The Strange Death of Edmund Godfrey

by Alan Marshall

  Unfortunately no examination was made of the victim’s hands (an essential requirement of a modern inquest) to show whether there was any evidence of resistance. The bruise under the left ear was either a knot mark or else came from the strangler’s fingers in the course of twisting or tying a ligature. Thus, in Simpson’s view, the evidence pointed to strangulation. The face was livid and the eyes discoloured and this could only have occurred if the circulation had been intact, thus the sword must have been thrust through either at the point of death, as a coup de grâce, or after death. The timing of the injuries would be significant as it would take several minutes for the bruises to develop and they would only have appeared during life. Therefore, Simpson considered Godfrey’s death to have resulted from a ‘beating up’ lasting several minutes and resulting in bruising, followed by strangulation by ligature lasting twenty to thirty seconds. Godfrey’s body was then transfixed by his own sword, either before or after his death.6

  The internal autopsy was poorly carried out. As we have seen, there appears to have been some argument as to whether or not the body should actually be opened. Once it was opened, if there really was little or no food in the stomach this could, Simpson claimed, be put down either to an incompetent post-mortem (quite likely given the conditions) or to Godfrey having eaten only certain easily digestible foods, such as eggs, milk, white bread, wine and so on. Alternatively Godfrey, who everyone agreed had been melancholic before his death, may not have been eating very much in any case. Simpson thought that Godfrey had died on or about Saturday. So in spite of a distinct lack of detail that a modern pathologist would certainly supply (crucially in the case of the hands), Simpson was willing to claim that there was clear evidence of three episodes in this death: bruising, asphyxia and stabbing. Other doctors also examined the evidence during the twentieth century, but their opinions need not detain us here. They were drawn upon to bolster or refute the argument between Pollock and Marks over whether Godfrey had taken the Roman way of death and fallen upon his own sword.7

  THE MENTAL STATE OF EDMUND GODFREY

  We have seen what sort of man Edmund Godfrey was and what sort of life he led. However, we must also try to assess his state of mind prior to his death. There are two possible conclusions. Either the evidence collected after his death was grossly exaggerated to fit the image of a careworn martyr torn by persecution, or the witnesses actually saw Edmund Godfrey in the throws of a breakdown or personality crisis. Although it is clear there was some exaggeration, not all of the witness statements can be easily dismissed. There were probably other witnesses who did not or would not come forward, or like Judith Pamphlin, appear to have been deliberately ignored, despite being able to offer reliable evidence as to the magistrate’s state of mind. There is certainly information to support the view that at the very least Godfrey was subject to depressive tendencies throughout his life and that these tendencies had reached crisis point just before his death. Taken together, therefore, they point towards suicide as a possible cause of death.

  The producers of the 1952 radio programme also called in a professor of psychological medicine at the University of Durham, Alexander Kennedy, to examine Godfrey’s death.8 His brief was to explore, from the evidence available, Godfrey’s state of mind just prior to death. Like Keith Simpson’s evidence, this makes interesting although inconclusive reading. Assessing the psychological condition of a man or woman long dead is a hazardous business for any practising doctor at the best of times, although historians of course do it constantly. None the less Kennedy clearly outlined the evidence for a state of morbid depression. Its effects, he claimed, would have made Godfrey a potential suicide. The extremities of depression would have brought gloomy ideas about the future, difficulties in sleeping, little or no appetite, and episodes of agitation and crisis. If such a crisis did strike Godfrey during the course of his duties, he might well have felt unable to cope.

