The Strange Death of Edmund Godfrey

by Alan Marshall

  While discussing the court and parliament in his letters, Godfrey’s political views were laid bare. As with many another magistrate, Godfrey’s great fears were of division, disorder and factionalism. He feared the way in which the political wind was blowing and he was certainly aware of the manoeuvres that were taking place in the 1670s towards a French alliance and another Dutch war. He not only commented upon the visit to Dover by the court in 1670, but was also apparently in attendance himself for a while as courtiers trailed behind the king to the south-east coast of England. Godfrey believed that the purpose for the visit by Madame, Charles II’s sister Henrietta Maria, was, ‘besides Mistresses & pleasures . . . to try if she can prevaile with our K[ing] to relinquish the Dutch interests & adhere to the French in his designs in Flanders’.75

  For the great fear from abroad was of the rising power of France. The ambitions of Louis XIV and his nation had been attracting critical comments in Godfrey’s circle for some time. In the London business community both Michael and Benjamin Godfrey apparently shared this view. These men were part of a group who believed that the Crown’s pro-French policies were damaging to both trade and religion. Indeed, Michael Godfrey took a prominent role in opposing these policies in the 1670s, expressing his dislike not only upon economic but also political grounds. Together with a number of other City merchants, on 24 November 1674 Michael signed the ‘Scheme of Trade’ which complained of the inequitable state of Anglo-French economic relations.76 Michael’s most notable and longstanding friendship in the City was with Thomas Papillon, with whom, as we have seen, he had travelled to France in 1647. Papillon was to have close links with Antony Ashley Cooper, the Earl of Shaftesbury, among others, but was also to be prominent among the City Whigs in the early 1680s. Indeed, as we shall see, Edmund’s mysterious death may even have assisted his brother’s rise among such men. The role, which Michael was eagerly to seize as kinsman to the ‘protestant martyr’, certainly did nothing to harm his interests, and in February 1680 he was even to give a dinner in memory of his dead brother to those arch rogues Titus Oates and William Bedloe.77

  At home Godfrey’s own fears extended to extremists in religion, whether ‘fanaticks’ or papists. Despite these fears, he was not in favour of persecution of either group and disliked what he saw as the purge of the Commission of the Peace in order to put the penal laws into effect. Indeed, he expressed some sympathy for the Quakers and their sufferings.78

  The key elements that emerge from Godfrey’s letters were those of discipline and good order in the home, in church, in the street (where he perceived poverty to be the gravest problem), and in politics: with discipline and good order would come freedom to worship. As the correspondence continued, he revealed that his greatest fear was that the court’s policies at this time (a mixture of persecution and liberality towards dissenters and Roman Catholics) would bring disorder and dissolution into the land. At the same time, for this man of contradictory impulses, the persecution of dissenters and recusants as scapegoats for the faults of court was not the answer to public disorder and a breakdown in discipline. Politically, Edmund Godfrey remained a man of contradictions, desiring strong government but no persecution to achieve it. He also had some unusual connections in the City and among the opposition. His activities as a merchant and his political beliefs apparently led him to drift towards those hostile to the greatest power in the court at this time, namely, Sir Thomas Osborne, Earl of Danby.

  In 1676–7 Godfrey’s name had been seriously linked for the first time with Sir Robert Peyton and his ‘gang’. The term ‘gang’ was in fact a misleading one. It was first used scornfully by Sir John Robinson in a letter to Sir Joseph Williamson, the Secretary of State, and has deceived some historians into thinking that it referred to a group of secret plotters. In fact, these men can be seen as part of the growing opposition to the policies of Danby and Charles II in the 1670s that cried ‘up against France, against popery . . .[and the] invasion of liberty’.79 Some members of this group were to be excluded from the Commission of the Peace as a result of their activities in 1675–7; two of them, Sir Robert Peyton and Charles Umpherville, were to be associated with the notorious Green Ribbon Club, one of a series of political clubs established during the Exclusion Crisis of 1679–83 that served as venues for meetings of the ‘opposition’. Godfrey was apparently friendly towards these men and partial to some of their ideas, although he was not removed from the Commission of the Peace in 1675–7. (In fact, the only time he was out of the commission was from October 1669 to May 1671, largely because of the offence he had caused the king in trying to arrest his physician, Sir Alexander Fraser, for debt) Godfrey’s links with Peyton were soon noted by the court and cannot have done him much good. Indeed, upon hearing of the magistrate’s death both Charles II and his brother James, Duke of York, who had good reason to be hostile to potential Republicans at the best of times, were openly to disparage Godfrey as a ‘fanatique’. This may be taken as a sure sign of their belief in his poor choice of company in the 1670s. On the other hand, Peyton himself was to switch sides in the early 1680s and become a ‘fallen angel’ among the Whigs in assisting Mrs Elizabeth Cellier, the Roman Catholic midwife, with her designs.80

