The Strange Death of Edmund Godfrey

by Alan Marshall

  THE EARL OF PEMBROKE

  The mad Philip Herbert, Earl of Pembroke and Montgomery, has long been a suspect in the killing of Godfrey. His name first entered the lists in an article written in 1924 by J.G. Muddiman.42 Other historians have subsequently elaborated Muddiman’s views, most notably Stephen Knight. In reality the crucial aspect of Pembroke’s candidacy as a murderer, as we shall see, rests not with his character, which was bad enough, but with whether contemporaries ever linked him with the strange death of Edmund Godfrey. The answer, unfortunately for some theorists, appears to be negative. Indeed, no one at the time ever seems to have linked Pembroke with the deed. Those who favour his candidacy, however, claim that the burden of truth rests not so much upon positive as negative evidence. Indeed, the argument put forward is that no one named Pembroke because they were too frightened to do so on account of what he, a man with a penchant for violence, might do to them. This argument is somewhat fallacious, especially given Pembroke’s death in December 1683. We are meant to believe that even after his death at the height of the Tory reaction and the persecution of the Whigs (with whom he was closely associated), no one dared come forward with his name when an awful lot of old scores were being settled. Surely some hint would have been made at this time? Yet there is only silence. So Muddiman’s likely suspect is ruled out for that reason alone. But there are other reasons to eliminate Pembroke, as we shall see.

  Even at first glance Pembroke does seem a well-qualified suspect. Philip Herbert, 7th Earl of Pembroke, was a child of the disrupted 1650s. He was born in January 1653 as the son of the fifth earl and his second wife. For much of his short life, Pembroke managed to get into one scrape after another, being at various times imprisoned for murder and for blasphemy. He was also the subject of a number of revealing pamphlets of the day. Although these were anonymous, the fact that they came out in print when Pembroke was still alive gives the lie to the view that people were too frightened to write about him at the time. Indeed, quite often it seems that Pembroke went out of his way to court notoriety. He was certainly guilty of an excessive passion for life and was probably an abuser of his wife into the bargain. He was also most likely an alcoholic. His massive drinking bouts appear to have brought out his violent streak and involved him in numerous duels and at least two killings – in 1678 and 1681. As far as we know, he was also a somewhat ill-educated young man. He was to spend his later days, after a life of aristocratic dissipation, mad and under lock and key at Wilton House in Wiltshire, the family seat.43

  He succeeded to the family title in July 1674. Within days he was involved in a duel and had been twice run through. The poet Rochester labelled him ‘Boorish Pembroke brave’, and as the new earl followed a wild career, his fearsome reputation began to proceed him.44 In December 1674 he decided to marry. His choice was an unusual one. Henriette Mauricette was the sister of the king’s mistress Louise de Kéroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth, a figure of some importance at court. Philip and Henriette were not a happy couple and what she saw in the earl is unclear. Pembroke had to wait until he had recovered from his wounds after a duel before the marriage could actually take place and thereafter he seems to have neglected his wife as much as possible, no doubt to her great relief. Indeed, he pointedly refused to lay out any expenses for her lying in on her pregnancy and when the Duchess of Portsmouth threatened to inform the king of the matter he crudely replied that ‘if she did so he would put her upon her head, and show his family the grievance of the nation’.45 Those who sought the repayment of debt from the young earl did not fair much better; they were threatened with violence. So Pembroke’s life settled into a round of drunkenness, duels, and hunting on his estates. His political ambitions were consequently limited. He was Lord Lieutenant for his country and thus had some authority, which he was later to use for the Whig cause, but beyond this his influence was restricted.

