The Strange Death of Edmund Godfrey

by Alan Marshall

  The next, and most important, witness was Miles Prance. He related his version of the murder and the roles played by the accused in a sober fashion much as we have already seen above. He was then cross-examined and in the main stuck to his story, even adding the occasional incidental detail to give it a genuine air. Such as in this exchange:

  Att. Gen:

  What had you for dinner [at the Queen’s Head]?

  Prance:

  We had a barrel of oysters, and a dish of fish. I bought the fish myself.

  L.C.J.:

  What day was it?

  Prance:

  The Friday after the proclamation.43

  Prance’s story appeared to hold together as by now, of course, he had rehearsed it several times for a number of audiences. Despite Lawrence Hill’s protests that Prance’s evidence was perjured and that it had been extracted under torture, only to be retracted and then emerge afresh once more, Prance was a generally convincing witness. Not that he was ever deeply pressed by either Jones or Scroggs. Indeed, at one point the Lord Chief Justice went out of his way to defend the witness against Lawrence Hill’s wife by flatly stating ‘Do you think he would swear three men out of their lives for nothing?’44 During the questioning which followed, the three accused men made a valiant attempt to trap Prance but only came to grief by admitting that they knew him and that they had in fact been drinking partners.

  William Bedloe was the next Crown witness. His version of events was now cautiously told. Borrowing the rhetoric of Oates, William now proclaimed himself as the man of action who had tried to infiltrate Jesuit designs. He had been recruited as a potential killer but, of course, he had refrained from the deed. He had, however, seen Godfrey’s body in the dark by a light with five or six others around it in Somerset House. The bad light had hindered his views of the others and he was careful not to swear against Hill or old man Green. Berry he had seen a number of times as the porter at Somerset House. He then related how he had spotted Prance in the lobby before the committee room and had spoken out against him as one of the men around the body that night. Hill in fact claimed he had never seen Bedloe in his life, but Bedloe did state that he knew both Green and Berry well, nor did they deny it.45

  The next three witnesses were also very important: Constable John Brown, together with Zachary Skillarne and Nicholas Cambridge, the surgeons who had examined the body. Their evidence will be re-examined in the next chapter. Another witness was Elizabeth Curtis, Godfrey’s maid, who spoke up against Hill, claiming that he had visited the magistrate on the Saturday morning and that Green had been there a fortnight before the murder on some other business. Both men denied this. She also mentioned the note delivered to Godfrey on the Friday that the magistrate did not know what to make of. The note had since disappeared. Various witness were then called to prove that the accused men had been seen in the company of Prance and the priests at the Plough Inn and the Queen’s Head. Of more importance was Sir Robert Southwell, who related how Prance had come before the Privy Council and had then been sent in company to Somerset House and there had found the rooms and places in which the killing had taken place. Crossexamined as to whether Hill had admitted before the Privy Council to knowing both Girald and Kelly, Southwell confirmed he had, but Hill protested that he knew a Girald but not the priest. Lord Chief Justice Scroggs mocked this equivocation mercilessly and the trial moved on to Berry’s part in keeping people out of Somerset House on the nights of the 12–14 October. In vain Berry protested that he had orders to do so. The prosecution wound down with a neighbour of Berry’s, who claimed that Mrs Berry had been with him the previous week in an attempt to get him to remember that he was with Berry on the Wednesday night when the body was allegedly moved. Unfortunately, he could not remember this at all.46

  It was now up to the accused men to prove their innocence. Hill tried hard to prove he had not moved out of doors on the Saturday after 8 o’clock, but once more Scroggs mercilessly took his testimony apart – all the defence witnesses were Catholics and as such in his eyes they were willing to swear anything to support each other. Hill’s attempt to prove that the body could not have been hidden in Dr Goddin’s chambers was also roundly dismissed. For his part Green called his landlord Mr James Warrier and his wife in an attempt to prove his whereabouts on the 12 October. They also suffered from the merciless questioning of Scroggs. One witness, Mr Ravenscroft, summed up the men’s plight by commenting that they were ‘all simple people, without defence for themselves’.47 The three soldiers who had actually been guarding the gate of Somerset House on the night of the 12 October, and who swore that they had been at their duties, were also dismissed by Scroggs as liars and drunks, although they stuck to their story with dogged determination and refused to be budged or intimidated: the sentinels were in place, said the corporal. Nor had they left to go for a drink or smoke at any time, nor was there a sedan came out, but there was one that came in and as they had no orders to stop anyone going in or out they allowed it to do so.48 Lastly, attempts to prove that Prance had been tortured into changing his evidence were cut short by Scroggs and the defence floundered.

