photography and forensic techniques. The constable John Brown supposedly deposed that the body was stretched face-down ‘Length-ways of the Ditch’, with the sword protruding out of his back. His left hand was under his head, and his right hand stretched out in front, touching the right side of the bank. The body was in ‘so Crooked a Posture’ that it did not touch the ground, but rather ‘Rest[ed] upon the Brambles; the Pummel of the Sword not reaching to the Bottom of the Ditch’. The coroner John Cooper opined that Godfrey was ‘found in a posture he could not fall or put himself’. Contemporaries such as Roger North, William Lloyd, Gilbert Burnet and Henry Thynne were convinced that Godfrey had been impaled on his sword after he was dead, the latter reporting that from the position of the body ‘it evidently appears that he was first strangled and then laid in the place where he was found’.61 L’Estrange, of course, asserted the contrary, as we have seen from the extract that opened this chapter, arguing that the posture of the body clearly indicated that the justice had fallen on his sword. L’Estrange also claimed that the surgeon Zachariah Skillard (or Skillarne) had searched the ditch and found ‘an impression’ under the sword hilt as though made by the weight of Godfrey’s body as he threw himself on the blade. This story of an ‘impression’ is nowhere else corroborated, and Skillard himself, both at the trial of Green, Hill and Berry and in the information he gave to the Lords committee, was adamant that Godfrey had been strangled.62 L’Estrange insisted that it was completely dark by the time witnesses were at the scene, and that there was no light to see by, implying that the weather was too ‘Tempestuous’ for candles or torches. However, it seems likely that the constable and those who accompanied him would have brought lanterns, and Godfrey’s brother-in-law and the master of the tavern, John Rawson, are also reported to have carefully searched the ditch with a candle and lantern after the body had been moved.63 The coroner’s jury initially met at the White House tavern to view the body and deliberate, but adjourned without reaching a verdict, reconvening on Saturday at the Rose and Crown in St Giles. This, along with a dispute between the coroners of Middlesex and Westminster over who had jurisdiction of the case, led Thompson and later L’Estrange to argue that

60

Conspirations d’Angleterre, 333. L’Estrange, 3:213; Lords MSS, 46; HMC Ormonde, 4:219. 62 L’Estrange, 3:230–1; Shaftesbury Papers, fol. 76. 63 L’Estrange, 3:221, 3:216, 3:223. 61

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‘art and skill’ or ‘Secret Practice, and Manage’ had been employed to induce the coroner’s jury to reach the verdict of murder by persons unknown.64 While L’Estrange suggested that Michael and Benjamin Godfrey and their Whig allies in the City actively conspired to cover up Sir Edmund’s suicide and ‘lay the Death … upon the Papists’, it is significant that in late 1678 and early 1679 the Catholic rumour mill concentrated its efforts not against the justice’s brothers, but rather the earl of Danby. The fact that one of the lord treasurer’s servants, Sergeant John Ramsey, had been at the scene almost immediately had been viewed as suspicious. Ramsey himself claimed that he was at Duke’s coffeehouse when the news broke and became involved in the investigation ‘by mere accident onely’, acting without ‘the direcon or privity’ of his employer. There was however a persistent ‘Report’ that Ramsey had visited Michael Godfrey, telling him that if he would ‘not stirr much in the businesse of his Brother’s death the Earl would take care that hee should have his brothers Estate’ – which, in theory, would have been forfeit to the crown, if the death had been ruled suicide. While in the Tower, Danby busied himself in collecting evidence that Michael Godfrey had denied this ‘report’ as ‘very false’, and that in fact Ramsey had been vigilantly guarding against (papist) ‘indeavours’ to have the coroner’s jury bring in Sir Edmund’s death as felo de se (self-murder).65 The fact that the partisans of the Catholics initially targeted the earl of Danby – advocating a murder, rather than a suicide scenario – does at least raise the possibility that Thompson and L’Estrange’s later insinuations that Michael and Benjamin Godfrey attempted to subvert the coroner’s jury proceedings were opportunistic and disingenuous. L’Estrange complained that, although prosecutors had given the impression that an autopsy had been performed on Godfrey, in reality the body had not been ‘Open’d … any further, then with a Little Incision to let out some Corrupt Matter’. There was a medical examination in which surgeons probed the body in view of the coroner’s jury, but L’Estrange viewed it as highly suspicious that Godfrey’s brothers had refused to give their permission for a full post-mortem in which organs were removed. While the journalist Stephen Knight has disputed this, claiming that there had been an autopsy, he based his opinion on a misreading of secretary Williamson’s notes. What Knight took to be ‘faeces’ is in fact a reference to Godfrey’s complexion: ‘Faces [i.e. face’s or face is] redder than ordinary, [therefore] not dead of wounds, which would make him pale’. Williamson’s description of the body – ‘extreme empty therefore had not eaten in two days or more’ – also led Knight to believe the contents of the stomach had been examined. Instead this seems to have been based on observations of eyewitnesses like William Lloyd that the body was ‘lank and empty’, the 64

Letter to Miles Prance, 1; L’Estrange, 3:233, 3:223–5. For a good account of the coroner’s inquest, see Marshall, 105–13. 65 L’Estrange, 3:195; BL Add MS 28047, fol. 117; BL Add MS 28043, fol. 46; BL Add MS 28047, fols 120–1.

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‘belly be[ing] shru[n]k up to the back as appeared to the view of all men that beheld it’. Williamson also noted that Godfrey’s ‘Body did Stink’. The surgeon Zachariah Skillard confirmed both at the trial of Green, Berry and Hill and to the Lords committee that the body was beginning to decompose: ‘when he went to open him, the Lean [muscle] of his body was soe putrid, that it hung upon the Incision knife, & … the humours which came forth of his wound did smell very much’. More dubiously, he added that the body itself ‘did not smell at all for strangled bodys are not apt to swell, & will keepe much longer then those that dye of deseases’. But Skillard was adamant that Godfrey had died close to the time he had gone missing, likely the afternoon or evening of Saturday 12 October 1678.66 Alfred Marks revived many of L’Estrange’s arguments and attempted to bolster them with early twentieth-century science, arguing that what contemporaries took as bruises from a severe beating was in reality ‘post-mortem hypostasis’ or lividity caused by the blood settling downwards after he had taken his own life by falling on his sword. In a 1952 BBC special on the mystery of Godfrey’s death, the forensic pathologist Keith Simpson rejected this notion, as such discolouration would have manifested itself evenly, not in patches: in his view, the injuries described could only be consistent with ‘a beating up by fist or boot – or both’. Modern insights about rigor mortis have also shed little new light on this very cold case. Both Thompson and L’Estrange attempted to discredit Prance and Bedloe’s claims that the body had been transported to Primrose Hill in a chair and on horseback by citing witness testimony that the limbs of the dead man were too stiff to be bent. However, contemporary Catholic apologists did not know it, but in arguing this and that the corpse was in an advanced state of decomposition they were making two contradictory claims. Rigor mortis normally peaks at twenty-four hours and begins to dissipate by forty-eight hours. While Marks suggested that it would have been prolonged by the cold weather, it is unlikely that Godfrey’s corpse would have been stiff five days after death and, if so, more implausible still that there would already be evidence of insect activity.67 66

L’Estrange, 3:150; Marshall, 108; Knight, 237; SP 29/366, fol. 305; Lloyd letters, no. 17, William Lloyd’s shorthand draft reply to Roger L’Estrange, 13 April 1686; Shaftesbury Papers, fol. 76. Early modern coroner’s jurors tended to be both deferential to local authorities and responsive to narratives which jibed with communal assumptions and gossip; see Malcolm Gaskill, ‘Reporting Murder: Fiction in the Archives in Early Modern England’, Social History, 23 (January 1998), 1–30; Malcolm Gaskill, Crime and Mentalities in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2000), 239–40, 246–8). Recent scholars have stressed that the surgeons who conducted examinations at early modern (and even late medieval) inquests were both more conscientious and more medically qualified than was once assumed: Carol Loar, ‘Medical Knowledge and the Early Modern English Coroner’s Inquest’, Social History of Medicine, 23 (2010), 475–91; Sara M. Butler, Forensic Medicine and Death Investigation in Medieval England (New York, 2015); K.J. Kesselring, Making Murder Public: Homicide in Early Modern England, 1480–1680 (New York, 2019), ch. 2. 67 Marks, 91; Knight, 240, quoted from Nesta Pain, BBC broadcast, Who Killed Sir Edmund

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While the looseness of the dead man’s neck was cited by the prosecution at the trial of Green, Berry and Hill as proof that it had been broken in a violent altercation, modern medical experts have seen this as evidence of nothing except that rigor mortis was past. The surgeons Zachariah Skillard and Nicholas Cambridge had hedged on the issue of whether Godfrey’s neck was broken, rather than merely ‘dislocated’; both however were adamant that the justice had died from strangulation. Eyewitness testimony taken close to the time of Godfrey’s death consistently described the dead man’s face as reddish (‘of a fresh colour, though in his life time very pale’) and his eyes bloodshot, evidence of petechial haemorrhage caused by asphyxiation. The undersecretary Williamson reported that Godfrey had a bruise ‘just under the collar’ and ‘a circle round his neck like those that are strangled’; the coroner John Cooper described the ‘circle’ as ‘green’, asserting that Godfrey had ‘a bruise near his throat’ where a ligature had presumably been tied. Most contemporaries believed that Godfrey had been strangled with his own ‘lac’d band’. The fact that it was not found on his body posed a problem for L’Estrange, who – citing second-hand testimony, mediated through Mrs Gibbon, from Judith Pamphlin – made a half-hearted attempt to suggest that the justice had earlier ‘quarrelled with his very Band’, throwing it off in a fit of pique. However, Godfrey’s clerk Moor and other witnesses deposed that he had been wearing it on Saturday morning.68 One of L’Estrange’s arguments that was eagerly taken up by Alfred Marks in his 1905 book was that the marks on Godfrey’s neck had been caused not by a ligature, but by his tight collar. L’Estrange claimed this explanation had been volunteered by the surgeon Richard Lazinby at the trial of Thompson, Payne and Farwell. However, this is a misrepresentation of the sense of Lazinby’s testimony: the latter had in fact argued that the marks had been made by the pressure of the collar during ‘strangling with a cord or cloth’ – in other words, Godfrey had been garrotted. Although called by the defence, Lazinby also devastatingly testified that Godfrey’s eyes were ‘blood-shed’ (bloodshot), that there was evidence of ‘a blow upon the temples or forehead’ and that his clothes were perfectly dry, despite a rainstorm the previous day. The fact that L’Estrange misrepresents Lazinby’s testimony casts doubt upon his invocation of Skillard’s evidence about the ‘impression’ in the ditch supposedly made by the hilt of Godfrey’s sword.69 As to the question of whether there was ‘any Evacuation of Bloud’ – critical to determining whether Godfrey’s sword wounds were posthumous – L’Estrange tried to have it both ways. He simultaneously invoked the witnesses cited by Thompson et al. who claimed there were ‘Gobbets of Blood’ both in the ditch and seeping out of the body and speculated that the sword had operated as a Berry Godfrey?, 16 September 1952; L’Estrange, 3:109, 3:227; Letter to Miles Prance, 3; Marks, 88–9. 68 Knight, 240, quoted from Nesta Pain, Who Killed Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey?, 16 September 1951; State Trials, 7:185; SP 29/366, fol. 30; Lords MSS, 46; L’Estrange, 3:179, 3:297, 3:209. 69 L’Estrange, 3:258–9; Marks, 111; State Trials, 8:1384.

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kind of cork, stopping the flow of blood. The testimony that there was ‘a Great Deal of Bloud’ seemed to have been elicited by Mary Gibbon, her daughter, and the widow of Lawrence Green, who together visited the White House tavern and questioned ‘the Woman of the House’, Mrs Rawson. The London recusant community was small and tight-knit and it is thus not surprising that Mrs Gibbon had links to the accused Catholics. The fact that the Rawsons lent their support to the suicide narrative (both testified as defence witnesses, albeit ineffectual ones, at Thompson’s trial) suggests that they too may have been Catholic, despite John Rawson’s denial when questioned by the Lords committee. The testimony of these apparently partisan witnesses conflicted with that of many others who, as we have seen, insisted that there was little or no blood, including several people who had inspected Godfrey’s clothes. The 1682 pamphlet Godfry’s Ghost reprinted the 1678 deposition of Godfrey’s maidservant Elizabeth Curtis or Draper, who maintained that there was no blood on her master’s clothes when she examined them (searching also for papers but finding none), only wax droplets and some green-coloured stains. And finally, L’Estrange’s claim that the sword may have stopped the flow of blood ‘as tight as a Tap’, and his suicide argument more broadly, falls to the ground when weighed against the testimony of numerous witnesses that there were two sword wounds.70 L’Estrange’s attempt to establish a case for suicide was thus based on largely the same forensic evidence that had been viewed as laughably unconvincing six years earlier, at the trial of Thompson, Farwell and Payne, when memories had been fresher. Ultimately, for all of L’Estrange’s deft spinning of the evidence, he could not argue away several inconvenient facts. There were clear signs of strangulation – by garrotting, not by hanging – and what contemporaries (and some modern medical experts) saw as convincing evidence that the dead man had been beaten. There was very little blood on the scene or on Godfrey’s clothes, despite the presence of not one but two sword wounds. Even if one of these could have been self-inflicted, how could they both have been? ‘Master of a dangerous secret’: Godfrey’s mental state

Where L’Estrange made a new and compelling contribution to the debate was in his psychological portrait of Godfrey as a man deeply distracted and depressed in the weeks leading up to his disappearance. Most of his evidence comes from Mary Gibbon, her husband and daughter, or through second-hand conversations – again related by the ubiquitous Mrs Gibbon – with Godfrey’s housekeeper Judith Pamphlin and his clerk Henry Moor. In his early twentieth-century book on the Popish Plot, which provocatively reasserted the theory that Godfrey had been murdered by the Jesuits, John Pollock claimed that there 70

L’Estrange, 3:271–2; Letter to Miles Prance, 3; L’Estrange, 3:326; Godfrys Ghost, 4.

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was ‘no scrap of evidence’ before L’Estrange’s Brief History that ‘his mind was diseased’. This is an exaggeration: Lloyd’s funeral sermon referred to rumours about Godfrey’s family history of depression, although it is likely that the voluble and assertive Mrs Gibbon was the principal source for these stories. In her 1683 deposition to the secretary of state Leoline Jenkins, Mary Gibbon claimed that Godfrey was ‘a very melancholy man and of late more than formerly’, and that he himself admitted to having inherited that ‘distemper’ from his father. She claimed it was ‘well known in Kent’ that mental illness ran in his father’s family, and that Godfrey senior had ‘several times attempted to destroy himself’ and on one occasion had even ‘endeavoured to murder three of his children with a sharp cleaver’, seriously wounding them.71 Mary Gibbon deposed to Jenkins in 1683 that on Sunday 13 October 1678, Godfrey’s housekeeper Judith Pamphlin had come to her house looking for the justice, obviously distraught, and ‘went away weeping’ after being told Mrs Gibbon had no idea as to her master’s whereabouts. On Monday 14 October, Michael and Benjamin Godfrey paid Gibbon a visit, following up a report that their brother had spent the night there. She told them that she had not seen Godfrey for two weeks, and described to them his behaviour on that last occasion: how he had insisted on locking the door and appeared ‘much out of order’, telling her that people were saying he would be hanged for not having discovered the Plot when Oates had first brought the informations to him ‘yesterday month’. At this, she claimed, the brothers appeared to be very alarmed: ‘Michael lifted up his eyes and hands, and said, O Lord, we are undone, what shall we do?’72 In Gibbon’s later, undated, deposition to L’Estrange, the scene is even more dramatic, with Benjamin ‘wringing his Hands’ and exclaiming, ‘What will become of us?’, and Michael ‘stamping, and Crying-out, O Lord! We are Ruin’d, What shall we do?’ Upon Gibbon’s asking them what was wrong, they clammed up, saying ‘Nothing’ and quickly taking their leave of her. Mary Gibbon’s later evidence to L’Estrange also expounded further on Godfrey’s troubled mental state, reporting that when they had last spoken in early October, he was ‘in a Discontented, Melancholique Humor as ever this Enformant Observed in Any Body’, and that his ‘Language, and Behaviour’ put her into ‘a Great Trouble and Amazement’.73 While Mary Gibbon’s later testimony to L’Estrange is more colourful, it aligns with the deposition given to Jenkins in 1683 in most essential details. There Gibbon claimed that she went to Godfrey’s house on Sunday 13 October, finding the housekeeper Judith Pamphlin weeping. Pamphlin ‘told her, she should never see Sir Edmund alive’, saying that ‘He had been very much discontented about a month’, but ‘she durst not trust her to tell what she thought was 71

SP 29/423, fol. 9. SP 29/423, fol. 9. Interestingly, ‘yesterday month’ would suggest Godfrey spoke to Gibbon on Monday 7 October, not Tuesday 1 October. 73 L’Estrange, 3:324. 72

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become of him’. She also told both Mrs Gibbon and her daughter that, on the night of Friday 11 October, Godfrey ‘tumbled over all his writings and burnt as many papers as her apron would hold’. (This was especially distressing to Pamphlin as she feared he had accidentally destroyed a copy of a lease belonging to her that had been in his safekeeping.) Gibbon claimed that Pamphlin told her, sometime in mid-November 1678, ‘Is it not sad that I should not be examined about Sir Edmund’s death? I and the clerk [Henry Moor] can say a great deal, if we were examined on oath’. Upon Gibbon’s pressing her to go to ‘a minister of state’ to give her evidence, she demurred, saying that she would not do so ‘voluntarily’ but only ‘if sent for’. Gibbon also reported that Pamphlin had ‘asked [her] eldest daughter, whether, if Sir Edmund killed himself, he were not in hell’.74 L’Estrange claimed that Judith Pamphlin also deposed that, ‘some Days before the Dead Body was found’, she overheard the wife of Godfrey’s clerk saying ‘Oh! That ever it should be said that such a Man as Sir Edmund should Murther himself!’75 Here we have evidence from Godfrey’s housekeeper that was related indirectly through Mrs Gibbon, or even more indirectly through Mary Gibbon junior to her mother. In the last example, the evidence, also second-hand, is extracted out of its context from an earlier deposition, probably sworn before the coroner John Cooper during the inquest in October 1678. (As is often the case, L’Estrange does not identify the source or provide a date.) There is no indication that L’Estrange was able to interview Godfrey’s servants personally, even if they had been willing to cooperate with his investigation, which is highly unlikely. In September 1684, Charles II granted L’Estrange a special commission to send two JPs to question Henry Moor, in retirement in Cambridgeshire. The examination they subsequently relayed did not however advance the investigation – the justices complaining that Moor was ‘Evasive’ and ‘very subtle and dexterous in Equivocating’. Henry Moor is reported as having died by 1688, and it seems likely that Judith Pamphlin (described as ‘Elderly’ in 1678) was also dead.76 Moor’s 1681 deposition, published in full in 1683, strenuously denied that he had either covered up his master’s suicide or ‘ever said that Sir Edmund-bury Godfrey made away himself, or words to that Effect’.77 It is likely or even probable that the words attributed to his wife (‘Oh! That ever it should be said that such a Man as Sir Edmund should Murther himself!’), far from being an admission, were intended as a reproach to someone – Mary Gibbon or her daughter come to mind – who had raised the possibility of suicide. Pamphlin’s supposed query about Godfrey being in hell might well have been uttered in a 74

SP 29/423, fol. 9v. Pamphlin seems to have safely recovered the ‘parchment’ she feared had been destroyed. See also L’Estrange, 3:192. 75 L’Estrange, 3:194. 76 L’Estrange, 3: ix–xi, 3:189, 171. L’Estrange does provide a ‘Catalogue’ of witnesses, listing when and to whom they gave their depositions, although not providing any details about the interviews he himself conducted. This brief page does not, interestingly, mention Pamphlin. 77 Several Affidavits, 5.

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similar context: to point out the unlikelihood that a man of his character would have committed an act that contemporaries would have viewed as a mortal sin – even, from a Calvinist viewpoint, proof of reprobation. Pamphlin’s story about Godfrey’s having frantically ‘Tumbled over his Drawers, and Trunks’ and burned a great quantity of papers ‘the Friday night before he went away’, could be interpreted as evidence that he was setting his affairs in order in preparation for taking his own life. However, another, perhaps more obvious, explanation is that he was in possession of compromising documents and he feared a search. (I shall speculate further as to what kind of papers these might have been in the concluding chapter.) Testimony by others in Godfrey’s entourage that the justice was melancholy and distracted in the days leading up to his disappearance – again, mostly given in disjointed soundbites by L’Estrange – is also susceptible of another interpretation than suicidal depression. Numerous witnesses attested to the fact that Godfrey was anxious about the fallout of having taken Oates’s informations, and that he genuinely feared for his reputation, perhaps even his life. L’Estrange, however, is at pains to emphasise behaviour on Godfrey’s part that would have been seen as pathological, evidence of his ‘sick and doubting Thoughts’ and mental ‘Disease’. L’Estrange cites the information of one of Godfrey’s acquaintances, William Church, who had ‘observ’d him to walk much Alone, and to Shun the Company of the Gentry’, which he found ‘very Irksome to him’, instead exercising and playing bowls with ‘Footmen’ and other ‘mean People’. When Church queried his friend’s eccentric behaviour, Godfrey supposedly explained that he played sports with his social inferiors ‘to divert’ the ‘Melancholy’ with which he was so ‘Overpower’d … that his Life was very Uneasie and Burdensom to him’.78 Numerous people testified to the fact that Godfrey was behaving oddly on the eve and morning of his disappearance. Between 4 and 5pm on Friday 11 October, Edward Birthy, his wife and another person crossed the path of the justice, who was fixedly staring at the ground and appearing ‘Extremely Pensive, and Melancholique’. When they greeted him, ‘Godfrey ‘made a very strange, and a sudden Pause, Setting one Foot forward with a stamp, Catching hold of the Brims of his Hat’ and staring at them without saying a word. Henry Bradbury thought Godfrey ‘appeared … in very Great Disorder’ both when he stopped at his house at around 5pm on Friday 11 October and then ‘rather worse’ when he saw him at the quarter sessions or vestry meeting at St Martin-in-the-Fields church afterwards. There Richard Wheeler claimed that Godfrey, ‘who was commonly the Mouth of the Board, sate Leaning, with his Face upon his Hand, without a Word speaking, saving that he once Lifted up his Head, and uttered these, or the like Words “That Will not do”’. Others present remarked on how Godfrey did not look ‘Well; his Countenance, and 78

L’Estrange, 3:220, 3:182. Church however dated this conversation with Godfrey to ‘about a Year before he Dy’d’ (L’Estrange, 3:183).

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Behaviour being very much Alter’d’, and were struck by ‘something Ghastly in his Countenance’. After watching Godfrey and two other vestrymen, Joseph Radcliffe and James Hemes, go ‘off another Way’ (to the house of Sir Edmund’s friend George Weldon) after the meeting, the other board members retired to a tavern where they ‘fell into Discourse about him, and wondred at his Ghastly Looks’. L’Estrange read sinister meaning into the fact that, while at Weldon’s, Godfrey had seemed intent on righting wrongs, setting accounts and making charitable provisions. After he had dispensed with this business, he appeared to be relieved, saying ‘Now he was Quiet’ and, as Radcliffe helped him on with his coat, ‘repeating that his Conscience was Clear’. The next morning, Saturday 12 October, Richard Cooper and his sister Mary Leeson encountered Godfrey in St Martin’s Lane. Leeson remarked, ‘the Justice is Melancholy’, but her brother thought he was merely ‘Studying’, or thoughtful.79 They were some of the last people to see him alive. Thomas Wynnel, an associate with whom Godfrey had both a business appointment and a dinner date – neither of which he kept – on the Saturday afternoon he disappeared, deposed that the justice had been for the previous ‘Two or Three Days … very much Disorder’d and Troubled in his Mind’. He claimed to have done his best to ‘remove that Extreme Sadness and Melancholy that he Labour’d Under’, but ‘Sir Edmund still persisting in that Disconsolate Temper of Mind … often expressing the Deep Sense he had of the Unhappiness of his Condition, and that he had not Long to Live’. However, L’Estrange had uncoupled this part of Wynnel’s evidence from the rest of his testimony, which made it clear that Godfrey’s ‘Dark Melancholy’ was tied to specific circumstances rather than to any depressive tendencies, and his fears for his life did not refer to his own suicidal impulses. Wynnel is cited as having asked Godfrey ‘some time why he was so Melancholy’, and receiving this reply: ‘he was Master of a Dangerous Secret, that would be Fatal to him: that his Security was Otes’s Deposition’ – that is, that Oates ‘had first Declar’d it to a Publique Minister’ by whose ‘Direction’ he had given Godfrey his evidence.80 Thus, the justice clearly feared being accused of misprision (or concealment) of treason: this explained his comments to Mary Gibbon about being hanged. Technically misprision, unlike treason, was not capital, but given the high stakes involved, Godfrey may be forgiven the exaggeration. His defence was that the information was already in the hands of a minister who could only be the earl of Danby. Was the dangerous secret Oates’s deposition itself, or information related to the Plot, or something else entirely? This question has exercised all those who have tried to resolve the mystery of Godfrey’s death. Roger L’Estrange suggests that this ‘secret’ was the fact that Oates was perjured (although does not quite spell out how or why this would be dangerous for Godfrey). He made it clear that Godfrey ‘never believ’d one Word of the 79 80

L’Estrange, 3:178, 3:177, 3:301–3, 3:309–10, 3:173. L’Estrange, 3:180, 3:182, 3:187.

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Story’ of the Popish Plot, ‘and told all People as much, where he thought he might Safely Declare himself’. Thomas Wynnel described a conversation with Godfrey in which he asked his friend how the five Catholic lords accused by Oates of complicity in the Plot could possibly be ‘such Fools’ as to believe that the pope had the power to absolve them of treason. To this Godfrey replied: ‘No; He [the pope] has None: the Lords are as Innocent as You or I: Coleman will dye; but not the Lords’, adding that Oates was ‘Perjured’. Upon Wynnel pressing him further about the Plot, Godfrey told him it consisted of ‘Consults about a Toleration; Nothing against the King; but there is a Design upon the Duke of York and This will come to a Dispute among them’, concluding ominously: ‘You may Live to see an End on’t, but I shall not’. The reliability of this account has been called into question because the conversation could not have taken place when Wynnel claimed – ‘about the Time of the Lords Commitment to the Tower’ – as Powis, Arundell, Stafford, Petre and Belasyse were in fact not arrested until 21 October, after Godfrey’s death. It is however likely that Wynnel later conflated Coleman’s imprisonment in early October with that of the so-called ‘five Popish lords’.81 L’Estrange did not deny that Godfrey’s acquaintances ‘heard him speak Many and Many a Time’ that he feared he was to be ‘a sacrifice’, the ‘first Martyr’ of the Plot. But, according to L’Estrange, Godfrey feared becoming a martyr not to the Catholics but rather to the ‘Terrible Parliament’ that was about to meet on 21 October. He was in danger not for having discovered the Popish Plot, but instead for having concealed it for weeks – unless, L’Estrange added, ‘doing both the One and the Other, in the Wrong Place’ – hinting only obliquely at Sir Edmund having warned the duke of York of the design against him. L’Estrange cites an extract from Godfrey’s clerk Henry Moor’s deposition to the coroner, claiming that his master had been ‘under Great Discontent, and in Disorder’ ever since ‘he had taken the several Depositions of Tong and Otes’ who he ‘wished … had never come to him’. It was this ‘Discontent’ and fear of the wrath of Parliament, ‘adding to all the Rest an Hereditary, and Inseparable Melancholy’, that (claimed L’Estrange) pushed Godfrey to suicide.82 Moor, who had assured Mary Gibbon on Sunday 13 October that his master was ‘as well as she’, later admitted that he had deliberately misled her on the instructions of Godfrey’s brothers. In fact, after Sir Edmund left the house between 9 and 10am on Saturday 12 October, Moor ‘never saw him Alive’. The family did not make the news of Godfrey’s disappearance public until the 15th, at the funeral of a neighbour. There, as Moor was making enquiries amongst those present, the churchwarden John Parsons told him that he had met Godfrey in St Martin’s Lane before 9am on that last Saturday, and that the justice had asked him for directions to Primrose Hill. As though remarking on the coincidence, Moor later told the coroner, and others, that he had been 81 82

L’Estrange, 3:185–6, 3:187; Marshall, 89. L’Estrange, 3:184; Lords MSS, 48; L’Estrange, 3:281–2.

