The Strange Death of Edmund Godfrey

by Alan Marshall

  In Catholic journals and elsewhere Pollock’s version of the events that led to Godfrey’s death was either roundly attacked or dismissed in the early twentieth century.65 Undaunted, he defended his position in vigorous terms, particularly in light of a pro-Catholic work that came out in answer to his claims, namely, Alfred Marks’s book Who killed Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey?66 Marks returned to the suicide theory. Prance and Bedloe were dismissed as liars and the Somerset House theory fell by the wayside. Instead Marks turned to the melancholic Godfrey who committed suicide on Primrose Hill by using his own sword. We shall return to this theory in the next chapter, but needless to say it has its own set of problems.

  It was J.G. Muddiman who in 1924 introduced a new and more melodramatic figure into the plot. His theory was based on an ingenious link between the man who killed Godfrey and a mad aristocrat with an apparently similar modus operandi. 67 This theory takes us in part back to the mysterious butcher Edward Linnet and his dog mentioned by William Griffith in a 1678 newsletter. Linnet was a St Giles butcher whom Muddiman was to claim had really dumped the corpse in the ditch and was to ‘find’ it sometime later. Not that Linnet was the killer. Rather, Muddiman claimed that Roger North knew the killer but had been afraid to speak out for fear of the murderer’s friends. His theory was that the killing was actually committed by the rather ill-tempered and ‘half-mad’ Philip Herbert, Earl of Pembroke. Pembroke was a violent, drunken, ‘Whiggish’ aristocrat, who, when not attacking his enemies, or his supposed friends, had contacts with the opposition groups. In 1678 Edmund Godfrey in his capacity as foreman of a jury had found Pembroke guilty of the crime of murder. Unfortunately Pembroke, being a lord, had been able to appeal to the House of Lords for his trial and had subsequently been released. Godfrey had then left the country for a while, but Pembroke had not forgotten him and in the autumn of 1678 he had sought his revenge on the magistrate. According to this theory, a worried Godfrey received a mysterious note on the Friday inviting him to a rendezvous. Godfrey had turned up on the Saturday afternoon only to be faced by an irate Pembroke. There he had been attacked, beaten and strangled by the mad earl. Coming to his senses in the aftermath of this attack the earl, or his servants, or Pembroke’s friends, had kept the body until it was safe to dispose of it. They relied upon an ingenious method to cloud the issue and had taken the body in the butcher’s cart to Primrose Hill to dump it there. The real clue was divulged in Mr Adam Angus’s story (see pp. 100–1) about being approached in the bookshop some hours before Godfrey’s body was discovered. We may remember that a man in a grey suit had told Angus that Godfrey had been discovered with his own sword run through him near Leicester Fields, which was close to where Pembroke had his London home. Once more there are considerable problems with this ingenious solution and we will examine them in the next chapter.68

  In the 1930s the detective story writer John Dickson Carr developed Muddiman’s theory into a book.69 His is a work of historical detection, with occasional lapses into outright fiction. Nevertheless, Carr clearly stated the possible suspects at the time and chose Pembroke as the most likely candidate. It was left to the historian J.P. Kenyon to take another route in his version of events, written in the 1970s.70 He relegated Godfrey’s killing to an appendix. This was not out of any lack of interest, but rather because he did not see it as part of his brief to go looking for suspects. In reality he thought that the easiest solution to the problem was that of the unknown footpad with a grievance. This unknown, and by now undiscoverable man, was as likely a candidate for the killing of Edmund Godfrey as anyone else. Perhaps the crime was in fact unconnected with the events of the plot in Godfrey’s life and this murder was merely a coincidence. Godfrey could have been waylaid and strangled on the Saturday, only to have been hidden until at least Wednesday when the killer had finally managed to arrange transport in order to dump the body near Primrose Hill. The sword was merely added to mystify the discoverers of the body, with the possibility that it would not have been found until the body had decayed so much that any marks of strangulation could not have been detected in any case. So suicide by his own sword would be the verdict. This solution, however, does not really explain Godfrey’s moods of depression prior to his demise. In addition, the solution was perhaps too clever for an allegedly uneducated footpad to think up. Moreover, once he had realised the reaction that he had set in motion, the murderer would have had to work out what to do with the corpse. This must inevitably have meant the involvement of others, both to store the body and to help him move it. Additionally, the body was not robbed. Given the £500 reward being offered for information, no common criminal, however ingenious, could have kept the affair quiet in the face of what was in contemporary terms an enormous amount of money.

