has been tried; the latest is that of Mr. Pollock: Godfrey was slain by ‘the Queen’s confessor,’ Le Fevre, ‘a Jesuit,’ and some other Jesuits, with lay assistance.* I have found no proof that Le Fevre was either a Jesuit or confessor of the Queen.
*Pollock, The Popish Plot, Duckworth, London, 1903.
As David Hume says, the truth might probably have been discovered, had proper measures been taken at the moment. But a little mob of horse and foot had trampled round the ditch in the dark, disturbing the original traces. The coroner’s jury, which sat long and late, on October 18 and 19, was advised by two surgeons, who probably, like the rest of the world, were biassed by the belief that Godfrey had been slain ‘by the bloody Papists.’ In the reign of mad terror which followed, every one was apt to accommodate his evidence, naturally, to that belief. If they did not, then, like the two original finders, Bromwell and Walters, they might be thrown, heavily ironed, into Newgate.*
*Lords’ MSS. P. 47, note 1.
But when the Popish Plot was exploded, and Charles II. was firm on his throne, still more under James II., every one was apt to be biassed in the opposite direction, and to throw the guilt on the fallen party of Oates, Bedloe, Dugdale, and the other deeply perjured and infamous informers. Thus both the evidence of 1678-1680, and that collected in 1684-1687, by Sir Roger L’Estrange, J.P. (who took great trouble and was allowed access to the manuscript documents of the earlier inquiries), must be regarded with suspicion.*
*L’Estrange, Brief History of the Times, London, 1687.
The first question is cui bono? who had an interest in Godfrey’s death? Three parties had an interest, first, the Catholics (IF Godfrey knew their secrets); next, the managers of the great Whig conspiracy in favour of the authenticity of Oates’s Popish Plot; last, Godfrey himself, who was of an hereditary melancholy (his father had suicidal tendencies), and who was involved in a quandary whence he could scarcely hope to extricate himself with life and honour.
Of the circumstances of Godfrey’s quandary an account is to follow. But, meanwhile, the theory of Godfrey’s suicide (though Danby is said to have accepted it) was rejected, probably with good reason (despite the doubts of L’Estrange, Hume, Sir George Sitwell, and others), by the coroner’s jury.*
*Sitwell, The First Whig, Sacheverell.
Privately printed, 1894, Sir George’s book – a most interesting volume, based on public and private papers – unluckily is introuvable. Some years have passed since I read a copy which he kindly lent me.
The evidence which determined the verdict of murder was that of two surgeons. They found that the body had been severely bruised, on the chest, by kicks, blows of a blunt weapon, or by men’s knees. A sword-thrust had been dealt, but had slipped on a rib; Godfrey’s own sword had then been passed through the left pap, and out at the back. There was said to be no trace of the shedding of fresh living blood on the clothes of Godfrey, or about the ditch. What blood appeared was old, the surgeons averred, and malodorous, and flowed after the extraction of the sword.
L’Estrange (1687) argues at great length, but on evidence collected later, and given under the Anti-Plot bias, that there was much more ‘bloud’ than was allowed for at the inquest. But the early evidence ought to be best. Again, the surgeons declared that Godfrey had been strangled with a cloth (as the jury found), and his neck dislocated. Bishop Burnet, who viewed the body, writes (long after the event): ‘A mark was all round his neck, an inch broad, which showed he was strangled… And his neck was broken. All this I saw.‘*
*Burnet, History of his own Time, ii. p. 741. 1725.
L’Estrange argued that the neck was not broken (giving an example of a similar error in the case of a dead child), and that the mark round the neck was caused by the tightness of the collar and the flow of blood to the neck, the body lying head downwards. In favour of this view he produced one surgeon’s opinion. He also declares that Godfrey’s brothers, for excellent reasons of their own, refused to allow a thorough post-mortem examination. ‘None of them had ever been opened,’ they said. Their true motive was that, if Godfrey were a suicide, his estate would be forfeited to the Crown, a point on which they undoubtedly showed great anxiety.
Evidence was also given to prove that, on Tuesday and Wednesday, October 15 and 16, Godfrey’s body was not in the ditch. On Tuesday Mr. Forsett, on Wednesday Mr. Harwood had taken Mr. Forsett’s harriers over the ground, in pursuit of the legendary hare. They had seen no cane or scabbard; the dogs had found no corpse. L’Estrange replied that, as to the cane, the men could not see it if they were on the further side of the bramble-covered ditch. As to the dogs, they later hunted a wood in which a dead body lay for six weeks before it was found. L’Estrange discovered witnesses who had seen Godfrey in St. Martin’s Lane on the fatal Saturday, asking his way to Paddington Woods, others who had seen him there or met him returning thence. Again, either he or ‘the Devil in his clothes’ was seen near the ditch on Saturday afternoon. Again, his clerk, Moore, was seen hunting the fields near the ditch, for his master, on the Monday afternoon. Hence L’Estrange argued that Godfrey went to Paddington Woods, on Saturday morning, to look for a convenient place of suicide: that he could not screw his courage to the sticking place; that he wandered home, did not enter his house, roamed out again, and, near Primrose Hill, found the ditch and ‘the sticking place.’ His rambles, said L’Estrange, could neither have been taken for business nor pleasure. This is true, if Godfrey actually took the rambles, but the evidence was not adduced till several years later; in 1678 the witnesses would have been in great danger. Still, if we accept L’Estrange’s witnesses for Godfrey’s trip to Paddington and return, perhaps we ought not to reject the rest.*
*Brief History, iii. pp. 252, 300, 174, 175; State Trials, viii. pp.
1387, 1392, 1393, 1359-1389.
On the whole, it seems that the evidence for murder, not suicide, is much the better, though even here absolute certainty is not attained. Granting Godfrey’s constitutional hereditary melancholy, and the double quandary in which he stood, he certainly had motives for suicide. He was a man of humanity and courage, had bravely faced the Plague in London, had withstood the Court boldly on a private matter (serving a writ, as Justice, on the King’s physician who owed him money in his capacity as a coal dealer), and he was lenient in applying the laws against Dissenters and Catholics.
To be lenient was well; but Godfrey’s singular penchant for Jesuits, and especially for the chief Catholic intriguer in England, was probably the ultimate cause of his death, whether inflicted by his own hand or those of others.
We now study Godfrey’s quandary. On June 23, 1678, the infamous miscreant Titus Oates had been expelled from the Jesuit College of St. Omer’s, in France. There he may readily have learned that the usual triennial ‘consult’ of English Jesuits was to be held in London on April 24, but WHERE it was held, namely in the Duke of York’s chambers in St. James’s Palace, Oates did not know, or did not say. The Duke, by permitting the Jesuits to assemble in his house, had been technically guilty of treason in ‘harbouring’ Jesuits, certainly a secret of great importance, as he was the head and hope of the Catholic cause, and the butt of the Whigs, who were eager to exclude him from the succession. Oates had scraps of other genuine news. He returned to London after his expulsion from St. Omer’s, was treated with incautious kindness by Jesuits there, and, with Tonge, constructed his monstrous fable of a Popish plot to kill the King and massacre the Protestant public. In August, Charles was apprised of the plot, as was Danby, the Lord Treasurer; the Duke of York also knew, how much he knew is uncertain. The myth was little esteemed by the King.
On September 6, Oates went to Godfrey, and swore before him, as a magistrate, to the truth of a written deposition, as to treason. But Godfrey was not then allowed to read the paper, nor was it left in his hands; the King,