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within a ‘few Rods of the Body’ while searching for his master the previous day. L’Estrange has read sinister meaning both into this admission and Moor’s ‘Stress … upon the word Alive’ in describing his master leaving the house on the Saturday morning. This, and the fact that Thomas Mason deposed that he had spoken to Moor on Monday 14 October while the latter was searching in the fields near his house in Marylebone, led L’Estrange to speculate that Moor, already halfway to Primrose Hill, had continued north, where ‘’tis Forty to One, he Found him’ – i.e. Godfrey’s body.83 Thus, L’Estrange claimed that Moor and Godfrey’s brothers discovered the justice had killed himself on Monday, but spent the next few days spreading rumours that he had been murdered by papists to buy time and to thwart the investigation.84 Mrs Gibbon told L’Estrange that Godfrey’s clerk Moor had confided in her ‘that Sir Edmund’s Brothers had commanded him to keep all Things Private’, concealing his master’s disappearance ‘to Save the Estate’.85 L’Estrange claimed it was ‘Common Talk’ that the Godfreys had meetings with the lord chancellor, Sir Heneage Finch, ‘to beg his Lordships Assistance to secure their Brother’s Estate, in case he should be found to have made himself away’. One witness claimed to have been told this by ‘Several [unknown] Persons’ around the time of the trial of Thompson, Farwell and Payne in 1682. L’Estrange’s insinuations, based as they were on dubious second-hand evidence, have been demolished as nonsensical by later writers: if the Godfreys were trying to cover up their brother’s suicide, why on earth would they divulge this secret to a high-ranking minister? It is also worth noting that Gibbon’s recollections of Moor’s words conflict with Judith Pamphlin’s testimony to the coroner in 1678. The housekeeper then deposed that Moor had told her: ‘To tell you the Truth, We are afraid he is Murther’d’, confiding that Michael and Benjamin Godfrey had communicated their suspicions to this effect both to the lord chancellor and the lord privy seal (the earl of Anglesey).86 Writing in 1688, Robert Southwell, who had been clerk of the Privy Council in 1678, indignantly refuted the ‘absurdity’ of the charge that Finch had connived in a cover-up. Southwell recalled that Michael and Benjamin Godfrey had first gone to the Privy Council on the Monday after their brother’s disappearance – not Tuesday as L’Estrange claimed – immediately and persistently demanding that a search be launched, adamant that Sir Edmund had been ‘murthered by Papists’. While the lord chancellor was reluctant to raise the alarm, given that the justice had been missing for so short a time, the brothers 83

L’Estrange, 3:171, 3:208; 3:173, 3:211. L’Estrange, 3:292. Nathaniel Thompson had also suggested that Michael and Benjamin Godfrey had been at the origin of the ‘Report’, current the morning after their brother had gone missing, that he had been murdered in Somerset House (Second Letter to Miles Prance, 1). Stephen Knight has speculated that these stories originated with John Oakley, the servant of one of Godfrey’s neighbours (111). 85 L’Estrange, 3:203. 86 L’Estrange, 3:205. 84

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continued daily to pester him, and the Privy Council, to take action. It was Southwell himself who delayed sending out the notice of Godfrey’s disappearance, having ‘some scruple in this matter’ in case it transpired that Sir Edmund had really committed suicide – a possibility he seriously entertained after hearing ‘how melancholly’ the justice ‘had appeared’ while at his friend Lady Margaret Pratt’s house the previous Friday. In short, ‘the Brothers’ never told the lord chancellor or the Privy Council of ‘any suspicion of Self Murther but plainly charg[ed] the Papists’.87 According to the 1680 pamphlet An Answer to the Earl of Danby’s Paper, Lady Margaret Pratt was one of several witnesses to Godfrey’s presence in the earl of Danby’s anteroom until about 1pm on that fateful Saturday, and supposedly testified as much to the Privy Council – although (not surprisingly) no record of this survives.88 Is it possible that she, and others, genuinely suspected the involvement of the lord treasurer in Godfrey’s disappearance? Did she give testimony that was kept hush-hush for this reason? Mrs Pamphlin’s remarks that she and Henry Moor knew more than they dared relate, mediated as they were through Mrs Gibbon, may well have related not to Godfrey’s brothers but to ‘Great Persons’ they feared to name. Similarly, far from proof of a deliberate cover-up, the fact that rumours that Godfrey had been murdered by Catholics began circulating within hours of his disappearance may have reflected genuine apprehension on the part of the justice’s acquaintances. Godfrey’s fellow JP Richard Adams would depose in 1684 that he called on him before 7am, but was told Sir Edmund had left home about an hour before; when he returned about 11am, ‘The People of the House seem’d to be in Great Consternation’. When Adams asked them ‘what the Matter was’, he was told ‘they had Cause to fear he was made away’. Alan Marshall has questioned the accuracy of Adams’s memory, speculating that he may have confused his dates, as the justice had only just left home. (Intriguingly, in a partial corroboration of this story, but one that raises further questions, lord Powis reported to lord Arundell that Adams had told him, in the late afternoon the day of Godfrey’s disappearance, that he had spoken to Godfrey at 11am that morning.) The fact that Godfrey’s household was in a state of alarm only hours after his departure has been cited as both unlikely and suspicious by Tory commentators such as Roger North; however, it does fit a scenario in which the justice’s intimates had inside information which they kept to themselves.89 On the afternoon of Saturday 12 October, Richard Adams enquired of Sir Edmund’s nephew Godfrey Harrison if there was any truth to the report that his uncle had been murdered by the ‘Papists’: Harrison replied that it was ‘too 87

L’Estrange, 3:205–6; Pollock, 93; Philip W. Sergeant, Liars and Fakers (1925), 63; BL Add MS 38015, fol. 316v. 88 Marshall, 34, 204n; An Answer to the Earl of Danby’s Paper Touching the Murther of Sir Edmondbury Godfrey (1680), 3. 89 L’Estrange, 3:188; Wiltshire and Swindon History Centre, papers of Henry Arundell, 3rd baron Arundell of Wardour, 2667/25/1.

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True’. Lord Powis would tell lord Arundell that Adams had communicated this story to him about 4pm on Saturday 12 October, only hours after Godfrey’s disappearance. (What the justice’s friends were doing chatting with a Catholic lord who would shortly be imprisoned in the Tower is a question I shall take up in the conclusion.) Colonel George Weldon, with whom, along with Wynnel, Godfrey was supposed to have dined that final Saturday, supposedly told various people ‘that he did very much suspect [Godfrey] to be Murther’d by the Papists’. Wynnel deposed that, while discussing Godfrey’s failure to meet them for dinner, Weldon had told him that they would never see their friend again. When Wynnel pressed Weldon about why he should have such apprehensions for a mere ‘Two hours Absence’, Weldon replied, ‘to tell you the Truth … His Brothers have been with me’ and ‘they say the Papists have been watching for him a long time, and that now they are very confident they have got him’. Although Wynnel wondered aloud why the Catholics would ‘do him any Hurt’ as ‘he was never observ’d to be an Enemy to them’, Weldon remained unshakeable in his conviction. It is worth noting that Weldon may well have been privy to Godfrey’s secrets: it was at his home that the justice had his clandestine meeting with Edward Coleman (under the false name of ‘Mr Clark’) two weeks earlier; Sir Edmund had also paid him a visit the night before he disappeared. And Wynnel seems to have come round to his friend’s thinking. Shortly after their conversation, at about 2 or 3pm on that same Saturday, Thomas Burdet, who was presumably a Catholic, claimed that Wynnel accosted him, demanding ‘What have your People done with Sir Edmundbury Godfrey?’90 If members of his entourage had learned more about dangerous company Godfrey was keeping than they chose to let on – or L’Estrange chose to report – this would make sense of why they immediately suspected foul play. In addition to William Lloyd, Gilbert Burnet and Michael Godfrey (not to mention Titus Oates), others of Sir Edmund’s acquaintances recalled that he had intimated that his involvement in the Plot would cost him his life. Thomas Robinson, a court officer and an old schoolmate of Godfrey, testified to the House of Commons that on Tuesday 8 October 1678, less than a week before his disappearance, Godfrey had confided to him that he had taken the Plot informations ‘very unwillingly’. When Robinson asked if he could see them, Godfrey told him that he could not, as he had left the papers with the lord chief justice Sir William Scroggs. The following day, Godfrey returned to the subject of the informations, saying, ‘I have taken them; and I know not what will be the Consequence of them; but I believe I shall be the first Martyr’. But when Robinson pressed him to ‘give him his Reasons for such his Apprehensions’, Godfrey refused to elaborate further.91 In his 1984 book, The Killing of Justice Godfrey, Stephen Knight cited these threats as evidence that Sir Edmund had not committed suicide: ‘it is a rare man 90 91

L’Estrange, 3:207, 3:195–6, 3:198. CJ, IX, 24 October 1678, 519.

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who kills himself to escape being murdered’. However Knight’s offhand remark may fail to do justice to the complexity of mental illness, it does seem as though Godfrey’s own words in the weeks before his death, if often fatalistic, reflected pugnacious determination rather than suicidal despair. Godfrey was a man with a reputation for personal bravery, who had once singlehandedly collared a thief hiding out in a pest house and had on at least one occasion successfully fought off an assailant, armed with a cudgel, who had waylaid him in the street. While Godfrey made numerous allusions to acquaintances about the dangers he ran of ‘being knocked on the head’, he also brushed off suggestions he seek the protection of a manservant, assuring Burnet, Lloyd and Robinson that he did not fear his enemies ‘if they come fairly, and I shall not part with my life tamely’. Edward Birthy’s story of Godfrey’s startled behaviour when he saw him in the street may suggest that the justice actually was being followed or dogged by agents of these mysterious enemies, or believed he was. (It may also be worth noting that Godfrey had a ‘defect in his Hearing’ which would have made it easier for both enemies and friends to sneak up on him.)92 One possible reason for Godfrey’s intimates to be anxious about his failure to show up for dinner with Weldon and Wynnel was that they had got wind of a prior meeting. One intriguing piece of evidence is the testimony of Godfrey’s maidservant Elizabeth Curtis or Draper, who claimed at the trial of Green, Berry and Hill that her master had received a mysterious letter the Friday night before his disappearance. When the man who had carried the note requested an answer, Godfrey supposedly said, ‘Pr’ythee … tell him, I don’t know what to make of it’. Roger L’Estrange dismissed this as a ‘sleeveless Story’ and Curtis as ‘an Infamous Wench’ – a mere charwoman, or casual help, and thus no true member of the household. Yet Curtis had not only reported this story to the Privy Council in January 1679, but Godfrey’s housekeeper Judith Pamphlin and her daughter had also confirmed it.93 John Parsons, the churchwarden who told Moor that Godfrey had asked him for directions on the morning of 12 October 1678, seems to have been dead by 1688.94 However, L’Estrange makes it clear that even before then Parsons had refused to give evidence about his conversation with Godfrey that last Saturday: all of the accounts of that exchange are second-hand, through Mary Gibbon, Judith Pamphlin, Henry Moor and Richard Wheeler. (That the conversation actually took place is further corroborated by a brief entry in undersecretary Williamson’s notes.)95 According to Wheeler, on 16 October 1678 – the day before Godfrey’s body was found, when speculation about his disappearance 92

Knight, 235; Burnet, 2:152; Tuke, 46–7, 49, 8; Marshall, 33; State Trials, 7:168; Marshall, ‘Correspondence’, 501. 93 State Trials, 7:187; L’Estrange, 3:151–2, 3:297; Bod. Rawl A136, fols 28, 3. 94 He is described by L’Estrange as a coachmaker, and is thus unlikely to be the brewer and Tory MP John Parsons (1639–1717), knighted by James II in 1687. 95 ‘Seen near his own house by the churchwarden of St. Martin’s. Spoke to him at his door’ (SP 29/366, fol. 305).

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had reached fever pitch – he and several other men grilled Parsons as to what ‘Discourse’ he had had with the ‘Lost … Justice’. Parsons was however ‘Loth’ to tell them anything, as Godfrey’s clerk Henry Moor had asked him ‘to say Nothing on’t’. Parsons finally, and with reluctance, said that Godfrey ‘had asked him three times whereabouts Paddington woods were’ but, upon Parsons enquiring as to whether he was thinking of buying a ‘Parcel of Land’, refused to tell him what business he had there. While no more could be extracted from Parsons, others reported slightly different versions of what he had told Moor at the funeral: Moor himself claimed that Godfrey had asked for directions to Primrose Hill; Judith Pamphlin remembered Moor saying her master had asked Parsons ‘the Way to some Woods … somewhere about Primrose Hill’.96 L’Estrange presented Parsons’s silence as suspicious, evidence of a conspiracy on the part of the justice’s family: ‘The Brothers Ty’d up Moor to Secrecy, and Moor Ty’d up Parsons’ for ‘no other Reason’ than ‘a Desire to keep it Private’ – i.e. to cover up Sir Edmund’s suicide.97 But why would Godfrey have asked for directions to a place where he planned to kill himself? It seems far more likely that the justice was going to a meeting, the details of which people in his circle chose to keep quiet. Nor was Parsons the last person to see Godfrey that day: as we shall see, soon afterwards the justice returned to his house, leaving again around 10am, but this time not in the direction of Primrose Hill, but towards Whitehall and then the Strand, in the law district on the border of Westminster and the City of London. Spectral sightings: tracking Godfrey’s last movements

Roger North described Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey as ‘a Man, so remarkable in Person and Garb, that described at Wapping, he could not be mistaken at Westminster’: ‘black’ (dark-complexioned) and ‘hard favoured’ (with stern features), ‘tall’ and ‘stooping’, he ‘went commonly wiping his Mouth and looking on the Ground’. North was making the point that, in the context of the villainous designs against him, there was ‘none so readily marked out, nor so easily to be taken, as he was’. But if the justice’s distinctive appearance meant that he was unlikely to pass unnoticed, his posthumous fame was such that some of these sightings may well have been spectral, the product of the febrile and suggestable imaginations of contemporaries – and the leading questions of interested parties like L’Estrange. Any tall, dark and craggy-featured middle-aged man (Charles II himself fit this description) could have

96

L’Estrange, 3:293, 3:208. Paddington Woods were about a fifteen-minute walk from Primrose Hill. 97 L’Estrange, 3:294.

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been imagined to be the missing justice, especially in retrospect, as memories altered and improved with time.98 On Saturday 12 October 1678, the JP Richard Adams and Mary Gibbon’s daughter called on Godfrey early in the morning (7 and 8am, respectively), only to be told that he had already left home. At about 8am Richard Cooper, accompanied by his sister and one other person, claimed to have met Godfrey in St Martins Lane heading towards New Street; they addressed him by name and the justice, although seemingly distracted, returned the greeting. He was also seen by the churchwarden John Parsons around the same time and near the same place; as they walked up St Martin’s Lane together, Godfrey asked Parsons several times the way to Primrose Hill (or, in a different version of this conversation, to Paddington Woods). Godfrey’s clerk Henry Moor had learned of Parsons’s encounter with his master at the funeral of one of Sir Edmund’s ‘near neighbours’, a Scottish physician named Clark, on Tuesday 15 October 1678. Moor’s questioning people there effectively spread the news that Godfrey was missing; as the American mystery writer John Dickson Carr has suggested, talk of his having asked directions to Primrose Hill may have given the actual murderer ‘his cue’ to move the body there.99 But Godfrey did not go to Primrose Hill on Saturday morning: even for the long-legged justice, it would have been two hours’ walk there and back, and he was back home again, according to Henry Moor, well before 10 am. The brewer William Collins deposed that he had seen Godfrey talking to ‘a Milk-woman near Paddington’ at about 9am. Thomas Mason, who claimed to know Godfrey well, having bought coal from him, claimed to have seen the justice walking towards town ‘betwixt Mary-bone Pound’ (near the present-day Bond Street station) and ‘Mary-bone Street’ (just north of Piccadilly and the Haymarket) about 10am, and that he had given him ‘the time of day’. Richard Wheeler also claimed that Moor had told him that he had been contacted by a sawyer in Soho who ‘us’d to Light [Godfrey] home’ who reported having seen the justice in Soho Fields around 9am that Saturday, ‘and described his Cloathes and his Band’. Taken together, this evidence suggests that Godfrey may have briefly struck out in the direction of Primrose Hill but changed his mind and turned back home. L’Estrange suggests that Godfrey, despairing and irresolute, intended to commit suicide but then lost his nerve and reversed course, before again changing his mind later in the afternoon and returning to fall on his sword where his body was found. This, he argues, ‘did not look like a Walk either for Pleasure, or for Bus’ness’, but rather a man struggling ‘betwixt his Nature, and his Disease’. However, as we shall see, Godfrey seems to have been

98

Examen, 199. L’Estrange, 3:329, 3:188, 3:209; Lloyd letters, no. 78, Lloyd’s shorthand draft response to letter from L’Estrange, 20 April 1686; Shaftesbury Papers, fol. 18; John Dickson Carr, The Murder of Sir Edmund Godfrey (1936), 332. 99

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in a hurry and absorbed by pressing business on that last Saturday – if he was distracted, he was by no means aimless.100 According to Henry Moor, Godfrey left his house in Hartshorn Lane (now Northumberland Street) near Charing Cross for the last time – if for the second time that day – ‘about 9am’; elsewhere he gives it as ‘between the Hours of Nine and Ten in the Morning’.101 Sir Edmund was then rumoured to have gone to the Cockpit, Danby’s residence in Whitehall, around 11am, where he supposedly was until about 1pm; some reports put this as late as 2pm.102 There were also other reported sightings. L’Estrange cites the testimony of Thomas Snell, who claimed to have seen Godfrey near the Turnstile walking north towards Red Lion Fields at around 12 noon. Snell did not know the justice personally, and admitted that he only concluded that this person with ‘Melancholique Appearance’ he had seen was Godfrey after being told so by someone else ‘whom [he] doth not remember’. This dubious evidence may have been at the origin of the report initially relayed by Michael and Benjamin Godfrey to the undersecretary Joseph Williamson that Sir Edmund was ‘Said to be seen near Turnstile near 3’. (Williamson later updated the entry: ‘but on inquiry by his brother nothing found of it’.) According to L’Estrange, one ‘Mont’ saw Godfrey ‘passing by Newmarket’; Richard Bornfield spotted him ‘Passing through the Black Gate of Lincolns-Inn-Fields’ at about 1pm; and ‘Mr Stephen Primate of Grays-Inn saw him Walking Cross the Fields toward Turn-Style, from the Corner of Clare-Market’, at about 2pm.103 These witnesses are never referenced again and seem not to have given depositions. In any case, their evidence suggests that Godfrey was moving closer to, not further away from, the urban area of Westminster as the afternoon wore on. (The sighting of Godfrey near the ‘Turn-Style’ may also have been the report later investigated and then rejected as a false lead by Godfrey’s brothers.) The last confirmed sighting was by the oil merchant Joseph Radcliffe and his wife, who spoke to Godfrey outside their house in the Strand, near St Clement Danes church, at about one in the afternoon. Radcliffe urged the justice to stay and dine with them, but Godfrey refused, saying ‘he was in hast [sic], and could not stay’, shaking off his friend’s outstretched hand so brusquely that Radcliffe ‘wondered at it, he having been usually Freer, and Easier with [him]’. Radcliffe’s testimony is highly credible: he reported this early, knew Godfrey well and had seen him the previous evening at George Weldon’s house, where he had remarked on his odd behaviour. He was thus not likely to have mixed up his dates, especially as the day before the body was found, 16 October, the vicar of St Martin-in-the-Fields William Lloyd, the two churchwardens (including Parsons) 100 L’Estrange,

3:297, 3:252, 3:210, 3:209, 3:219–20. 3:297, 3:171. 102 Henry Payne, Some Reflections upon the Earl of Danby (1679), 2–3; An Answer to the Earl of Danby’s Paper Touching the Murther of Sir Edmondbury Godfrey, 2; SP 29/366, fol. 305. 103 L’Estrange, 3:218; Marshall, 93; L’Estrange, 3:218, 3:171, 3:281; SP 29/366, Notes by Williamson, 20 October 1678, fol. 305. 101 L’Estrange,

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Figure 4. Godfrey’s last known movements, superimposed on William Morgan’s London &c. actually surveyed (1682), Library of Congress, Geography

and various vestry officers questioned Radcliffe, having heard he had walked out of London with Godfrey. Radcliffe denied this rumour, but confirmed that Sir Edmund had been ‘at his Door about One of the Clock that Saturday’. Two other witnesses, Caleb Winde and Richard Duke, confirmed that they had seen Godfrey speaking with Radcliffe at that time and place in their evidence to the coroner John Cooper in October 1678.104 According to L’Estrange, it was the evidence of the ‘oyl man’ that Godfrey had been in the Strand, close to Somerset House, rather than heading towards Primrose Hill when last seen that had swayed the opinion of the coroner’s jury towards murder, rather than suicide. (It is worth noting that Mason and Collins, who had themselves seen Godfrey returning from Paddington towards Charing Cross that morning, were among the jurymen.)105 It was obviously key to any suicide scenario in which Godfrey had died at the scene that he could be traced walking away from Westminster and towards the fields and ditches of Primrose Hill later in the afternoon of Saturday 12 October. Nathaniel Thompson’s Letter to Miles Prance (1682) was the first to reference ‘a person living near Primrose Hill’ who had supposedly told ‘divers persons’ that he had seen Godfrey at about 3pm on that Saturday afternoon ‘walking in those Fields, his usual Walk being that way’. Thus was born the canard, based on the new and unsubstantiated testimony of unnamed witnesses, but repeated uncritically by later writers 104 Burnet,

2:153; L’Estrange, 3:304, 3:217, 3:281. 3:xix.

105 L’Estrange,

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such as Sir George Sitwell and Alfred Marks, that Godfrey’s body had been found in a place where he regularly walked.106 If this were the case, why would he have asked Parsons for directions there? Thompson and his partisans answered objections as to why these mysterious witnesses had not come forth earlier by pointing out that it had not been safe to do so, considering ‘the great Torrent that carried all before it in favour of the Plot, and the murder of Sir E.B.G by the Papists’. All who questioned this narrative were then ‘stigmatized with the odious Names of Papists, and Discouragers (if not Promoters) of the Plot’. In his Brief History, L’Estrange fleshed out Thompson’s more skeletal narrative, citing several witnesses by name, and suggesting that even more eyewitness testimony placing Godfrey heading towards or near Primrose Hill later in the afternoon of Saturday 12 October had been, ‘out of Fear, Faction and Lazyness … Undoubtedly Lost, or Suppress’d’. L’Estrange cites the deposition of Thomas Grundy that, around 2 or 3pm on 12 October, he saw a ‘Tall Person walking alone, towards the WhiteHouse near Primrose Hill’, whom he first believed to be one Dr Barwick. His companion, James Huysman, corroborated this story, adding that the person walked ‘with a very Melancholique Posture’, and that they wondered at seeing anyone ‘in so Lonesom a Place’. In other words, neither Grundy nor Huysman knew Godfrey personally, or were able to identify him at the time. This was anything but convincing testimony (especially as it seems to have been taken long after the fact by Sir Roger himself), but L’Estrange, in later summing up Godfrey’s movements that day, refers without any qualification to their evidence as a positive identification.107 Finally, L’Estrange puts a name to the witness who seems to have been alluded to by Thompson and Farwell in their earlier pamphlets: one Edward Baker, who did not know Godfrey but apparently declared, after seeing his body at the White House, that he had seen the justice walking near Primrose Hill. This story was, however, related second-hand. The mistress of the White House, Margaret Rawson, claimed she had overheard Baker saying ‘either I saw this Man in my Fathers Forty Acres-Field upon some Day, which [she] does not Remember, or the Devil in his Clothes’. Thomas Burdet confirmed this, adding that it ‘was upon that Saturday in the Afternoon’. It should be added that Burdet seems to have been Catholic, as Mrs Rawson probably was as well; both may be considered partisan witnesses, having given evidence corroborating the presence of blood at the crime scene in the pamphlets and at the trial of Nathaniel Thompson. Interestingly, however, Edward Baker refused to give a deposition to this effect. In an entry for 5 June 1686, the diarist Roger Morrice reported that ‘divers of the inhabitants of Marrowbone’ (Marylebone) had been interviewed 106 Letter

to Miles Prance, 1; George Sitwell, The First Whig: An Account of the Parliamentary Career of William Sacheverell (Scarborough, 1894), 40; Marks, 102. 107 Second Letter to Miles Prance, 2; L’Estrange, 3:219, 3:175, 3:218.

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about Godfrey’s death, several of them swearing that ‘One Mr Baker did say in their hearing that he saw Sir Edmondbury walking in their fields the day before he was found dead’. However, Baker himself, upon being ‘Examined by Sir Roger Le Strange … upon his Oath denyes that he ever said any such words’. L’Estrange demanded whether he had indeed seen Godfrey’s body in the White House, which he admitted, but being asked ‘whether he saw the body bleed’ so ‘that the blood run down into the floor, and through the boards into the Celler (as some of the people had sworn)’, Baker replied that ‘he did not see any blood at all run from him, but when the sword was taken out a little water and corruption followed it out’. Striking a threatening pose, ‘the Justice told him he had best take heed what he said, for those words were sworn against him by more then [sic] one or two’.108 Thus the original story, evidently distorted in the retelling by Mrs Rawson and Thomas Burdet, was that Baker had spotted Godfrey near Primrose Hill on Wednesday 16 October 1678, the day before the discovery of the body and four days after his disappearance – truly a spectral sighting. More to the point, Baker later denied having said that he had seen Godfrey (‘or the devil in his clothes’), despite L’Estrange’s leading questions and strong-arm interviewing style. As we shall see in the discussion of his correspondence with William Lloyd in Chapter 5, L’Estrange was aggressive in pushing his own agenda, having no scruples about ignoring not only arguments but evidence with which he disagreed. L’Estrange’s methods, in other words, raise serious doubt not just about his suicide hypothesis, but his presentation of the facts. Ockham’s razor?

The argument that Godfrey committed suicide has appealed to modern writers in large part because it allows for a repudiation of the antipapist conspiracy theories that justified the persecution and execution of innocent Catholics. The twentieth century was bookended by two studies of Godfrey favouring this thesis: that of Alfred Marks in 1905 and that of Alan Marshall in 1999. However, as much as the suicide hypothesis might satisfy the emotional and political preferences of modern scholars and armchair detectives alike, it is not substantiated by the evidence – especially when we consider the ways in which the witness depositions were manipulated and often misrepresented by the main proponent of the theory (and curator of the evidence), Roger L’Estrange. Although attempting to graft on a few new insights from the more advanced medical science of his day, Marks’s book uncritically adopted L’Estrange’s evidence and arguments wholesale, and falls to the ground for the same reasons. Alan Marshall’s more recent, and much more scholarly, study acknowledges the 108 L’Estrange, 3:218–19; The Entring Book of Roger Morrice 1677–1691, vol. 3, ed. Tim Harris (Woodbridge, 2007), 130.

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problems with L’Estrange’s dubious editorial practices and his ‘robust’ interviewing tactics, and rejects the hypothesis that Godfrey fell on his own sword as inconsistent with the evidence. However, Marshall ultimately subscribes to and reinforces L’Estrange’s narrative that Godfrey’s troubled state of mind pointed to suicide. Marshall believes that Godfrey suffered from ‘depressive tendencies’ not just in the weeks before his death, but for most of his life, which may account for the fact he never completed his degree at Oxford or his legal studies at the Inns of Court.109 Marshall, invoking the principle of ‘Ockham’s razor’ – in which ‘no more things should be presumed to exist than are absolutely necessary’ (i.e. the simplest explanation is best) – argues that ‘Edmund Godfrey committed suicide by self-strangulation near Primrose Hill’: that is, he did not hang himself but rather tied himself to a tree and tightened a ligature around his own neck. While ‘an odd method of death’ (as Marshall concedes), it does has the advantage of fitting the forensic evidence. Marshall speculates that Moor found Godfrey’s body on Monday 14 October and then connived with his brothers in staging the scene as a murder – removing the ligature and pushing him face-down in the ditch and impaling him with his sword, thus allowing for the family to cover up the suicide while ‘giv[ing] a boost to the otherwise flagging Popish Plot’. This scenario, however, far from being the simplest and most rational explanation, involves a tortuously complex cover-up. Marshall even suggests that the body had been moved to ‘a safe place’ while Michael and Benjamin Godfrey laid their plans.110 Thus while Alan Marshall’s argument fits the forensic evidence better than that of L’Estrange (or Marks) it strains credulity still more in necessitating the complicity, and later, the silence, of Godfrey’s brothers and his household, and probably others as well, in a dubious and highly fallible venture. Finally, what we can reconstruct of Godfrey’s movements on that last Saturday does not support the claim that he went to Primrose Hill under his own power. None of the reports cited by L’Estrange that Godfrey had been spotted heading out of town towards Primrose Hill on that last Saturday afternoon hold up to scrutiny, while numerous reliable witnesses establish his last known sighting near St Clement Danes church – steps from Somerset House – around 1pm that day. Despite L’Estrange’s considerable talents as both propagandist and mental contortionist, and the attempts of modern historians to salvage some of his arguments, the suicide thesis is borne out neither by the forensic evidence nor by witness testimony. All of this leads us in a different direction: murder, the conclusion reached by contemporaries themselves, and which seemed obvious even to most Catholics in the immediate wake of Godfrey’s death. As we have seen, with the passage of time, Catholics like Mary Gibbon and some Tories like Roger L’Estrange adapted their arguments – and, perhaps, the evidence as well 109 Marshall, 110 Marshall,

ODNB entry on Godfrey; Marshall, 154. 146, 181–2.