  Edmund Godfrey was also linked to these men by the wrangles connecting others in London in the mid-1670s. As a result of the Dutch war of 1672–4, there had been increasing disagreement both in parliament and in the Common Council of the City, where Peyton himself had been prominent, over whether parliament should be dissolved and a new election called in order to save the nation from French influence. After a rousing speech by Francis Jenks to the Common Council on 2 June 1676, Charles II and Danby had attempted to wrest the London and Middlesex Commission of the Peace, as well as the City government, back from their opponents.81 Edmund Godfrey was almost certainly involved in these matters, even if only peripherally. He was not only a merchant but he had by now returned to the Commission of the Peace. He feared France and had openly disagreed with a court with whose dealings he had expressed some distaste both in his letters to Greatrakes and in person to the gossipy cleric Gilbert Burnet.82 In short, Edmund Godfrey showed all the signs of increasing opposition to the court shared by his fellow merchants, and is all too likely to have been dabbling in opposition politics; not as deeply as his brother Michael perhaps, but sufficiently to have been noted by the court and for his name to have found its way on to its lists. In fact, had he not died so mysteriously in 1678, Edmund would probably in time have drifted into full opposition. Or perhaps not, for among the most notable characteristics of Godfrey were his contradictions. As we shall see, he had also retained a friendship with a number of Roman Catholic acquaintances such as John Grove, who lived in Southwark, and the notorious gossip and self-styled agent of France, Edward Coleman. This contradiction doubtless accounts for some of Godfrey’s ill-fated moves in the autumn of 1678 when faced with the implications of Oates’s depositions about a Popish Plot.83 It was also apparent that Godfrey had little time for aristocratic nobility, noting ‘It were a great Reformation here to see them [the nobility] affected with Civility, or Sobriety [however] nothing but an act of pure necessity will put us upon those courses’. ‘To speak truth’, he noted somewhat puritanically, ‘nothing spoyles these Nations but ease & plenty’.84

  As the 1670s progressed, Edmund Godfrey’s status as a magistrate and a man of business gave him some authority in his community. He grew prosperous and his activities took him into many an area of government and into many walks of life; he associated with many people from the Earl of Danby (however much he disliked that overmighty first minister) to the poor of the parish. He dabbled in city politics, engaged in his justice’s business, sat as foreman on a grand jury that found the riotous Earl of Pembroke guilty of murder (only to see the verdict overturned by the earl’s peers) and went about his daily business selling coal and wood. Occasionally the ‘black dog’ of depression appears to have caught up with him, at which times he would engage
in fasts and was bled to ease his cares. He was often seen wandering the streets of London, dabbing at his mouth with a handkerchief and staring at the ground as he went. Yet it seems that he led a reasonably active social life and was commonly to be found in his later years at Lady Pratt’s house in Charing Cross, where she held court for her numerous guests.

  One further local interest of Godfrey’s should be noted. This was his presence on the Commission of Sewers for Westminster, where he took on the role of treasurer and chief accountant for the Commission. This was yet another officious city committee, whose concern was to keep up the ditches and embankments for the riverside parishes. It met regularly to listen to reports of experts, carry out surveys and assess the local inhabitants for their rates. Edmund Godfrey was not only in regular attendance at these meetings, but he threw his considerable energies into its work. So much so that the non-appearance of this energetic man at the committee’s meeting on 12 October 1678 was soon noticed by the other members, and as the news spread they were not alone in wondering where the magistrate had gone.85

  CHAPTER THREE

  Titus Oates and the Popish Plot

  Some truth there was, but dash’d and brew’d with lies, To please the fools and puzzle all the wise