  The Attorney General then began to sum up the case. There was a weak defence, he claimed, and the proof against the prisoners was very strong because Bedloe agreed with Prance on some minor but telling details. Moreover, he went on, the staff at the Plough Inn concurred about the meetings that the accused held there, just as the maid agreed about the men visiting Godfrey on the Saturday. The evidence of the constable and two surgeons proved that Prance’s version was the correct one ‘so that’, he went on, ‘I think, there was never an evidence that was better fortified than this’.49 As a final flourish he then attacked Roman Catholicism.

  The Solicitor General took a different tack by dismissing talk of Prance changing his mind, and he explained it away easily. He concluded by saying it was ‘impossible that Mr. Prance, a man of that mean capacity, should invent a story with so many circumstances, all so consistent, if there were not truth at the bottom of it’.50 It was left to the Lord Chief Justice to conclude. Scroggs began by assessing the evidence of Oates, Prance and Bedloe once more. He praised Godfrey as a willing and able justice of the peace. He dismissed talk of Prance’s change of mind, as he was not on oath at the time. Bedloe, whom allegedly Prance had never met, he claimed confirmed Prance’s story in particulars. Scroggs was quite certain that it was not possible for a man like Prance to invent such a story and yet have it confirmed by people he did not even know. On the other hand, it was very possible for the priests, who were capable of anything, to contrive such a deed. On the matter of the soldiers, Scroggs was less dismissive, but he still sowed doubt in the minds of the jury as to how much weight could be placed upon their testimony. He then went on to attack priests in general as ‘the preachers of the murder’. There was, he said, monstrous evidence for the whole plot and the delusions of popery. Naturally enough the jury was brief in its deliberations and quickly returned with a verdict of guilty. The accused were then sent down and brought back on 11 February to hear sentence. Green claimed he was as innocent as a child, Berry that he was not guilty of anything in the world such as this crime and Hill that God Almighty knew of his innocence. The trio were doomed and were sentenced to be executed by hanging.

  At the first two executions on 21 February 1679 both Hill and Green died still protesting their innocence to the last. Berry, being a Protestant, had been held over in the hope that he would make further discoveries. But on 28 February he also was executed while denying all knowledge of the crime. While on the scaffold ‘he lifted up his hands towards heaven, and said, As I am innocent, so receive my soul, O Lord Jesus’, and many there wondered at his words.51

  EDMUND GODFREY AND THE HISTORIANS

  To contemporaries the killing of Godfrey was thus quite quickly settled. The papists had murdered him as part of a wider Popish Plot, and, three of the men accused – Green, Berry and Hill – died upon the scaffold for their crime. Atte
mpts to alter this verdict only came in the 1680s when the heat of the plot had begun to die. The first real attempt to give a different version of Godfrey’s death took place in 1682 and resulted in Nathaniel Thompson, William Pain and John Farwell being placed on trial for libel. These men had produced a pamphlet called A letter from Miles Prance in relation to the murder of Sir Edmondbury Godfrey, in which it was implied that Godfrey had killed himself and that the coroner’s jury had been persuaded to bring in a verdict of murder rather than suicide. The pamphlet also criticised the forensic evidence and the witnesses of the day to prove its point. Thompson and Farwell were swiftly tried, found guilty and placed in the pillory, while Pain was fined £100 and imprisoned until he had paid his debt.52

