The Strange Death of Edmund Godfrey

by Alan Marshall

  Given his background, Godfrey’s involvement with the Commission of the Peace for Westminster and Middlesex seems to have been almost inevitable. Most of his early biographers believed that his work as a magistrate was in his blood, for both his father and brothers were also justices.55 To be included in the commission of the peace brought with it social status as well as an opportunity to associate with the great and the good, and nowhere was this more true than in the commission for Westminster. As the court was located in its precincts and the area itself was the home for many prominent figures, Westminster had its own commission of the peace. In fact, the precincts of the court were policed by being allocated to one justice in particular, the ‘Court Justice’, and this was the semi-official post that Edmund Godfrey soon came to occupy.56 It was this justice who could be relied upon by the palace authorities for prompt and immediate action in an emergency, and the office needed to be occupied by an especially energetic, able and reliable man. Given that Godfrey appeared to be all of these things, he seemed a suitable choice. We can also trace some of Godfrey’s work as a justice of the peace through the quarter sessions records of Middlesex. For example, in July 1673 James Mullet, a gardener, was fined for calling Godfrey a ‘knave’. In May 1675 William Smith of Warwick Street was brought before the justices for ‘directing a scandalous paper against Sir Edm[und] Godfrey upon punishing Hester Symonds in Westminster House [of] Correction’.57 Some individuals were clearly rather resentful of the magistrate’s highhanded manner.

  Edmund Godfrey’s influence in the parish and in London had been at its height during the plague year of 1665.58 St Martin’s on the eve of the plague was its usual overcrowded self, with pockets of poverty, vice and bad housing that were to prove a prime breeding ground for the disease that now emerged and multiplied. Westminster appeared healthy until around May 1665, when evidence of the disease in the squalid area of Long Ditch next to the abbey brought forth its first plague victims. The juxtaposition of palace and slum soon began to have its effect. By July deaths in the area around St Martin’s Church had risen fivefold and the court of Charles II, seeing discretion as the better part of valour, moved out to Oxford. St Martin’s was as hard hit as anywhere else in the metropolis, and the week of 5–12 September alone saw 214 deaths in the parish from the plague. A large pest house was established in the parish at Clay Fields in Soho Gardens, and a rudimentary cemetery was established next door for the victims of the dread disease. For a while Westminster was left to drift, cut off from higher authority with the court, monarch and many justices out of town. Eventually certain justices of the peace were chosen to ‘remain and continue at their habitation in the City of Westminster . . . to the end that the people may be better govern[ed] and such orders observed in this sad season as are necessary’.59

  One of the justices chosen for this important task was Edmund Godfrey. Alongside his colleague and fellow justice of the peace, Edmund Warcup, he ran the government of the area in the absence of most other authorities. According to him, the ‘people seem[ed well] satisfied with their government’.60 Of course he was not on his own; a few others of note stayed in the dying city during the crisis. The former Cromwellian architect of the Restoration, George Monck, Duke of Albermarle, stubbornly remained as the sole representative of the government at Whitehall. Albermarle sought to rule Westminster as he ruled the army – with a rod of iron. His lieutenant was William, Earl of Craven, while their sergeants were justices of the peace such as Edmund Godfrey. Godfrey’s business as woodmonger naturally provided him with transport, and he could use wagons, carts and horses to shift the plague victims through the silent streets of the capital to their last resting place. His actions as a magistrate were often severe, but he survived the great disaster of the plague with an increased reputation. His reaction to the Great Fire of 1666 made him a notable figure at court and in Restoration London. As a result, Godfrey was well rewarded for his pains with a knighthood and £200 of silver plate. Engraved in Latin on a silver tankard that was part of his reward for his services was the inscription that he was:

  A man truly born for his country; when a terrible fire devastated the City, by the providence of God, and his own merit, he was safe and illustrious in the midst of the flames. Afterwards at the express desire of the King (but deservedly so) Edmund Berry Godfrey was created a Knight, in September 1666. For the rest let the public records speak.61

  One would have thought such praise would have pleased him. Yet this stubborn man still courted trouble by claiming that he sought no reward and went so far as initially to refuse the honour bestowed on him by the king.