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– to their genuine conviction that the accused Catholic peers and priests were innocent of the Popish Plot. A very similar dynamic is in evidence in the next chapter, which explores the conspiracy theories implicating the Whigs, or the political opposition, in Godfrey’s death. After all, if the Plot was the brainchild of a few perjured witnesses and scheming oppositional politicians, a convenient political fiction weaponised against the monarchy, surely Sir Edmund’s even more convenient murder was part of that larger conspiracy?

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4 ‘Managery … behind the Curtain’? Oppositional Plots and Whig Lords The contemporary lawyer and writer Roger North, whose conspiracist views about the origins of the Popish Plot would have a profound impact on the debate over Godfrey’s death, believed that the key to the mystery could be reduced to ‘a single point’: ‘cui bono’ (who benefits?). If William Lloyd had invoked the same principle to pin the magistrate’s murder on the Jesuits, the villains that North had in mind were not Catholics, but the self-styled champions of Protestantism: ‘the Faction, or Fanatic Party’ – otherwise known as ‘Whigs’. North, the younger brother of the chief justice of the Common Pleas, Francis North, one of the presiding judges during the Exclusion Crisis and Rye House Plot, was not just well-connected, but close to the centre of political action in his own right, becoming king’s counsel in 1682 and serving as a Tory MP in 1685. After the Revolution of 1688/9, he became a non-juror, refusing to swear allegiance to the new monarchs William and Mary. North’s Examen, a history of the later reign of Charles II, was a defence both of the king and the author’s brothers, Francis and Dudley North, crown servants whose actions had come under attack by the Whig historian White Kennett.1 While Roger North shared the same loyalist sympathies as his fellow Tory chronicler Roger L’Estrange, he diverged sharply from him as to the cause of Godfrey’s death. North was adamant that Godfrey had not committed suicide. Rather, he had been ‘wilfully and most barbarously murdered’ – not by ‘Thieves’ or ‘Papists’, but ‘by the Procurement of those very execrable Villains, behind the Curtain, who first gave Life and Birth to the Plot, and inspired the wicked Testimony of it’. According to North, ‘the Contrivers of this horrid Plot’ cast about them for convincing proof of the conspiracy they had invented. What better way than to find ‘a Magistrate that is popular, and some Way concerned about this Discovery’ and to ‘take and kill him, and expose the Body in a Manner as may be most apt to stir Passion in the People; for, if you can fill them with Anger and Terror, all at once, any Work, you would have, is done’. Godfrey’s unmistakable appearance and regular habit of walking about without servants made him an easy target, but there were even better reasons: ‘Godfrey 1

Examen, 196, iii, 507; P.T. Millard, ‘The Chronology of Roger North’s Main Works’, The Review of English Studies, 24, 95 (1973), 287.

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was known to have a Friendship and Conversation with Mr. Coleman, and some, for that, suspected him of inclining to Popery’. Nor was it a coincidence that Oates had brought his informations to Godfrey. ‘I do not think any Thing was done, in all this Proceeding, by Accident. There was some Reason to choose an inferior Magistrate’ – rather than, say, the mayor, the lord chief justice, a privy councillor or one of the secretaries of state – and ‘this Man’ in particular.2 According to Roger North, until news of ‘Coleman’s Papers’ broke in early October 1678, ‘the Plot was sinking’. This correspondence revealed that Edward Coleman, the former secretary of the duchess of York, had solicited money from French and papal agents to promote the Catholic cause in England. [This] made as much Noise in and about London, and indeed all over the Nation, as if the very Cabinet of Hell had been laid open. It took away common Freedom of Speech about Oates and his Plot, for People’s Passions would not let them attend to any Reason or Deliberation on the Matter.

If anyone more moderate, and, retaining some Doubt, was disposed to ask Questions, he was rebuffed with a What? is there a Plot or no? … This popular Logic carried it in all ordinary Conversation; so as one might have denied Christ with less Contest than the Plot.3

Even so, such were the inconsistencies in Oates’s evidence – his incredible narrative of a Catholic plot to assassinate Charles II and massacre English Protestants bearing little resemblance to Coleman’s schemes to establish toleration – that ‘the Plot began to reel and stagger again in its Credit, till this Murder came out, which reinstated it higher than ever’.4 The timing of Godfrey’s death was thus suspiciously convenient, and has fuelled conspiracy theories ever since. Tories of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and many modern writers, have seen the magistrate as the victim of a larger machination on the part of the political opposition, who so clearly benefited from the backlash against the court and the Catholics in general, and James duke of York in particular. A conspiratorial paradigm had always lent coherence and meaning to this otherwise confusing period of plots and counter-plots, providing villains and victims for contemporaries and for modern armchair detectives alike. With the passage of time, the Tory view slowly gained the upper hand, flipping the older antipapist conspiratorial narrative on its head. Now members of the political opposition were no longer patriots but rather unscrupulous opportunists who viewed the judicial murders of innocent Catholics as acceptable collateral damage in their struggle against the late Stuart 2

Examen, 197–8, 199–200, 172; BL Add MS 32509, fol. 51v. Examen, 196–7. 4 Examen, 177–8. 3

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monarchy. A popish assassination became a Whig murder plot – or, at the very least, a cover-up after the fact. Both Roger and Francis North believed ‘nothing could be more improbable’ than that the magistrate had been killed by Catholics, who had nothing to gain and everything to lose from his death. What was likely, they speculated, was that Godfrey ‘might have offended the discoverers’ – Oates and his oppositional patrons – ‘by being too free with Coleman’, and that they had avenged this injury by permanently silencing him. As Francis North observed, Danby had been initially suspected of having invented the Plot to deflect criticism from himself and to justify maintaining the troops ostensibly raised to fight France. But like his brother (and many others), North inferred the authors of the Plot from its results: ‘If it had bin a Court stratagem, the Court must needs have had the Comand of the Engin’. Given that this was clearly not the case, ‘it was an unpardonable folly to give force to a designe that was formed & conducted by the opposite party as this must be concluded to be’.5 If not Danby, who was (to quote James II) ‘the first raiser of that Devil’, the Popish Plot? Late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Tories traced the genesis of the Plot to the original sin of disobedience, a crime against nature. For James, it was a satanic act of rebellion; for Roger North, a ‘monstrous birth’ imposed upon the nation.6 Most writers have viewed Titus Oates and the venal witnesses that followed him as too despicable to have played more than a supporting role in the tragedy that unfolded. According to the nineteenthcentury Catholic historian John Lingard, the Plot witnesses were ‘mere puppets, whose motions were regulated by the invisible hand of some master artist’. Lingard, like many before and since, assumed that the evil genius of the Plot was the leading court opponent, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st earl of Shaftesbury. While Lingard hedged a little as to whether Shaftesbury was the original inventor or ‘real parent of this imposture, this at least is certain, that he took it under his protection from its birth, and nursed it with solicitude till it arrived at maturity’. Lingard was borrowing his analogy as well as his conclusions from Roger North, who in Examen claimed that, even if the Plot were not initially of Shaftesbury’s ‘Midwifery’, he was the ‘Dry-Nurse … behind the Curtain’ under whose ‘Managery’ the conspiracy had grown to monstrous dimensions. James II agreed, writing in his memoirs that Danby had ‘fancyed by the helpe of his pretended conspiracie, and crying out against popery, he should pass for a pillar of the church, and ward the blow which he foresaw was falling on his shoulders’, but Shaftesbury, ‘who soon found out his drift’, outfoxed him: ‘let the treasurer cry as lowd as he pleases against popery, and think to put himself at the head

5

BL Add MS 32518, fol. 151. J.S. Clarke, The Life of James the Second, King of England, &c. Collected out of Memoirs Writ of his own Hand (1816), 1:546; Examen, 95. 6

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of the plot, I will cry a note lowder, and soone take his place; which he failed not to make good’.7 To escape prosecution as the Tory Revenge gained momentum in late 1682, Shaftesbury fled to the Netherlands, where he died shortly afterwards. He was thus a good fall guy for those chroniclers keen to shift the blame for the 1683 Rye House Plot away from the Whig martyrs Algernon Sidney, William lord Russell and Arthur Capel, earl of Essex. Recent scholarship has qualified this traditional image of Shaftesbury as the Machiavellian puppet-master of the Whigs, stressing that the opposition was not an organised political party in the modern sense of the word, but rather a loose, shifting and far from unified coalition of people of diverse interests and backgrounds.8 Even Gilbert Burnet, whose influential account of the Plot contributed to the image of Shaftesbury as the moving force behind the opposition, thought Titus Oates’s incredible narrative too ‘gross’ for such a master of intrigue. Modern armchair detectives, such as the American mystery writer John Dickson Carr, have similarly viewed the circumstances of Godfrey’s murder as too crude for a man of Shaftesbury’s subtle intelligence: ‘the crime was not worthy of him. It was too clumsily carried out’.9 Roger North’s identification of those who had encouraged the witnesses with Godfrey’s killers has led most modern writers to assume that he was pointing the finger at Shaftesbury, but in fact North never explicitly named him as the author of Godfrey’s murder. Rather, in his manuscript notes (and, more obliquely, in Examen) he hinted at an even more eminent suspect: the Prince of Orange, later William III. North posed the question of who had supported Oates financially after Charles II had revoked his pension – and why. It could not have been out of any ‘good will to his person’: the perjured informer had become ‘the odium of all people’. The only possible explanation was that Oates ‘had some very great & important secrets to sell, to the best bidder’. North suggested that the identity of this person who had first set the Plot in motion – the secret that had to be kept at all costs – could be inferred from events: ‘in a dark business as this is, there must be a consideration of what goes before and what followed after, what disturbed our peace, and when moved, settled in the

7

John Lingard, The History of England, 5th ed. (1849), 9:360; Examen, 95; Clarke, Life of James the Second, 1:546. 8 The attack on the older notion of a ‘Whig’ party cohering around the issue of exclusion is forcefully articulated in Jonathan Scott, Algernon Sidney and the Restoration Crisis (Cambridge, 1991), 11–14, 47–8; see also Mark Knights, Politics and Opinion in Crisis, 1678–81 (Cambridge, 1994), 5–10. As Tim Harris has argued, however, even if the Exclusion Crisis extended far beyond the single constitutional issue of the succession and ‘fluidity in political allegiances’ persisted, it was nonetheless characterised by ‘a party conflict’ between two opposing, and clearly discernible, sides (Politics under the Later Stuarts: Party Conflict in a Divided Society, 1660–1715 (Harlow, 1993), 82; 52–75). 9 Burnet, 2:169; John Dickson Carr, The Murder of Sir Edmund Godfrey (1936), 326.

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room, & then the Cui Bono &c. will answer the Question’.10 Who, according to the classic conspiracist formula, benefits most? The people at the top, of course. As long as there is cynicism about politics and human nature, even the most grandiose conspiracy theories will lack neither proponents nor plausibility. In September 1679 the French diplomat Jean-Antoine de Mesmes, comte d’Avaux, reported that William of Orange had long consorted with the ‘wickedest people in England’, supposedly having met secretly with Oates several years earlier – before the outbreak of the Popish Plot.11 Thus, theories of Whig complicity in Godfrey’s death, while appealing to a sense of poetic justice, are by no means more objective or rational than the antipapist conspiracy theories they sought to debunk. They are based not so much on evidence but inferences about who stood most to gain from Godfrey’s death. With Roger North we are wading knee-deep in the most fantastical conspiratorial scenarios, not unlike those implicating the first Tudor monarch, Henry VII, in the murder of the Yorkist princes in the Tower. And even what seem to be plausible theses involving non-Catholic suspects quickly become entangled in multiple, and byzantine, conspiracy theories. For instance, J.G. Muddiman’s proposal in the 1920s that Godfrey was killed by a violent psychopath, the earl of Pembroke, appeared to offer a refreshingly new lead. But as Pembroke, like Godfrey’s brothers, had ties to the political opposition, this thesis inevitably devolves into speculation that the murder was followed by an elaborate Whig cover-up of the crime and a deliberate misdirection of the investigation. The modern conspiracy theorist and ‘Ripperologist’ Stephen Knight, best known for his work linking the Whitechapel murders to both the British royal family and the Freemasons, has gone even further, suggesting that Godfrey was a double agent silenced by fellow members of the so-called ‘Peyton gang’ (a splinter group of the republican Green Ribbon Club) for leaking secrets to the court.12 This chapter will assess the likelihood of these and other ‘Whig’ murder scenarios, addressing the question of what actually happened as well as what contemporaries actually believed. For, when it comes to Godfrey’s death, it is impossible to disentangle facts and partisan opinion, news and rumours, evidence and innuendo, investigation and subornation.

10

BL Add MS 32509, fol. 63v; see also Examen, 193. Négociations de Monsieur le Comte d’Avaux en Holland, Depuis 1679, jusqu’en 1684 (Paris, 1754), 32. William reportedly met Oates in company with a Dutch agent named Frimans and the Huguenot Pierre du Moulin, ‘a great scoundrel’ (grand sclélérat) and ‘intriguer’. William’s modern biographer Stephen B. Baxter has claimed this meeting was ‘limited to a desire for information and for assistance in his continental designs’ and not ‘a conspiracy against the throne’ (William III (1966), 164). 12 Stephen Knight, Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution (1976); Knight, 245–9. 11

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True crime, false leads and tall tales

Godfrey’s death coincided with, and helped to fuel, the burgeoning news culture of late Stuart England. Even before the lapse of the Licensing Act had opened the floodgates of print in May 1679, there had been a great efflorescence of news-sheets and crime pamphlets. While providential narratives of murder and other heinous crimes had been a staple of print culture since the late sixteenth century, the late 1670s witnessed the emergence of the regular serial crime publications, the Ordinary of Newgate’s Account of the malefactors executed at Tyburn and the Old Bailey Proceedings. Both these semi-official accounts and their competitors claimed to deliver accurate verbatim reports (‘true relations’) of trials and speeches, often citing original documents such as depositions and private correspondence.13 Much as the O.J. Simpson trial in 1995, along with advances in forensic technology, helped spawn a cottage industry in television crime scene investigations and cold cases in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, Godfrey’s death seems to have spurred this late seventeenth-century fascination with true crime. Narcissus Luttrell’s Brief Historical Relation, a summary of the main news items recounted in the newsletters and pamphlets of his day, began its detailed reporting with Godfrey’s disappearance and death. The magistrate’s murder was clearly a turning point, a mystery that whetted public interest not only in solving this particular crime but which also created a demand for similar stories and the expectation that history would be repeated. Luttrell’s journal was full of rumours and false leads, such as the report that the London merchant John Powell, who disappeared several weeks after Godfrey, had also been murdered by the papists. Somewhat anticlimactically, however, he turned up alive and well several weeks later.14 Tory writers such as Roger L’Estrange claimed that the rumours implicating the Catholics in Godfrey’s disappearance and death were deliberately manufactured by opponents of the court (including Sir Edmund’s brothers). In his notes on the Plot, which would later be edited by his younger brother Roger, laying the groundwork for Examen, Francis North cast doubt on reports that Godfrey had been threatened and dogged by papists in the weeks before his 13

Peter Lake, ‘Deeds Against Nature: Cheap Print, Protestantism and Murder in Early Seventeenth-Century England’, in Kevin Sharpe and Peter Lake (eds), Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England (London, 1994); Frances E. Dolan, Dangerous Familiars: Representation of Domestic Crime in England, 1550–1700 (Ithaca, 1994); Malcolm Gaskill, Crime and Mentalities in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2000), 213–38; Andrea McKenzie, ‘From True Confessions to True Reporting? The Decline and Fall of the Ordinary’s Account’, London Journal, 30 (2005), 55–6; Tim Hitchcock, Robert Shoemaker, Clive Emsley, Sharon Howard and Jamie McLaughlin, et al., The Old Bailey Proceedings Online, 1674–1913 (www.oldbaileyonline.org, version 7.0, 24 March 2012); Frances E. Dolan, True Relations: Reading, Literature, and Evidence in Seventeenth-Century England (Philadelphia, 2013). 14 Luttrell, 1:1–2, 1:3. The entries dealing with events before Godfrey’s death appear to have been added subsequently.

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death: ‘Whether he believed himself in danger, he best knew, but no one els would think so, because he continually went about in the streets lanes & alleys alone, as his office and business led him’. Conversely – as all was grist for the conspiratorial mill – Godfrey’s zeal in carrying out his duties exposed him to the snares of the real plotters, making him ‘a fit person to be practist upon’. Francis and Roger North believed that the rumours that circulated after the magistrate’s death were ‘cunningly’ floated out by the opposition as trial balloons, or ‘essays on the humour of the people’, to see which charges would stick. They were both a means of testing venues for the murder – the Cockpit, Arundel House and Somerset House – ‘that it might be knowne what those places could say in defence of themselves’, and of sowing divisions between the court and the Catholics, encouraging them ‘to toss the fire from one to the other’.15 Clearly, the links between Edward Coleman and his patron the duke of York were convenient for the political opposition; so too was the rumour campaign implicating the king’s principal minister, the earl of Danby, in Godfrey’s death. This last – although spearheaded not so much by proto-Whigs as partisans of the Catholics, as we have seen – fizzled out when it emerged that the lord treasurer’s servant Edward Christian, who had been named as the assassin in various manuscript libels, had been out of town for weeks at the time in question. Danby would in 1681 subsequently be accused by Edward Fitzharris (‘at the Extraordinary earnest prosecution of the brothers of Sir Edmond’, claimed Francis North) of having ordered Godfrey’s murder. Several months later, another Irish witness, Bryan Haynes, signalled his willingness to testify that he had seen the then lord treasurer come ‘muffled in a cloak into the room where Godfrey lay dead’. But in the immediate aftermath of Godfrey’s death, Christian’s alibi meant that ‘the Cockpitt was quickly freed’, with suspicions (and the testimony of witnesses like Bedloe and Prance) henceforth focusing on Somerset House, the residence of Catherine of Braganza.16 After the trial of Green, Berry and Hill in February 1679, anonymous libellers posted a scurrilous paper on the walls of the queen’s palace announcing that, in keeping with the common practice of hanging malefactors on or near the scene of particularly heinous crimes, ‘the 2nd part of the Tragedy of Sir Edmund Godfrey by the queens servants’ – i.e. the condign execution of the latter – would take place at Somerset House, ‘where all that will come may see it for nothing’.17 Anti-Catholicism had from the late sixteenth century become a potent, and highly malleable, oppositional discourse appropriated by both religious reformers and constitutional critics of the monarchy: Puritans, Parliamentarians and, finally, the opponents of the court who would by the 1680s be known 15

BL Add MS 32509, fols 53v, 54, 51v. BL Add MS 32518, fol. 151v; Newdigate Newsletters, 16 June 1681, L.c.1088; BL Add MS 32518, fol. 151v. It should be noted that Haynes also supported the Somerset House narrative: it was in a room in this palace that he claimed to have seen Danby near Godfrey’s corpse. 17 Newdigate Newsletters, 15 February 1678/9, L.c.746. 16

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as ‘Whigs’. As an eminently expandable ‘variant of the evil counsellor’ argument, antipopery allowed the opposition to demand reforms by attacking the king indirectly, through Catholic or supposedly ‘popishly-affected’ ministers, favourites or spouses.18 As scholars have emphasised, popery served as a political metaphor for disease, corruption, idolatry, and a political and moral order dangerously off-kilter. During the reign of Charles II specifically, both the king’s papist mistresses and his childless Catholic wife were lightning rods for criticism.19 Even though the queen had suffered several miscarriages (the last one, in 1669, reputedly induced by a pet fox jumping on her bed), she was widely characterised as infertile. In November 1680, John Reresby gleefully repeated the rumour that the queen had ‘a continuall flux of blood in her secret parts’, a condition that supposedly accounted both for her ‘Barrenness’ and the fact that Charles II’s former principal minister, the earl of Clarendon, had promoted the match: his daughter was married to the heir apparent, James duke of York.20 Somerset House was thus a politically convenient venue for Godfrey’s murder, not least because a scandal which could lead to a royal divorce offered a possible solution to the problem of the succession which, following the Popish Plot revelations, had reached crisis proportions. Many, taking their wishes for reality, believed that Charles II would be only too happy to have an excuse to cast off his long-suffering queen, ‘whose Person’, in the words of Laurence Echard, ‘he had ever dislik’d, upon the Account of her Bodily Infirmities’. Hopeful speculation about a royal divorce had long preceded the Popish Plot. In the late 1660s, the duke of Buckingham had supposedly concocted a scheme to abduct Catherine during a masquerade and to send her to an American plantation in order to facilitate the king’s remarriage.21 Many at court had read significance into Charles II’s interest in the high-profile divorce of John Manners, lord Roos, in 1670.22 A letter to his friend Valentine Greatrakes suggests that Sir Edmund Godfrey himself shared the widespread conviction that Charles II’s support of 18

Peter Lake, ‘Anti-Popery: The Structure of a Prejudice’, in Richard Cust and Ann Hughes (eds), Conflict in Early Stuart England: Studies in Religion and Politics 1603–1642 (1989), 9. 19 Frances Dolan, Whores of Babylon: Catholicism, Gender, and Seventeenth-Century Print Culture (Ithaca, 1999). 20 Haley, 276; Andrew Browning (ed.), Memoirs of Sir John Reresby, 2nd ed., ed. Mary K. Geiter and W.A. Speck (1991), entry for 17 November 1680, 204; Laurence Echard, History of England (1718), 3:277. See also Brian Wieser, Charles II and the Politics of Access (Woodbridge, 2003), 21. 21 Echard, History of England, 3:277; Burnet, 1:456. Similarly, the story of a ‘black box’ containing documents proving the marriage of the king with the mother of his favourite (and Protestant) illegitimate son, the duke of Monmouth, gained traction during the Exclusion Crisis. 22 Annabel Patterson has emphasised the significance of this ‘innovation’, speculating that the king, as interested in the concurrent proceedings about the Conventicles Bill as he was about the divorce, had an explicit political agenda in beginning to attend the Lords debates (The Long Parliament of Charles II (New Haven, 2008), 157).

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the bill allowing Roos to remarry signalled the king’s own intention to discard his popish wife for a younger and more fertile bride.23 After James’s Catholicism became public knowledge after 1673, pressure for a royal divorce intensified, but Charles II would confound all such projects, refusing to abandon his queen: as he told Gilbert Burnet, ‘it was a wicked thing to make a poor lady miserable, only because she was his wife, and had no children by him, which was no fault of hers’.24 There is no doubt that these rumours and speculations – including the cruel and misogynist gossip about queen Catherine, capitalising on the associations between Catholicism and moral and physical deformity and decay – played into the hands of court opponents. Whether they had been deliberately manufactured by them is another question. What is clear is that, in this era of conspiratorial politics, the hypothesis that Godfrey had been murdered by popish plotters could not be dispelled by scepticism about the plausibility of the evidence or the credibility of witnesses, but could only be displaced by another conspiracy theory: a narrative that resonated with the partisan political views of its audience. For there was also a long-established anti-Puritan/Presbyterian tradition that co-existed with, and even reinforced, the dominant anti-Catholic narrative of English history insofar as (in the classic conspiratorial ‘horseshoe’ formulation) radical Protestant sectarians and republicans shared the Jesuit penchant for deposing and murdering Anglican kings. In this context, both Roger L’Estrange’s 1680 broadside Popery in Masquerade, equating dissenters with Catholic plotters, and Francis North’s manuscript ‘Instructions for a treatise to be wrote for undeceiving the people about the late popish plott’, can be seen as attempts to ‘provoke a loyalist backlash’ by demonstrating the dangers of ‘Presbiterians & sectary’s’ to the monarchy and the Church of England.25 Thus the Plot was not popish but Presbyterian, and the murderers of Godfrey not Catholics but the true enemies of Charles II: radical republicans (‘king-killers’) and Protestant dissenters (‘fanatics’). In other words, one conspiratorial nail drove out another. This is not to say that this Tory moral panic of the early 1680s was any more contrived or disingenuous than the antipapist hysteria of 1678–79. As scholars have emphasised, early modern moral panics cannot be seen merely 23

NLI, MS 4728, copy of letter from ‘Ellis Lockier’ to Greatrakes, 16. These letters are also reproduced in Elmer, Appendix 3, 210–37; see also Marshall, ‘Correspondence’. 24 Burnet, 1:456. John Evelyn wrote in his Diary that ‘the King was too kind an husband’ to ‘gratifie some, who would have ben glad’ if he had ‘married a more fruitfull Lady’ (E.S. De Beer (ed.), The Diary of John Evelyn (Oxford, 1955), 4:158); John Miller, Popery and Politics in England, 1660–1688 (Cambridge, 1973), 128. 25 Tim Harris, London Crowds in the Reign of Charles II: Propaganda and Politics from the Restoration until the Exclusion Crisis (Cambridge, 1987), 139–40; Add MS 32518, fol. 144; Tim Harris, ‘“A sainct in shewe, a Devill in deede”: Moral Panics and Anti-Puritanism in Seventeenth-Century England’, in David Lemmings and Claire Walker (eds), Moral Panics, the Media and the Law in Early Modern England (Basingstoke, 2009).

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as ‘top-down, media-imposed’ events, conjured out of thin air by the partisan press, and still less as under the effective control of the state.26 Oral and literate culture, far from being distinct, were in the early modern period both overlapping and symbiotic: there was constant ‘cross-fertilisation’ between manuscript and print and political discourse, rumour and gossip. Many of the accusations relating to Godfrey’s death, like the stories that circulated about him, seem to have been spontaneous and grassroots, rather than choreographed either by the government or the opposition.27 The views later associated with ‘Whigs’ or ‘Tories’ were not merely post facto political constructions, but originated organically in disputes between neighbours in the streets or in taverns and coffee-houses, reflecting divisions between those who were willing to suspect the court, and Charles II himself, of complicity in a cover-up or an obstruction of the investigation of a Plot against Parliament and the Protestant religion, and those who believed the king’s life was in danger from ‘Presbyterians’ as well as, or more than, from ‘papists’. In early February 1679, an arrest warrant was made out for a servant of the duchess of York who, while ‘discourseing … with some merchants’ about the execution of Green, Berry and Hill, reportedly said ‘that it would be found that [Godfrey] was Murthered by the fanaticks’. When asked about the Plot, he declared ‘there was noe such thing’; upon it being objected that ‘his Majesty called it a Hellish plot in his proclamation’, he replied, ‘he did soe but laught at it afterwards’. As late as September 1682, John Wine, the king’s fishmonger, was indicted for declaring that ‘Sir Edmundbury Godfrey was murthered by the Presbiterians’.28 The Tory claim that the earl of Shaftesbury directed a campaign of misinformation and ‘fake news’ would by the eighteenth century become a historical commonplace. According to Sir John Dalrymple, he ‘coined rumors as they fitted his purpose, and had men of his party ready who could repeat and men who could write them, so as to make them circulate through every part of the kingdom’.29 However, far from being exclusively manufactured by court 26

Harris, ‘Moral Panics’, 102, 109, 112; see also Alexandra Walsham, ‘“This Newe Army of Satan”: The Jesuit Mission and the Formation of Public Opinion in Elizabethan England’, in Lemmings and Walker, Moral Panics, 157. Scholars of witchcraft prosecutions in seventeenth-century Scotland and England have similarly emphasised how they were at best an ineffective weapon for authorities, largely driven by local officials and amateurs and occurring in areas and moments in which the state’s power was weak or contested; see Malcolm Gaskill, ‘Fear Made Flesh: The English Witch-Panic of 1645–7’, in Lemmings and Walker, Moral Panics; Brian P. Levack, Witch-Hunting in Scotland: Law, Politics and Religion (New York, 2008). 27 See for instance Harold Love, ‘Oral and Scribal Texts in Early Modern England’, in John Bernard and D.F. McKenzie, with Maureen Bell (eds), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. 4, 1557–1695 (Cambridge, 2002), 1–5; Adam Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1500–1700 (Oxford, 2000), 5–6. 28 Newdigate Newsletters, 15 February 1678/9, L.c.747; Dom Hugh Bowler (ed.), London Sessions Records, 1605–1685 (1934), 358. 29 Dalrymple, 1:45. George Sitwell believed that Dalrymple had evidence that Shaftesbury had actively ‘contrived’ the Plot and suborned the witnesses, but that the documents

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opponents, rumours about Godfrey had flown from every direction. The correspondence of the clerk of the Privy Council Sir Robert Southwell makes it clear that all kinds of theories were initially mooted to account for Godfrey’s disappearance, some ‘imput[ing it] to revenge’ for his having taken Oates’s testimony, others speculating that he might have absconded because of debt. Roger North acknowledged that, in addition to reports tracing Godfrey to St James, Whitehall or Arundel House, it was also reported that ‘he was married and in Bed with a Lady of Fortune. Some said he was got into an Alehouse, and found in Bed with a Whore’. As Gilbert Burnet noted, the Catholic duke of Norfolk’s ‘officiousness’ in promoting such ‘stories’ to account for Godfrey’s absence only served to draw suspicion upon himself.30 For all of the late seventeenth-century fetishisation of authentic accounts or ‘true relations’, where harder evidence was lacking, speculation and gossip inevitably stepped in to fill the breach.31 This was especially the case as the investigation dragged on without any arrests, and distrust of the court led many people to privilege rumour and innuendo over official sources. In November 1678, one letter-writer reported not only that the two men that had found Godfrey’s body had been committed to Newgate after being ‘found in contrariety’, but that a child was supposedly arrested after offering ‘a young gentleman’ one hundred pounds ‘to kill an old gentleman’, and that the duke of Buckingham’s agent Sir Ellis Leighton had also been questioned ‘but ’tis kept secret’. Rumours about Godfrey’s death were as difficult to control as they were to assess, often the result of the tall tales and ‘dangerous talk’ of men and women in their cups. Such stories were inevitably garbled and distorted with each transmission, with satire and sedition sometimes thrown in the mix. Some may have originated as jokes at the expense of powerful people before being later transposed as ‘news’, such as the report that the lord chief justice Sir William Scroggs had made out a warrant for ‘Madame [Carwell]’ – the king’s principal mistress, the duchess of Portsmouth – ‘for being privy to the murder at Somerset House and that she out of zeal for her religion spat on Sir Edmund’s face, as he lay dead’.32 Just as word of mouth was the bread-and-butter of scribal newsletters and the printed news culture of the 1670s alike, rumours and loose talk could direct investigations. On 11 November 1678, Elizabeth Martialle, who lived near Albemarle House in Piccadilly (not far from St James’s Palace, the duke of York’s principal residence), gave an information to the duke of Buckingham and the marquess of Winchester, members of the Lords committee investigating the Plot, claiming that she had heard ‘3 or 4’ men near her lodgings about the time were either lost or deliberately destroyed subsequently: The First Whig: An Account of the Parliamentary Career of William Sacheverell (Scarborough, 1894), 47–8. 30 HMC Ormonde, 4:459; Examen, 202; Burnet, 2:153. 31 Dolan, True Relations; see also Barbara J. Shapiro, A Culture of Fact: England, 1550–1720 (Ithaca, 2000). 32 HMC 7th Report, 471; David Cressy, Dangerous Talk: Scandalous, Seditious, and Treasonable Speech in Pre-Modern England (Oxford, 2010); SP 29/411, fol. 64.