  Very few people were at ease in his company; although one author claimed that he was in reality full of virtue and treated with ‘Respect and Honour by all that know him, and reputed ill by only such as are not worthy [of] his Acquaintance’.46 Despite these words in Pembroke’s defence it is clear that when he was drunk, or even sober, he was a dangerous man to be around. Pembroke was a notorious duellist, although it must be said not a very accomplished one. He lost quite a few duels in this time and was run through on a number of occasions. After one such contest in 1676 he treated the jury that acquitted him to a drink, but no one dared sit near him until Sir Francis Vincent did so. The two men promptly got into a quarrel and Pembroke smashed a bottle of wine over Vincent’s head. As Vincent staggered out Pembroke drew his sword and Vincent roaring that he was ‘never afraid of a naked sword in his life’, drew his own weapon in return. In the ensuing fight Pembroke’s sword broke and the two men resorted to fisticuffs in which the earl was badly beaten. One of Pembroke’s servants ended up in the River Thames into which a maddened Vincent had thrown him.47

  In fact, in an era when aristocratic violence was common enough, young Pembroke, who was still only twenty-three, had much in common with his peers. To the Restoration aristocrat of his generation violence was fairly commonplace and was linked to the code of honour. This aristocratic code had emerged over a number of years. A series of unwritten rules, it revolved around individual self-esteem and reputation. Men such as Pembroke were unusually sensitive to the least slight as a result, the more so as they were also desirous of as much praise as possible. Naturally the gentleman aristocrat was bound to show courage, fortitude, and familiarity with his equals, but of necessity he was to receive in return respect, praise and even esteem. Indeed, to lose one’s reputation was to lose the immortal part of a gentleman’s soul. Thus affronts were frequently looked on unfavourably and were usually settled by the code of honour on the duelling field. Giving someone the lie, as contemporaries put it, was also looked upon as a dangerous business. The moral code that most aristocrats lived by was exemplified by their willingness to fight those of equal status. Indeed, to be ‘challengable’ was desirable in any gentleman. This private system of law regulated life between men of honour, for a gentleman’s word was his bond. Conversely mere violence was to be offered to those unfortunate souls who lurked below the code of honour. Pembroke was guilty on both counts. He fought those who were his social equals and he beat to a pulp those whom he thought beneath him. Occasionally, of course, he went too far as in the case of Nathaniel Cony.48

  On Sunday 3 February 1678 Pembroke was drinking with his friends in Long’s House in the Haymarket when Nathaniel Cony and his friend Goring came into the tavern.49 As Pembroke knew Cony, he invited the pair to drink at his table. At first the wary Cony refused, but he and Goring were eventually persuaded. Towards midnight, after some heavy drinking, Pembroke and Goring quarrelled. Pembroke threw wine into the man’s face and a scuffle broke out. As the two were forcibly separated, Goring threatened to draw his sword and he was bustled out of the room. Pembroke then turned on Cony in a fit of rage, kicking and punching him severely. Having satisfied his honour, he then left with his friends. Cony was soon pushed out of the tavern, taken home and put to bed. He died of his injuries a week later. Goring later remembered that the quarrel was over ‘families and play’, but he remembered little else, being, like the others, already befuddled with drink. One Captain Savage in Pembroke’s company said that Goring told Pembroke that ‘he was as good, or a better gentleman then he was’50 and got wine in his face as a result. A gentleman called Shelly was also there. He claimed that the fight broke out over gambling. Goring asked Pembroke to play, but when the earl was about to send for £500 he backed out. A peeved Pembroke said: ‘you are an idle fellow that you propose these things and [do] not pursue them. Upon that Mr. Goring tells my Lord, his name was a better name than his Lordships, and he a better gentleman then my Lord’51 and so they set too. Cony only got involved when Goring had been hustled out of the room. Pembroke apparently told him to go and join his friend. Cony replied somewhat ins
olently that he did not know why Goring had been taken out in the first place, and so Pembroke knocked him to the ground and brutally kicked and stamped on him. Captain Fitzpatrick, another witness, told another tale. He later claimed that Goring, who was drunk, said ‘I will drink, I will play, I will fight any with man’.

  ‘Who is this gentleman,’ said Pembroke, ‘that I should never hear of him.’

  ‘’s Blood,’ said Goring, ‘not hear of me? My name is Goring, a name and family as good as any gentleman in England.’

  ‘There is nobody doubts it,’ said Pembroke.

  ‘Your betters’, said Goring and then Pembroke threw the wine in his face.52 Pembroke was subsequently arrested and sent for trial.