  The lack of an obvious answer led to the somewhat wild solution that the late Stephen Knight put forward in the 1980s.71 A former journalist, Knight had previously investigated the Whitechapel murders of 1888 and in that case had ingeniously found not one lone killer but three, all backed by a government plot that involved the royal family.72 Having solved this puzzle to his own, if no one else’s satisfaction, Knight turned to this earlier mystery. In his version of the story Knight simply piled one theory on top of another, implicating everyone who could possibly have played any part in the killing. The ‘mad’ Earl of Pembroke was once more accused of the murder. In addition, Knight also introduced into his version of events the spy John Scott, about whom we will shortly learn more. However, this time Pembroke was egged on to kill Godfrey by his own private motives, that is Godfrey’s part in his trial, as well as those of the betrayed members of Sir Robert Peyton’s gang. Godfrey, a former member of this group, had betrayed them by his links with the Catholics and was in turn killed to make the Catholics look guilty and bolster the plot. He had been summoned to a meeting with the gang on the Friday by the mysterious note. On turning up at the venue on the Saturday, he was murdered and the body was kept until it could be arranged in such a way as to implicate his Catholic friends.

  Knight’s theories were rather too ingenious and more than a little unhistorical. His startling new evidence was also somewhat lame, being neither very new nor that revealing, and his exaggerated view of the so-called Peyton gang led the whole book to fall somewhat flat. Another obvious question must also be whether any sensible group of plotters would have relied upon an apparently dangerous lunatic such as the Earl of Pembroke to do its bidding. Thus Knight’s reckless earl, Republican plotters and murdered magistrate all come confusedly together in the author’s enthusiasm for multiple plots, which appears to derive from his previous book on the Whitechapel murderer.73 Historical puzzles, of course, still require solutions and in a case such as this, as we have seen, the evidence first points one way and then the other. We must once more re-examine the evidence to see which solution presents itself as the most likely in this most mysterious of historical mysteries.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Case of Ockham’s Razor

  Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem. [No more things should be presumed to exist than are absolutely necessary.]

  William of Ockham

  ‘The finest work of [murder in] the seventeenth century’, wrote Thomas de Quincey ironically, ‘ is, unquestionably the murder of Sir Edmondbury Godfrey, which has my entire approbation. In the grand feature of mystery, which in some shape or other ought to colour every judicious attempt at murder, it is excellent; for the mystery is not yet dispersed.’1 In point of fact the case for the murder of Edmund Godfrey rests upon three main pillars: the medical or forensic evidence; witness statements (of which that of Miles Prance was the most significant); and the general belief of contemporaries that the magistrate had been murdered. An alternative to the verdict of murder does exist – namely, that the magistrate committed suicide while of unsound mind or in a state of acute depression, and that his body was found, held, manipulated and dumped in the ditch near Primrose Hill to give a boost to an otherwise flagging
Popish Plot. This verdict also rests on three main foundations: an assessment of Edmund Godfrey’s mental state; the forensic evidence; and the witness statements and rumours at the time.