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Sir Edmund ‘was killed’ saying ‘that if they had some body there they would make him dance as they did Justice Godfrey’. While this does not appear to have gone anywhere, it is significant that the committee was willing to pursue all leads, however flimsy or far-fetched. A document in the Shaftesbury Papers suggests that the Lords committee had investigated a letter from Thomas Hariot reporting that an unnamed man had ‘followed the Coach and Housed Sr Edmund-bury Godfrey in St Gyles’s, & waited for him at the Doore from 12: till 5 a Clock of that fatall Saturday’. Hariot had heard this from one Hempson, who had it from Mr Raworth, who had it from Mr Hall, who had it from William Farrington, who claimed ‘he had already given Information of it to the Councell’, but asked not to be questioned further ‘by reason of a Third Person who could not for the Present be spoken withal’ because the time ‘was not ripe for a discovery’ but that all would be revealed in a few days, ‘3 at furthest’.33 Sir Thomas Armstrong reported to the committee that he had been told by one Colonel Philip Howard that he had heard a story about a coachman who, around the time of Godfrey’s disappearance, had been seized and blindfolded by a fare who, after being joined by several accomplices, forced him to drive ‘away his coach with him blind on the box’; when they finally stopped, the coachjackers left, after threatening the driver ‘that if he stirred in an hour they would kill him’. When he finally dared to remove ‘his muffler he found he was near Primrose Hill’. This story may have originated from a St Giles drayman named Thomas Winder or Windor, who reportedly told Elizabeth Simpber, a brewer’s wife, that he had been told by the servant of a hackney coachman named James that the latter had ‘carried a person that was said to bee sicke or drunke’ from Duke Street behind St James Square out of town on the ‘Wensday or Thursday night, after Sr Edm Godfrey was missing’, and that three or four men ordered the driver ‘to sit in the box’ until ‘they [had] put in the drunken man themselfes’. Several other witnesses confirmed having heard this account from Winder, but the coachman who had supposedly transported Godfrey’s body was never apprehended. J.G. Muddiman, to whose arguments we shall return, saw these reports as spread deliberately by court opponents like Shaftesbury (and Armstrong) to place the murder of Godfrey at Somerset House. However, Duke Street, where the mythical coach had supposedly picked up Godfrey’s body, was far from Somerset House – although the fact that it was only steps from St James, the town residence of the duke of York, is unlikely to have been a coincidence. The Shaftesbury and Coventry papers are full of second-hand reports and tall tales implicating not just the queen, but other prominent Catholics in Godfrey’s death: according to one persistent rumour, 33

Shaftesbury Papers, fol. 21. J.G. Muddiman has read particular significance into this account, largely because the second page of the document is missing – destroyed by Shaftesbury as it was too incriminating, he suggests. However, in that case, why keep the first page? (Muddiman, 144; see also his Notes and Queries, 16 August 1924, ‘Depositions about the Popish Plot’, 113).

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the magistrate had been murdered in the cellar of lord Belasyse, one of the five ‘popish lords’ accused by Oates.34 Many accusations and denunciations, some of them anonymous, were malicious or opportunistic; the reward of £500 for anyone coming forward with information leading to a conviction for Godfrey’s murder was, obviously, a powerful motivation. One informant, identified only by his initials, complained of having been unable to obtain an audience with the secretary of state Henry Coventry, despite waiting on him ‘these three days together’. He claimed to have been in a ‘Victualling house’ in Whitefriars on the evening of 15 October in company with one ‘Hogshead’, who had boasted of having fifty pounds and offered to treat everyone with wine and oysters. Hogshead then supposedly confided to the letter-writer (on condition ‘that hee would never discover’) that he had received the money after he and three other men, servants of the Catholic peers Belasyse and Petre, had murdered Godfrey the night before at Wild House, the residence of the Spanish ambassador. The Lords committee duly examined one Roger Hawkshead on 6 November. The latter, while acknowledging that ‘he might probably be at an Alehouse in White fryers the 15th daye of October last’, denied the rest of the story. The committee seems to have taken him at his word and released him.35 Catholics were not only the prime suspects for Godfrey’s murder, but also looked and acted suspiciously – if only because so many of them were in breach of the proclamation ordering them either to leave London or to submit to an oath of allegiance seen by most of their co-religionists as tantamount to a renunciation of their faith. On 31 October 1678, John and Mary Pritchard reported that their lodger, a Scottish Catholic named Alexander Ogestone or Oglestone, had been behaving oddly, staying out all night on the Saturday that Godfrey had disappeared, and later carrying rosemary (a token of mourning) and wearing a periwig, which he had not done previously. After Godfrey’s body had been discovered, Ogestone had supposedly opined that ‘he might bee killed by beggars’, later remarking that he had heard that ‘Sr Edmunds body was carried out in Blanketts’. Ogestone, upon being questioned by the Lords committee, deposed that he had spent the night of 12 October at the deathbed of a countryman, a physician by the name of Mr Clark. (In fact, it was at the latter’s funeral on Tuesday 15 October 1678 that Godfrey’s clerk Henry Moor made the news of his master’s disappearance public.) Ogestone denied wearing a wig, but admitted having repeated the story about Godfrey’s body being wrapped in blankets and transported in a coach. He claimed that he had heard this from a man who had himself heard it from two women.36 The committee seems not to have pursued the matter further. 34

Lords MSS, 46; Shaftesbury Papers, fols 45, 33–4, 35–7; Muddiman, ‘Depositions about the Popish Plot’, 113. Armstrong was executed in 1683 after being summarily convicted (i.e. without trial) for an outlawry for treason for his involvement in the Rye House Plot. 35 Coventry Papers 11, fol. 237; Lords MSS, 37. 36 Shaftesbury Papers, fols 17–18.

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Some English Protestants clearly felt empowered to spy on their Catholic neighbours. Barbara Thompson swore an information before the mayor of London that she had hidden behind the bed of a Mr Toden, a French pewterer in St Martin’s, in order to report on his conversation with another French Catholic. She claimed that the latter had asked Toden, ‘in a joviall way’, if there was anyone around to overhear them, because if there were, ‘the fashion is to kill them’. Godfrey’s murder then came up in larger discussion of Parliament, the king of France and various ‘Traynes’ (schemes, traps). Interestingly, Thompson reported that Toden then said of Charles II: ‘God Blesse my king for he is a good king’.37 The artisan Barbara Thompson was attempting to denounce was clearly of higher status than her: her deposition suggests she was a servant running an errand; she seems to have been illiterate, signing her testimony with a mark. The Popish Plot fostered a culture of denunciation in which both the traditional social hierarchy and the conventional standards for assessing the truth were upended and disrupted, uncoupled as they were from the usual associations between credibility and social respectability.38 Several Plot witnesses had served in Catholic households. Miles Prance had been betrayed by a lodger behind in his rent, whom his wife had accused of theft; the testimony of Prance’s servants and apprentice had strengthened the case against him. Samuel Pepys was implicated in the conspiracy by a disgruntled former butler whom he had dismissed for having an affair with his housekeeper (and against whom Pepys had subsequently brought a complaint of robbery to none other than Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey himself).39 Anyone suspected of being Catholic or employed by Catholics fell under suspicion, including strangers who may have been indiscreet enough to venture their own opinions when asked for news. On 14 November 1678, John Parr of Boythorpe gave an information to two Derbyshire JPs about William Whillis, who had come to him looking for work. Parr seems to have offered Whillis a place to stay in part because he was a ‘North Country man’ but also because, upon discovering he was ‘a Papist’, he believed ‘he should get some intelligence of him about the late plot’. Parr claimed that Whillis had told him that ‘he was not five foote from’ Godfrey when he was killed and that he knew the ‘foure persons concerned’: two Catholic priests and two laymen. Whillis was allegedly a servant to Philip Hungate, the priest ‘that stabbed the said Sr Edmundberye Godfrey & gave him his death blow after he was strangled & his mouth stopped’. Shortly afterwards, Whillis ‘fled’ but was pursued by Parr, who apprehended him and, after ‘refresh[ing]’ him ‘with a Cup of Ale’, persuaded him to make more disclosures. Whillis now supposedly confessed that Godfrey’s body had been hidden in the house of one of the Catholic gentlemen for two days 37

Bod. Rawl A136, fols 573–4. Rachel Judith Weil, ‘“If I did say so, I lyed”: Elizabeth Cellier and the Construction of Credibility in the Popish Plot Crisis’, in Susan Dwyer Amussen and Mark Kishlansky (eds), Political Culture and Cultural Politics in Early Modern England (Manchester, 1995), 190. 39 C.S. Knighton (ed.), Pepys’s Later Diaries (Phoenix Mill, 2004), 37–8; Grey, Debates, 7:307. 38

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before being ‘caryed into a dich [sic] … with his owne Raper [sic] thrust thorow him & had all things left with him as they found him walking his papers of Examinations onely excepted which they tooke from him & burned’.40 Whillis, questioned at the same time by the two Derbyshire justices, ‘denied that he had any private discourse with the said Carr … other then [sic] ordinary discourse’ and ‘denie[d] the knowing any thing of the Plott or of Sir Edmundsbury Godfreys death’; he also denied being ‘a Papist’. The matter was taken seriously enough for Whillis to be taken to London and questioned by the Privy Council. According to the undersecretary Williamson’s notes, ‘Wheelis’ repeated his denials, despite being offered a pardon by the king in exchange for a confession. While he was remanded to the Lords committee for questioning, no further record of him survives. Presumably, Whillis’s insistence he was a practising Anglican who could prove that he was ‘80 miles from London when Godfrey was killed’ withstood scrutiny and he was released.41 Recollections of conversations, especially those conducted in watering holes, were inevitably subjective, and witnesses and suspects were highly vulnerable to suggestion or pressure. Idle words, speculation and gossip were like wildfire – propagating rapidly under the right conditions, but equally difficult to contain or direct. The moral panic precipitated by Godfrey’s death may have initially served the interests of court opponents, but does it necessarily follow that it was deliberately orchestrated, still less effectively controlled, by them? To assume causes by their effects is of course key to conspiracy thinking. Conspiratorial beliefs provide simple explanations, imposing meaning upon and connecting otherwise inchoate and unrelated events. If Tories assumed that the Popish Plot investigations and prosecutions were a screen for the interests of the political opposition, Whigs conflated two things that, in hindsight, seem distinct to us: the witnesses’ accusations against Catholic peers and clergy (which we now know to be unfounded) with suspicions of secret Anglo-French diplomacy and crypto-Catholicism at court (which were all too true). In late 1678 and early 1679, parliamentary investigators genuinely believed that Coleman’s letters and Godfrey’s death corroborated the existence of a Plot, even if they perhaps did not swallow wholesale the fantastical narrative peddled by Titus Oates. Their own ‘confirmation bias’, or predisposition to believe evidence that fitted with their larger conspiratorial paradigm, should have led them to assume all the Catholics they interrogated were guilty. And yet, in ways that Roger North or L’Estrange’s narratives fail to acknowledge, many of the leads pursued by the Lords committee ultimately went nowhere and the suspects were released. Did this mean the investigation was more legitimate than these Tory writers acknowledged, or that Shaftesbury and his allies cynically chose to fly at higher game, such as Catholics associated with the queen’s household? 40 41

Shaftesbury Papers, fols 70–2. Shaftesbury Papers, fol. 73; SP 29/408, fol. 52.

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Did the Popish Plot investigators engage not only in manufacturing false rumours but in suborning and tampering with Plot witnesses? As always, there was an opposite, and partisan, reality. For Tories, the Plot was a political fiction used by radical republicans who would stick at nothing in their attack on the monarchy. The Whigs seem to have been equally convinced that the court was engaged in an obstruction of the investigation. The fact that distrust was rampant not only undermined people’s confidence in the integrity of officials, but also eroded the inhibitions of actors across the political spectrum against themselves resorting to underhanded tactics. If you believed the ‘other side’ was already bribing or coercing witnesses, why should you hold back? In the climate of distrust fostered by both Charles II’s court and his political opponents, it is difficult to unravel the chicken-and-egg question of which came first: conspiracy-thinking or the conspiracy itself. Shaftesbury and subornation

Late seventeenth-century Catholic and Tory accounts not only emphasised the dubious antecedents, disreputable characters and venality of Popish Plot witnesses but also suggested that the parliamentary committees investigating the Plot engaged in subornation and intimidation, even torture, to extract confessions. The Catholic activist Elizabeth Cellier claimed to have heard, while visiting Newgate in January 1679, ‘Terrible Grones and Squeeks’, which she took to be ‘the voice of a strong Man in Torture’ and the ‘winding up of some Engine’ on which he was being racked. She claimed to have heard the man – Miles Prance, accused by Bedloe of complicity in Godfrey’s murder – protesting, loudly and often: ‘I know nothing of it, I’me Innocent … What would you have me say? Will you Murder me because I will not bely myself and others?’ Cellier reported that both Prance and Francis Corral, a coachman questioned in regard to Godfrey’s death, had been subjected to ‘hard and cruel usage’, being heavily laden with irons and denied fire and food. Corral supposedly reported that ‘a Duke’ (Monmouth) ‘beat him and Pull’d him by the Hair’ and threatened him with a sword, and that ‘another great Lord’ (Shaftesbury) ‘laid down a heap of Gold’ before him, telling him it was £500, and he should have it and a post in the duke’s household if he confessed. Cellier openly accused Shaftesbury of having sent his servant ‘Mr. Johnson’ to distribute bribes to ‘[set] up’ new Plot witnesses.42 Contemporaries and subsequent historians alike have singled out the earl of Shaftesbury as the animating force behind the Lords committee investigating the Popish Plot, as well as the principal leader of the ‘Faction’. Charles II, who had been sceptical of the Plot from the beginning, viewing it as a ‘contrivance’ of his enemies, confided to Gilbert Burnet his suspicions that it was Shaftesbury who

42

Elizabeth Cellier, Malice Defeated (1680), 3–4, 8–9.

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‘had set on Oates, and instructed him’.43 Danby believed that Shaftesbury was behind efforts to suborn witnesses to swear against him, noting in his memoranda that where Edward Whittaker – attorney to Shaftesbury, as well as Buckingham and other Whigs – ‘is imploy’d … hee will never want witnesses to swear what he pleases’. Amongst Danby’s papers is a letter, endorsed ‘notice of a subornation against mee in June 1679’, claiming that ‘Dr Toung hath confessed that the Earle of Shaftesbury hath solicited him to beare false Wittness against your Lordship and that he hath threatned him for refusing to do the same’.44 (Israel Tonge never made any such claim; rather, several insertions in his journal clearly dating from after the treasurer’s 1679 impeachment reveal his support of the political opposition and his conviction that Danby had conspired to suppress the Plot.)45 Shaftesbury was certainly the central villain in L’Estrange’s account, in which the earl is represented as alternately cajoling, browbeating and threatening the hapless coachman Corral and other witnesses. After trying (unsuccessfully) to bribe Corral with £500, Shaftesbury supposedly told him: ‘We are the Peers of the Land; and if thou wilt not Confess, there shall be a Barrel of Nails provided for thee, to put thee in, and roul thee down a Hill’. When Corral persisted in his refusal, the earl allegedly told him ‘Then thou shalt dye’ and promptly committed him to Newgate under heavy irons. While in prison, several of Shaftesbury’s servants supposedly told Corral that the Lords committee was empowered to ‘torment’ him if he persisted in his refusal to confess. L’Estrange also cited extensively from a deposition that Godfrey’s friend Mary Gibbon had delivered to the Tory secretary of state Leoline Jenkins several years after the fact, in which Gibbon was aggressively questioned by Shaftesbury about the paper that she had written claiming that Sir Edmund had hanged himself. Shaftesbury supposedly swore at her, ‘calling her Bitch, and other Vile Names’, saying that ‘if she would not Confess, that Sir John Banks, Mr. Pepys and Monsieur de Puy’ – the first two associates of the duke of York, and the latter his confidential servant – ‘set her on to write that Paper, she should be Torn to Pieces by the Multitude; Threatening to have her Worry’d as the Dogs Worry Cats’.46 Cellier and L’Estrange’s versions of events have been accepted uncritically by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century chroniclers such as Laurence Echard and John Lingard, the former concluding his account of the interrogations of Mary 43

Burnet, 2:168; see also The Entring Book of Roger Morrice 1677–1691, vol. 2, ed. John Spurr (Woodbridge, 2007), 355–6. 44 BL Add MS 28043, fol. 43v; BL Add MS 28049, fol. 44. In an untitled memorandum from 3 June 1681, Danby also claimed that he had received a letter from a porter at Gray’s Inn that ‘some of the Duke of Buckinghams Agents’ had ‘suborned’ one John Bury ‘to have sworne against mee’ (BL Add MS 28043, fol. 47). 45 SP 29/409, fols 5, 92. At many points in his narrative, Tonge insinuates that Danby was not relaying information he communicated about the Plot to authorities. 46 L’Estrange, 3:103–5, 3:101. Several orders for Gibbon to be summoned before the Lords committee survive in the Shaftesbury Papers, fols 44r, 66, but there is no record of her interrogation.

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Gibbon, Francis Corral and others with this scathing judgement: ‘Such were the Arbitrary Proceedings of the great Pretenders against Arbitrary Power’.47 The assumption that Shaftesbury and other court opponents strong-armed Popish Plot witnesses has gone largely unchallenged by later historians. In part this is because ‘Whig histories’ linking the efforts of parliamentary reformers with self-congratulatory narratives of progress are unfashionable; modern writers are also understandably reluctant to take up the cudgels to defend late seventeenth-century criminal investigative ethics. Early modern defendants had few legal rights, especially before the 1696 Treason Trials Act: suspects were routinely denied access to legal counsel and even pen and paper, and the presumption of innocence was honoured more in the breach than the observance. While the tales told by Mary Gibbon and Francis Corral likely grew in the telling, there is little doubt that those questioned by both the Lords and the Commons committees were aggressively interrogated and subjected to strong pressure to deliver a narrative that conformed to the agenda (if also, probably, the genuine beliefs) of their questioners.48 Whether they were actually tortured, as Cellier claimed, is another question. Late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century jurists often boasted of the fact that in England, unlike Scotland or the continent, torture was not used to extract confessions. (This conveniently excluded such barbaric English survivals as peine forte et dure, inflicted on defendants who refused to enter a plea and take their trials.) The use of such instruments of torture as the rack required a special warrant from the Privy Council, and had fallen into desuetude in the early Stuart period; the last such warrant was issued in 1640.49 Scholars have pointed out that the law similarly authorised torture only under exceptional circumstances in Scotland, where thumbscrews, the ‘boot’ and other devices nonetheless continued to be used in judicial interrogation until their abolition by statute in 1708.50 The reasons behind the earlier English abandonment of implements of torture such as the rack were as much cultural as legal, owing in part to the anti-Catholic propaganda of such sixteenth-century martyrologists as John Foxe which linked torture, cruel punishments and censorship to arbitrary papist regimes, such as that of the Catholic ‘Bloody’ Mary Tudor. (Central to later Whig attacks on James II was the fact that he had employed judicial torture while resident in Scotland.)51 47 Echard,

History of England, 3:501. See Bod. Rawl MS A173, ‘A short narrative of Samuel Atkins his case’, fol. 113; John Harold Wilson, Ordeal of Mr. Pepys’s Clerk (Athens, OH, 1972); William Smith, Intrigues of the Popish Plot Laid Open (1685), 17–18. 49 John Langbein, Torture and the Law of Proof: Europe and England in the Ancien Régime (Chicago, 1977), 139; Conrad Russell, The Fall of the British Monarchies, 1637–1642 (Oxford, 1999), 129; Michael Braddick, God’s Fury, England’s Fire: A New History of the English Civil Wars (London, 2008), 95. 50 Levack, Witch-Hunting in Scotland, 4, 21–3. 51 Tim Harris, Restoration: Charles II and His Kingdoms, 1660–1685 (London, 2005), 365–7. 48

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Nonetheless, practices that we would today view as constituting torture not only persisted in England but were normalised well into the eighteenth century: prisoners were routinely loaded with heavy irons, placed in uncomfortable positions, deprived of food, fire, blankets, etc. Psychological torture such as threats was also widely employed. After recanting his original confession, Miles Prance endured a rough interrogation by the Privy Council, in which he was upbraided as a ‘Villain and Apostate’ and threatened with, and perhaps shown, the rack. Robert Southwell’s notes make it clear that this initiative had come not from one of Shaftesbury’s allies but the lord chancellor Heneage Finch.52 It is worth noting that Finch, like Danby, had been criticised early on for not being sufficiently proactive in investigating the conspiracy. (Over-correction on the part of frightened officials was an important, if under-appreciated, dynamic driving the prosecution of the Plot.) Interestingly, even in L’Estrange’s narrative, Prance did not claim to have actually been racked, although there is no doubt that he suffered dreadfully from the cold. But the most effective interrogation tactic, then as today, may have been a sudden alleviation of the prisoner’s torments. As we shall see in the next chapter, Prance, nearly frozen to death, retracted his recantation on 11 January 1679 and delivered a full confession – a version which he would maintain until 1686 – after being revived before a fire. Even if nothing can justify their methods, it should be noted that the ‘bribe’ that Popish Plot investigators were routinely represented as offering was in fact the £500 reward offered to anyone providing information leading to a conviction in Godfrey’s death. Investigators also seem to have been following genuine leads. While Cellier and L’Estrange implied that the coachman Francis Corral was simply an innocent bystander singled out for no particular reason, in fact he had boasted in an alehouse of being a material witness in Godfrey’s murder. Matthias Fowler, who kept the Half Moon tavern in Cheapside, deposed to the Lords committee members Shaftesbury, Essex and Henry Compton that on 30 October 1678 Corral had told him ‘that he escaped the carrying Sr Edm. Bury Godfry’s body as he beleeved’, claiming that on the evening of the magistrate’s disappearance, 4 gentlemen mett him neere St Clements Church with swords and would have come into his Coach but he told them his axel tree was broke then he saw those 4 take another hackney coach & two of them get into the boxe & one of them blinded the Coachman by putting a cloak before his eyes.

Corral supposedly told Fowler’s wife that he could identify those four men if he saw them again, but then (evidently regretting his rash words) ‘slipped away without his fare for whom he wayted’.53 While L’Estrange’s narrative of Corral’s interrogation followed closely from a paper supposedly authored by 52

Bod. Rawl A136, fol. 415; HMC Ormonde, 4:494; see also entry by Robin Eagles in Ruth Paley (ed.), The History of Parliament: The House of Lords (Cambridge, 2016), 2:1026. 53 Shaftesbury Papers, fol. 23. See also State Trials, 7:1195–6, 7:1213.