  Lewis Wolpert, in his illuminating book Malignant Sadness: the Anatomy of Depression, has outlined the distinguishing symptoms and characteristics of depression as he himself experienced it.9 These are, he notes, overwhelming sadness, numbness, dullness and apathy. Thoughts of suicide are common, alongside an inability to concentrate, fatigue, a lack of energy and general anxiety. Certain people are more prone to depression than others and episodes might last a day, a week, or years. Wolpert also gives a clinical description of the features of depression formulated by the German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin in 1921 that is worth quoting in full. The depressive, he states:

  feels solitary, indescribably unhappy, as a creature disinherited of fate; he is sceptical about God, and with a certain dull submission, which shuts out every comfort and every gleam of light, he drags himself with difficulty from one day to another. Everything has become disagreeable to him; everything wearies him . . . Everywhere he sees only the dark side and difficulties. . . . Life appears to him to be aimless . . . the thought occurs to him to take his life without knowing why. He has a feeling as if something has cracked in him.10

  In the seventeenth century the idea of melancholia was less clinically expressed. It was defined in two ways: both as an illness and a temperament.11 Most medical knowledge was still based upon Galen’s principles of the four humours (blood, yellow bile or choler, black bile and phlegm) governing the human condition. The ideal temperament held all four in balance, but this rarely occurred. In fact, to the medical men of the day most individuals were subject to one or two predominant humours which produced the sanguine, phlegmatic, choleric and melancholic personalities they saw around them. Melancholy was thought to be the result of an excess of one of the humours (black bile) over the others. In 1621 Robert Burton, who himself suffered from the illness, spent a great deal of time and energy dissecting the various conditions in his large book The Anatomy of Melancholy.12 He concluded by stating: ‘I can say no more, or give better advice to such as are any way distressed in this kind, than what I have given and said. Only take this for a corollary and conclusion, as thou tendrest thine own welfare in this, and all other melancholy, thy good health of body and mind, observe this short precept, give not way to solitariness and idleness. Be not solitary, be not idle.’13

  At that time there would have been little more by way of treatment for this condition than letting blood to balance the humours, which we know Godfrey did indulge in, and the sufferer’s reliance upon the support of a family. For a lonely bachelor this would have been difficult and this is possibly why Godfrey turned to Mrs Gibbon. Was this also why Godfrey was so anxious for the correspondence with his friend Valentine Greatrakes to be maintained, as it diverted him and made him less prone to thinking morbid thoughts? It seems possible. Another cure was to escape to the country to get over it all, a solution that we know Sir Robert Southwell had at first suspected the magistrate to have adopted in October 1678.14 According to Burton and today’s doctors the tendency to depression also runs in families. Burton called this an ‘inward, inbred cause of Melancholy . . . the temperature, in whole or in part, which we receive from our parents’.15 There is some evidence that such illness ran in Godfrey’s family.16 Contemporaries mention his father’s alleged bouts and attacks. Godfrey himself even seems to have recognised the ‘black dog’ as hereditary and this may not have been the first attack he had suffered. We may also add as evidence of depression Godfrey’s apparent lack of a degree at Oxford, the subsequent trip to Europe, the mysterious abandonment of his studies at the Inns of Court and his retreat thereafter into the countryside, as well as his visits to France in 1668 and 1678. Indeed, his physicians were allegedly responsible for sending him there the second time. Godfrey may well have returned still depressed and unable to sleep. He was noted as someone who wandered the streets at all hours of the night. His business, judicial, financial and personal activities seemed designed to keep him very busy at all times. The phrases noted by contemporaries are pertinent here; with their continual references to him being prone to ‘sadness’, being ‘pensiv
e’, ‘discontented’, or in ‘disorder’, or ‘very sad’ and so on, they cannot all be discounted as exaggeration after the event. In a statement, admittedly given well after the death, William Church described how in 1677 the magistrate especially shunned the company of his own kind at Richmond. Instead he exercised on the bowling green with ordinary company, footmen and the man who helped to roll and make the ground for the game. When a shocked Church asked Godfrey why he acted in this way, the magistrate’s reply was very revealing. He said: ‘That company was very irksome to him; That he Bowl’d and exercise’d with those mean People, that he might run up[w]ard[s] and down, and do what he would to divert Melancholy, for he was so overpower’d with melancholy that his life was very uneasie and Burdomsom to him.’17

