The Strange Death of Edmund Godfrey

by Alan Marshall

  Be that as it may, Edmund’s eccentricities certainly became more pronounced as he grew older and he was more set in his ways. It was alleged, for example, that he found crowds ‘very irksome’, as well he might if his hearing were impaired, and his association with men who were socially beneath him shocked many of his acquaintances. Godfrey, it was said, was often seen playing bowls in the company of footmen and ‘ordinary’ folk.39 All of this savours of a man who became merely eccentric or simply careless of the normal social conventions of the day. There were to be few individuals around him in his personal life to curb such eccentric behaviour. According to one of the social conventions of the day he was in a minority (albeit a growing one): Edmund Godfrey remained unmarried and (as far as we can tell) never sought a wife for the remainder of his life. This was not that uncommon for the time. It may be that as a younger son he was never lucky enough to catch an heiress, and this resulted in him being among the one in six men (according to the statistics) who were still unmarried in their fifties. For whatever reason, Edmund Godfrey was never ‘clogged with a wife and family’.40 One of his early biographers, desperately attempting to give Edmund the state of martyrdom he felt he surely deserved, believed Godfrey to be completely celibate. This may or may not have been true. Naturally his sexual life remains, like many another in the period, obscure, and there were women, or for that matter men, available, especially in London, had he wanted them. However, unlike his father and grandfather, Edmund Godfrey was to gain neither a wife nor children in whom he could confide or to whom he could turn for comfort when troubled.41

  With the legal world closed to him, apparently for good, Edmund Godfrey retired to the countryside to rethink his future. ‘Idleness being always a burthen to him’, and with his busy father and brothers Michael and Benjamin as his example, he needed an occupation. The outbreak of civil war in 1642 did not seem to raise the martial spirit in the 21-year-old Edmund. Indeed the Godfreys, sensibly enough, mostly seem to have remained out of the firing line over the eight-year period of the wars. We know that Edmund for one appears to have remained away from London during the war years. According to Richard Tuke, Edmund still had some ‘unhealthiness in his body’ and for this reason settled in the country.42 He was involved in a legal dispute over some land in Stevenage in 1647, but this is one of the few traces of him in the 1640s.43 Edmund’s part in the great conflicts of the era, if he ever played one, has sunk without trace. His brothers Michael and Benjamin were certainly kept out of harm’s way, and perhaps Edmund followed a similar course. Benjamin remains a shadowy figure, although long-lived – he died in 1704 aged seventy-three. A businessman for much of his life, he apparently held similar political views to his brother Michael. Indeed Michael, about whom we know much more, was eventually parcelled off into an eight-year apprenticeship under Major Thomas Chamberlain of Leadenhall Street, but in August 1647 both he and his friend Thomas Papillon went abroad as a consequence of the troubles of the Civil War in England. Michael Godfrey was employed for some seven years as a factor at Morlaix and Rouen in France. His ‘economy, attention, steadfastness, hopefulness and courtesy’ did him no harm, and in the best tradition of such tales, he returned to London and in January 1655 married his master’s daughter Anne Mary Chamberlain at St Dionis Backchurch. His apprenticeship completed in spectacular style, he was admitted to the Mercer’s Company and in 1659 called to its livery. In 1681 Michael was to be labelled by his enemies as a ‘stark Ph[anatic] but goes to church’44 and we will meet him again, but it is worth noting at this point that he apparently had a shrewd eye for business. As for Edmund in the late 1640s, the prospect of being a self-made man of business in London seems also to have had its appeal, and it is to this next phase of his life that we must now turn.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The London Woodmonger

  If [I] wo’d be throw paced [I] might be somebody among them, But I fear [I have] a foolish & narrowe conscience, and that spoyles [me] and all that use it.

