The Strange Death of Edmund Godfrey

by Alan Marshall

  Naturally the problem of James as the popish successor to the throne loomed ever larger over the years, especially because of the king’s failure to produce a legitimate heir who could oust James from the succession. But the failure of religious toleration, fears for English liberties in the face of the monarchy’s prerogative powers, the secret dealings with France in the 1670s, war in Europe, factional rivalry, and the corruption that seemed to pervade the court of Charles II, all contributed to the crisis that now developed.

  The crisis of 1678–83 cannot thus be said to have had a single cause. Although James’s conversion did not help, it was clear to some that the king’s secret, and not so secret, deals made with Louis XIV were as much a threat to the nation as James. They were thought to be undermining the very fabric of Protestantism as well as, more mundanely, damaging English pockets. Danby’s widespread abuse of the parliamentary system was also perceived as a threat to English liberties. As a result, new political patterns now began to form that eventually led to the development of political ‘parties’ following the dissolution of the Cavalier Parliament in 1679. Country beliefs in a staunch Protestantism, merchant-trading interests, concern with liberty, and hostility to prerogative notions and court corruption, were to emerge with the creation of a Whig ‘party’. The old Anglican Royalist beliefs of ‘Church, King and hereditary right’, were to produce the ‘Tories’. Thereafter the divided political nation was to pursue the banners of exclusion of James, limitations on his future powers as monarch, the legitimacy of James, Duke of Monmouth (the king’s eldest and illegitimate son), the divorce and remarriage of Charles II himself, or simple loyalty, with equal force. Hand in hand with this went the widespread fears of court corruption and waste, of hidden court Catholics and their influence, fears of a popish successor and of the increasing power of France. The concerns of the nation were exemplified by the catchwords of the day ‘popery and arbitrary government’.26 The confirmation that something really was rotten in the state was to be found in the death of the magistrate Edmund Godfrey and the revelations of a liar with an already notorious reputation: Titus Oates.

  THE SALAMANCA DOCTOR: THE EARLY HISTORY OF TITUS OATES

  Titus Oates, the future ‘saviour of the nation’, was of Norfolk ancestry. His father Samuel Oates had been a rather down-at-heel weaver and Baptist conventicler in Coleman Street, that den of nonconformity in the seventeenth-century City of London. By 1644 Samuel had married a Hastings midwife and had also stepped from the loom to the pulpit without much difficulty. In the turbulent days of the Civil War, when religious life itself was in a state of some flux, numerous individuals were setting themselves up as preachers of the word of God, and Samuel was to the fore, preaching louder than most. Samuel Oates was thought to be a ‘famous preacher’ and was a popular man among his Baptist congregations, although later writers were to condemn much of his religious talk as ‘sedition and nonsense’. Not that this appears to have concerned Samuel overmuch, for in the end he was not so tied to his religion that he could not change his religious colours at least once or twice in his career. In due course his ranting lifestyle naturally got him into difficulties. In 1646 Samuel was hauled up before the local magistrates in Essex, after one of his female converts died of exposure having been ‘dipped’ rather too vigorously in the eternal waters of life by the energetic preacher. Although he was found not guilty, Samuel was forced to leave Essex in a hurry. It was some three years before he began to prosper again. In 1649 he became a chaplain to the regiment of Colonel Pride in the New Model Army, and the same year – the year in which a Republican government was established – also saw the birth of Samuel and Lucy Oates’s second son, named Titus, at Oakham in Rutland.27