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the coachman himself, Corral had refused to sign or to swear to this testimony, claiming to be afraid of incurring the ‘Lords displeasure’ and of forfeiting the £50 sureties he had given for his release. It seems likely, as K.H.D. Haley concluded, that Corral was merely someone ‘with an unfortunate propensity for telling tall stories to attract attention’, and that his account of his treatment by the Lords committee was as embroidered as his brush with Godfrey’s murderers.54 Nathaniel Thompson, in his Second Letter to Miles Prance (1682), argued that evidence that would have exonerated the Catholics from any involvement in Godfrey’s death had failed to come to light earlier because witnesses feared to come forward – not surprisingly, ‘when it is duly considered, that the two persons that first found the Body, (for no other cause) suffered much in their Persons and Estates, by a long and chargeable Imprisonment’. L’Estrange claimed William Bromwell and John Walters were ‘severely threatned’ by the Lords committee, put in irons and committed to Newgate and then recalled for questioning. Shaftesbury supposedly asked Bromwell leading questions about the ‘Great Roman Catholique’ who had instructed them ‘to find out the Body of Sir Edmundbury Godfrey’, alternately threatening both men and offering them money (again, £500). As though to emphasise that the men were simply at the wrong place at the wrong time, L’Estrange adds that, when they were on the way to alert a constable that they had found a body, they were warned by ‘one Jennings’ ‘to say Nothing on’t, but let some body else find it out, for you may bring your selves into a Great Deal of Trouble’.55 Yet, L’Estrange omits not only the fact that both Bromwell and Walters were, apparently, members of the ‘popish club’ of tradesmen who frequented the White House tavern, but that they seem to have been quick to accuse one another. Another regular, Edward Linnet, a butcher in St Giles, told the committee that one Swanwick, a waterman and victualler in the same parish and ‘a constant man at the popish clubb at the White House … was observed to be very busy & inquisitive to heare what the Coroner sayd & did upon the inquisition of the death of Sr Ed: Godfrey’. More scribbled notes in the Shaftesbury Papers suggest that other members of this club pointed fingers at one another: the earl’s secretary Thomas Stringer jotted down the surnames – ‘Mayne Blundell Swanet [Swanwick] Brand’ – of those who had been, apparently, suspiciously ‘busy to overheare the Coroner when hee sat upon the dead body’ but ‘without asking any questions how the man came to be killed’.56 Edward Jennings, whose prophetic words were quoted by L’Estrange, had also behaved suspiciously. He was thrown into Newgate in the spring of 1679 after his wife had claimed that he had brought home a ‘band’ which he ‘said … was the Band of Sir E. Godfrey’ – the famous falling neckband or cravat missing from the 54

BL Add MS 28047, fols 126–7; Haley, 474. A Second Letter to Miles Prance, in Reply to the Ghost of Sir Edmund-bury Godfrey (1682), 2; L’Estrange, 3:98–9, 99–100. 56 Shaftesbury Papers, fols 15, 372–3. 55

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magistrate’s body.57 We see, then, that while many of the people interrogated by the Lords committee about Godfrey’s death may well have been mistreated, most would have appeared nervous or guilty; many were anxious to deflect the blame from themselves to (other) Catholic acquaintances. And some, clearly, had been foolish enough to have boasted about knowing something about the magistrate’s death, improving on reports that they had heard second-, third- or fourth-hand (like Corral and the story of the four men commandeering a coach to carry Godfrey’s body) simply to exaggerate their own importance. Central to L’Estrange’s argument was the claim that the ‘Ambulatory committee’ or the ‘Cabal’ that dominated the Lords’ investigation not only ordered prisoners to be maltreated but carefully scripted the confessions they obtained. According to L’Estrange, William Bedloe and Miles Prance were ‘like a Couple of School-Boys of the same Form’, as they ‘had in Effect the very same Lesson given them’. L’Estrange claimed that ‘a Paper of Instructions’ had been brought to Prance ‘with Hints, and Minutes of the Plot’. Shaftesbury supposedly threatened him with hanging and abused him ‘for Crossing Bedloe’s Evidence’, telling him that ‘there were Great Ones concern’d; and he must discover Them … for the Little ones should not serve his Turn … reflecting upon the Queen and the Duke of York’ and ‘bidding him not to spare the King himself’. Yet at other points in his Brief History, L’Estrange seems to hedge, acknowledging that Prance had only received ‘General Lights … about Godfrey and Bedlow’ in this ‘Newgate-paper’. Prance was ‘left Miserably in the Dark, how to put Things and Things together, towards the Formalizing of a Story’, as ‘His Instructions were Short’: he knew Godfrey was supposed to have been killed at Somerset House, but was left to explain ‘in what Manner it was done’ and by which ‘persons’. While this helps explain the glaring discrepancies between Bedloe and Prance’s evidence, it does contradict L’Estrange’s insinuations elsewhere that Prance had recited a narrative that had been dictated to him.58 Interestingly, in the part of a letter reproduced in his Brief History that L’Estrange claimed Prance had sent to him in early 1688, the case for subornation was more muted. Prance there admitted that he had been ‘wrought upon … to Forswear myself’, from ‘fear of Death, and the Misery of my condition’. He claimed that Shaftesbury had vaguely promised ‘that Great Things would be done for me’, buying some plate from him and hinting his trade would prosper if he confessed. Yet Prance admitted that Shaftesbury had given him very little money – contributing only two guineas towards his legal fees. Prance wrote that, after he had recanted his confession, he had been brought before ‘Two Eminent Lawyers’, who speculated aloud that he had done so for fear ‘of Losing [his] Trade … among the Papists’, which Prance ‘took … for Hints’ for an ‘Excuse’ to 57

L’Estrange, 3:333. L’Estrange, 3:74, 3:27, 3:80, 3:73, 3:43–4. Andrew Lang believes that Prance, whose confession differed so materially from Bedloe’s, lied to L’Estrange about having been given instructions (The Valet’s Tragedy and Other Studies (1903), 86), but a more obvious explanation is that L’Estrange was exaggerating or massaging the evidence. 58

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explain why he had gone back on his evidence. This was pretty subtle as subornation goes. And while Prance wrote that he had been threatened with hanging if he ‘did not confess more and more’ and given a ‘Paper’, it is unclear whether this had included instructions.59 It seems more likely that Prance, like Bedloe, had cobbled together his confession from rumours he had heard about the Plot, implicating the ‘usual suspects’ – servants of prominent English Catholic lords (many of whom were already in custody) or shadowy Irish priests or unnamed Jesuits (who would never be apprehended).60 In 1680 L’Estrange himself had been accused of having suborned Simpson Tonge, the ne’er-do-well son of Titus Oates’s collaborator Dr Israel Tonge, to testify that the Popish Plot had been fabricated by his father. Simpson Tonge subsequently recanted his story, claiming that L’Estrange had first pressured him into delivering it and then exaggerated and misrepresented what he had said.61 In his Brief History, L’Estrange claimed that the whole affair had been a plot by his enemies to entrap him. He triumphantly reproduced parts of both a letter he had received in late 1681 from Simpson Tonge, apologising for his earlier accusations of subornation, and a petition the latter had sent to the king in which he confirmed his original story ‘that the Plot was Contrived by my Father and Titus Otes’ out of various ‘Books’. L’Estrange claimed that ‘The Design of Tong’s Plot was upon the Duke of York’, ‘the Queen’ was ‘not Spar’d’, and ‘the Late King himself more than Innuendo’d into the Conspiracy’. According to L’Estrange, Bedloe was instructed ‘by an Eminent Patron of the Cause that is now in the Grave’ (Shaftesbury) to imply that he had seen ‘a Tall Black Man’ (Charles II) standing over Godfrey’s murdered body – although, added L’Estrange with characteristic sarcasm, Bedloe ‘did Heroically Declare that he would not Name the Man’.62 Not surprisingly, the real story was much murkier, and L’Estrange’s role in it not above suspicion. Simpson Tonge claimed that one Captain Ely and several Catholic partisans working with L’Estrange had in the summer of 1680 aggressively solicited him to deliver a narrative denying the Plot.63 Ely assured 59

L’Estrange, 3:128–9. The letter is misdated as 17 January 1677/8: the correct date must be 1687/8. 60 Bedloe had first accused lord Belasyse’s servant Thomas Blesington for the murder, but this charge was later quietly dropped, presumably because Blesington had an alibi (SP 44/28, fol. 228); Prance also named Belasyse, along with Powis, Petre and Arundell (SP 29/408, fol. 176a). All four lords were already in the Tower. 61 Parliamentary Archives, HL/PO/JO/10/1/396, no. 334, Simpson Tonge’s Narrative, 10 December 1680, 9v. 62 L’Estrange, 2:111–12, 2:113, 2:112, 2:118. 63 Simpson Tonge named the king’s fireworks maker, one Choqueux, and the parents of John Lane, who had accused Oates of sodomy; he had also met directly with L’Estrange. When Ely was later thrown in Newgate as a result of Tonge’s accusations, Joseph Bennet agreed to stand surety for him, despite the fact that Ely ‘was then an utter stranger to him’, as a particular favour to L’Estrange, who told him that Ely was ‘a friend of his and an honest man’ (Bod. Rawl A136, fol. 436).

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Simpson Tonge that Godfrey had been murdered by the ‘Protestants … that they might be revenged upon the Roman Catholicks’, and that Shaftesbury was ‘chief’ of a ‘Rebellious Club … of Presbiterian Lords in the Citty who plotted the destruction of the Government’. Simpson Tonge maintained that, despite accepting Ely’s hospitality (he admitted to having been ‘seldom very sober’ in his company), he had refused to swear to accusations against his father and that the ‘Objections against the Plot’ that he wrote up at Ely and L’Estrange’s urging were speculative only, rather than based on any firsthand knowledge.64 Tonge’s credibility is dubious at best: he seems to have been a drunken sponge willing to make agreeable noises to anyone who plied him with liquor. Charles II was cautious in regard to this new evidence, supposedly telling Captain Ely that ‘he had been bitt already & soe hath his Brother’ by Popish Plot witnesses, ‘soe that he would not concerne himselfe but referred the business to the Lord Chief Justice’. Simpson Tonge claimed to have obtained an audience with Charles II in which the latter told him that ‘there was a just God who would call all mens actions to account’ and that ‘he was sufficiently sensible of the heinous crye of Innocent blood when wrongfully spilt’ – a cryptic statement from the cagey king that could be read as either an encouragement to give evidence or a warning against perjury.65 Ultimately, Simpson Tonge’s evidence was disregarded by the government – not because he would subsequently recant it, but because it was seen as fallacious from the outset. After Tonge declared to the Privy Council that the ‘plott was a forgery contrived by his father & Dr Oates’ and that the former ‘did forge the letters relating to the plot’, he asserted, upon being pressed further, that this included Coleman’s correspondence. John Robartes, earl of Radnor, the president of the Council, then asked him ‘if hee did likewise forge the letters which Coleman acknowleged to be his own hand which Question putt him to a non plus & hee looks about him as if he expected to be prompt[ed] soe hee was ordered to withdraw’.66 This breathtakingly stupid lie suggests not only that Simpson Tonge had been led to believe his story would be welcomed uncritically by the Privy Council, but that his father had never entrusted him with any information about the Plot. In his subsequent recantation, Simpson maintained that he knew nothing about Godfrey’s death, being out of town at the time, but he hinted that a man had made a ‘discovery’ to his father about the matter that Bedloe’s evidence, coming at the same time, had caused to be neglected. The later pamphlet version of Simpson Tonge’s narrative identified the man as John Wren, Prance’s lodger and original accuser. Thus, far from being a new lead, this was a confirmation of the earlier Somerset House narrative. The investigation 64

Simpson Tonge’s Narrative, fols 4, 2v. Shaftesbury Papers, fol. 147. Charles II referred explicitly to James being ‘bitt’ by Thomas Dangerfield, a protégé of Elizabeth Cellier turned Plot witness, who had betrayed his former patroness in the so-called Meal Tub Plot. 66 Shaftesbury Papers, fols 148v–149. 65

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of Godfrey’s death may have been a bottomless pit, but the current in its dark waters was circular, swirling from ‘papist’ to ‘Presbyterian’, and back again.67 If there was a Tory narrative about Whig subornation of witnesses, there was a corresponding and opposing orthodoxy about government efforts to suppress the Plot. The Whig polemicist Henry Care included a chapter in his 1681 history of the Plot exposing the ‘design of the Papists to suborn Witnesses, to oppose and vilifie the Evidence of Dr Oates and Mr. Bedloe’. Links between ‘the Papists’ and the court were implicit: Care hinted that the king’s favourite mistress, the duchess of Portsmouth, had a hand in such practices, while Titus Oates supposedly not only claimed in private that the king himself was ‘as deep in the Plot’ and ‘as arrant a Papist as his Brother’ but that he had ‘suborned Witnesses to stifle the Plot, and to throw it upon the Protestants’.68 Such accusations were made openly in the ‘secret histories’ published after the Glorious Revolution, in which Charles II and James II were portrayed as degenerate tyrants, the former ‘out-do[ing] Tiberius in dissimulation’; the latter, surpassing Nero in cruelty.69 Even in ‘real time’, as it were, the court was seriously embarrassed during the course of the investigation by several unsuccessful attempts to buy off Plot witnesses. As we have seen, Bedloe had accused Danby of trying to suborn him. Nathaniel Reading, an attorney for the Catholic lords imprisoned in the Tower for the Plot, was convicted of attempting to bribe Bedloe to retract testimony against his clients: even Roger North, whose brother Francis North had presided over the trial, acknowledged that Reading was guilty as charged. The evidence of the shorthand notes of George Treby, the chairman of the Commons Committee of Secrecy investigating the Plot, suggests that he and his colleagues genuinely suspected the court of witness tampering.70 The Catholic midwife Elizabeth Cellier, working on behalf of Lady Powis and the ‘Popish Lords’ in the Tower, was in late 1679 implicated in the ‘Meal Tub Plot’, a botched attempt to frame several leading Whigs for treason, a design in which the duke of York was believed to be complicit. In early 1681, the royalist double agent Edward Fitzharris was hired by the duchess of Portsmouth to plant a seditious libel on court opponents. This backfired when Fitzharris was himself arrested in possession of the paper and, fearing for his life, flipped to the opposition. Despite a concerted Whig effort to impeach Fitzharris so that he could give Popish Plot evidence against both Danby and the duke of York, the court moved heaven and earth to quash the affair. In fact, the speedy dissolution of the Oxford Parliament in March 1681 may have owed as much to Charles II’s desire 67

Simpson Tonge’s Narrative, fol. 7; The Narrative and Case of Simson Tonge (1681), 10. Care, 155–9, 156. See also Lois G. Schwoerer, The Ingenious Mr. Henry Care, Restoration Publicist (Baltimore, 2001); Examen, 272. 69 John Phillips, The Secret History of K. Charles II and K. James II (1690), 96, 185; Rebecca Bullard, The Politics of Disclosure, 1674–1725: Secret History Narratives (2009). 70 Andrea McKenzie, ‘Inside the Commons Committee of Secrecy: George Treby’s Shorthand and the Popish Plot’, Parliamentary History, 40, 2 (June 2021), 277–310. 68

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to have Fitzharris tried at common law and safely ‘hang’d out of the way’ as his resolution to block the passage of the Third Exclusion Bill.71 Gilbert Burnet recounted that in 1681 Charles II ‘complained with great scorn of the imputation of subornation that was cast on himself’, telling him that ‘he did not wonder that the earl of Shaftsbury, who was so guilty of those practices, should fasten them on others’. The witty king then ‘pleasantly’ cited ‘a Scots proverb’: ‘At doomsday we shall see whose a[rse] is blackest’. For all that modern readers may be less susceptible than Tories of previous centuries to the charm of the merry monarch, there is something seductive about Charles II’s moral relativism, given our own cynicism about human nature and postmodern doubts about the attainability of objective truth. But the fact that both sides distrusted each other and acted unscrupulously as a result does not change, or excuse, the fact that Charles II secretly pursued a foreign and religious policy at odds with the desires and interests of most of his subjects and (in point of view of religion, certainly) against the laws established by his own parliament. By 1678, most of the political nation had heard rumours of the king’s secret diplomacy and crypto-Catholicism; Godfrey’s murder acted as a catalyst hardening those suspicions to certainty as the investigation dragged on, and Charles II’s many subsequent prorogations of Parliament were seen as attempts to discourage further enquiries into the involvement of his wife, minister or brother in the crime. The devil of distrust had been raised long before Titus Oates swore his Popish Plot informations before Godfrey in September 1678. The chief necromancers were not the ‘Presbyterians’, or the ‘Faction’, but the royal brothers themselves. Whig suspects and oppositional secrets

If Godfrey did not commit suicide and was not murdered by the Catholics, what happened to him? We can rule out robbery: thieves would never have left so much gold and silver in the dead man’s pockets. Even if Godfrey had been murdered by robbers and his body tampered with and staged afterwards by others, those persons, even if they could have planted their own money on the body, could not have replaced the magistrate’s jewellery unless they had been in cahoots with the thieves. This notion of the earl of Shaftesbury (or any other contemporary court opponent) as a seventeenth-century Jonathan Wild or Fagin strains credulity. In the mid-eighteenth century, David Hume made the reasonable but novel conjecture that Godfrey’s killer might have had no connection to the Catholics, the political opposition or the Plot witnesses, but could have simply been 71

Roger North, The Lives of the Norths, ed. Augustus Jessop (1890), 1:203; Pacquets of Advice from Rome, 6 May 1681; John Hawles, Remarks upon the Tryals of Edward Fitzharris (1689); Andrea McKenzie, ‘Sham Plots and False Confessions: The Politics of Edward Fitzharris’s Last Dying Speech, 1681’, in Brian Cowan and Scott Sowerby (eds), The State Trials and the Politics of Justice in Later Stuart England (Woodbridge, 2021).

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someone with a personal grudge against him: ‘so active a magistrate, might, in such a city as London, have many enemies, of whom his friends and family had no suspicion’.72 In a similar vein, the historian John Kenyon, in an appendix to his 1972 history of the Popish Plot, speculated that Godfrey had been killed by a lone member of the criminal underworld, who had left the magistrate’s effects on his person to throw authorities off the trail. Kenyon believed the body could have been hidden for several days in the house of a working-class killer ‘living alone, or with a loyal wife’, who might have had to wait a few days before he could procure a cart to transport the body to Primrose Hill.73 Nonetheless, as Alan Marshall has pointed out, the £500 reward for information leading to the arrest of Godfrey’s killers, a very large sum for the time, surely would have tempted any common criminal or ordinary working person with suspicions to come forward.74 The circumstances of the magistrate’s murder – at once apparently sloppy and bizarrely overdetermined – were such that it would have been beyond the ability of a single killer working alone (even allowing for the most discreet of wives) both to carry out the crime and to keep it secret afterwards. As we have seen, Roger North’s conspiratorial Tory narrative equating Godfrey’s murderers with those who had the most to gain from the Plot must be taken with a grain of salt. Some of his innuendoes are fantastical, not to mention unprovable, like those against William of Orange.75 And, while it is undeniable that Shaftesbury used the Plot to advance his political agenda, this was, as scholars have pointed out, no more than Danby had done earlier (if with notably less success).76 Even if he could have theoretically participated after the fact in a cover-up of the crime or a misdirection of the investigation, Shaftesbury was out of town at the time of Godfrey’s death and could not have been personally involved.77 Who, then, could have been the actual murderer? We shall consider the main ‘Whig’ suspects below in turn. Titus Oates

It is only fitting that Titus Oates, the perjured witness whose false Popish Plot allegations led, directly or indirectly, to the judicial murders or deaths in prison of dozens of innocent Catholics, should head the list of suspects. He was a favourite villain of novelists, personally dispatching Godfrey in the nineteenthcentury Gothic novel Whitefriars; in John Buchan’s 1921 The Path of the King, it was Oates’s idea to hide the body and then later stage it at Primrose Hill as 72

David Hume, History of England (1768), 8:77. Kenyon, 269–70. 74 Marshall, 144. 75 Others may have arisen from personal animus or professional rivalry. Roger North, for instance, hints that the zeal with which the then attorney general William Jones prosecuted the Popish Plot was suspicious, but provides no more compelling evidence (North, Lives of the Norths, 1:69–70). 76 Marshall, 164. 77 Haley, 458. 73

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a clumsy attempt to pass a murder off as a suicide.78 The American detective writer J. Dickson Carr was sceptical that Titus Oates could have had a direct hand in the murder only because he assumed that the informer was too much of a physical coward.79 In fact, as despicable as he may have been, Oates, almost alone amongst the Plot witnesses, never recanted his testimony, and he endured his punishments for perjury in the reign of James II – whipping, the pillory and imprisonment – with a ‘constancy’ that impressed even his detractors.80 Some Catholic writers have speculated that Oates murdered Godfrey to ‘cover up changes to his deposition’ as well as out of ‘revenge’ for having communicated news of the Popish Plot allegations to Edward Coleman.81 According to the account published in 1685 by his former schoolmaster William Smith, Titus Oates supposedly boasted that he believed ‘not a Word’ of the charge that the papists had murdered Godfrey, but ‘it made well for [him]’ in that it established his bogus Popish Plot narrative as fact.82 In his 1972 study of the Popish Plot, John Kenyon confidently characterised Oates as an ‘active and practicing homosexual’, even invoking a kind of ‘homintern’ – a paedophile sex ring within the Catholic Church – to explain how Oates was able to infiltrate Jesuit ranks.83 Recent scholars have been more sensitive to the challenges of projecting modern categories onto the past, debating whether the identifiable subculture of men seeking sexual relations with men or boys that emerged in the eighteenth century was even in existence in the 1670s.84 Restoration rakes like the duke of Buckingham, rumoured to have affairs with men as well as women, are best seen as libertines or sexual epicures rather than what we might now call bisexual.85 Accusations of sodomy – often defined broadly (i.e. any of the practices that had incited God’s wrath against the cities of the plain) – were also a 78

Emma Robinson, Whitefriars; or the Days of Charles II (1844). In Whitefriars, Captain Thomas Blood, assisted by several ruffians (including Bedloe), knocks Godfrey out, not intending to kill him, but it is Oates who deliberately strangles him. In Buchan’s novel, Oates was an accomplice of Bedloe and William Carstairs, the perjured witness whose testimony sent the Catholic banker William Staley, the first victim of the Plot, to the gallows. See Burnet, 2:159–60. 79 Carr, Murder of Sir Edmund Godfrey, 321. 80 Burnet, 3:36. 81 John G. MacLeod, ‘Some Truths about the “Popish Plot”’, The Month and Catholic Review, 37 (1879), 398. 82 William Smith, Intrigues of the Popish Plot Laid Open (1685), 8. 83 Kenyon, 47, 49. 84 Paul Hammond, ‘Titus Oates and “Sodomy”’, in Jeremy Black (ed.), Culture and Society in Britain 1660–1800 (Manchester, 1996); Alan Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England (New York, 1995); Rictor Norton, Mother Clap’s Molly House: The Gay Subculture in England, 1700–1830 (Hornchurch, 1992). 85 Randolph Trumbach, ‘Sodomy Transformed: Aristocratic Libertinage, Public Reputation and the Gender Revolution of the 18th Century’, Journal of Homosexuality, 19, 2 (1990), 105–24; John Spurr, England in the 1670s:‘This Masquerading Age’ (Oxford, 2000), 185. See also Cynthia Herrup, A House in Gross Disorder: Sex, Law, and the Second Earl of Castlehaven (Oxford, 2001).

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common means of defamation in the late seventeenth century and thus difficult to untangle both from antipapist tropes and anxieties about inappropriate social mixing and the denunciation of social superiors by subalterns.86 Nonetheless, most writers agree that, given the sheer volume of rumours to this effect – after 1683, Roger L’Estrange made increasingly open and gleeful reference to Oates’s ‘train of buggering lackeys’ – Oates likely did have sex with men or boys.87 Oates was reputedly dismissed in 1676 as a naval chaplain after being caught ‘in flagranti’ with a shipmate.88 Similar incidents may have accounted for his abrupt departure from Cambridge and several public schools and Jesuit seminaries. He was in 1679 accused of sodomy by his servants Lane and Osborne, although this prosecution, bankrolled by Danby, may have been malicious. We do know that in 1675 Oates had falsely accused William Parker, his rival for the post of schoolmaster in Hastings, of sodomy with a pupil, the quarrel between their two families subsequently making its way to the Privy Council.89 Whatever Oates’s sexual orientation, he certainly had no qualms about using accusations of sodomy to advance his own interests. Was Godfrey what was once euphemistically referred to as a ‘confirmed bachelor’ and hence vulnerable to pressure or blackmail from Titus Oates, as Alan Marshall has hinted? Marshall’s speculations are informed by his discovery of the magistrate’s correspondence with his friend, the Irish faith healer Valentine Greatrakes, in the early and mid-1670s. These letters reveal Godfrey to be something of a ‘woman-hater’, writing disparagingly of female sexuality and sceptically of marriage. None of this marks him out as unusual for his time. Nor is there any suggestion in contemporary sources that Godfrey’s misogyny was rooted in anything but neo-Puritan disapproval of the sexual licence of his day, especially at court – sentiments which could easily have arisen as much from thwarted heterosexual as ‘suppressed homosexual leanings’.90 The ‘false reports’ supposedly spread by Catholics to account for Godfrey’s disappearance which so outraged his acquaintances implicated the magistrate in wholly banal heterosexual scenarios – he was ‘indecently married’ or ‘in bed with a Whore’.91 And, even if Oates had tried to threaten or extort Godfrey – and what we know of his pugnacious 86

Valerie Traube, Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns (Philadelphia, 2016), 179; Hammond, ‘Titus Oates’, 88; see also Herrup, House in Gross Disorder, 32. 87 Mark Goldie, ‘Roger L’Estrange’s Observator and the Exorcism of the Plot’, in Beth Lynch and Anne Dunan-Page (eds), Roger L’Estrange and the Making of Restoration Culture (Aldershot, 2008), 77; Hammond, ‘Titus Oates’, 88. The Arundell papers include numerous copies of depositions of witnesses swearing to Oates’s perjuries and ‘buggery’ (Wiltshire and Swindon History Centre, 2667/25/1). 88 [J. Morgan], A Letter from Amsterdam to a Friend in Paris (1679), iii. 89 PC 2/64, 21 April 1675, 408. In his initial discussions with him about his star Plot witness, Israel Tonge jogged Charles II’s memory by referring to Oates’s ‘miscarriages’ in the navy and his being ‘hardly treated’ in Hastings: ‘then the king remembered him’ (SP 29/409, fol. 118). 90 Marshall, 37–8; Marshall, ‘Correspondence, 502. 91 Tuke, 82; Burnet, 2:152; Examen, 202.

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character suggests that he was not an easy man to bully – common sense dictates that a blackmailer makes a more likely murder victim than murderer. Philip Herbert, 7th earl of Pembroke

In 1924, J.G. Muddiman published an article in the National Review arguing that the theory Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey had been murdered by Catholic agents at Somerset House was an ‘utterly ridiculous belief’; suicide was ‘equally untenable’. Rather, he declared, the justice had been murdered by a ‘private person’: the drunken and ‘homicidal lunatic’, Philip Herbert, 7th earl of Pembroke. Pembroke, who had a long history of violent and unprovoked attacks on drinking companions and hapless bystanders, had in February of 1678 knocked down one Nathaniel Cony and kicked and beat him so violently that he died several days later of his injuries. Not only did the modus operandi in this attack – and other, less lethal ones committed by the earl before and after – fit with the injuries apparently sustained by Godfrey, but Pembroke had a particular motive for hostility against the justice, who had been the foreman of the grand jury who had indicted him for Cony’s murder.92 As a peer, Pembroke not only had the right to be tried in the House of Lords – where he was found guilty of manslaughter only, a ‘clergyable’ (i.e. non-capital) offence – but was not even subject to branding, the penalty meted out to commoners convicted of this offence.93 Even this brush with the law, and the fact that benefit of clergy could only be claimed once, did not long chasten the violent earl: in August 1680 he murdered a watchman who had stopped his coach during a night of drunken revelry. Ultimately, however, after a petition was signed by twenty-four of his fellow peers, including such Whig luminaries as William Russell, the duke of Monmouth and the earl of Shaftesbury, Pembroke obtained a royal pardon even for this second homicide.94 Muddiman’s hypothesis was not only eminently plausible but convenient, promising to break the centuries-old deadlock between (forensically unconvincing) suicide and (increasingly unfashionable) anti-Catholic theories. The Pembroke thesis seemed to explain satisfactorily not only Godfrey’s injuries and the expensive candlewax, used in aristocratic homes, on his clothes, but the note that had been sent to his house the night before his disappearance. Pembroke had in November 1678 similarly summoned Charles Sackville, 6th earl of Dorset, his rival in a lawsuit, to the home of a mutual acquaintance, only to violently assault him.95 Muddiman believed that a trip to France that Godfrey had reportedly made sometime in 1678 for his health had in fact taken place around the time of Pembroke’s release from custody, suggesting that the 92

Muddiman, 138, 142, 143. Unlike a regular jury trial, the verdict in cases tried in the House of Lords was determined by majority vote. 94 Entry by Charles Littleton in Paley, The History of Parliament, 3:336. 95 Muddiman, 143–4, 139; LJ, XIII, 384. 93

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magistrate feared the peer’s vengeance.96 Even Angus Adam’s story (recounted by Lloyd) about Godfrey’s body having been found at the Dead Wall in Leicester Fields seemed to provide additional corroboration: this was near Pembroke’s town residence. Muddiman also claimed to have uncovered new evidence supporting his theory: a letter by the secretary of state Henry Coventry’s clerk, William Griffith, alluded to the body having been discovered by a butcher’s dog, and a document in the Shaftesbury Papers that indicated that this butcher, Edward Linnet, had been with Walters and Bromwell that day and, moreover, lived ‘hard by’ Leicester Fields.97 The fact that Pembroke was something of a political ally of the earl of Shaftesbury (making the latter’s ‘worthy’ list) also lends credence to conspiratorial theories in which Godfrey’s death, or at least the subsequent staging of the body at Primrose Hill and the misdirection of the investigation, were part of a larger ‘Whig’ plot. Pembroke also had a close connection to the court, being married to Henriette de Kéroualle, sister to the king’s principal mistress Louise, duchess of Portsmouth. Muddiman goes so far as to suggest that Portsmouth’s ultimate support of exclusion and the fact that Shaftesbury never pursued articles of impeachment against her, were part of a larger ‘conspiracy of silence’ in which ‘both sides’ – the court and the opposition – were privy to the secret of the identity of Godfrey’s murderer, but agreed to ‘hush the matter up’. Indeed, it was because L’Estrange had advanced so much ‘bad evidence’ in support of a suicide theory that he knew was false that Roger North ‘contemptuously ignored him in all his works, manuscript as well as printed, and does not even mention his name’.98 In his 1936 book, The Murder of Sir Edmund Godfrey, J. Dickson Carr largely adopted Muddiman’s thesis, adding several inaccuracies (such as the claim that Godfrey had been imprisoned and starved for several days before his death), but also elaborating or improving on points that Muddiman had left obscure.99 While the thesis continues to find proponents, there are a number of mistakes and many holes in Muddiman’s short article.100 He made some transcription errors (for instance, rendering ‘Waters’ [Walters] as ‘nabors’), misreading the document in the Shaftesbury Papers, which in fact indicated that Linnet had parted ways with Bromwell and Walters before they discovered the body, and was only reporting second-hand what they had told him. Far from having his testimony hushed up as inconvenient, as Muddiman claims, Linnet was interviewed and seemed to be cooperative. There is also no indication that his other source, William Griffith, had any real inside knowledge or even saw the body: his assertion that the second 96

Tuke, 52; Stephen Knight has argued that this trip to Montpellier in fact took place in 1677 (39). 97 Muddiman, 140–1. 98 J.R. Jones, ‘Shaftesbury’s “Worthy Men”: A Whig View of the Parliament of 1679’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 30 (November 1957), 232–41; Muddiman, 144, 145. 99 Carr claims that Godfrey’s clean shoes can be explained by the fact that he had had them polished, knowing he was going to the house of a peer (Murder of Sir Edmund Godfrey, 335). 100 Pembroke is the murderer in the Anthony Fowles novel Necessary Things (2008).