  Edmund Godfrey

  A MAN OF BUSINESS

  Whether by accident or design, Edmund Godfrey found a congenial role for his talents in business. He took up the trade of woodmonger and coal merchant in London in 1650 by entering into a partnership with James Harrison (a relative of his father’s dearest friend Edmund Harrison). As they were armed with an estate of some £1,000 per annum, both men were able to invest in a yard near Dowgate in the City of London.1 Godfrey at least proved himself a skilful businessman and the business quickly prospered. His relations with Harrison were good and the eventual separation of the partners was an amicable one, made the more so by the fact that Harrison had married Jane Godfrey, one of Edmund’s sisters. It is possible that Harrison was initially the senior partner in the business and that Edmund learned his trade from him. When Harrison retired from the firm, however, Edmund took it over and made it his own. His first move was an ambitious one. Evidently seeing better opportunities in the city of Westminster (where indeed there was less competition in his new trade) than the City of London, he moved his livelihood into the parish of St Martin’s-in-the-Fields in 1659 and restarted the business as a timber merchant and coal dealer.

  On the eve of this new business venture, what sort of man was Edmund Godfrey? His person at this time was described by Richard Tuke, his first true biographer, as of a ‘stature extenuated some what above the common size of ordinary tall men: the habit of his body spare, far from corpulencie; but well set and exactly proportioned. He was indeed (as most tall men are) somewhat inclined to stoop in his going, which might be occasioned by the thoughtfulness of his musing head.’2 There are in fact available three reliable portraits of Godfrey from his years in London.3 Two were painted just after his death, but one, a portrait miniature by John Hoskins of Godfrey in 1663, aged forty, and painted when he had been in business for a number of years, is possibly the most significant. This miniature shows a rather different image from the careworn figure generated by the Whig propaganda machine after Godfrey’s death. It is a portrait of a rather heavy-faced man with curly brown hair worn down to the shoulders; he had yet to adopt the fashionable long wig. A small goatee beard sits upon his chin under a prominent nose and slightly pursed mouth. Heavy-lidded eyes stare off into the middle distance past the viewer and the face is a stern rather than a kindly one. Otherwise it is the portrait of a man of the City and of business who has made good in London, dressed as he is in a fine lace collar, lawn shirt and rich, black-patterned doublet. Whatever the truth of his personal life at the time, the fact is that Edmund Godfrey had soon made himself a noted figure in the bustling streets of London.

  London, the home of 350,000 souls in 1659, was in fact two cities, London and Westminster; or three, if one included the growing suburb of Southwark with its stews, brothels and playhouses.4 The metropolis was just emerging from the trauma of the Civil War in which it had played such a notable part, and in 1659 it was still the centre of Republican government. The Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell, who had died on 3 September 1658, was succeeded by the brief, but turbulent, rule of his son Richard Cromwell. As Godfrey was setting up shop in the parish of St Martin’s-in-the Fields in 1659, this rule was coming to an end. The year 1660 would see the ushering in of the Restoration under King Charles II, and in the streets of the metropolis there would be opportunities aplenty for the enterprising businessman.

  London in the late 1650s and early 1660s still retained a somewhat medieval flavour, although new building and the shift of the élite population to the West End in order to surround the court based at Whitehall Palace had already begun.5 Indeed the old city’s population had already outgrown its walls and was gradually spreading west, east and north. Edmund Godfrey was to take advantage of this general movement. Earlier in the century James I and his son Charles I, fearful of any metropolitan expansion beyond their control, had singularly failed in their attempt to prevent the enterprising Londoners from expanding their residences any further.

  Architectural
ly, however, it was a mixed metropolis that greeted the eye. London’s skyline was dominated by the bulky, recently refurbished, but now sadly neglected cathedral of old St Paul’s and hundreds of other obscure, and not so obscure, church spires. Below this lay densely packed houses and streets with the city clustered along the banks of the Thames from the low dens and shanty houses of the East End around the Tower to the green Moorfields stretching beyond Westminster. In the West End fine townhouses were beginning to replace the rather old-fashioned and decayed palaces once used by the aristocracy and courtiers. However, many of London’s buildings, their top storeys leaning outwards and seeming to cramp the noisy streets below, were also made of wood and represented a great fire hazard. Despite this, the metropolis remained a great and noble city. However, for the more puritan members of the population, London represented a new Babylon, a den of iniquity, merely waiting for the justice of God to fall upon it, which, they noted with some perverse satisfaction, it finally did when struck by plague in 1665 and the Great Fire in 1666. For others London took on a different guise, as an ‘immense crowd and hurry and bustle of business and diversion . . . the noble churches, and the superb buildings of different kinds, agitate, amuse, and elevate the mind . . . Here a young man of curiosity and observation may have a sufficient fund of present entertainment, and may lay up ideas to employ his mind in an age.’6