  It is at this point that Edmund Godfrey briefly enters the story. Godfrey was the foreman of the grand jury that brought in a verdict of murder and necessitated further action. The grand jury having found Pembroke guilty, as they were bound to do given the evidence against him, he pleaded his status as peer of the realm and was sent up to the House of Lords to stand trial before his peers. Fortunately for him, they only found him guilty of manslaughter and, having paid a fine, he was set free.53

  What is one to make of this case, for upon it rests the argument that the ‘psychotic’ Pembroke subsequently sought revenge (or was encouraged by Scott to seek revenge), on the foreman of the grand jury, Edmund Godfrey. In fact, Pembroke emerges not as a psychotic, but as a drunken boor of man, certainly prone to violence, but not given to premeditated murder. Rather he was a man who acted upon impulse. If he even remembered the foreman of the grand jury, it is unlikely that he cared very much about him, for after all he was ultimately acquitted and released to continue his merry way with other deeds of drink and violence. Moreover, why single out the foreman of the jury? What of the other men involved and those who gave their evidence in his trial? The connection between the pair is thus tenuous and full of supposition. The idea that Godfrey subsequently scurried across the Channel when Pembroke was liberated is also fallacious. Nor was the magistrate who had stood up to the king and a number of assaults in the street likely to be frightened away by a drunken lout such as Pembroke, for all of his aristocratic airs and graces. In addition, although Pembroke was a violent man, as we have seen within his code of honour and given the way in which he lived, he will undoubtedly have thought himself cleared of Cony’s death: he was proved right by his peers, having been found guilty of manslaughter. Cony was not important – he was not a gentleman. Nor in Pembroke’s eyes were the members of the jury. Moreover, as K.H.D. Haley long ago pointed out, Pembroke may not have even been in London in September and October 1678. He was irregular in his habits at the best of times and his attendance in the House of Lords mirrored his life. In fact, he seems not to have been there in person until at least 5 December 1678.54

  Pembroke is ultimately an unlikely suspect, however violent he was in his life, and his candidacy smacks of certain historians looking too hard for a suspect and ignoring the full facts of the case. In the end he continued to live life to the full as he saw it. A further killing followed in 1681, after which the king intervened to pardon him. Pembroke having eventually been removed to his estates for his own, and others’ safety, he finally burnt out and died aged thirty in 1683.55 The case against him, therefore, remains purely circumstantial. It is true that Pembroke had inflicted injuries on one of his victims that in a number of ways resembled those found upon Godfrey, but in the end the answer must be that he had little real motive to kill the magistrate.

  MURDERED FOR THE CAUSE: THE ROMAN CATHOLICS, PRANCE AND BEDLOE

  On 18 September 1680 the Roman Catholic midwife Mrs Elizabeth Cellier was nearly another victim of the Popish Plot crisis. She was standing in the pillory having been found guilty of libel, with stones and other rubbish thrown at her head by the howling Protestant mob of London. Cellier’s crime was that earlier in 1680 she had published pamphlets that called the Popish Plot witnesses liars and blamed the king for allowing them to make a profit out of their perjuries. Her other charges were that both Miles Prance and Francis Corrall, a somewhat garrulous hackney coachman, had been tortured in Newgate prison to make them inform upon the Catholics, from which Cellier had suggested that Protestantism itself was basically anti-royalist. These were formidable charges and her presence in the pillory that day suggests that the authorities took them seriously enough to ensure her punishment. Yet her presence there was also the result of a series of sham plots in which she, with the help of other minor Roman Catholics, had tried to engineer a shift in responsibility for the crisis from the Roman Catholic community to the Whig opposition. Cellier and her cronies thus provide an interesting entrance to the next, and most popular, group of suspects in the strange death of Edmund Godfrey: the members of the Roman Catholic community of London themselves.56

  It is generally accepted by most modern historians that the Catholics had no real reason to kill Edmund Godfrey, and that the three men who were executed for his murder, Robert Green, Henry Berry and Lawrence Hill, were entirely innocent. Indeed, the case against the Roman Catholics rests largely upon the evidence given at the trials of 1679–80, the literature written by men such as Titus Oates, William Bedloe and Miles Prance, and the popular belief at the time that, whatever the reality of the plot, one element of suspicion above all others was at least justified: that the Catholics had murdered Edmund Godfrey. However, a number of questions need to be explored: were Prance and Bedloe really telling the truth about the murder at Somerset House? Or, as Pollock suggested in 1903, was Prance actually telling the truth but disguising the names of those involved in order to protect the real culprits? Why would the Catholics want Godfrey to die in any case? Was the strange death of Edmund Godfrey in reality a mistake, a serious error of judgement on the part of a rogue group within the Catholic community? Or had the Jesuits and other Catholics killed Godfrey for their own reasons? We must begin to answer such questions by examining the basis for the belief that the Catholics killed Godfrey – the evidence of Bedloe and Prance, and their claim that this crime had taken place in Somerset House in the Strand.

  Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset and Lord Protector of Edward VI constructed Somerset House in 1549.57 Located in the Strand, next door to the older and by the 1670s largely decayed, Savoy Palace, Somerset House became the abode of the Roman Catholic queen consorts of the realm in the seventeenth century. It had a respectably large establishment of Catholic servants, priests, confessors, laymen and even the odd discreet Jesuit inhabiting the precincts of the queen’s court and home. Under Queen Catherine of Braganza, who was the royal occupant in 1678, the palace had a notable Roman Catholic chapel mainly for royal use but also available to the numerous Catholics who lived about the palace in the crowded streets off the Strand. In a sense, therefore, by 1678 Somerset House had become something of an island of Catholicism in Restoration London and was naturally suspect. As such, the palace also provided a suitable setting for the theory that one of the most heinous crimes of the century, the murder of Edmund Godfrey, was committed by Roman Catholics.

  The English belief in the cunning of Catholics in general and of the Jesuits in particular has already been noted. The Jesuits themselves were seen in English eyes as containing in their ranks the most cunning Catholics of all, who were given to going about in disguise and, being more fanatical than most in their devotion to the ‘anti-Christ’, that is the Pope in Rome, were ever eager to create mayhem in Protestant countries. They were also believed to obey a creed that did not rule out the elimination of the opposition by political violence where necessity and the Lord willed it. Indeed, it was claimed that the Jesuit order even possessed a philosophical justification for the assassination of monarch, minister, or subject in the doctrines laid down by Juan de Mariana.58 The Spanish Jesuit Mariana’s view that ‘anyone who [was] inclined to heed the prayers of the people may attempt to destroy a tyrant’ was seen by some as evidence of the basic immorality of the order, which had been e
stablished in the 1530s by Ignatius Loyola. Thus the plethora of images in Oates’s and Tonge’s imaginings of secret groups of Jesuit assassins stalking the king and his land pandered to a tenacious set of beliefs among good Protestant folk in general. Yet few appear to have questioned Oates’s account of the incompetent Irish assassins, Grove and Pickering, dropping flints and silver bullets from guns behind bushes, and hired by the Roman church to murder a monarch who was inclined to their religion and who had done his best to bring relief to Catholics where he could. Indeed, if elements of the the Catholic church really had wished to kill Charles II, they could have hired hands far more competent than Oates’s ‘fantasticks’, as there were professional assassins aplenty available for hire in Europe. Nevertheless, Oates had set the scene with his revelations of murdering papists, and it only remained for his fellow informants to provide tales of men who had actually murdered a Protestant magistrate.59

  We must begin with the information of William Bedloe.60 Bedloe’s accusations about the murder were significant mainly because he was the first to come forward to the authorities with any evidence of how Godfrey died. It was also Bedloe who first singled out Somerset House as the scene of the crime. Despite being a large rambling place it was, unfortunately for him, a poor choice. Like most seventeenth-century palaces, Somerset House was liable to be crowded with people at all times of the day and night. Nevertheless Bedloe had lived in London and undoubtedly knew his way about the place; he was able, for example, when taken back there after his revelations to the Privy Council, to locate the very room in which he had seen the body of Godfrey by the light of a lantern. It was a ‘lobby or place for servants to attend in’. It was not the best of choices in retrospect, but at least there were Catholics in the vicinity. Of course the servants of the queen and other inhabitants of the palace who both saw Bedloe and heard his tale made much of the fact that this was a public room, claiming that his whole story was a ‘falsehood and an impossible thing’. Moreover, they also appear to have had some previous dealings with Bedloe and knew him for a ‘notorious robber and highwayman’.61 Bedloe even admitted he had occasionally been on the wrong side of the law.