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wound was ‘a cross broad Wound on his Breast’ is uncorroborated by eyewitnesses. An additional claim, that Sir Edmund’s remains were embalmed, is patently false.101 While the lack of positive evidence that Pembroke was in London at the time of Godfrey’s disappearance is hardly conclusive, Muddiman’s contention that numerous contemporaries had known the identity of Godfrey’s killer and yet never divulged it is more problematic.102 It is implausible that such knowledge would have left no trace even in the private papers of people like Roger North – who did not scruple to hint that William III had ordered Godfrey’s murder. Nor is it likely that Charles II would have protected Pembroke out of concern for his mistress’s sister’s conjugal happiness: Henriette herself might have welcomed a means of getting rid of her drunken brute of a husband. But the insuperable objection to Muddiman’s thesis is the fact that the risk of reprisals from Pembroke ended with his death in late August 1683, well into the Tory Revenge. Not only would his identification as Godfrey’s killer have been most welcome to the court, but such a secret surely would have come to light, amongst other damaging revelations, when the Whigs were demoralised and divided by the Rye House Plot. In short, Pembroke is an intriguing possibility, but no more than that. The Peyton Gang

The journalist and conspiracist Stephen Knight turned his fertile imagination to the mystery of Godfrey’s death in his 1984 book, The Killing of Justice Godfrey. According to Knight, the answers to two questions – who were the ‘very honourable friends’ who had brought Israel Tonge and Titus Oates to Sir Edmund’s door in early September 1678, and why had they done so? – ‘shine a light where for three centuries there has been darkness’. As we have seen, Tonge’s journal makes it apparent that these ‘friends’ were in fact the Anglican bishops of London and Lincoln, Henry Compton and Thomas Barlow. Knight, however, in a section confidently entitled ‘The Answer’, identifies them as the so-called ‘Peyton Gang’: a group of ‘republican conspirators’ – of which Godfrey himself was ‘an extreme and active’ member – associated with the radical Green Ribbon Club. For Knight, the motive for Godfrey’s murder was ‘betrayal’ – the fact that Sir Edmund had communicated Oates’s allegations to Coleman, and hence the duke of York. While Tonge’s journal indicates that it was Danby himself who instructed Oates to accuse Coleman, Knight speculates that the other ‘gang’ members had deliberately inserted Coleman’s name in the Popish Plot articles to ‘test’ Godfrey’s loyalty – a test he failed.103 101 Muddiman,

‘Depositions about the Popish Plot’, 112; Shaftesbury Papers, fol. 9; Lambeth Palace Library, Gibson Papers, vol. 942, Letters from William Griffith to Benjamin Colinge, 17 and 22 October 1678. Griffith also mentions that a watch was found on Godfrey’s person, as does Richard Tuke (Memoires, 84); this is not corroborated by Thompson’s pamphlets or other sources. Thomas Mason claimed Godfrey had asked him the time on the day of his disappearance, which suggests he did not have a watch (L’Estrange, 3:210). 102 Haley, 458; Marshall, 168. 103 Knight, 67, 247, 253, 256.

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Alan Marshall, an expert on late seventeenth-century English intelligence and espionage, is deeply sceptical of Knight’s arguments. As he points out, ‘Sir Robert Peyton’s gang’ referred not to an actual clandestine organisation but was applied ‘scornfully’ to a list submitted to the undersecretary Joseph Williamson of JPs and deputy lieutenants of Middlesex and Westminster suspected of being disaffected with the government.104 The common denominator linking the twelve names on this list was likely not republican politics per se, but discomfort navigating the penal laws against dissenters – one of the chief tasks of the officials in question.105 Stephen Knight was not a historian, and his book is marred by several erroneous preconceptions – not least of which was the teleological assumption that opponents of Danby in 1677 must have been vehement antipapists and republicans. Even Sir Robert Peyton, who was indeed a founding member (and, later, chairman) of the Green Ribbon Club, was a complex figure who would defect to the court in late 1679. Similarly, while Knight describes Richard Adams, another member of the ‘Gang’, as the ‘Papist-hating lawyer of Lincoln’s Inn’, this does not explain why Adams was engaging in friendly conversation with Powis, one of the five Catholic peers accused by Oates, on the day of Godfrey’s disappearance.106 Could the ‘friendship’ between Adams and Godfrey have ‘stemmed’ not from ‘their mutual complicity in seditious activities’, as Knight assumes, but rather their shared interest in religious toleration? Many Catholics and Protestant dissenters, bound by a common opposition to Danby’s intolerant Anglican policies and the desire to dissolve the Cavalier Parliament that had passed and continued to uphold the penal laws, had briefly allied in the late 1660s and early 1670s; negotiations between Shaftesbury and the duke of York continued into the mid-1670s and beyond.107 While Shaftesbury and other court opponents would after 1679 commit themselves to the explicitly antipapist policy of Exclusion, other outcomes and options were possible and still under consideration in 1677 and even 1678. Knight’s book raises some good and original arguments; however, to paraphrase the apocryphal insult attributed to Dr Samuel Johnson, the original ones are not good, and the good ones are not original. For instance, Knight speculated that the secret that had cost Godfrey his life was the fact that various 104 Marshall,

41, 145, 164. 29/442, fol. 123. The names were as follows: Sir Robert Peyton (JP Westminster); Sir Reginald Foster (JP Middlesex); Sir William Bowles (JP Westminster); Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey (JP Westminster); George Welch; William Barker (JP Middlesex); Richard Adams (JP Middlesex); William Hempson; Setter Sabbs (JP Middlesex); Samuel Burk; John Baker (JP Middlesex); Charles Umphrevile. Umphrevile was one of the jurors on the trial of Green, Berry and Hill (Tuke, 105). Both Umphrevile and Peyton were members of the Green Ribbon Club. There are crosses beside those who have been removed from commission: Peyton, Welch, Barker and Burk. 106 Knight, 251; L’Estrange, 3:197; Wiltshire and Swindon History Centre, papers of Henry Arundell, 3rd baron Arundell of Wardour, 2667/25/1. 107 Burnet, 2:266; Miller, Popery and Politics, 141, Haley, 401–2; Memoirs of Sir John Reresby, 207. 105 SP

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members of the patriotic opposition were in the pay of the French king, an inconvenient truth first made public by the eighteenth-century historian Sir John Dalrymple.108 This was the very theory that had been advanced by the Tory historian Arthur Bryant in 1935 (and reiterated by J. Dickson Carr the following year) as the motive for Godfrey’s murder. Bryant believed that the magistrate either died accidentally while being tortured by ‘republican leaders’ (citing Cellier and L’Estrange for the ‘fiendish cruelty’ of ‘their proved methods of proceeding’) or was assassinated on their orders – possibly by Pembroke, but more likely by the unscrupulous informer and soldier of fortune Colonel John Scott.109 Knight also recycles Carr’s argument that Godfrey allowed himself to be drawn into a meeting with the author of the note sent to his house on the eve of his disappearance, feeling compelled, despite his trepidation, to ‘find out his fate’; i.e. verify if members of the opposition knew about the information he had leaked to (and received from) Coleman.110 Ultimately, however, no one theory can satisfactorily contain all of the different conspiratorial scenarios advanced by Knight: his argument fragments as he proposes a succession of possible killers, including Godfrey’s friend Adams, the ubiquitous earl of Pembroke, Colonel Scott and the notorious Colonel Thomas Blood, whose picaresque career involved a thwarted kidnapping or murder attempt on the duke of Ormond and the theft of the crown jewels from the Tower of London.111 The duke of Buckingham and Colonel John Scott

Titus Oates’s former schoolmaster William Smith claimed that Oates had told him, with characteristic vulgarity, that Godfrey ‘was a Cowardly Rascal, for when I went with my Depositions to him, he was so frighted, that I believe he beshit himself; for there was such a stink I could hardly stay in the Room’.112 However we may be sceptical of the literal truth of this account, it is likely enough that Godfrey was frightened by the deep waters into which he had been drawn, especially after seeing Coleman’s name in Oates’s Popish Plot articles. The dangerous secret to which Godfrey alluded to his friends he was privy was unlikely to have had anything to do with Titus Oates being perjured – something many people suspected and which, in any case, was only a misdemeanour – or even the fact that he may have been suborned by the earl of Danby. Coleman certainly could have confided to Godfrey secrets damaging to the court: we shall explore this avenue in the next chapter. But he could also have told him about the French money he had, as Barillon’s agent, helped funnel to court opponents in Parliament (although not, 108 Dalrymple,

2:158. Bryant, Samuel Pepys: The Years of Peril (Cambridge, 1935), 216. 110 Carr, Murder of Sir Edmund Godfrey, 345. 111 After receiving a pardon for the 1671 theft of the crown jewels (for reasons that remain mysterious), Blood seems to have become a court informer. In 1678 and 1679 Blood appears to have been working as an agent for Danby against the latter’s enemy, the duke of Buckingham, and can probably be eliminated as a suspect. 112 Smith, Intrigues of the Popish Plot, 8. 109 Arthur

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it should be noted, to Shaftesbury).113 The irony was that Louis XIV was simultaneously paying off both members of the political opposition and Charles II to prevent the king from reaching an accommodation with Parliament that could interfere with French operations in the Low Countries. Louis XIV’s most prominent and, arguably, most enthusiastic pensioner was George Villiers, 2nd duke of Buckingham (1628–87). He also makes a surprisingly good suspect for Godfrey’s murder. The son of James I and Charles I’s favourite and a childhood companion of Charles II, Villiers had fought as a Royalist in the Second Civil War. Mercurial, restless, ambitious and vain, he however chafed under any restraint or imagined slight, conspiring for and against Cromwell and later falling in and out of favour with Charles II. Buckingham’s dabbling with oppositional politics became more serious after 1677, when he joined Shaftesbury and several other rebellious lords in the Tower of London after invoking a medieval statute requiring annual parliamentary sessions to challenge the legality of the Cavalier Parliament. In 1678 he repeatedly solicited money from Barillon to raise his own personal army, and met secretly with Louis XIV in Fontainebleau in 1678 and 1679 to promote his schemes, requesting funds to disburse amongst members of the political opposition so that he could gain the upper hand over his Francophobic rival Shaftesbury. Buckingham’s megalomania knew no bounds: Barillon reported with bemusement that, ‘after supper’, the duke often boasted of his own claims to the English throne (his mother, Katherine Manners, was descended from a sister of Edward IV).114 In addition to covering up his secret negotiations with France, another possible motive for Buckingham to have killed Godfrey could have been to frame Danby for the crime. Before and after the magistrate’s disappearance, Buckingham and Danby had been engaged in a no-holds-barred feud, culminating in the latter’s prosecution of the duke for sodomy. Buckingham not only vigorously supported Danby’s impeachment but apparently tried to have the treasurer investigated for Godfrey’s murder. For what it is worth, there were rumours implicating Buckingham himself in the crime: in Danby’s papers is a report, originating with a scrivener named Hawkins, that Sir Edmund ‘was murdered at Wallingford Howse’ – the duke’s town residence.115 While 113 Shaftesbury

seems to have kept his hands scrupulously clean, even while such legendary figures as Denzil Holles and William Russell had secret dealings with the French ambassador Barillon, and Algernon Sidney and various ‘country’ MPs accepted bribes from him. Dalrymple, 2:158, 389; J.J. Jusserand, Recueil des Instructions Données aux Ambassadeurs et Ministres de France, vol. 2, 1666–1690 (Paris, 1929), 268. 114 Baschet 141, Barillon to Louis XIV, London, 12/22 December 1678, fol. 102v; AAE 132, Louis XIV to Barrillon, 21/31 December 1678, fol. 360; 137, 3/13 April 1679, fols 36–38v; 14/24 July 1679, fol. 66; Baschet 143, Barillon to Louis XIV, 3/13 July 1679, fol. 38. 115 BL Add MS 28043, fol. 63; Danby himself had lived at Wallingford House until October 1677, when it reverted to Buckingham (Andrew Browning, Thomas Osborne: Earl of Danby and Duke of Leeds (1913), 1:245n. The Lords committee questioned witnesses, such as John Walters, there (L’Estrange, 3:100).

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Buckingham himself did not balk at violence (most notoriously, his lover’s husband, the earl of Shrewsbury, died of injuries sustained in a duel with him), a more likely triggerman was his agent since at least 1677, Colonel John Scott. The latter was an unscrupulous and amoral rogue who had supposedly killed a page of the duke of York in the late 1660s and murdered a coachman in 1682; his false evidence landed Samuel Pepys in the Tower in 1679. Even Marshall, who has advocated the suicide theory, has acknowledged that Scott’s behaviour was suspicious around the time of Godfrey’s death: he abruptly left town on 15 October, making for the coast and fleeing the country. Intriguingly, he had been travelling under the pseudonym ‘Godfry’.116 Buckingham cast himself as a champion of the dissenters and fancied himself a demagogue who could command support in the City – pretensions which had earned him the sardonic nickname of ‘Alderman George’ from Charles II. He had cultivated disaffected merchants such as the linen-draper Francis Jenks, imprisoned in 1676 for a seditious speech against the government.117 Godfrey’s brothers may well have been Buckingham’s clients or associates, just as Sir Edmund had business dealings with the duke of York.118 Is it possible that the papers Godfrey burned on the night before his disappearance incriminated his brothers? If Michael and Benjamin Godfrey were mixed up in Buckingham’s schemes, or themselves in receipt of French bribes, that could explain their panicked reaction upon hearing from Mary Gibbon that their brother had confided to her about the Plot. While none of this constitutes positive proof, there is nonetheless a decent case to be made against the duke of Buckingham – a ‘Whig’ suspect who is however a most unlikely accomplice of his political rival Shaftesbury. The Popish Plot is now seen as a convenient political fiction that facilitated an attack on the court – including the queen, the king’s principal minister the earl of Danby and especially the Catholic heir to the throne, James duke of York. But if the Plot witnesses were clearly mendacious, the distrust – of not only papists at court, but the court itself – that lent plausibility to their accusations was real. This chapter has cast doubt on the traditional Tory narrative that Shaftesbury and his followers deliberately embarked on a campaign to spread misinformation and rumours implicating the Catholics in Godfrey’s death and to coerce, suborn and coach witnesses. For all the confabulations, denunciations and opportunist prosecutions set in motion by Godfrey’s death, chaos was just as likely as a premeditated Whig conspiracy. The fact that Godfrey was the magistrate who took Oates’s evidence was not so much the result of sinister and deeply-laid plans (as Roger North suggested) as a testament to Sir Edmund’s character: unlike other officials, who were unwilling 116

Alan Marshall, ODNB entry for Scott; Alan Marshall, Intelligence and Espionage in the Reign of Charles II, 1660–1685 (Cambridge, 1994), 240–2; SP 44/28, fol. 223a. 117 Jenks, when asked by the Privy Council who had put him up to making his speech, claimed it was his own idea, at which Charles II ‘laughingly told him that it was Alderman George who was the author’ (Baschet 133, Courtin to Louis XIV, 13/23 July 1676, fol. 32). 118 Gary S. de Krey, London and the Restoration, 1659–1683 (Cambridge, 2005), 148.

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to involve themselves in such a dubious or dangerous business, Godfrey was diligent, to the point of officiousness: ‘He was thought vain, and apt to take too much upon him’, observed Burnet.119 His contemporary biographer Richard Tuke notes that he was ‘free of access, and ready to hear the meanest persons’ in the commission of his office; moreover, such was his reputation for ‘Peacemaking’ that he was often called upon for ‘Arbitrations and composing of differences’.120 Whether out of broadmindedness or pragmatism, Sir Edmund had a wide acquaintance with both Catholics and Protestant dissenters; his correspondence with his friend Valentine Greatrakes reveals that he had extensive business dealings with the duke of York and his entourage.121 Like Alan Marshall, I agree that the key to the mystery lies in Godfrey’s personality, but I come to a different conclusion: Sir Edmund’s habits and character drove him not to suicide, but into a political morass in which he became mired. As Roger North speculated, It is possible [Godfrey] might know too much. He affected to search the Bottom of all Parties, and, it is likely, was very much trusted by diverse of them. As for Papists, he dealt by Coleman, and was in with the Republicans. Who can tell what he might know of Tong, Oates, and somebody (I wish I might say who) else?

North hinted that Godfrey might have ‘discovered’ some of the secrets to which he was privy ‘rather than his Friend Coleman should suffer by Means of any Thing as past through him’. It seemed, he claimed, as though ‘Care’ had been taken to get ‘him out of the Way, before Coleman’s Trial came on; and every one knew he did not love the Earl of Danby, who apparently abetted the Plot’. It was far more likely that ‘he might have done some Service’ for the Catholics, ‘even to the Priests who were tried for Treason’ than ‘do any Thing against, to hurt them’.122 Roger North’s accusations are both scattershot and coy, including a reference not only to Danby but probably William III as well (‘I wish I might say who’). North was not an intimate of Godfrey’s, and for all his hints, likely had no real idea of who had murdered him. But Godfrey did have friends and acquaintances whose opinions and suspicions have not received as much weight as they deserve. In particular, we should take more seriously, and literally, the fact that men like William Lloyd and Gilbert Burnet emphasised Godfrey’s tolerance for and mysterious dealings with Catholics, suggesting that they may have got him into trouble. The next chapter will turn to the question of what the people who actually knew Godfrey believed happened to him on that last Saturday afternoon.

119 Burnet,

2:152. 20, 27–8. 121 Marshall, ‘Correspondence’, 502. 122 Examen, 200. 120 Tuke,

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5 ‘Horrible Secrets … not for his Majesty’s Service’: The Evidence of William Lloyd’s Shorthand In April 1686, the Tory propagandist Roger L’Estrange, who had recently been given a warrant to reopen the investigation into Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey’s death,1 wrote to William Lloyd, bishop of St Asaph, soliciting information. Lloyd had in October 1678 been the curate of Godfrey’s parish, St Martin-inthe-Fields, and well-acquainted with the magistrate and many of his circle; he also had viewed the body and interrogated some of the leading Plot witnesses and suspects, including the three innocent men hanged for Sir Edmund’s murder. L’Estrange’s three original letters and the shorthand drafts of three of the bishop’s five replies – which have until now remained undeciphered – are housed in the Gloucestershire Archives.2 Extracts from the bishop’s responses were cited in L’Estrange’s 1688 Brief History of the Times, as though confirming the author’s suicide hypothesis. However, after successfully decoding the shorthand, using the key included with the papers and comparing text from Lloyd’s drafts with L’Estrange’s published excerpts, I was able to determine that in fact Lloyd had said very much the opposite, not only maintaining that Godfrey had been murdered, but darkly hinting that he knew by whom.3 William Lloyd is perhaps best known for delivering Godfrey’s funeral sermon and hence has a reputation as a fanatical antipapist, hardly improved by Roger North’s characterisation of him in the reign of Anne as ‘a crazy grey haired Profet’.4 His biographer Tindal Hart seems to dismiss Lloyd simultaneously 1

SP 44/336, fol. 364. L’Estrange mentions having had ‘the Honour of four from your Lordship’ in his last letter to Lloyd on 29 April 1686 (Lloyd letters, no. 80). As Lloyd subsequently responded, that brings the number of letters he wrote to L’Estrange to five. L’Estrange dated one of the missing letters as 18 April (L’Estrange, 3:85–6). 3 William Lloyd used Thomas Shelton’s shorthand system, the same as used by Samuel Pepys. Shorthand ‘rules’ differed according to the treatise or edition used and the choices and idiosyncrasies of the writer. Lloyd used many scribal abbreviations and words in longhand. There was also a key, making his shorthand easier to decipher than that of contemporaries like George Treby and Pepys, although the latter’s shorthand draft of Charles II’s escape after the battle of Worcester had been published, providing what amounted to a key. See my article, ‘Secret Writing and the Popish Plot: Deciphering the Shorthand of Sir George Treby’, HLQ (December 2021). 4 BL Add MS 32509, fol. 51. 2

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as a religious maniac who in his old age embarrassed visitors to court with his anti-Catholic and millenarian prognostications,5 and a political opportunist in his prime who ‘strove … to run with the hare while hunting with the hounds’. Lloyd was both ‘a noted latitudinarian and friend of Non-conformists’ and a court clergyman during the reign of Charles II, becoming chaplain in ordinary to the king in 1666, and bishop of St Asaph in 1680. He had also been made chaplain and almoner to the duke of York’s Anglican daughter Mary in November 1677, the same month as her marriage to the Dutch Calvinist William of Orange – of which Protestant match Lloyd, along with most of the nation, heartily approved.6 Lloyd would later become one of the ‘Seven Bishops’ prosecuted in 1688 by James II for seditious libel for petitioning against the king’s Declaration of Indulgence, which would have granted Catholics freedom of worship. Restoration latitudinarians, as William Lloyd and his friend Gilbert Burnet are generally understood to have been, were typically tolerant of and sympathetic towards Protestant dissenters but not Catholics.7 Lloyd was however a complex figure who defies simple categorisation. His papers reveal him not only to be a disciplined and erudite scholar who wrote in Hebrew, Greek and Latin (as well as shorthand), but a conscientious minister, knowledgeable about and genuinely solicitous of the welfare of his parishioners.8 If Lloyd epitomised the anti-Catholicism of most English people of his time, he also reflected the contingency of such attitudes. Like many – if by no means all – English Protestants, Lloyd differentiated in practice between individual Catholics and the larger machinery of international Catholicism, linked in the minds of his compatriots not only with the papacy, but also with Louis XIV’s increasingly aggressive and successful campaigns against Protestants 5

A. Tindal Hart, William Lloyd: Bishop, Politician, Author and Prophet, 1627–1717 (1952), 127,178–9. Lloyd told Queen Anne in 1712 ‘that the Church of Rome would be destroyed and the Papal City consumed by fire in less than four years time’ (177), flying into a passion when contradicted by the earl of Oxford about the interpretation of a passage of scripture and then whispering into the queen’s ear that ‘after four years were expired, Christ would reign personally upon earth for a thousand years’ (178); Burnet, 1:337–8. 6 Hart, William Lloyd, 15, 48. Lloyd, an enthusiastic supporter of William III, would after the Revolution be promoted to the bishoprics of Coventry and Lichfield (in 1692) and finally Worcester (in 1699). 7 According to the historian John Spurr, the originally pejorative term ‘latitudinarian’ was less of an accurate description than ‘a stigmatizing nickname’ for those Restoration clergymen, many former Calvinists who conformed during the Interregnum, who were castigated by both ‘high church’ brethren and dissenters as opportunists who trimmed their sails according to the political direction of the wind; see his ‘“Latitudinarianism” and the Restoration Church’, HJ, 31 (1988), 82. However, the term remains useful as a shorthand label for those Restoration clergy who favoured a broader, more comprehensive Church of England. 8 A study of his commonplace notebooks reveals that Lloyd used two Hebrew alphabets (Samaritan and Syriac, in which he was proficient) and an Arabic script (in which he was less adept); Margaret Crum, ‘Common-Place Books of Bishop William Lloyd, 1627–1717’, Bodleian Library Record, 9 (1977), 268.

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in the Low Countries and elsewhere on the continent. Although Lloyd had written several anti-Catholic treatises in the early 1670s, he was considered by many as too measured in his criticisms. Indeed, Lloyd’s distinction between ‘Papists of loyal and disloyal principles’ – i.e. those Catholics, including secular priests, who were open to taking the oaths of allegiance, versus hardliners and those in regular orders (like the Jesuits) – excited a real backlash against him as being too soft on popery, ‘as being not Protestant enough’.9 Lloyd’s antipapist funeral sermon for Godfrey, which explicitly identified Catholics as Godfrey’s killers, won him fame and promotion after 1678, but the glare of the Popish Plot that had thrust him into the limelight would expose him to criticism from contemporaries and later writers alike. In 1679 Lloyd was suspected of having connived with the court to have suppressed the supposed confession of guilt of the queen’s porter Henry Berry (which, in fact, did not exist). These attacks on him for supposedly not being a keen enough Popish Plot prosecutor may help to explain, if not excuse, Lloyd’s egregious failure to come forward in 1680 to discredit one of the principal witnesses against lord Stafford, Edward Turberville, whom Lloyd knew to be perjured, based on his earlier interviews with him in which the allegations were much vaguer and the peer not mentioned. Burnet tried to explain away the silence of his friend as ‘negative evidence’ that ‘could have done Lord Stafford no service’; his biographer Hart’s harsher assessment – that Lloyd held back ‘for fear … of the same public opinion which had already censured him as a lukewarm Protestant’ – is likely closer to the mark.10 However, while the vehemently anti-Catholic message of Lloyd’s funeral sermon for Godfrey could be seen as an overcompensation for the perceived moderation of the former’s earlier writings, it would be wrong to assume that Lloyd was anything less than sincere in his passionate denunciation of the papists as the authors of his friend’s death. This chapter, in addition to shedding new light on L’Estrange’s reliability as a source, will discuss what Lloyd believed in regard to Godfrey’s disappearance and death and why he and others in his circle were genuinely convinced that Catholics were implicated in their friend’s murder. It will also provide some larger context to better understand how it was that what we may see as paranoid suspicions and outlandish conspiracy theories about not only papists in general, but court Catholics in particular, seemed reasonable, even probable, to contemporaries.

9 Hart,

William Lloyd, 22, 23–4; this last quotation is from a sermon Lloyd preached to the House of Lords on 5 November 1680, cited in Hart, William Lloyd, 23. Scott Sowerby has recently challenged the assumption that most English people were relatively tolerant of their recusant neighbours: Making Toleration: The Repealers and the Glorious Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 2013), 262. Certainly, Lloyd’s experience suggests that fears of Catholic disloyalty were more generalised than has been assumed. 10 Burnet, 2:258; Hart, William Lloyd, 33.

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The correspondence of Roger L’Estrange and William Lloyd

Given what we already know about L’Estrange’s editorial practices, it should not surprise us that he cited selectively from Lloyd’s responses to his questions. It must be noted, though, that L’Estrange’s direct quotations seem to have been faithful to the original text: the small differences in wording between the excerpts and the shorthand drafts almost certainly reflect Lloyd’s subsequent changes to the fair copies which he ultimately sent and which do not survive. It only makes sense that L’Estrange would have been unlikely to do overt violence to the words of a prominent Anglican bishop, who could have immediately contradicted him in print. Even so, this may give us more confidence in the accuracy of the extracts that L’Estrange reprinted from earlier depositions of which we no longer have the originals, such as those taken by the coroner John Cooper during the inquest into Godfrey’s death in late 1678. Nonetheless, the parts of Lloyd’s responses that L’Estrange omitted often directly contradicted the arguments he advanced in his Brief History, and there are large parts of Lloyd’s replies, and one whole letter, that he ignores entirely. L’Estrange’s first letter to Lloyd, from 13 April 1686, consisted largely of a series of questions. Some were relatively open-ended: for instance, he pressed Lloyd to say more about who had told him the story of ‘Godfrey’s being found Dead with two Wounds’ several hours before the body was discovered on Thursday 17 October 1678. Others were more tendentious. L’Estrange asked ‘what Direction’ the then attorney general Sir William Jones had asked Lloyd to pass along to Michael Godfrey to pressure the coroner’s jury ‘to hasten the Verdict out of hand’. He also enquired as to what ‘State’ Lloyd had found Miles Prance in when he visited him in Newgate, asking ‘in what Manner he was Chaind, or Fetter’d … whether he had not a Chain across him to keep him down upon the Floor’, and whether he ‘did not Condition’ – i.e. make it a condition of his confession – to ‘be Eased of his Irons’. L’Estrange also asked what Lloyd ‘remembers of the Wax upon his Coat; which was only Dirt Dryed on (though taken for Wax) and so prov’d by an Unquestionable Evidence’.11 In his draft shorthand reply which also presumably served as a copy – and which was often rough and undoubtedly differed in small detail from the fair copy in longhand that was sent to L’Estrange but which has not survived (but is dated in his Brief History as being written on 16 April) – Lloyd responded sequentially to L’Estrange’s questions. In the quotations from these shorthand drafts that follow, I have rendered words or parts of words that were longhand in the original in italics; editorial insertions made by Lloyd by way of correction or additions are indicated by angled brackets. The first of L’Estrange’s questions related to Adam Angus’s oft-repeated story, widely publicised at the time by Lloyd in his funeral sermon and later corroborated by Gilbert Burnet: that Godfrey’s body had been found on the afternoon 11

Lloyd letters, no. 76, letter from Roger L’Estrange to Lloyd, 13 April 1686.