  After these punishments, few people were willing to enter the lists against the accepted version of Godfrey’s death. It took a sea change in English politics in the mid-1680s to allow Sir Roger L’Estrange to finally take up the challenge of the investigation.53 By February 1685 the Duke of York had finally succeeded to the throne as James II, and as a Catholic he was naturally rather unhappy with the blame for the plot and the murder still being laid on his co-religionists. So the new king took his revenge. Titus Oates was tried and punished, Miles Prance felt the weight of the law as a perjurer and L’Estrange was given a warrant to begin a new ‘strict and diligent Enquiry into such matters’. L’Estrange, it must be noted, was neither an unbiased historian nor a disinterested party. Indeed, as a fervent Royalist and ‘Tory’ he had been at the centre of the publication war during the crisis of 1679–83, nor had he held back from attacking the great informers of the day from Titus Oates to Edward Fitzharris. In his work he plainly spoke of his ‘horror for this villainous deceit [the plot]’ and he saw himself as a friend to ‘plain dealing and common justice’. In reality L’Estrange was more of a hired hack.54

  L’Estrange eagerly undertook to investigate both the plot and the murder of Godfrey on behalf of James II. He used his new-found authority to examine parliamentary journals, council papers, public depositions, printed trials and narratives. Only the coroner’s report and evidence eluded him, until in March 1687 he obtained a warrant from Secretary of State Sunderland ordering the Coroner of Middlesex, John Cooper, to deliver up to him the information taken in October 1678. L’Estrange then began his A Brief History of the Times, which he eventually published in three parts beginning in August 1687.55 In this work he claimed that he had taken great care to ‘lay open the matter of Fact on the one side, as on the other; for where should any man look for the true and reasonable grounds of a verdict, but in the words and Import of the evidence?’56 In fact, although L’Estrange somewhat muddied the waters, and permanently removed some evidence from circulation, he underwrote his work by collecting valuable information from some forty witnesses whose statements he then cut and pasted in his book in such a way as to prove that Godfrey had committed suicide.

  L’Estrange’s main thesis was simple enough. He claimed that the Godfrey brothers had covered up the crime of suicide, or felo de se, in conjunction with the advice of the Whig Earl of Shaftesbury, in order to save their estate and damage the regime. For L’Estrange, Edmund Godfrey’s melancholia was the main element of this drama and he was keen to uncover further evidence relating to the magistrate’s state of mind prior to his demise. So he had Henry Moor, Godfrey’s former clerk, hunted down and interrogated in his retirement in the Isle of Ely.57 This and much of L’Estrange’s other evidence gathered some years after the event was of course not above suspicion. There seems little doubt that L’Estrange manipulated some of his witnesses and they in turn feared his power. He rewrote some of the witness statements to make them into more suitable and fluid accounts; he may even have altered evidence to suit himself. Certainly few of the witnesses who now came forward with different stories from the ones they had told in 1678 were willing to stand up against the propagandist L’Estrange’s robust methods of research. Yet, some of the evidence he found (and he had the advantage of being upon the scene much earlier that any subsequent historian) does ring true. Once his book was published the case for suicide rested, and although it was not generally well received it did convince the playwright Aphra Behn to write a poem praising L’Estrange’s efforts. James II, however, fell from power in December 1688, after which it was not thought politic to raise the spectre of a suicidal Godfrey for the time being, now that the Protestant monarchs of William and Mary were on the throne and the former magistrate’s nephew was giving financial assistance to King William’s war.58

  After the Revolution of 1688 the historians of the day mostly regurgitated evidence taken from the contemporary pamphlets. They had little new evidence to add to the case. Two exceptions were the former courtier and legal officer Roger North and the philosopher and part-time historian David Hume.59 North was the most pertinent as he was actually in London at the time of the death and its aftermath. His book, Examen, was finally published in 1740.60 In part of this work North presented his view of how Godfrey might have died. He claimed that the plot was in fact ‘sinking’ until Edward Coleman’s dangerous letters emerged and that the idea that the murder proved the plot was simply wrongheaded. In fact, he thought the Roman Catholics were probably innocent of the crime but he doubted that Godfrey had killed himself. Instead North laid the blame upon those ‘execrable villains, behind the curtain, who first gave life and birth to the plot, and inspired the wicked testimony of it’. He also claimed that he would not ‘deal in Opinions, but in Things and make no Conclusions, but what flow irresistibly from them’. North’s statement that the link between the plot and the murder was the men who contrived the scheme went little further. After a brief review of the evidence he obscurely hinted that the real culprit was either Oates himself, Danby or Oates’s backers, by whom he presumably meant Shaftesbury and the other Whig leaders.61