  Economically, the metropolis was something of a boom town. Finance jostled alongside industry, and the smoke and fumes of the town became such that John Evelyn was later moved to write a tract against them in his Fumifugium: or the Inconveniencie of the Aer and Smoak of London Dissipated.7 Parts of London were also densely overcrowded. With the end of the civil wars hordes of disbanded soldiers and their families came to the city, adding to the already high annual migration into the packed streets. Plague and other diseases periodically eliminated some of these dense pockets of humanity, but migrants still flocked to the capital seeking wealth, education, opportunity, a new life and invariably finding the streets paved with a less salubrious substance than gold. It was a city ‘wither all sorts reside, noble and simple, rich and poor, young and old from all places and countries, either for pleasure . . . or for profit’.8 In fact, the citizens of the capital were busy with both native and immigrant energy. In one of the great pictorial poems of the era, John Gay described London life in 1716 in a way that gives a flavour of what Edmund Godfrey would have found in his daily rounds of the metropolis.9 Among the forest of houses, alleyways, streets and courts, the smells and sounds of the great crowds of city life bustled from dawn to dusk. At dawn:

  Industry wakes her busy sons

  Full charg’d with News the breathless hawker runs:

  Shops open, Coaches roll, Carts shake the Ground,

  And all the streets with passing cries resound.10

  With the sun’s rising a raucous noise began, amplified in the narrow streets by the movement of carts, coaches and sedan chairs all crowding each other over the cobbles and making life dangerous for pedestrians.11 The different street cries also marked the seasons in the town: the ‘bounteous product of the Spring! / Sweet-smelling Flow’rs . . . And when June’s Thunder cools the sultry skies, /E’ven Sundays are prophan’d by Mackrell cries’.12 As John Gay noted, one could also:

  . . . remark each Walker’s diff’rent face,

  And in their look their various Bus’ness trace.

  The Broker here his spacious Beaver wears,

  Upon his Brow sit Jealousies and Cares;

  Bent on some Mortgage, to avoid Reproach,

  He seeks bye Streets, and saves th’expensive coach.

  Soft, at low Doors, old Letchers tap their Cane,

  For fair Recluse, who travels Drury-lane.

  Here roams uncomb’d, the lavish rake, to shun

  His Fleet-street Draper’s everlasting Dun.13

  While the city was busy during the day, other forces roamed its streets, alleys and courts at night. Honest people went home at sundown and left the night-time to those of more curious tastes and less respectability. Gay noted that the walker at night should:

  Let constant Vigilance thy Footsteps guide,

  And wary Circumspection guard thy side;

  Then shalt thou walk unharm’d the dang’rous Night,

  Nor need th’ officious Link-Boy’s smoaky Light.

  Thou never wilt attempt to cross the Road,

  Where Alehouse Benches rest the Porter’s Load . . .

  Let not thy vent’rous Steps approach too nigh,

  Where gaping wide, low steepy Cellars lie; . . .

  Though you through cleanlier Allies wind by Day,

  To shun the Hurries of the publick Way,

  Yet ne’er to those dark Paths by Night retire;

  Mind only Safety, and contemn the Mire.14

  London after dark could be a dangerous place. The era remained a violent one. Civil wars and political plots were one side of life, but Londoners in particular were prone to violence. In a vigorous, bustling city, both gentleman and commoner invariably carried weapons and were occasionally forced to use them. In the crowded taverns, inns and gin shops where both men and women gathered to drink, tempers were easily lost and passions were often ungovernable.15

  Lighting in London streets at this time was minimal. Although each householder was meant in theory to place a lantern outside their dwelling, few did so and when the sun went down shadows and darkness covered the metropolis. Thievery and violence in this darkness was commonplace. Understaffed, underequipped and untrained nightwatchmen often fought running battles with groups of drunken aristocrats. Nor were violent mobs unknown. In Drury Lane and elsewhere many of the city’s prostitutes openly plied their trade with passersby. Consequently, after dark there were a number of follies the unwary traveller could fall prey to if lost in the shadows of the city’s streets. In an age of uncertainty, crime and poverty stalked London alongside industry and pleasure. Amid the squalor and the misery, however, a burgeoning population, honest hardworking folk for the most part, were wary but enterprising citizens of the greatest city in Europe.