  In spite of his peculiarities, Godfrey remained careful to keep the peace and to punish those who broke it. However, he was also known as a very ‘busy’ man who seemed to have little fear of the criminal types with whom he might come into contact. Nor does he seem to have lacked courage when it came to exercising his office. He was first assaulted during the 1660s: caught in an alley by an old enemy Godfrey was threatened with a cudgel and was forced to draw his sword. The magistrate managed to fight the man off until his cries for rescue brought assistance.62 His sense of duty, moderation and patience, as well as sheer hard work, kept the area under his custodianship on a tight leash and allowed law-abiding citizens to go about their business. But even here the peculiarities of his character kept revealing themselves from beneath his veneer of respectability. His sense of duty was thought by some to be almost maniacal in its intensity; leaping into a plague house to seize an absconding criminal was all very well, but Edmund Godfrey proved to be someone who was often quite reluctant to abandon the role of amateur sleuth. Indeed, he regularly took a lead in such matters, being noted as a man who moved about at odd hours of the night, a solitary figure who peered down alleys and lanes in search of misconduct. He was also thought by many to be rather too prone to taking responsibility upon himself, and at the same time equally reluctant to give it up once he had taken it.

  Even more oddly for a public official, he was seen as being soft on dissent. It was soon known that Edmund Godfrey was very reluctant to invoke the many penal laws against those of a tender conscience. He had many Catholic and dissenting friends, with whom he dealt liberally. Indeed, if we are to credit one story, he was even willing to bend the law so as not to punish Catholics in particular. It was doubly unfortunate therefore that on 5 September 1678 Edmund Godfrey came face to face with the odd figure of Dr Israel Tonge, who claimed knowledge of a Popish Plot, in his capacity as a herald for the even odder figure of the monstrous Titus Oates.

  FRIENDS, BELIEFS AND POLITICS

  As he established himself on the London scene, Edmund Godfrey naturally acquired a number of friends and acquaintances. They ranged from his dearest friends such as Sir George and Lady Margaret Pratt who lived, when in London, at Charing Cross, to the more humble friendship of the Gibbon family. Mrs Mary Gibbon, who seems to have been a cousin of the magistrate, had her home in Old Southampton Buildings where, in his later years, Godfrey took to visiting her once a week for advice, gossip and the exchange of confidences. However, there is little doubt that the most important of Edmund Godfrey’s friendships of these years, and one we know a great deal about, was the relationship he formed with the Irishman Valentine Greatrakes. Their friendship began with Greatrakes’s visit to London in 1666.63

  Valentine Greatrakes was born in Affane, County Waterford, on 14 February 1628, the son of a Protestant gentry family who had settled in Waterford in the 1590s. He was well educated, but on the death of his father William Greatrakes, and the outbreak of the Irish Rebellion in 1641, Valentine was sent to live with relatives in England. He returned to Ireland in 1647 and lived a retired life upon his estates until he volunteered to serve in the Cromwellian campaign of 1649 in the regiment of the regicide Colonel Robert Phaire. During the next few years, through Phaire’s influence, Greatrakes held a number of local offices in County Waterford, although with the advent of the Restoration he again retired from pub
lic life, after having first secured a pardon for his actions. He then became a respectable and wealthy member of his local community in Affane. He was described as a ‘very civil, frank and well humoured man, conformable to the discipline of the church’.64 He was also wealthy and was said to have an income of £1,000 per annum. In addition, he had made a well-connected marriage to Ruth Godolphin, daughter of Sir John Godolphin.