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of Thursday 17 October, several hours before the discovery was actually made. A young man in a grey suit (whom no one was ever able to identify subsequently) had supposedly burst into ‘the Shop of Mr. Chiswell a Bookseller in St. PaulsChurch-yard’ at about 1pm and announced that ‘Sir Edmundbury Godfrey is found’; and, when asked where, replying ‘In Leicester-Fields, at the Dead Wall, with his own Sword run through him’.12 Lloyd explained that this report had been relayed to him that Thursday afternoon ‘about Two or Three of the Clock’ by Mr Adam Angus, curate of St Dunstan-in-the-West, who had been browsing in the bookshop with a friend. Lloyd immediately sent a servant to make enquiries at Godfrey’s house, who reported back that the household ‘had heard of no such thing’. Later that night, when word that Godfrey’s body had been found at Primrose Hill reached him, Lloyd ‘sent again to his house’ – first, to confirm the news, and second to suggest ‘that inquiry should be made of that story that I heard in the morning [sic]’. Lloyd emphasised that ‘at that time I was wholly a stranger to his brothers’ but that Michael and Benjamin Godfrey later told him they had interviewed Angus and ‘took him with them to inquire after the authors of the report’, but were unable to find any trace of the mysterious man in grey. Lloyd added pointedly, ‘what the success was I suppose you may have heard from themselves and from Mr Angus to whom I directed formerly’.13 For although L’Estrange’s letter to Lloyd seems to suggest that the two had never corresponded before, the bishop makes it clear that he had in fact previously related the story he had heard from Adam Angus to L’Estrange, possibly closer to the actual events, prefacing his account with ‘I told you as I think in a former letter’.14 Lloyd may have been flagging L’Estrange’s invitation to give his account of Godfrey’s death as if it were for the first time as deliberate and disingenuous: a reminder that, in this new political climate, the Tory investigator and his Catholic patron James II were receptive to a new version of events – one in which Michael and Benjamin Godfrey had deliberately manufactured rumours that Sir Edmund had been murdered. In his published account, L’Estrange implied that the detail about the ‘two Wounds’ had been an ‘Enlargement’ subsequently added to the story by Michael and Benjamin Godfrey after the discovery of the body; in contrast, Lloyd emphasised not only that Sir Edmund’s 12

L’Estrange, 3:88. Lloyd letters, no. 76, Lloyd’s shorthand response, 16 April, to L’Estrange’s letter from 13 April 1686. Angus gave the time as 1pm; Angus’s friend Mr Oswald, who had been with him, 2pm (L’Estrange, 3:88–9). 14 Lloyd may also have sent L’Estrange an earlier reply to his query of 13 April, possibly just a brief note to indicate he was about to send a fuller account. L’Estrange made no reference to any such letter, but the cataloguer at the Gloucestershire Archives prefaced L’Estrange’s letter from 13 April and Lloyd’s reply from 16 April with this description: ‘Relating to Sir Edmundberry Godfrey’s murder with the Bp’s answers in shorthand to questions put to him & saying that the Archbishop of York was dead & that the see would be kept open for some time’. The fact there was no mention of the archbishop of York in Lloyd’s surviving draft suggests that perhaps a letter or part of one subsequently went missing. 13

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brothers had ‘heard from others’ about the ‘two wounds’, but that it had always been part of the narrative.15 Moreover, in several sentences not included in L’Estrange’s published account of their correspondence, Lloyd stresses that he had concluded from the evidence of his own eyes that Godfrey was not a suicide but a victim of murder. I saw the two wounds on his body when I came to view it on the Saturday morning and judged as all others did that saw them that they were both so near the heart that supposing he gave himself the first wound after that he could not possibly have given himself the other.

As we have seen in Chapter 3, L’Estrange tried to explain away the problem of the two wounds by claiming that Godfrey fell on his sword, and that the second was the exit wound. Lloyd, who had actually seen the body, categorically rejected this theory. His next sentence may have been intended as a hint that he understood but refused to follow L’Estrange’s leading questions in their intended direction, and knew full well that his views were unwelcome to the Tory investigator: ‘But this is more than belongs to your first question’.16 And, indeed, in his Brief History L’Estrange omitted these two sentences and Lloyd’s entire response to his second question, which essentially demanded that the bishop confirm his assertion that the attorney general Sir William Jones, a political ally of the Whig martyr lord Russell and a zealous Popish Plot prosecutor, had pressured the coroner’s jury to return a premature verdict of murder. Lloyd baldly refuted this, claiming that ‘I had no such direction from Sir Wm Jones nor had no [sic] conversation with him concerning this matter’. Rather ‘The direction I had was from his Majesty’ who ‘bid me go to the Coroner or send one whom I could trust to speak to him to hasten his verdict that it might be given in to the council on the morning business Sunday’.17 Lloyd accordingly asked one Mr Wilson, a vestryman and ‘intimate friend’ of Godfrey’s, ‘to get the coroner to hasten his verdict according to his Majesty’s order which was accordingly performed’.18 Lloyd also pushed back against insinuations by L’Estrange that Godfrey’s brothers had obstructed efforts to have an autopsy performed, refusing to endorse the narrative the Tory writer was pushing that Lloyd and one Dr Goodall had urged that the body be opened ‘for the common satisfaction to 15

It is possible that Lloyd himself had added the phrase, ‘with this Enlargement’ (L’Estrange, 3:87), in his final draft, but I suspect L’Estrange reworded it to introduce more doubt as to the two wounds. 16 Lloyd letters, no. 76, Lloyd’s shorthand response, 16 April, to L’Estrange’s letter from 13 April 1686. 17 Normally, there were no Council meetings on Sunday but this would have constituted an emergency. The Privy Council also sat on Sunday 29 September 1678 to continue the examination of Titus Oates and his Popish Plot allegations which had begun the previous day. 18 Lloyd letters, no. 76, Lloyd’s shorthand response, 16 April, to L’Estrange’s letter from 13 April 1686.

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show how he came by his death’.19 It was true, Lloyd acknowledged, in a section of his letter that was not referenced at all in L’Estrange’s Brief History, that he had suggested the body be opened, but not because he had any doubts about the forensic evidence. I was not as solicitous about that because I was satisfied upon the view of his body and all other evidence to be satisfied likewise that he was murdered and that not by himself and I could not think what one could expect to know more by seeing the inside of his body.

Rather, Lloyd pressed for the corpse to be embalmed after persuading Godfrey’s family, who had asked him ‘to preach at his funerall’, originally scheduled for Tuesday 22 October, to put off the service for another week so that he could better prepare his sermon. ‘The body being already in decay I apprehended it would not keep as long sweet without some such application’. However, ‘the brothers or one of them would not hearken to this proposal for he said that none had ever been opened of their family and that it was not necessary for the keeping of the body for so short a time’, especially given the desiccated state of the corpse: ‘extreme lank and empty the belly be[ing] shru[n]k up to the back as appeared to the view of all men that beheld it’.20 This description of the body was similar to that given by Lloyd in his funeral sermon for Godfrey, which had misled some contemporaries and modern writers alike into thinking that there had been a full autopsy which had determined that the stomach and bowels were empty.21 Lloyd, then, refused to confirm L’Estrange’s argument – which the latter, naturally, went on to make without any qualification in his book – that the coroner’s inquest had been subject to pressure and interference by Godfrey’s brothers and the attorney general Sir William Jones. Indeed, Lloyd hinted if there was any ‘Secret Practice, and Manage’22 it was on the part of the court, and even the king himself. Not only was it Charles II who had bid the coroner’s jury to ‘hasten’ its verdict but, in Lloyd’s last letter to L’Estrange, written on 2 May 1686, he mentions that on Saturday 19 October 1678, while he was returning to court after a discussion with Michael and Benjamin Godfrey and Dr Goodall about the possibility of an autopsy, he met with ‘Mr Jn Chace the king’s Apothecary who told me then that he was going thither’, and also believed that he ‘saw Mr Knight the king’s surgeon there or going thither’.23 None of this, of course, made it into L’Estrange’s Brief History. 19

Lloyd letters, no. 76, letter from L’Estrange to Lloyd, 13 April 1686. Lloyd letters, no. 76, Lloyd’s shorthand response, 16 April, to L’Estrange’s letter from 13 April 1686. 21 Lloyd, Sermon, 20–1; Les Conspirations d’Angleterre (Cologne, 1680), 222; John Dickson Carr, The Murder of Sir Edmund Godfrey (1936), 100; Knight, 127. 22 L’Estrange, 3:233. 23 Lloyd letters, no. 80, Lloyd’s shorthand response, 2 May 1686, to L’Estrange’s letter of 29 April 1686. 20

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L’Estrange did however include most of Lloyd’s response to his query about the sad state in which he had found Miles Prance – almost dead from cold – when he first visited him in prison, in which the bishop weakly pushed back against L’Estrange’s insinuation that Prance had made it a condition of his confession that he be ‘easd of his Irons and to be lodged in a warmer room’. Lloyd describes that during his first interview with Prance, in which the latter denied any knowledge of the Plot, the prisoner was huddling in a corner of his ‘very cold’ cell ‘wrapt in a coverlet’ and ‘seemd to have very little life in him’. The bishop thought there might have been ‘a little fire’ in the chimney but was ‘not certain of this’. Prance had told him that he would tell him ‘everything that he knew’ on his next visit, Lloyd adding but then crossing out ‘and he did then or the next day earnestly desire to be eased of his irons and to be lodged in a warmer room I do not remember that he made that a condition of his discovery’. It was early January during ‘an hard Frost’, and Prance would have understood that a confession would be rewarded by allowing him a fire. Sure enough, when Lloyd visited Prance the following day (L’Estrange specifies that this was the afternoon of 10 January 1679) the latter ‘was brought down to the Hall-fire where for a good while he did not speak a word to me perhaps he could not for he seemd to be stupifyd with cold. By degrees he came to himself and complained extremely of pain one while in his arms another while in his legs and I think in other parts till the natural heat … had prevailed. And then he seemd to be a new man’ and ‘began to open’ up to Lloyd all he claimed to know about Godfrey’s death and the Popish Plot. Lloyd acknowledged that Prance did ask ‘to be easd of his Irons and to be lodged in a warmer room’, but hedged: ‘I do not remember that he askt either of these things before his discovery but after and then and thereupon made a long confession’.24 All this (except the text deleted by Lloyd himself), L’Estrange faithfully quoted, including Lloyd’s assertion that he had not seen any chain holding Prance down to the floor – although leaving out Lloyd’s insistence that neither Prance nor anyone else had told him of ‘P’s being chained in that manner’. L’Estrange glosses the whole matter by claiming that the Newgate keeper Captain Richardson ‘had received an Order the Day before, for the Admittance of the Dean [Lloyd], so that there was both Notice and Preparation for his reception’: in other words, Prance was given a blanket and (it is implied) the chain was removed.25 We may recall that the wax droplets found on Godfrey’s clothes were seen as a key piece of evidence, suggesting the body had been in the hands of Jesuits or the servants of aristocratic Catholics, who would have used expensive white wax rather than the tallow candles customary in ordinary households or taverns. The deposition given by Godfrey’s servant Elizabeth Curtis, who had stripped the body, specified that there was ‘a great many spots of white Wax, dropped on his Clothes, and Stockings’. Interestingly, when Prance had been asked by the 24

Lloyd letters, no. 76, Lloyd’s shorthand response, 16 April, to L’Estrange’s letter from 13 April 1686. 25 L’Estrange, 3:84.

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Lords committee ‘how wax candles came to be dropped on Godfrey’s clothes’, he replied that ‘he took no notice of it; observed no wax candles to be in the room. His company had a lanthorn’ – yet another indication that, if Prance had been suborned, he had not been particularly well coached. J. Dickson Carr suggested that the wax had dripped on Godfrey’s clothes while he had been at the vestry meeting in St Martin’s church the night before his disappearance, although this does not explain how it also got on the dead man’s stockings. Alfred Marks speculated that those viewing the body in the White House had spilled wax on it, and that ‘the eye of faith’ later ‘transmute[d] the droppings of tallow candles into wax droppings’.26 L’Estrange’s explanation was that the marks were not wax at all but mud – in his Brief History citing Mrs Gibbon’s testimony that her daughter ‘shew’d her that it was only Dirt’, by flicking some off with her fingernail.27 Just as none of Lloyd’s information about the coroner’s inquest made it into L’Estrange’s Brief History, also omitted was the bishop’s sarcastic reply to this last assertion. I shall quote his response in its entirety because it is very telling as to the leading questions L’Estrange asked, and the way in which he was selective about unwelcome information (such as Godfrey’s clean shoes). Lloyd also acerbically upbraids L’Estrange for not coming forward with his claims earlier, when they could have been more easily disproved. In your 5th question you do me a great favour by telling me that that which was taken for wax upon his coat was only durt and blood so by unquestionable evidence for if you had left me to myself askt me without this I should have told you with great assurance that that which I saw upon his Coat was not durt but true wax I am sure it seemed so to my eye and as I remember to my fingers too and to the eyes of many more that observed it and no man doubted it of all them that were there present with me. I hold myself obliged to anyone that showeth me I am in an error at any time, but it had been a far greater kindness of anyone to have shown it me then upon the place before I had multiplyd it as I did, first by affirming it to his Majesty then publishing it at the funeral and then by printing it to all the world. If anyone had questioned it then the producing of the Coat with no wax upon it but only durt would have been much greater than anyone can pretend to give now at this distance of time. But pray what doth your Witness say of the stockings and shoes which the body had on when it was viewed by all that company. Upon them there was no appearance of durt where one would much rather have lookt for it. I know not how to agree the matter between the Credit of my senses of your witness but by believing that Sr E.G. had more Coats than one and that the wax which I saw was upon one Coat and your witness saw the durt upon another. 26

Sir Edmundbury Godfrys Ghost: or, An Answer to Nat. Thompsons Scandalous Letter from Cambridge, to Mr. Miles Prance, in Relation to the Murder of Sir Edmundbury Godfrey (1682), 4; Lords MSS, 52; Carr, Murder of Sir Edmund Godfrey, 151; Marks, 105. Alan Marshall has speculated that this happened during the constable’s initial intervention or at the White House (Strange Death, 110). 27 L’Estrange, 3:326.

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Figure 5. Detail of Lloyd’s shorthand response to L’Estrange’s letter of 13 April 1686 (Lloyd Papers, No. 76) In summing up his response to L’Estrange’s first letter, of 13 April (Figure 5), Lloyd took pains to spell out that he understood the purpose of the former’s leading questions: To conclude in your questions there seem to be two driven at. First to take away the Credit of Prance’s Evidence. 2ndly to make it appear that Sir Edmd Godfrey killed himself. The 1st thing I believe may be atteind without difficulty. P.[’s] Evidence I never saw how it could stand of itself and I assure you I never went about to support it.

(Of all this long summary, L’Estrange would cite only the last sentence.) Lloyd was clearly preoccupied with clearing himself of the suspicion of subornation in regard to Prance, writing – in a part of his letter that was cited by L’Estrange – with obvious defensiveness that he had warned him sternly and repeatedly about the dangers of perjury. The bishop claimed that, when Prance began to deliver a ‘long confession’, implicating various Catholic acquaintances, ‘I was afraid of him and warnd him of accusing innocent persons and bringing the guilt of their blood upon his head’.28 In another letter of 18 April, Lloyd questioned the credibility of Prance, ‘a White-Liver’d-Man of No Principles’.29 It is only fair to acknowledge that Lloyd’s apprehensions were less apparent at the time: in his account to the secretary of state on 11 January 1679, Lloyd was matter-of-fact in his reporting of Prance’s claims that one ‘Messenger’, a servant of lord Arundell, and a Catholic silversmith named Benedict Presser had conspired to free the ‘5 Lords’ imprisoned in the Tower and to murder both the king and the earl of Shaftesbury, as well as to reinstate the Catholic religion in England. Lloyd also glossed over the fact that this confession had been delivered after Prance had, literally, been brought back to life by being warmed by a fire, explaining Prance’s earlier silence as a function of his ‘Melancholy fits’.30 Yet Lloyd’s reservations about Prance’s confession were not wholly invented after the fact, in the more sceptical climate of the Tory Revenge. He seems to have genuinely had qualms about Prance’s evidence, perhaps especially after 28

Lloyd letters, no. 76, Lloyd’s shorthand response, 16 April, to L’Estrange’s letter from 13 April 1686. 29 L’Estrange, 3:84. 30 Coventry Papers 11, fol. 357. Green, Hill and Berry were not mentioned in this earlier confession.

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ministering to the men Prance later accused and who maintained their innocence to the end: Robert Green, Lawrence Hill and Henry Berry. The latter’s denials carried particular weight, as Berry had been a Protestant whose conversion to Catholicism had been recent and apparently opportunistic, in order to work at Somerset House. Burnet wrote that Lloyd ‘was much persuaded of [Berry’s] sincerity’ in his professions of innocence, thinking initially that Prance had mistaken him for someone else. In a letter written to his father, the duke of Ormond, in February 1679, the earl of Ossory mentioned that he had just seen a letter of Doctor Floyd’s [Lloyd] to my Lord of Clarendon, begging a reprieve for the fellow [Berry], but withal saying that the man absolutely denied anything of his knowledge of the matter of Sir Edmundbury Godfrey … God knows what this man may say truly, or for hopes of pardon, but I am sure Doctor Floyd’s letter seems to believe that these condemned men are innocent of that part of which they were found guilty.

In a subsequent letter, Ossory referred to ‘those unfortunate men who lately suffered’ for Godfrey’s murder as ‘altogether innocent of the part laid to their charge’.31 In other words, Lloyd – and those to whom he confided his doubts – believed that not only Berry but Hill and Green had been wrongly accused. Lloyd was at the same time suspected by less friendly acquaintances of having suppressed Berry’s confession. Lloyd explained to L’Estrange the origins of this rumour, describing how he confronted Berry with Prance’s sworn testimony that he (Berry) was one of the three men who smuggled Godfrey’s body into a room in the stables of Somerset House. He told me, Upon his Salvation ’twas False … He gave such Reasons for what he said, that I went to Prance with them immediately, and endeavour’d to Convince him that it was a False, or a Rash Oath that he had taken. He would not Yield, nor Abate, but still Persisted in it, and Affirm’d, Upon his Salvation, that All this Part of his Enformation was True. I could not certainly tell which of them had forsworn himself, though I suspected Prance much rather of the Two. But being now very sick of my Employment, I went home to my House in Leicester-fields, where Presently a Lady of Quality came in, and, having heard before that I was sent to Berry in Newgate, she, out of Curiosity, Ask’d me what I had heard of Sir E.G. I told her that I had heard That, which made my Hair stand an End: Meaning of the two Contradictory Oaths [Berry’s and Prance’s], as I should have explain’d my self if I had staid. But at That Instant I was call’d away to Whitehall.

The ‘Good Lady’ thus ‘went away with the Belief that I had heard such things from Berry of That Murder’ that ‘it was expected I should have made great Discoveries’, instead of rather having ‘Questioned all that had been made’ – as was really the case. This story, exaggerated, garbled and ‘blown about the Town’, quickly ‘enraged a Faction against me’, convinced that ‘Berry had Confess’d 31

Burnet, 2:184; HMC Ormonde, 4:325, 4:329.

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most Horrible things to me’ which Lloyd had supposedly ‘Acknowledg’d’ before going ‘to the Court’, where he was ‘Charm’d into Concealment’. Unfortunately Lloyd’s shorthand draft of his letter to L’Estrange about his interview with Henry Berry, dated 18 April 1686, does not survive, and we are obliged to rely on the excerpts reproduced in A Brief History. We shall never know what there may have been in this letter that L’Estrange chose to leave out, but it seems likely that the substance quoted by him was accurate enough, including Lloyd’s deep scepticism of Prance’s evidence: I believe, Prance can say nothing more then [sic] every one knows of the Murther of Sir E.G. Yet he is best able to confute his own Fictions concerning it, and his Word may be of some Credit in This, though of None in any thing else.32

Nonetheless, the draft shorthand letters that do survive make it very clear that Lloyd was unshaken in his conviction that Godfrey had been murdered by the papists. As Lloyd wrote: ‘ Oateses and Bedlows and Prances informations, which would make me renounce any thing that depended on their Credit, yet they have not made me alter my opinion in this’. In a few lines in which the interlining, insertions and excisions betray some degree of mental anguish (Figure 6) Lloyd remained adamant: But for the murder of Sr Edmd G. (all the world knoweth what I preached and published concerning it and I tell you finally I) am not yet changed that my opinion I believed that he did not kill himself. Who did it? I wish I were able I would surely tell you if I knew but all the world knoweth what I preached and published concerning it. That was my opinion then and I have not seen Cause to change it since.33

L’Estrange’s two follow-up letters (on 20 and 29 April, respectively) demonstrated an almost breathless disregard for the content of Lloyd’s replies, continuing to insist that Godfrey had committed suicide and rehearsing the arguments – presented, though, as certainties – that he would later publish in his Brief History. (Indeed, so confident were his assertions that the cataloguer at the Gloucestershire Archives, who could not read the shorthand, assumed that L’Estrange was responding to ‘the supposition which seems to have been suggested by the Bp that Sir Ed: Godfrey killed himself’.) L’Estrange wrote: I must beseech you to Pardon me the Freedom of assuring you notwithstanding all observations that fell under your Remarque, that the Presumptions of Godfreys killing himselfe are as Pregnant, as Numerous, and as well Back’d as ever Any were, and there wants Nothing but to Prove the very stroke it selfe. 32

L’Estrange, 3:85–6. Lloyd letters, no. 76. Lloyd’s shorthand response, 16 April, to L’Estrange’s letter of 13 April 1686. 33

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Figure 6. Detail of Lloyd’s shorthand response to L’Estrange’s letter of 13 April 1686 (Lloyd Letters, No. 76) The Enformations to the Jury carry in the face of ’em a Manifest Practice. They found him not to be killd with the Sword, because the surgeons told them there was no Bloud; and yet 6 or 7 of the Jurors sweare to Mee that there was Bloud. They found him strangled upon the View of his Neck, and yet the Common Searchers agree that they find the same Tokens with them in their Ordinary Visits of Dead Bodies. The Circle is sworn by a Surgeon to have been made by the Edge of the Collar. The Wound Enter’d under his Left Pap, and came out at his Right Shoulder, which could be no other way done, but by casting his Body upon the Weapon; And the Bones Crash’d upon the Drawing of it out. Upon the opening of his Body, if he had dy’d by the Sword his Thorax would have been full of Coagulated Cloud.

L’Estrange also rejected Lloyd’s suggestion that Godfrey’s brothers had initially concealed his disappearance because of a report that he had run off to get married, since ‘the Brothers sayd upon the very Day that Sr Edmund went away that he was Murder’d by the Papists’.34 Lloyd responded to this message from L’Estrange from 20 April in a letter which I have been unable to date, because it is not referenced at all in the Brief History. Lloyd politely objected that I cannot but take notice that the Informations you mention (I know nothing of the rest and therefore cannot tell what to say to them …) they are concerning the circumstances in which the body was found and they seem to account for some circumstances very well to show that … he had killed himself as tis presumd that he did but as to some other circumstances they seem to have been not yet considered.

Amongst ‘some other things that seem to be of great weight in this matter’ was the fact that Godfrey spoke of having been threatened. ‘What should move him to say I shall be knockt in the head and other words to that purpose (this I heard him say at two several times and I have heard that he said the same to others) some days before he was missing which was on Thursday fortnight before his fun[er]al’? – that is, Thursday 10 October, two days before he went missing. Lloyd also wrote, in objection to L’Estrange’s theory that Godfrey had committed suicide at Primrose Hill on Saturday 12 October, that on Wednesday 34

Lloyd letters, no. 78, letter from L’Estrange to Lloyd, 20 April 1686.

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the 16th, ‘as I have been told there was a pack of hounds that were hunting all over the gr[oun]d where his body was found the next day and then it was not there however it came thither afterward’. He reiterated the story he had heard from Adam Angus as worthy of further enquiry. Lloyd professed to be surprised at L’Estrange’s assertion that ‘upon the very day that Sir E. went away his brothers said he was murdered by papists’. He recalled that on Monday 14 October, Godfrey’s clerk Moor ‘came to advise with me concerning [Godfrey’s disappearance]’ which he then confided to him ‘as a secret’, but that at the funeral for a neighbour on the following day this news, and the conviction that Sir Edmund had been ‘murdered by papists’, was ‘Mutterd by some in the company’. Lloyd added that the day after this, Wednesday 16 October, Godfrey’s brothers’ attempt to obtain a search warrant from the Privy Council ‘was industriously thwarted by a great Peer in what manner the brothers themselves can best tell you[,] though it is not unknown to others that were then at the Council’. The clear implication is that this peer was the earl of Danby (the duke of York was, at any rate, not present). Lloyd then began to say more but then apparently thought better of it, writing and then scratching out ‘What should move that noble Peer to’ (Figure 7). Clearly, Lloyd harboured suspicions he felt it was dangerous to express. He made one last attempt to warn L’Estrange to tread carefully (Figure 8): I lay these difficulties before you to the end that you may not be hasty in publishing anything till you have considered all that can be said as well against it as for it[.] I assure there is no man upon the earth more willing to be undeceived than I am. (And I am not so fond of any opinion but that when I am convinced it was an error) and when I am convinct I hold it my duty to acknowledge I was in an error and to publish my acknowledgement in such a case as this is but if I am not convinced I should say nothing more than I I hope I may have leave to keep my opinion to myself for the future … unless I am commanded to declare it by one that has that authority over me …35

In both this and his previous letter Lloyd hinted that it would best serve both L’Estrange’s interests and the king’s if he (Lloyd) kept what he himself knew and suspected about Godfrey’s death to himself. But Lloyd was still more forceful, even impassioned, in warning L’Estrange away from the investigation at the conclusion of his first letter, in which it becomes clear that the two men knew each other better than L’Estrange’s original message to Lloyd implied. After acknowledging how little credence he placed in the testimony of Oates, Bedloe or Prance, Lloyd made a series of astonishingly candid statements, which I quote here at length (Figure 9), including insertions and text so crossed or blotted out that it is difficult to read, but which speak all the more eloquently to the genuine torment of the author: 35

Lloyd letters, no. 78, Lloyd’s undated draft response to L’Estrange’s letter of 20 April 1686.

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Figure 7. Detail of Lloyd’s undated shorthand response to L’Estrange’s letter of 20 April 1686 (Lloyd Letters, No. 78)

Figure 8. Detail of Lloyd’s undated shorthand response to L’Estrange’s letter of 20 April 1686 (Lloyd Letters, No. 78)

Figure 9. Detail of conclusion of Lloyd’s shorthand response to L’Estrange’s letter of 13 April 1686 (Lloyd Letters, No. 76)

CONSPIRACY CULTURE IN STUART ENGLAND

Sr E. G knew Oats and contemned him as much as you do in my hearing but he dreaded those things which he had heard from Mr Coleman though perhaps the horrible secrets he told him were nothing els but the Chimæra’s of that vain Ambitious man. I deal freely with you in saying this (and as I will still in anything that you may ask me) and perhaps I overdo it in advising you not to ravel farther into this matter[.] It will not be for his Majesties service it will but set people’s minds in a ferment by inquiring into that matter of Sr E. G.’s death and perhaps it will occasion things to be pursued which will not be for his Majesties service but what needs he this cui bono? and what need is there of this 36 no one will think much of it and what need you do more than to denying [sic] all the Evidence? That will satisfy the people as well as it would do if you had proved what I doubt you never can that Sr E. G killed himself. I would not give you this under my hand but in confidence of your justice and friendship … [for I] know that an evil man might make evil use of it and an enemy would use it so as that it might do me hurt [but] … I believe you are neither of [these,] and I hope you believe me to be as I am truly what I call myself [i.e. the subscription].37

These lines are obscure, of course, but several alarming points emerge: Coleman had confided sensitive and ‘horrible secrets’ to Godfrey; an investigation into the latter’s death would ‘not be for his Majesty’s Service’ – indeed, it would not only ‘set people’s minds in a ferment’, but would raise the (unwelcome) question of ‘cui bono’. Why was William Lloyd so wedded to the conviction that Godfrey had been murdered by papists, despite knowing his tolerance for recusants in general and his friendship for some Catholics in particular? What did Lloyd really think had happened to his friend on that fatal Saturday afternoon? What were the secrets that were so dangerous that they may have cost him his life? Royal suspects and secrets

In his 1903 book, The Popish Plot, John Pollock controversially resurrected the thesis that the Jesuits had indeed murdered Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey. Their motive, he claimed, was to protect – at all costs – the exposure of a secret so explosive that, if it had fallen into the hands of the political opposition, it would have led to the impeachment and exile, possibly even the execution, of the king’s Catholic brother, James duke of York. This secret, ‘the shadow of which’ (in Pollock’s melodramatic phrase) ‘Godfrey saw stretching across the line of his life’ in the early autumn of 1678 was ‘beyond doubt’ the fact that ‘the Jesuit congregation of April 24 had been held in the house and under the patronage of the

36

It is not entirely clear if this phrase should be here, or after ‘it will but set people’s minds in a ferment by inquiring into that matter of Sr E. G.’s death’, above. 37 Lloyd letters, no. 76, Lloyd’s shorthand response, 16 April, to L’Estrange’s letter from 13 April 1686.