  John Dryden, ‘Absalom and Achitophel’ (1681)

  On the morning of 13 August 1678, Charles II, King of England, Scotland and Ireland, and ‘defender of the faith’, was about to take his daily exercise by walking in St James’s Park. Despite the difficulties of the political situation, the king was his usual easy self. His first minister, the Earl of Danby, was still struggling in his schemes to provide His Majesty with what the king regarded as a reasonable amount of money from the increasingly difficult ‘500 kings’ who sat in parliament. Charles II’s own schemes for squeezing further cash handouts from his cousin Louis XIV, in return for remaining out of European conflicts and the sphere of French king’s ambitions, had once more fallen upon deaf ears. Yet, Charles, whose mind was invariably a welter of short-term projects and designs, was no doubt looking forward to his walk with some relief. (Feeding the ducks and imagining the hordes of courtiers trying to keep up with his brisk pace through the park would amuse him.) He certainly did not wish to be bothered by supplicants such as Christopher Kirkby, whom he occasionally employed to assist him on a part-time basis with the chemical experiments in which he was prone to indulge in his laboratory at Whitehall Palace. Yet Kirkby still hovered around him, much as he had done the previous day. In the outer gallery of the palace, he even pressed a paper into the king’s hand; Charles now read it as he proceeded downstairs. It talked of plots and a need to speak privately. The king, doubtless with a heavy sigh, called the man over to him. ‘What plots are these Mr Kirkby?’ was his question. Kirkby, an ingratiating individual in an ill-fitting wig, by all accounts hastily replied that there was a plot against His Majesty’s life, and men might that very morning be lying in wait ready to shoot him. Having heard many such stories in the course of his reign, Charles said that he would talk to Kirkby on his return and then passed on his way to spend an uneventful morning feeding the ducks.1

  Upon the king’s return, Kirkby was ushered into the monarch’s closet by a servant, William Chiffinch, and asked to explain himself. Kirkby laid out the bare bones of a Catholic plot. He told the king of the plan by a Benedictine lay brother, Thomas Pickering, and a Jesuit lay brother, John Grove, to shoot His Majesty. Moreover, should this fail, the queen’s physician Sir George Wakeman was privy to a scheme to poison Charles. Asked for the source of his information, Kirkby offered to bring the individual himself to the king; Charles agreed to see the pair between 8 and 9 o’clock that evening. At around 8 o’clock Kirkby was once more ushered into the king’s presence, this time accompanied by the somewhat wild figure of one Dr Israel Tonge who laboriously proceeded to read out forty-three articles relating to a plot. For a while the king listened with increasing impatience and then bade the doctor come to the point. The plan appeared to involve his assassination and the raising of the three kingdoms on behalf of his brother and heir-apparent James, Duke of York, but further clauses and sub-clauses were yet to be revealed. Tiring of these eccentric ramblings, but experienced enough to be unwilling to drop the information entirely just in case it could be true, the king decided to turn the two men over to his first minister to investigate. The next morning, as the king proceeded to Windsor, the ‘Popish Plot’ dropped into the lap of the Earl of Danby. In order to understand Danby’s reaction to the ‘plot’ and what followed, we must begin by providing some context for the political situation in which Danby found himself, and the more general attitude toward Roman Catholicism that made the whole design more believable.2

  A ‘FLAMING METEOR, ABOVE OUR HORIZON’: THE EARL OF DANBY AND THE 1670S

  Sir Thomas Osborne, Earl of Danby, dominated political life in mid-1670s England.3 With his pale face and bad stomach, the Lord Treasurer had first been called to the helm of government in 1673 amidst the raging storms of a dissolving ministry and the wreck of a lost war with the Dutch. His subsequent struggles to remain in power in the 1670s were hampered by a host of troubles that mainly revolved around the ambitions of Louis XIV, a factious and uncooperative parliament, the envy and malice of his rival courtiers and the growing problem of ‘popery’ in high places. It must be said that in these years Danby seems to have undertaken the impossible task of reconciling the irreconcilable. His aim was to ensure that his naturally secretive monarch would journey along with a nation that had by the 1670s good reason to distrust their king. The royal court was seen as a nest of popery and French influence; previous schemes for the toleration of Catholics had unsettled the nation; and there were growing fears of what the future might bring under the king’s brother James, Duke of York.