  It was in 1662 that Greatrakes had his first premonition of the power of healing that lay within him. He soon acquired the reputation of a ‘stroker’ and his stroking ‘cures’ thereafter were often spectacular, if slightly gruesome. Indeed, Greatrakes’s healing practices began to attract huge crowds at his estate who gathered to see him exercise his powers. Given his previous political background and the general fear of all dissenters at the time as possible regicides, Greatrakes was soon in trouble with the Irish clergy who naturally tried to suppress his activities. His local success at exercising his healing powers on scrofula, or the King’s Evil – in itself something of a radical statement – also led to a growing national fame. This fame crossed the Irish Sea and eventually he was invited in July 1665 by Viscount Conway of Ragley to visit England in order to attempt to cure Anne, Viscountess Conway, of her severe migraines.65 After some hesitation and persuasion (for he was apparently reluctant to come to England at the behest of any lord), Greatrakes finally left for Ragley Hall in January 1666. While his activities there did little for Viscountess Conway’s migraines, the expedition did his career no harm. Viscountess Conway, herself a metaphysician and philosopher of note, had some influence among the divines, philosophers and scientists who visited Ragley Hall, and they soon gathered at the house to view the healer. Many hundreds of humbler souls also flocked there in search of Greatrakes’s curative powers. In short, Valentine Greatrakes soon became a national celebrity who, in addition to his healing hands, had spittle (it was said) that could cure deafness, while his urine, which apparently smelt of violets, could cure dropsy. He began to tour the country as a healer and he generally refused payment for his services. While at Worcester in the spring of 1666, he was summoned to the court of Charles II to perform his wonders before the king, mainly it seems due to the persuasion of the king’s cousin Prince Rupert and Sir Henry Bennet, Lord Arlington. Charles II, ever eager for any amusement, however esoteric, was to be disappointed in this instance. The healer failed to achieve anything in his demonstrations before the king, and instead Greatrakes became the brief subject of scientific disputation, which was of less interest to the world-weary monarch. Greatrakes’s alleged powers as a healer did, however, allow him to strike up a firm friendship with Edmund Godfrey. Valentine had apparently worked his wonderful cures before the magistrate. Godfrey was so impressed that while in London, Greatrakes occasionally stayed in the magistrate’s house. Indeed, upon the healer’s return to Ireland in May 1666, in order to resume the life of an Irish gentleman, the two men maintained their friendship by an intimate correspondence.66

  Edmund Godfrey wrote frequently to his friend, and this correspondence is revealing on a variety of levels. It is clear that Godfrey was not only a staunch believer in Greatrakes’s powers, but may have been cured by the healer himself. It is certain that he had witnessed the activities of Greatrakes at first hand within his own family. Godfrey’s letters to Greatrakes reveal boundless admiration for his friend, both as a man and as a healer. In his will Godfrey was to leave the Irishman £10 for mourning clothes, and Greatrakes had also named one of his sons after the magistrate. In part, the correspondence between the two men dealt not only with Greatrakes’s healing powers, which the magistrate sought to promote at every opportunity, but also with Godfrey’s views of the court, their mutual friendships, business deals, and the magistrate’s own personality. Godfrey evidently saw the correspondence as a chance both to cultivate a friendship and to show off some of his learning, for he was liable to lapse into Latin tags and foreign phrases. He also gently, and sometimes not so gently, mocked Greatrakes’s intimacy with his wife. Godfrey, a celibate bachelor of forty-five, appears to have been something of a misogynist at heart, believing, as he put it, that ‘the Devil in Woman had prevail’d on them to Deboachery’.67