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Duke of York’.38 According to Titus Oates’s bogus Popish Plot allegations, it had been at this consult – which he claimed had taken place at the White Horse tavern in the Strand – that the resolution had been taken to assassinate Charles II and commissions and plans drawn up for a Catholic coup. Thus, ironically, the Jesuits and most of the other Catholics who suffered for the Popish Plot, certainly James’s agent Coleman, could have demonstrated that Oates’s evidence was perjured; it is a testament to their fidelity to the Catholic heir to the throne that they chose to go quietly to their deaths rather than betray his secret. There is no evidence that Oates grasped the full subversive potential of his allusions to the consult: while a student at Saint Omer, he had heard that the administrative meeting held every three years by the Jesuits of the English province would take place in London, and knew the date, but almost certainly had no idea where it had actually occurred. That Coleman would have communicated this information to Godfrey after the latter had warned him about Titus Oates’s informations seems plausible, even natural. Coleman was by all accounts both well-informed and indiscreet, and surely it would have been the first thing that would have occurred to him to demonstrate the falsity of the charges. There is no doubt either that James had indeed hosted the meeting or that revelations about it would have constituted a serious embarrassment for him. After Oates’s conviction for perjury in May 1685 (on the basis of his claim to have been in attendance at this supposed consult at the White Horse tavern, when numerous witnesses attested to his being in Flanders), James II confided to John Reresby that ‘indeed ther was a meeting of the Jesuits that day [24 April 1678], which all the schollars of St. Omers knew was to be, but it was well Doctor Oats knew noe better wher it was, for was then held in St. James, wher the said King then dwelt; for’, added James, ‘if that had been understood by Oats, he would have made ill worke for me’.39 Pollock not only believed that Godfrey was murdered by Jesuits – and hence, he implied, with the at least tacit consent, if not the active participation, of the duke of York – but that the crime had indeed taken place at Somerset House and that Miles Prance had been privy to it. While Green, Berry and Hill had been innocent of the crime, Prance (or so Pollock claimed) named them to throw investigators off the trail of the real murderers, named by William Bedloe: Le Fevre (or Le Faire or Le Phaire), the queen’s confessor, Charles Walsh, a Jesuit in lord Belasyse’s household, and Charles Pritchard, supposedly another English Jesuit. The motive was not to suppress Oates’s Popish Plot informations, charges that were entirely fabricated – even if the ‘intrigues’ conducted on the duke of York’s behalf by Coleman, ‘under the guise of a demand for liberty of worship … to turn England into a Roman Catholic state in the interest of France and the Jesuits’, 38

Pollock, 153. Pollock was not the first to raise the issue of the Jesuit meeting being at St James in the context of Oates’s depositions. This is mentioned briefly in John Lingard’s History of England, 5th ed. (10 vols, 1849), 9:348, and more pointedly by Sir George Sitwell in his The First Whig: An Account of the Parliamentary Career of William Sacheverell (Scarborough, 1894), 47. 39 Andrew Browning (ed.), Memoirs of Sir John Reresby, 2nd ed. (1991), 365.

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were very real, and pursued openly after James II’s accession in 1685. Rather, the ‘dangerous secret’ to which Godfrey had alluded to friends like Thomas Wynnel was the ‘stupendous fact’ that the Jesuit consult had taken place at St James.40 Not surprisingly, Pollock’s book provoked a wave of indignation from writers, Catholic and otherwise, who handily demolished most of his arguments – many of which were in any case patently unconvincing, such as the characterisation of the pitiable Miles Prance as ‘one of the most astute and audacious of the Jesuit agents’. There was, and is, no real evidence linking the Jesuits to the crime, and no indication either that Le Fevre was the queen’s confessor or even that he existed at all; there is no record of him or Walsh being Jesuits.41 More importantly, Pollock’s central argument does not hold water: why on earth would James have confided this secret to Reresby if it could have connected him to Godfrey’s death? As Catholic apologists at the time, and many others since, have pointed out, Godfrey had been tolerant of recusants in general and more inclined to help than harm Coleman and his patron the duke of York – so much so that, in a move that baffled his Protestant contemporaries, he even tipped them off about Oates’s allegations. And if James had been reckless and ruthless enough to order or at least acquiesce to Godfrey’s murder, why not have Coleman eliminated as well? His wife’s gossipy former secretary was in possession of much more incriminating information than Godfrey could ever be: in the event, his interrogation and trial, not to mention the publication of his correspondence, was nothing short of a calamity for the duke of York and all English Catholics. It is also worth noting that Pollock took the quotation about the ‘dangerous secret’ out of context: Wynnel had deposed that, ‘upon his asking Sir E.B. Godfrey some time why he was so Melancholy; his Answer has been, that he was Master of a Dangerous Secret, that would be Fatal to him’, but ‘his Security was’ that ‘Otes’s Deposition’ had been ‘first Declar’d … to a Publique Minister’ (Danby) who had sent him to ‘Sir Edmund’. Thus the ‘dangerous secret’ related not to the Jesuit consult or Oates being perjured but to the fact that, by keeping the informations to himself for so long, Godfrey had opened himself up to a misprision (concealment) of treason charge. Not least, by destroying evidence (the mysterious papers the housekeeper reported to have seen him burning), Godfrey could have plausibly been accused of having tried to stifle the discovery of the Plot.42 Pollock’s critics have pooh-poohed the claim that the Jesuit meeting at St James had really been a secret at all, citing an allusion to it in a 1681 pamphlet attributed to the Jesuit John Warner (who replaced Thomas Whitbread as the English provincial after the latter’s execution in 1679). John Dickson Carr has even gone so far as to extrapolate from this that this news not only would not 40

Pollock, 44, 153, 150. Pollock, 166; John Gerard, ‘History “Ex Hypothesi” and the Popish Plot’, The Month, 102 (July–December 1903), 7n; Andrew Lang, The Valet’s Tragedy and Other Studies (1903), 58; Marshall, 122. 42 Pollock, 150; L’Estrange, 2:187; Marshall, 88; Lang, Valet’s Tragedy, 67–9. 41

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have surprised anyone, but that it was ‘an open and very dull secret’.43 This is something of an exaggeration, as the reference was oblique, and buried on page 44 of a ninety-four-page publication. Without naming James, the author claimed that ‘it would be an ill requital’ on the part of the Jesuits of the favour received from him, who did not refuse their meeting under his roofe, which would render him obnoxious to a violent malicious Faction. It is enough for our purpose, that by shewing the meeting was not at the white horse Tavern, we convince Oates’s Perjury in swearing it was there, & that he never was at it, seeing he knows not where it was.44

While this may have provided confirmation for anyone who already guessed that the duke of York had hosted the consult, suspecting and knowing are two different things. The lack of hard evidence provided at least plausible deniability to those loyalists who preferred to ignore such rumours and hints or to reject them as Jesuit casuistry, wordplay aimed to deceive and to sow divisions amongst Protestants. The Stuart monarchs, although by definition the head of the reformed Church of England, were particularly vulnerable to antipapist smears, descending as they did from that notorious Catholic, Mary Queen of Scots. Although the latter’s son, the first Stuart king of England, James I (James VI of Scotland), was raised a Protestant, his wife, Anne of Denmark, became a Catholic convert. And while their son was posthumously accorded the status of an Anglican martyr, during his lifetime Charles I’s preferences for Laudian bells and smells over Puritan austerity, and Arminian free will over dour Calvinist predestinarianism, opened him up to suspicions of crypto-Catholicism – mightily reinforced by his uxorious marriage to Henrietta Maria of France (aunt to Louis XIV). Unlike more discreet Catholic queen consorts such as Anne of Denmark, Henrietta Maria flaunted her religion, openly making pilgrimages to Tyburn to pray for the Jesuits and priests martyred there in previous reigns.45 Rumours that Charles II and his brother James were crypto-Catholic were rife in the 1670s, but hardly new: there had long been suspicions that they had been corrupted both by their mother Henrietta Maria’s nefarious influence and by their long travels on the continent. Indeed, in 1661, the king’s principal minister, Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon, had successfully pressed for the passage of a statute that barred anyone who accused Charles II of being a Catholic from public office.46 This 43

Gerard, ‘History “Ex Hypothesi”’, 6–12; Carr, Murder of Sir Edmund Godfrey, 319; see also Marshall, 41. 44 A Vindication of the English Catholiks (1681), 44. 45 For fears of crypto-Catholicism at court in the reign of Charles I, the classic studies are Robin Clifton, ‘The Popular Fear of Catholics during the English Revolution’, Past & Present, 52 (August 1971), 23–55; and Caroline M. Hibbard, Charles I and the Popish Plot (Chapel Hill, 1983); for the marriage of Charles I and Henrietta Maria, see Anne Hughes, Gender and the English Revolution (2012), 119. 46 Jonathan Scott, ‘England’s Troubles: Exhuming the Popish Plot’, in Tim Harris, Paul Seaward and Mark Goldie (eds), The Politics of Religion in Restoration England (1990), 117;

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did not prevent speculation: innuendoes that both royal brothers, but especially James, had secretly connived with Jesuits and other Catholic arsonists in the Great Fire of London appeared in print as early as 1667.47 In the memoirs attributed to him, James himself claimed to have converted to Catholicism in 1669. By 1670, the duke of York was regularly assuring the French ambassador Charles Colbert de Croissy that he and his wife Anne Hyde were eager to publicly declare themselves Catholics, and chafed at having to find excuses not to attend Anglican service. After the passage of the 1673 Test Act – which not only required that office-holders take the oaths of supremacy and allegiance and receive the Anglican sacrament but contained a clause denouncing transubstantiation, a central tenet of Catholic belief – James effectively confirmed suspicions by resigning his place of Lord High Admiral. He ceased taking Anglican communion in 1676, although he did not formally acknowledge himself to be a Catholic until becoming king in 1685.48 Thus James’s Catholicism was, by 1678, an open secret. And, while there may have been a difference between knowing and only suspecting a politically inconvenient fact, the line between the two would stretch to breaking point in the Exclusion Crisis (1679–81) – the showdown between the government and the opposition over religion, the succession and the arbitrary powers of the crown that Godfrey’s death had helped spark. In April 1679 the House of Commons passed a unanimous (or, at least, unopposed) resolution ‘That the Duke of Yorke’s being a Papist, and the Hopes of his coming such to the Crown, has given the greatest Countenance and Encouragement to the present Conspiracies and Designs of the Papists against the King, and the Protestant Religion’. On 11 November 1680, the day that the Lower House ordered the Exclusion Bill to be brought up to the Lords, the MP Godwin Wharton openly accused the duke of York of betraying French Protestants, conspiring to burn down the City of London, and lying about the Popish Plot. James had supposedly said in regard to Le Phaire, accused by Bedloe of murdering Godfrey, that ‘There was no such man in the World, nor about the Queen’, but Wharton claimed – without naming his source – there was a ‘Bond found, under his hand’ that proved the existence of the shadowy Jesuit. Wharton would have continued, but he was interrupted by George Saunderson, viscount Castleton, who burst out, ‘To hear a Prince thus spoke of, I am not able to endure it!’49 In June 1680, Shaftesbury Tim Harris, Restoration: Charles II and His Kingdoms, 1660–1685 (London, 2005), 166; David Cressy, Dangerous Talk: Scandalous, Seditious and Treasonable Speech in Pre-Modern England (Oxford, 2010), 217–18; 13 Car. 2, c. 1; Burnet, 1:335–6. 47 True and Faithful Account of the Several Informations Exhibited to the Honourable Committee appointed by the Parliament to Inquire into the late Dreaded Burning of the City of London (1667). 48 J.S. Clarke, The Life of James the Second, King of England, &c. Collected out of Memoirs Writ of his own Hand (1816), 2:440–1; Baschet 97, Colbert de Croissy to Louis XIV, 19/29 January 1670, fols 14v–15; 1/11 April 1670, fol. 76; Baschet 142, Barillon to Louis XIV, 5/15 May 1679, fol. 76; 5/15 May 1679, fol. 93; John Miller, Popery and Politics in England, 1660–1688 (Cambridge, 1973), 109. 49 CJ, IX, 605; Grey, Debates 7:449.

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and his supporters tried to indict James as a recusant before a Middlesex jury; in late November, the prosecution was revived, this time by London magistrates; both attempts were squelched by the court.50 The Popish Plot had created a climate in which things before only speculated about behind closed doors and in the dark smoky rooms of taverns and coffee-houses were now dragged out into the light. The open identification of James as a Catholic, which may seem to us as superfluous, being so widely known, was corrosive not only of his authority but that of the king and court generally, given the association between popery and arbitrary rule, not to mention arson and assassination plots. In the months and years that followed Godfrey’s death, there was no shortage of ‘fake news’ (like the story of the bond proving Le Phaire’s existence) seemingly confirming the worst suspicions of contemporaries. Unsubstantiated reports gained credence with repetition and the apparent corroboration of copycat rumours; the addition of new details, however fantastical, provided a kind of meretricious granularity which passed for realism. With time, too, the Plot witnesses became bolder in their attacks upon the court. Even if we know now that these witnesses were perjured, the fact that they gave their testimony under oath swayed many observers, including those on the bench.51 At the trial of the five Jesuits in June 1679, Stephen Dugdale testified that on Monday 14 October 1678 he had seen a letter from the Jesuit William Harcourt in London to Father Francis Evers52 in Tixall, Staffordshire, announcing that ‘This very night sir Edmundbury Godfrey is dispatched’. Dugdale claimed to have been worried that the crime would be traced back to them, but Evers reassured him: Godfrey ‘was a man that prosecuted persons that went to debauched houses, and it will be said to be some of them that did revenge themselves of him’. One Charles Chetwyn confirmed hearing Dugdale’s report in Staffordshire on 15 October, two days before the discovery of Godfrey’s body, and four days before the news reached the county by post.53 A 1682 pamphlet reported that another ‘four Witnesses of very good Reputation’ also corroborated this account. This story was credited all the more readily because Dugdale, the former steward of the Catholic lord Aston, came across as a genteel and plausible witness. The French ambassador Barillon even reported that Charles II told him that Dugdale’s evidence ‘seemed to him so little contrived and was full of so many realistic facts that he could no longer keep himself from believing in a plot against his person’.54 50 Harris,

Restoration, 147. Roger North, The Lives of the Norths, ed. Augustus Jessop (1890), 1:201, 1:204; Barbara J. Shapiro, Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth-Century England (Princeton, 1983), 183–7. 52 Father Francis Evers or Every was a Jesuit and a priest to lord Aston (1630–98); see Henry Foley, Records of the English Province of the Society of Jesus (1879), 5:681–2. 53 State Trials, 7:338, 341, 340. Dugdale had been more vague about the date and the author of the letter in his original deposition (Bod. MS Carte 81, fol. 512; Treby Papers, 1626). 54 Godfrys Ghost (1682), 6; Baschet 142, Barillon to Louis XIV, 16/26 January 1679, fol. 24. Charles was likely being disingenuous in order to justify his having acquiesced to political pressure to prosecute the Plot and authorise the executions of the condemned, which he had initially resisted. 51

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Not only did this testimony provide what appeared to contemporaries to be compelling proof of Jesuit complicity in Godfrey’s death but, at the trial of William Howard, 1st viscount Stafford, in late 1680, Dugdale dropped another bombshell: the motive for Godfrey’s murder. ‘Mr Evers told me, that there was a message sent to Coleman’ after he had been taken into custody as a result of Titus Oates’s accusations in late September 1678, ‘to desire him that he would not reveal what he knew concerning the plot or any thing of that nature’. Dugdale’s coy use of the passive voice naturally elicited the question of from whom that message had come. One can only imagine the reaction in the courtroom as he replied: From the duke of York. And Coleman did send word back again [that] … he had been so foolish as to reveal all to sir E. Godfrey, who had promised to keep it all as a secret. But upon the examination, of Oates, before sir E. Godfrey, as a justice of peace, he was afraid he would come in an evidence against him; and had shewn himself a little too eager, which made Coleman afraid he would witness against him. And the duke of York did send word back again, that if he would take care not to reveal but conceal it, he should not come in against him, or to that purpose: and the next news we heard was the letter that he was dispatched.55

This incendiary claim had not been part of Dugdale’s initial deposition in March 1679, nor had he mentioned it in his testimony at earlier Popish Plot trials.56 But there had long been rumours that part of Dugdale’s original evidence had been suppressed or deliberately lost.57 Gilbert Burnet, while ‘amazed to see such a thing break out after so long a silence’ and conceding that ‘it looked like an addition to Dugdale’s first evidence’, claimed the earl of Essex had told him that Dugdale, upon first being examined, had told a ‘strange story’ that the king asked be left out of his deposition, as it was hearsay and would only serve to ‘heighten the fury against the duke’. Supposedly, the duke had sent to Coleman, when he was in Newgate, to persuade him to discover nothing, and that he desired to know … whether he had ever discovered their designs to any other person; and that Coleman sent back answer, that he had spoke of them to Godfrey, but to no other man: upon which the duke gave order to kill him.58 55

State Trials, 7:1319. On 30 October 1680, Dugdale had told the House of Commons that ‘a Jesuit had told him that the Duke of York had promised Coleman that “order should be taken to keep Godfrey from doing any hurt, which in a few days was performed by his death”’ (Haley, 596). 56 In addition to testifying against the five Jesuits (Whitbread, Harcourt, Turner, Fenwick and Gavan), Dugdale had also appeared against the Catholic lawyer Richard Langhorn; the queen’s physician Sir George Wakeman; Lionel Anderson and several other priests; and John Tasborough and Anne Price. 57 Grey, Debates, 7:56–8, 77–8; CJ, IX, 584. 58 Burnet, 2:181.

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Were such accusations, like the Plot itself, only a convenient political fiction, or did people really believe the duke of York could have ordered Godfrey’s murder? While no one suspected James of personally carrying out the crime (he had an alibi, being with the king in Newmarket at the time in question), he was known to have a hot temper. John Miller tells us that in 1643, when James was a child in captivity during the Civil War, he tried to kill with a longbow a servant who had threatened to report an angry outburst to his keeper, the earl of Northumberland.59 James was, if less artificial, both more impulsive and high-handed than his studiously pleasant and easy-going brother. A manuscript libel attributed to Shaftesbury, ‘The Present State of the Kingdom at the opening of the Parliament, March 6 1679’, contrasted Charles II, ‘a man of good parts, excellent breeding, and well natured’, with his more domineering brother, whose religion ‘suits well with his temper, heady, violent, and bloody’. The anonymous writer of a similar tract, ‘A Word in Season to all true Protestants’, warned readers that they could expect no quarter from ‘a Popish Successor, one who is notoriously known to be obstinate and revengeful, yea in malice implacable’.60 James’s ruthlessness towards the Rye House plotters near the end of his brother’s reign and the ‘Bloody Assizes’, the harsh judicial reprisals for the Monmouth Rebellion early in his own, would seal his reputation for vindictiveness and cruelty. After Coleman’s arrest, and particularly after Godfrey’s murder had plunged the nation into an antipapist moral panic, few doubted that the duke of York would throw his protégé under the bus to save his own political fortunes. In his memoirs, James tried to distance himself, writing that he had warned Coleman, who was ‘generally hated’ for his over-zealousness in the Catholic cause, ‘to be careful how he carryd himself’ and ‘not to be so busy and meddlesome’. After the seizure of Coleman’s letters, James denied any knowledge of the contents of the correspondence. In a dispatch from 21 October 1678, the French ambassador Barillon reported that ‘the Duke of York and his friends are greatly worried and believe that they can redeem themselves at Coleman’s expense, but they are reckoning with people who will not be easily appeased’.61 John Miller believes that Coleman, once he saw that he was about to be hung out to dry by his master, decided ‘to drag James down with him’. When examined in Newgate on 28 October by members of the Lords committee – Shaftesbury, Winchester, Clarendon and Halifax – Coleman reportedly confessed that his letters to Louis XIV’s confessor, the papal internuncio and other Catholic agents had been written 59

James had been reacting to news that his father had been caught and imprisoned after his escape attempt to the Isle of Wight, crying out: ‘How durst any rogues to use his father like that?’: John Miller, James II: A Study in Kingship (1977), 4. 60 Quoted in W.D. Christie, A Life of Anthony Ashley Cooper, First Earl of Shaftesbury, 1621–83 (1871), 2:309, 2:314; Shaftesbury Papers, part 2, fol. 357v. 61 Clarke, Life of James the Second, 1:534; Baschet 141, Barillon to Louis XIV, 21/31 October 1678, fols 124v–125.

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with the knowledge of and under the direction of the duke of York, and that lord Arundell had been privy to all of it. Coleman then asked to speak with the king – when asked why, replying that he wanted ‘to know how farre hee might name the Duke in the businesse’. This report from the Lords committee was also corroborated by a letter from William Hulton to Roger Kenyon and the always well-informed Barillon. The latter, however, added something the English sources omitted: that Coleman claimed that the duke of York had ‘commanded him to do nothing but with the consent of the king of England’. Barillon reported that it was believed that ‘Coleman has allowed himself to be intimidated and hopes to save himself by speaking against this Prince’ (James).62 When he was questioned again by the Lords committee the next day, on 29 October, however, Coleman seemed to be getting cold feet, his responses becoming more equivocal. Despite being offered a pardon and reward for ‘making a frank Confession of what he knew’ and reminded that there was enough in the correspondence that had been seized for a treason conviction, ‘wee could not make him owne the knowledge of any thing further But that he had been guilty of a great many follyes’. He owned that the duke of York may have been ‘in the business at first’, but stressed that ‘afterwards, he himselfe had proceeded in all the Circumstances and manner of designe’ on his own initiative. And while he had on the previous day apparently ‘taken … liberty of speaking of the Kings ministers and reproaching some of them with breach of Faith and Promises with his Royalle Highnesse’, he now demurred, saying he ‘had been foolish in that as well as in other things in delivering his owne opinion And that he had not other ground for it’. By the time Coleman was questioned by a committee of the House of Commons on 4 November, ‘his noate was changed’ entirely: ‘hee would own nothing of the Duke, but sayd what hee had done was for religion[’s] sake’. He admitted to having received money from the current and previous French ambassadors for ‘Intelligence’ about proceedings in parliament and, more recently, £500 from Barillon to distribute to MPs to ‘prevent a Rupture between the Two Crowns’. However, Coleman claimed never to have disbursed the money in the Commons; rather, he maintained, he had spent it on himself.63 Coleman seems to have finally – if too late – learned the value of discretion and was now trying not to cross those who could harm him: his patron the duke; Danby (surely one of the ‘Kings ministers’ he felt had betrayed James); and various oppositional MPs (who had indeed been in receipt of French bribes).64 62

John Miller, ‘The Correspondence of Edward Coleman, 1674–78’, Recusant History, xiv (1977–78), 261–75, 272; BL Add MS 28047, fol. 8; HMC 14th Report (1894), 108; AAE 131, Barillon to Pomponne, 31 October/7 November 1678, fols 170v–171. 63 BL Add MS 28047, fols 8–8v; HMC 14th Report, 108; BL Add MS 28047, fol. 13; CJ, IX, 534. 64 One of these pensioners, William Harbord, later had the temerity to say that the Commons committee ‘prudently did not take any names from [Coleman], it being in his

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Coleman was nonetheless convicted of treason and duly executed in December 1678. At the place of execution, he declared himself a Catholic, saying that ‘he did not think that Religion prejudicial to the King and Government’, but made no other confession – although, when questioned about Godfrey’s death, he swore ‘upon the words of a dying man’, that he knew nothing about it, being ‘a prisoner at that time’. Inevitably, the duke of York was suspected of having tampered with Coleman in order to ensure his silence. According to Narcissus Luttrell, Coleman ‘was naturally of a timorous temper, and would have discovered very considerable matters to the parliament (who were then sitting) had he (as is thought) had not … [an] assurance … of a pardon from [his] r[oyal] h[ighness]’. Luttrell and other contemporaries appeared to credit the report that, when at Tyburn, Coleman ‘look[ed] very much about him when in the cart’ and to the ‘last’ questioned ‘the sherif of Middlesex’ whether ‘he had a pardon for him; which he absolutely denying’, Coleman lamented: ‘Then there is no faith in man’. The Whig pamphleteer Henry Care repeated this story in his 1681 history of the Plot, ostensibly to register his scepticism (‘no Credible person have yet appeared to testifie that they heard the words spoken; so that it must be left only as a probable rumor’) but almost certainly to further smear the heir to throne by committing the accusation to print.65 The charges were made freely in manuscript libels that circulated at the time in which the king, too, was overtly attacked. A paper dropped on the Royal Exchange in February 1679 (of which multiple copies were seized by authorities) claimed that if Coleman ‘at his very last houre … had thought of dyeing, I know above 500 men by name, that could never have thought of living; but … he perished by putting his trust in Man’. The anonymous author warned readers ‘not to split upon the same rock … for how many times hath the K[ing] promised upon his Royall word besides his many orders & proclamations to encourage the protestant Religion when you know he never meant one word of it’. A scatological rhyme reinforced the message: ‘his royall word … signifies noe more than his royall T[urd]’.66 The link between James’s Catholicism and the suspected popish tendencies of his brother was a natural one, as was the connection between the duke of York’s correspondence with foreign Catholics and the king’s own secret diplomacy. When Charles II confided to Gilbert power to asperse whom he pleased, possibly some Gentleman against the French and Popish Interest’ (Grey, Debates, 14 December 1680, 8:141). 65 The Tryal of Edward Coleman (1678), 104; Luttrell, 1:4; Care, 33. Les Conspirations d’Angleterre (1681) reports Coleman’s last words as ‘let this be an example to everyone not to put your faith in princes [aux grands] even the greatest [aux plus grands]’ (388). 66 Coventry Papers 11, fol. 366, see also fols 366–7, 384v, 476; one was seized at York. The author claims to have ‘been once of the Romish Religion’ and ‘soe unfortunate as to be nearly related to one whoe hath had too high a hand in the D[uke’s] affairs’. It is tempting to speculate that this may have been Coleman’s cousin by marriage, William Battie (see Andrew Barclay, ‘The Rise of Edward Colman’, HJ, 42, 1 (1999), 119–22), although there is no evidence that Battie had ever been Catholic.

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Burnet his apprehensions that the Popish Plot was a screen for a rebellion on the part of his subjects, Burnet had the temerity to suggest that the crisis was rooted in more informed fears about the royal brothers’ ‘foreign negotiations’, which Coleman had ‘insinuated’ during his interrogation.67 Almost certainly compromising details of the king’s secret dealings with France figured in the ‘horrible secrets’ Coleman had confided to Godfrey. All conspiratorial roadmaps lead, inevitably, to the top. Both Roger North and his brother Francis believed that the political opposition had intended all along to charge Charles II with Godfrey’s murder, Shaftesbury supposedly threatening the king ‘that if he would not pass the Bill of Exclusion’, the Irish witness ‘Bryan Heynes should have bin most powerfully produc’t’ to swear against him.68 The oppositional conviction that the papist conspiracy could be traced back to ‘our Master’ (in Titus Oates’s ironic phrase) had a kind of corollary in the loyalist popular belief that the long-suffering but all-knowing king would, in good time, reveal the truth.69 In 1683 the shopkeeper William Forster reported that one Robert Diggs had told him that there was no Popish Plot, only ‘a Presbyterian plot fathered on the Papists’. When Forster objected by asking who, then, had ‘killed Sir E. B. Godfrey’, Diggs replied that ‘the Papists did not, nor was he killed in Somerset House’, adding that ‘the King knew who killed him and where it was done, and would have made it public, but the Lord Keeper [Francis North] told him other things were to be done first’. The truth was hidden, but out there; in the words of Godfrey’s biographer Richard Tuke: ‘Time [is] the Parent of Truth’.70 The truths that would in due course be revealed would not reflect well on Charles II. In the infamous secret Treaty of Dover with France in 1670, Charles promised to declare war on the Dutch and to announce his conversion to Catholicism (the timing and the manner of which were left to his own discretion) in exchange for subsidies from Louis XIV and military aid from him against his own subjects should they revolt. These clauses were kept secret from all but James and a few of Charles’s Catholic or Catholic-leaning ministers, and the full details of the treaty were not made public until the publication of Sir John Dalrymple’s Memoirs of Great Britain and Ireland in 1771.71 However, news of the confidential provisions trickled out much earlier, reportedly first leaked in 1672 by Arlington to Shaftesbury and by James to Buckingham.72 Godfrey 67

Burnet, 2:168–9. BL Add MS 32518, fol. 13; Examen, 117. Francis North indicated (and then scratched out) that he had this account from Charles II himself, writing ‘as I have heard his Majesty