  Edmund Godfrey was soon among the most enterprising. He made his first home in 1659 in Greenes Lane, part of Hartshorne Lane, in the parish of St Martin’s-in-the-Fields, a relatively new area that had been developed in 1628.16 Godfrey rented a house, yard and wharf. The lane itself was a long, low, dingy passage that ran down to the Thames and lay at the south-east corner of Charing Cross, off the main thoroughfare. It is no longer in existence, having been demolished in 1760, but it can be traced on contemporary maps. It was only one of a number of narrow streets and alleyways in the area and not that notable, although Ben Jonson had apparently lived there as a child. Hartshorne Lane was known for being ‘much clogged and pestered with carts’, mainly plying their trade from the wharves and sheds at its end to Charing Cross and the Strand, and back again to the wharves.17 John Gay later described the carts:

  . . . issuing [forth] from steep Lanes, the Collier’s steeds

  Drag the Black Load; another cart succeeds,

  Team follows Team, Crouds heap’d on crouds appear,

  And wait impatient, ’till the road grow clear.18

  Hartshorne Lane, like many of Westminster’s alleys and lanes off the main road, was a gloomy affair, poorly lit, airless and narrow, although still densely inhabited. It was caught between the palatial surroundings of Northumberland House, with its once fashionable architecture, courts and gardens, and the rising clamour of Hungerford market, selling its wares of fruit and vegetables – although the latter had recently been losing business to the much more profitable Covent Garden on the other side of the Strand.19 A number of alleys and courts led into and out of the lane, and its residents numbered the occasional professional (two doctors in 1663), small tradesmen, businessmen, carpenters, bricklayers, stone masons and cordwainers, most of whom had connections with the royal palace of Whitehall, which lay just past Charing Cross.20 Many tenants lived in form
er sheds and warehouses now converted into houses, or in the more old-fashioned brick houses and numerous courts. Being enterprising souls, all of them took some care to build further additions to their property, with or without the permission of the local landlord. The landlord with overall responsibility for the area was the Hospital of the Holy and Undivided Trinity of East Greenwich, founded in 1614 by none other than Thomas Godfrey’s old patron, Henry Howard, Earl of Northampton. Northampton having died in 1614, the hospital’s trustees, the Worshipful Company of Mercers took over. The company numbered among its ranks Michael Godfrey and his good friend Thomas Papillon.21 An inn called the Christopher had also once stood in the lane and this large establishment had originally been the reason for the lane’s existence.

  Sometime before 1660 the wharf and timberyard at the foot of the lane came under the control of Robert Scawen of Horton Place, Buckinghamshire. His twenty-one-year lease on the wharf and the adjoining tenement he promptly let out to Edmund Godfrey. Scawen died in 1669, but not before assigning the lease to his tenant. In fact, Godfrey’s home was a ‘very faire new brick house’ in 1663, no doubt long and thin as was the fashion of its neighbours of the day. It was still standing in 1848 and had (ironically enough considering its former owner’s eventual fate) been turned into a police station at some point.22 Godfrey, by 1663 an independent, middle-aged bachelor, lived and traded there, although he was never far from his relatives. For a time James Harrison and his new wife were to live with him in the house, and his brothers Michael and Benjamin were also trading not far away in the City of London.23 Like his neighbours, Edmund Godfrey eventually undertook some of his own building work in the area in 1664 and 1671. In 1671 the result evidently annoyed his neighbour Mrs Brocas so much that she made a complaint. She claimed that the work allowed the carriage of ‘dung and [the] running of horse piss from . . . [Godfrey’s] stable through a door and a passage which he hath lately made through a brick wall which was built for separation’.24 Given Godfey’s connections with the landlords, Mrs Brocas complained in vain and she lost her case. In any event she soon had other matters to think about, for her husband fell into debt and by May 1673 he was lodged in the King’s Bench prison. By November 1677 their tenement was empty and in January 1678 their lease too was granted to Edmund Godfrey.25