  In order to achieve his own purposes, Danby attempted to project a ‘Church and King’ policy in which loyalty to the monarchy would be coupled with support for the established church, thereby bolstering the Cavalier interest. If he succeeded in this, Danby would be able to establish some of the basis for winning financial security for his king, while retaining his own influence within the precincts of the court. One thing the Lord Treasurer did not lack was ambition. Indeed, in order further to protect and expand his new ministry, in 1674 he sought to engage in practical management techniques with both the parliament and the court. As both bodies tended to insist vociferously upon their liberties and freedom of action, the manipulations of the Lord Treasurer were naturally much resented. Nevertheless Danby aimed to create a solid core of followers, a party of men who would do his bidding and guarantee the monarchy financial security by undertaking to manage both the House of Commons for the Crown’s benefit and the court for his own. In the end, the reliability of the followers that Danby succeeded in acquiring in the mid-1670s was very dubious. And however hard he worked, Danby met with obstacles at every turn. As a result his ministry, after a first flurry of open political warfare, was soon bogged down in the trenches of the House of Commons. At court Danby had other problems: he could never bring himself to be just a ‘companion in pleasure’ for the King.4 The earl was far too businesslike for the king’s taste, and in the game of court politics this left him at something of a disadvantage. His attempts to compensate for his personal failing only led to further blundering associations with some of the king’s mistresses, and, according to Sir John Reresby, a widespread use of a ‘secret trade of taking bribes for good offices’.

  Bishop Burnet noted that like many another courtier Danby was ‘very plausible [as a] speaker’ and he ‘gave himself great liberties in discourse [but he] did not seem to have any great regard for the truth’.5 Certainly, the Lord Treasurer’s insinuating manner, by turns positive and reassuring, continued to worry away at the political life of the nation, and he retained the confidence that ‘all things would go according to his mind in the next session of parliament, and after his hopes failed him, he had always some excuse ready, to put the miscarriag
e upon that’. At the same time, as one courtier put it, Danby was prone to ‘lay about him & provide for his family’. It was suggested that ultimately this would be a double-edged sword ‘for if he comes to be out with ye King his enemies will [certainly] maul him’.6 Nevertheless, the Danby ministry was quick to emphasise its support for Cavalier doctrines, the well-being of the Church of England and hostility toward Roman Catholics, nonconformists and supporters of ‘anti-prerogative’ measures, and engage the nation in a genuine reconciliation of king, parliament and the church.7

  For his part, Charles II viewed such matters with his usual jaundiced eye. He soon came round to assessing the chances of his minister’s pulling off schemes to draw money from an increasingly ill-tempered and impatient parliament. Having weighed these chances up, and found them wanting, the king quietly slid back towards the French in order to finance his lifestyle, especially as Danby, faced with a possible shortage of cash, was finally forced to embark on a policy of retrenchment at court. By the mid-1670s Charles had once more settled down to the interminable secret negotiations for money with his French cousin, Louis XIV, which he much preferred. He initially did this over the head of his first minister who, once he was made aware of the situation, was only reluctantly dragged into the ever-more convoluted schemes of alliance. Danby’s only counter move to such schemes was yet another attempt to ensure that the next parliamentary session was more profitable. So time and again exhaustive lists of supporters were drawn up and approaches made to various individuals in order to strengthen the ministry’s hand. Yet inevitably all these schemes came unstuck in the bear-pit of the House of Commons. By 1678 the once pristine Danby ministry had virtually ground to a halt, spattered with rumours of corruption and instability. With Danby’s own position still dependent on securing a benign House of Commons that would grant the financial security needed to placate the king, his only resource for so doing was to continue the anti-French and prochurch rhetoric which thus far had singularly failed to secure very much. As distrust of his methods mounted, Danby still continued to berate the King, writing: ‘Till he [the King] can fall into the humour of the people he can never be great or rich, and while differences continue prerogatives must suffer, unless he can live without parliament’.8 This, as Danby frequently pointed out, was not possible, given the condition of the Crown’s revenue, and a French alliance was to him merely ‘good words’. Over all of this, however, there now loomed a more sinister shadow – that of Roman Catholicism.9