  Alexander Kennedy also made an interesting diagnosis of Godfrey’s frequently described habit of wiping his mouth and looking upon the ground: it could have been evidence of hardening of the arteries.18 All of which may well have aggravated his depression still further and led to expressions of paranoia and fears for his life. At no point does it appear that Godfrey was of unsound mind, that is, in the throws of madness, but if we take this view the evidence does seem to point towards a man heading towards a breakdown. He could well have been already morbidly depressed when Oates and Tonge turned up on his doorstep. In that case fears that parliament, Danby or the king himself would extract vengeance for his part in the affair meant that Godfrey may well have seen suicide as a way out of his problems. The burning of his papers and settling of debts would reflect some sense of responsibility prior to his demise. In short, Kennedy’s conclusion was that here was a man aged fifty-six, with a history of attacks of depression, and no immediate family, wife or children to rely upon, who in such a crisis was predisposed to suicide. That he committed suicide, therefore, Kennedy claimed to be not only a logical conclusion of the evidence but, given the state of his life, almost inevitable. However, if one does not accept that suicide is the easiest and most logical solution to the mystery of the strange death of Edmund Godfrey, then one must consider it murder by one man or by a group of men.

  THE INFORMERS

  The first suspect is obviously the man who apparently had most to gain from Godfrey’s death in the sense that it might help to confirm the Popish Plot: Titus Oates.19 It is possible to create a scenario whereby, in the midst of a failing plot, Oates tracked down and murdered Godfrey in a bizarre fashion in order to confirm the reality of the Roman Catholic threat. Yet several factors are against this. First, Oates was just not this type of villain. While he was certainly a rogue, had the intelligence to bring such a murder off had he chosen to do so, and, of course, had a motive, he was rather too much of a coward to resort to physical violence. We may recall, for example, his beating at the hands of no less than St Omers’ schoolboys and yet another beating by his neighbour. His subsequent whines were not the reactions of a hardened killer. Instead he tended to resort to spiteful recriminations – when it was safe to do so. In the end Oates is ruled out, if only because for much of this period he was actually under guard in Whitehall. Although the king had given him rooms in the palace as a result of his revelations, Charles II had also insisted that guards were to be placed near him to prevent him being prompted in his revelations. How strict this guard was we do not know, but it is very unlikely that Oates could have slipped away for a few days, killed Godfrey in such an elaborate manner, moved the body and then returned. Moreover, knowing what we do of Titus’s character, it is equally unlikely that having committed such a crime he would not have then given himself a more prominent part in the affair, hinting at revelations in the charged arena of the Commons and in his own pamphlets. In fact, he was relatively restrained at the trial of Green, Berry and Hill. If we are to believe his old teacher William Smith, Oates knew little enough about the killing of Godfrey except that it was very convenient, and his compatriots Bedloe and Prance apparently knew even less. Smith noted that:

  Coming one evening to visit him [Oates] at Whitehall, I found Bedloe and Prance with him; among other discourses, they talkt of Sir Edmundbury Godfrey: Oates laught at the business, and said, Here is Bedloe, that knew no more of the Murder than you or I did. But he got the five hundred-pound, and that did his work, and give this blockhead [Prance] 30l of it. He pickt him up in the lobby of the House of Lords, and took him for a loggerhead fit for his purpose; at which Bedloe laught heartily and Prance look’d a little dull, as displeased. At this rate I have heard Oates and Bedloe discourse very often, who used always themselves to make the business of Godfrey a ridiculous story and entertain’d themselves when private with the jest on’t.20

  However, another version of this story is possible. In it we find Oates, who had been dogging Godfrey, coming across the dead body of the magistrate who had committed suicide. Seizing this opportunity to bolster the flagging Popish Plot, he and his colleagues manipulated the body to make it look as though the Catholics had killed Godfrey. Yet all of this theory in the end remains rather tenuous. The same reservations about Oates’s involvement remain. Once more we must take his own words, as witnessed by William Smith. Smith alleged that: ‘This business happen’d well for Oates, as he afterwards often told me. He would usually say, “I believe not a word on’t; but my plot had come to nothing without it; it [was] made well for me; I believe the Council would have never taken any farther notice of me else, if he had not been found”.’21