  David Hume, on the other hand, was the first to make the sensible suggestion that Godfrey’s murder might not have been connected with the Popish Plot at all. After his review of the evidence, Hume commented that the Catholics had no reason to kill Godfrey, as he was friendly towards them, and it was too clumsy and absurd a crime for the Whigs to execute. Hume concluded by noting that:

  We must, therefore, be contented to remain forever ignorant of the actors in Godfrey’s murder; and only pronounce in general that that event, in all likelihood, had no connection one way or the other, with the Popish Plot. Any man, especially so active a magistrate as Godfrey, might, in such a city as London, have many enemies, of whom his friends and family had no suspicion. He was a melancholy man; and there is some reason, notwithstanding the pretended appearances to the contrary to suspect that he fell by his own hands. The affair was never examined with tranquillity, nor even with common sense during the times; and it is impossible for us, at this distance, certainly to account for it.62

  During the nineteenth century, the strange death of Edmund Godfrey was occasionally mentioned but little new evidence came to light. Various candidates were put forward as killers, ranging from a group of rogue Catholics, to the Whigs and Republicans or Titus Oates. In the early 1900s, however, the case once more erupted into debate. Andrew Lang, in another guise from his authorship of fairy stories, wrote a most sensible account of the affair, but in 1903 John Pollock, a pupil, if not disciple, of the great liberal historian Lord Acton, wrote a book entitled The Popish Plot. Pollock’s solution to the puzzle pleased some and outraged others.63 His thesis was that there really was a Popish Plot. While the details were obscure, the plot was an attempt by Roman Catholics to gain power and bring the nation back under the control of Rome. According to Pollock, Edmund Godfrey had revealed the Oates depositions to Coleman and during their conversations the latter told him that there had in fact been a secret consult of Jesuits on 24 April in St James Palace, and that Charles II and James, Duke of York, both knew of this. It is true that James at a later date did claim that if this event had become known to Oates and his friends, then it w
ould have led to serious trouble. Pollock’s view was that at the time, to save the Duke of York, the innocent Godfrey had to die. In this view, therefore, we have a motive for Godfrey’s death in that he was to be eliminated to cover up a ‘great secret’. Pollock’s theory then identified the murderers. He claimed that although Prance brought false evidence against a trio of innocent men, he did in fact relate the real facts of the crime. Moreover, even after he admitted his perjury in the mid-1680s Prance remained a friend of the Jesuits to the extent that he eventually left the country in 1688 in the company of a fleeing Jesuit. The evidence against Green, Berry and Hill was, therefore, used to screen other more important and still-guiltier persons: the men accused by William Bedloe.64

  Pollock’s theory was ingenious rather than convincing and it rested the reason for Godfrey’s death on the magistrate’s knowledge of the secret meeting. However, it is not that clear whether Coleman did actually know of this matter, and if he did, being a loyal son of the Catholic church, why would he blurt it out to Edmund Godfrey? Moreover, there was also no reason to believe, until Coleman was arrested and his papers were read, that the plot would develop in the way it did. Further, we also need to believe that having revealed to Godfrey the real plot, such as it was (and it was not that much of a plot, merely secret meetings), Coleman then went on to tell the Jesuits and his master that he had made such a blunder.

  The famous secret consult described by Oates was in reality the provincial congregation usually held every third year by the Society of Jesus for the purposes of electing a proctor to be sent to Rome. Forty senior members of the district met in St James’s Palace in a room placed at their disposal by the Duke of York. The question must be whether this meeting was as secret as some made out? In fact, if it was supposed to be a secret, it was not a terribly well-kept one, for a few years later, in 1681, it was well known that the meeting had taken place and not where Oates had claimed. It also seems that a meeting that was a regular part of the district affairs was hardly a significant reason to kill a Protestant magistrate at the beginning of an anti-Catholic agitation. Finally, Pollock’s thesis also rested upon the tales of two known liars and perjurers, each of whom came up with stories that did not match the other in particulars, both of whom used a palace which on any given day would be typically crowded with people, and both of whom would not have lasted very long in a modern court of law. Disregarding the latter point, in its favour the theory firmly places Miles Prance at the centre of the plot. In this respect Prance, if he really was lying (as we must suppose he was), was either a fortuitous choice for Bedloe to make or he really did know something of the crime.