  Inventing solutions to ‘disperse’ De Quincey’s grand mystery has been a pastime for historians since 1678, and there are solutions aplenty to choose from: a rogue group of Roman Catholics; the Earl of Danby; the mad Earl of Pembroke; Shaftesbury; a Republican gang; Titus Oates; William Bedloe; the two Godfrey brothers and Henry Moor; Green, Berry and Hill. Or even, as John Dickinson Carr and J.P. Kenyon have speculated, ‘X the unknown’; at least this is a satisfyingly simple version, since it makes the culprit a man for whom the killing of Edmund Godfrey meant something personal, and the Popish Plot and Edmund’s connections to it not very much at all. We have seen that Godfrey naturally created some enemies in the course of his life as a magistrate. However, far too often historians have arrived at their pet solutions by working back from the death and ignoring the man himself. Any real solution to the mystery should probably lie with who Edmund Godfrey was and how he died, his activities in London life and his part in the Popish Plot – about all these matters the reader will by now be arriving at his or her own conclusions.

  The purpose of this chapter is to re-examine the forensic evidence, the usual suspects and the possible solutions to the mystery. I hesitate to say that any of the solutions put forward is the correct one because the evidence for each carries only a limited amount of weight. Until more evidence turns up, if it ever does, what follows has to remain an interesting set of theories; I would claim no more than this. As to the validity of these theories, the reader must be the judge. I will begin, however, as always, with the known and knowable hard facts about the death of Godfrey – the forensic evidence. Much attention has been devoted to this in the past and it still remains controversial.

  STRANGULATION, WOUNDS AND SURGEONS: FORENSIC EVIDENCE

  As with any crime of this nature, a description of the type of wounds found on the body is vital. The most important descriptions of the state of the corpse are to be found in the statements of the medical witnesses at the trial, who were, one must presume, the most expert of the witnesses there. Two surgeons were called to the inquest and the trial in 1679 to give evidence: Zachary Skillarne and Nicholas Cambridge. Both men appeared to give their information with some assurance and both were regarded as authorities, although there were some disagreements between them on certain matters and at the inquest they apparently confused the jury. Skillarne, who first saw the body at noon on Friday with Cambridge, said that he thought Godfrey’s breast had been beaten with an obtuse weapon, fists or feet. He claimed that the neck was distorted, and that there were two wounds; the first had hit a rib and the second had penetrated the body through to the other side. Godfrey, he said, had not been killed by this second wound. Skillarne was clear that he thought that the neck had been broken and that, as he put it, more had been done to the neck than ordinary suffocation. Godfrey, he went on to say, had died four or five days earlier, which would put the time of death at sometime on Sunday or Saturday. Nicholas Cambridge, on the other hand, claimed that the neck was only dislocated, but he did agree that the breast looked as if it had been beaten. There were also two puncture wounds, both administered after death.

  What were the credentials of these medical men? The élite English physicians were invariably Oxford or Cambridge trained although few began as medical students and in most cases Latin and books were the keys to success rather than clinical cases. Some anatomy was studied and many preferred to go to a good foreign medical school to undertake practical training in medicine. In general Skillarne and Cambridge, about whom we know little enough, would have been aware of the standards of their day, each skilled in his own way, but they were not exceptional physicians.2

  There were other medical men who saw the corpse at the White House, in 1678 whose evidence only emerged later during the trials for libel in 1682. These men were the king’s apothecaries, the Chases, father and son. One Mr Hobbs also came forward to say that the corpse’s face appeared ‘blotted’, and although the eyes were bloody they were not ‘fly blown’. Chase junior noted the two wounds and also a great contusion on the left ear. He also thought the face very bruised. His father saw the two wounds and a swelling on the left ear and that the dead man gave the appearance of having been beaten from neck to stomach. The last medical witness was Mr Lazinby, testifying four years after the death in 1682. He claimed that Godfrey had been strangled and a ligature kept about his neck until he was cold. The corpse’s face was all bloody and the upper part of the neck, breast and stomach were discoloured, as was his mouth. Lazinby also observed that the collar was tight and there were two great creases both above and below the neck, the neck being swelled above the collar and below by the strangling with a cord or cloth. Godfrey’s eyes had matter in them and were bloodshot. William Griffith, a newsletter writer who compiled his account of the death on 19 October 1678, noted that the magistrate had been strangled, his breast was bruised and blood had settled in a face that was in life rather sallow. There were impressions, he said, of cord marks around the neck with a ‘cross broad wound in his breast’. It was supposed that Godfrey had been killed somewhere else and his sword wounds had been inflicted after death, but putrefaction had not set in.