  The other suspects around Oates are even less likely to have had a hand in any murder. Israel Tonge was both too old and half-mad. Christopher Kirkby, after his prominence during the early days of the Popish Plot, dropped from sight. Although we do know that Kirkby was occasionally mistaken for Oates and was disappointed that he was not reaping enough attention and rewards, there is little to suggest he would have had a hand in a killing.22 A timid man at the best of times, although he knew of some of Godfrey’s part in the affair, would he have tried to engineer a bigger role for himself by murder? It is unlikely. If he had, then why did he not subsequently come forward with real evidence in the matter and take the substantial reward and credit for the discovery? With Oates, Kirkby and Tonge unlikely suspects, this leaves William Bedloe and Miles Prance. To these two gentlemen we will return later.

  COURT POLITICS

  A number of Restoration statesmen had been involved in murderous schemes or were aware of government assassination plots in the early 1660s.23 With this in mind a number of reasons can be put forward for Lord Treasurer Danby as a potential prime suspect in the killing of Godfrey. We may first note that Danby apparently had a motive. His ministry was in the political doldrums and with Charles II forming new alliances with Louis XIV his chances of survival at court were diminishing by the day. The ‘Church and King’ policy was just not delivering the necessary political alliances and funds that he required. The Popish Plot, therefore, was something of godsend to Danby. If it could be manipulated correctly, he would find favour with parliament, bolster ‘Church and King’, find scapegoats among the Roman Catholics, check the Yorkist faction at court and even suspend the king’s need for a French alliance. Or so it might seem to a worried statesman. Danby was never a popular minister but he was very shrewd, and if, by appealing to the nation’s baser instincts, a suitable Roman Catholic agitation could bring benefits in its wake, he would have been willing to use it.

  It was unfortunate for Danby that things went seriously wrong, for Edmund Godfrey interfered with his schemes. Brought into the affair by Oates, Tonge and Kirkby, Godfrey was not content merely to play the part devised for him in taking the depositions and thus making the plot more public. He not only read the documents but also told his friend Edward Coleman about the scheme. In turn Coleman told the Duke of York who made a fuss about the matter at court and so brought the plot into the open. Danby would doubtless have been furious at the magistrate’s interference. As we have seen, it was said that he summoned Godfrey and threatened him. There seems little doubt that Danby was one of the grea
t men whom Godfrey mentioned as being upset with him. They already disliked one another. But why have Godfrey killed?

  We can speculate that Godfrey may have been murdered at Danby’s behest in order to make the plot look as convincing as possible and allow the first minister to recapture the initiative. Alternatively, it could be surmised that Danby was so angry that, in the manner of Henry II and Beckett, the incensed minister blurted out in the company of his servants and hangers-on: ‘Will no-one rid me of this troublesome magistrate?’ Danby was surrounded by men who might well have stooped low enough to do this deed on his behalf, whether he really wished it or not. One of the more significant men in this respect, for example, was to act for him in 1680 in another scheme designed to damage the Duke of Buckingham: Edward Christian.24

  Edward Christian had served the Royalist cause in the Civil War, and from 1660 he had acted as a rent-collector for George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, on his estates. Before long his abilities had seen him promoted to the position of the duke’s chamberlain and financial secretary. There seems little doubt that Christian was corrupt above the ordinary sense of the word in the seventeenth century. He embezzled large sums of money from Buckingham’s estate before his dismissal in 1673. By 1676 he had approached Danby for employment and, despite his reputation, Danby had made him his steward. Accusations that Danby had been involved in the killing of Godfrey were made by his opponents soon after the event. Christian’s staunch defence of the earl at the time proves the trust between them. Christian also defended Danby in print and was subsequently accused of having a part in the affair himself, although he claimed to have been in Stamford, Lincolnshire, at the time. Later on in 1680 we can find other evidence of Danby and Christian working together.25