  The two men were involved in business affairs together almost from the very beginning. In the main these interests were connected with Godfrey’s livelihood as a wood and coal merchant in Westminster. Some speculative land dealing in Ireland also took place and Godfrey undertook to act as a spokesman for Greatrakes in London.68 Greatrakes was obviously someone to whom Godfrey felt he could reveal his personal feelings. He noted at the receipt of one letter that nothing ‘was more welcome unto me than ever the most kind letter from an amoroso to his Mrs. or su e contra from her to him,’69 or again that he regarded Greatrakes’s letters as items ‘I keep carefully by me among my choicest Reserves’.70 The correspondence reveals depths in Godfrey’s character that have not previously been available to biographers. His legal struggles with his nephew, Godfrey Harrison, are revealed in the letters, recently uncovered by the author in Dublin; they drove him to despair. We also learn that Godfrey had suffered losses in property, as well as injury to his person, during the course of the Great Fire of London in September 1666. To sustain him in these bad times he called upon a deep religious belief and a remarkable faith in the powers of Greatrakes. These powers he regarded as both exceptional and God-given. The injury he sustained, due to a piece of timber striking him on his back, could, he believed, only be cured by Greatrakes’s healing touch. Greatrakes had already shown his skills as a healer before the magistrate by curing Godfrey’s sisters as well as other people, and Godfrey did not doubt his friend’s healing gifts.

  At the same time the correspondence also began to reveal Godfrey’s melancholy nature, a dark side to his character that apparently could not be shaken off. This was expressed in a number of ways. It was particularly apparent when Godfrey discussed Greatrakes’s wife. Although she was jestingly complimented by the magistrate, her close relationship with Greatrakes appeared to have alarmed Godfrey. His apparent dislike and mistrust of women now became more obvious and in itself was perhaps revealing of the underlying tensions that existed in his personality. It raises the speculation that Godfrey’s apparent expressions of dislike of the female sex, his status as a bachelor, his deep friendship with the healer and his comments to Greatrakes may have relevance in other ways. A case could perhaps be made for suppressed homosexual leanings, although the evidence is contradictory and somewhat slight.71 Such aspects of his personality, however, could be part and parcel of his depressive moods, which many acquaintances commented upon, as well as his failure to marry. Moreover, the known homosexuality of Titus Oates (with which we shall shortly deal), and the speculations of J.P. Kenyon about a homosexual ring in the Roman Catholic community, suggest possible reasons as to why Oates and Tonge approached an emotionally vulnerable Godfrey rather than any other justice in September 1678.72 Certainly Godfrey’s eagerness for the personal contact and companionship provided by Greatrakes is revealing of his psychological state in the 1660s and 1670s. He was a lonely man, despite his busy life. Indeed, questions about Godfrey’s state of mind were also to be raised after his disappearance in October 1678. The figure that emerges from the correspondence naturally bears little or no resemblance to the Protestant martyr portrayed by Whig propaganda in the late 1670s and early 1680s. Instead Edmund Godfrey appears as a man of flesh and blood, deeply religious, somewhat misanthropic and troubled by his relatives, as much as by his odd personality. This combination of factors led him even to think of retiring to live in Ireland in the early 1670s in the company of his friend. This retirement, continually postponed for one reason or another, never happened.

  The correspondence also contains much by way of political comment and for the first time reveals Edmund Godfrey’s political attitudes. As a businessman with access to the Restoration political world, albeit as a minor figure on the stage, Godfrey often had close relations
with courtiers and politicians at Whitehall, although in his own political life Godfrey noted prophetically that he was a man who ‘If he wo[ul]d be throw paced . . . might be somebody among them [at court.] But . . . [I have] a foolish & narrow conscience . . . that spoyles . . . [me] and all that use it’.73 Although wary of expressing his opinions too blatantly, for fear that the correspondence would be intercepted and read by eyes other than those of Greatrakes, Godfrey did comment upon the events of the day. His opinions of the court during the period of the misnamed ‘Cabal’ ministry in the early 1670s are generally sound. He disliked the vanity of court life, where he believed that the king’s mistresses, Lady Castlemaine and Nell Gwyn, backed by the Duke of Buckingham and Lord Arlington respectively, held sway. Godfrey was equally interested in the vexed relationship between Charles and his queen, Catherine, as well as the ‘pranks’ at Whitehall and Newmarket. As an example of the moral poverty of the court of Charles II, Godfrey’s description of the funeral of the Duke of Albermarle in 1670 was particularly damning. He described the roguery of the king and his friends at this former hero’s last rites as ‘a poor, pittyful sneaking show’.74