  To summarise this forensic evidence, therefore, contemporaries were faced with the corpse of a lean 56-year-old man, previously noted as being in poor health, possibly hard of hearing, and of a melancholy disposition. He had two puncture wounds, both of which appeared to have been inflicted after death with his own sword, and the second wound the sword had fully penetrated the body. There was little blood at the scene, ‘bruising’ on the breast and stomach, a bruise on the neck under the left ear, with marks around the neck below and above the collar. The neck was distorted, dislocated or even broken. The eyes were bloodshot and the face, in life noted as pale, was reddish in colour. The body was relatively malleable and did not appear to be yet subject to putrefaction until it was opened. Based on this evidence and other material, the coroner and jury, after some difficulty, came to a judgement of murder.3

  What then are we to make of the forensic evidence as it has been reviewed in our own century? It has been the subject of many debates. In a 1952 radio programme on Godfrey, Professor Keith Simpson, a noted pathologist and a Reader in Forensic Medicine at the University of London, made some pertinent remarks about the forensic evidence.4 He noted that the sword wounds on the body were not the cause of Godfrey’s death and that the amount of blood involved, of which contemporaries made so much, threw little light on the mystery. It was clear, however, that Godfrey was dead when the sword was passed through him. Simpson also went on to say that the marks on the neck were indicative of strangulation with a cloth or band and were not compatible with hanging. He cited the fact that the jacket collar had to be undone to expose the neck marks in the first instance and they were also too low down to be consistent with hanging. He noted furthermore that those who die in such a way tend to have marks that lie under the lower jaw. It was possible, albeit rare, that the victim could have used a ligature to strangle himself by drawing it up so tightly that he lost consciousness and died of asphyxia. Of course, this would have required the removal of the ligature by a person or persons unknown. Simpson, of course, could not state whether this had occurred and he preferred the logical conclusion that the killer had removed it, but selfstrangulation was not impossible.

  Simpson easily dealt with the looseness of the neck, for he noted that it could well have become loose after the initial rigor mortis had passed. Rigor mortis begins in the muscles of the face and head. It then passes slowly and progressively downwards. Thus if the jaw was stiff and the arms mobile it was a good indication that death had occurred within a few hours. Unfortunately, Simpson thought, the surgeons were not pressed sufficiently about the nature of Godfrey’s neck and only made some general comments concerning its looseness. Was
it broken or not? The experts differed. The injuries to the chest and upper abdomen certainly required more thought. They were not, Simpson claimed, evidence of hypostasis, although he qualified this by noting that the contemporary descriptions were not detailed enough and so this still remained a possibility.

  Hypostasis or post-mortem lividity sets in immediately following death. At the time of death the blood ceases to circulate around the body, and because of gravity it gradually sinks to the blood vessels in the lowest part of the corpse. The affected parts of the body then display a livid colour. After ten to twelve hours these purplish stains become fixed and resemble nothing so much as bruises. Lividity is used as a measure in that it can prove whether a corpse has been moved after death; in such a case the marks will differ on the body from the place where it has been laid. In fact, the resemblance of hypostasis to bruises has led to many a conflict between modern medical experts, hence Simpson’s hesitation in making a judgement on a case some 300 or so years old. The point is significant, of course, for if the bruises on Godfrey’s body were really only signs of post-mortem lividity then the case that Godfrey was beaten before he was murdered almost disappears, for a man face down in a ditch would have such lividity marks where the surgeons found ‘bruises’.5 In fact, Simpson inclined towards the opinion that Godfrey had been beaten by fists, boots, or both as he defended himself.