  There is no doubt that Titus Oates had a difficult childhood; his father seems to have disliked him from the first, and the preacher was hardly a model parent to his children. William Smith, who was to meet Titus’s mother at the height of the informer’s fame, noted that even she believed Titus odd, revealing that she thought that her son ‘would have been a natural . . . and his father could not endure him’.28 With his convulsions, runny nose and slavering at the mouth, the young Titus was singularly abused as a child. It was said that his father, coming home at night after a hard day preaching and ‘doing good’, used to spy the young Titus lurking in the chimney corner and ‘would cry take away this snotty fool, and jumble him about’.29 This, Lucy Oates said, ‘made me often to weep because you know he was my child’.30 In time, Titus was to prove dull or apparently just plain stupid, but then again the Oates clan as a whole was hardly much better. Titus’s brother Samuel Oates junior went to sea in the 1650s and 1660s, where he served against both the Dutch and the Turks. Titus’s other brother Constant Oates became a glazier in Southwark.31 Both of his brothers were to inform against Titus in the 1680s. His two sisters, Hannah and Anne, were inoffensive enough, and his mother also seems to have been a harmless individual who, as mothers usually do with even the worst of their children, bore him some affection, which Titus was to return with abuse and harsh words.32 As noted, his father thought little of his youngest son, but as Titus reached manhood Samuel was willing to go along with some of his early schemes and suffered as a result. Samuel senior was to end his days in 1683 in a London tavern, the Half Moon in King Street, under the ‘vehement suspicion of adultery’. Yet with the Restoration of the monarchy underway in 1660, Samuel Oates desisted from belabouring his family and once more thought it politic to change his religious colours. He became a minister of the Church of England at Hastings in Sussex, and the family moved there to support him in his new ministry.33

  In the course of the 1650s Titus had been sent up to London for his education. It is possible that for a while he attended Edmund Godfrey’s old alma mater Westminster School, but there is little or no trace of him there. In any case, however much he tried, Titus was never a very successful pupil. Indeed, it was later claimed that he was a ‘great dunce’.34 In spite of this, by 1664 Titus had taken to attending the Merchant Taylors school as a free scholar and was under the tutelage of the master there, William Smith. In return for this tuition, Titus was alleged to have cheated Smith out of his tuition fees and was later still to accuse Smith of having a part to play in the Popish Plot. Titus proved an incorrigible pupil and he was soon expelled from the institution for his tricks. As a result, in 1665 he was sent off to school at Sedlescombe, some six miles from Hastings. As this was hardly more than a dame-school, it could not have done very much for Titus’s rather peripatetic education. Perhaps his father sent him there to get him out of the way. Nevertheless, aged eighteen, in June 1667, Titus, like many another aspiring young gentleman of his day, was launched upon a university career. This proved all too brief. He went up to Caius College, Cambridge, where for some two years he continued to garner a bad reputation for his ‘dullness and debauchery’.35 He subsequently transferred to St John’s College as a result but he was no more successful there, and he remained troublesome to the end as his tricks, debt, ignorance and other vices became ever more marked. He left Cambridge in disgrace in 1669 without a degree but with a capacious memory for lies, which was to serve him well in the future. However, lying and cheating were but minor crimes in contemporary eyes. His major vice, common enough at the university it seems but damned at the time, appears to have been his by now emergent homosexual leanings.

  Edmund Godfrey’s sexuality, as we have seen, was uncertain. However, in the case of Titus Oates there is no doubt that his sexuality holds important clues to his personality and his future career as an informer. Whether Titus Oates may genuinely be labelled ‘homosexual’ is a debatable point, for research into early modern sexuality has shown many men who had experience of such matters did not necessarily consider themselves homosexual or ‘gay’ in the modern sense.36 There seems to be little doubt that Oates engaged in sodomy. Contemporaries mention this as a fact in the satires and pamphlets of the day. Accusations of homosexuality were often conventional in
such works, but the evidence for Oates’s sexuality goes beyond mere satire. A swipe at Oates upon his marriage to a follower of the religious radical Lodwick Muggleton in 1693 makes the point that Oates wed this unfortunate lady having been ‘touched in [his] conscience for some juvenile gambols that shall be nameless . . . and made a vow to sow his wild Oats, and not to hide the talent which God had plentifully given him in an Italian napkin’.37 The reference to the ‘Italian napkin’ was to various sodomising practices that the English, in their usual prejudiced way, naturally thought of as the activities of foreigners in general and of Italians in particular. Yet more evidence in a vulgar form, replete with double entendres about back entrances, makes it clear that this satirist was drawing upon an already well-known and well-founded tradition of knowledge and a story about Oates that had not died down since his first emergence into public life in 1678. Sodomy, of course, was regarded as a grave sin and certainly one against the preached norms of society.38 It had become a criminal offence in 1562 and a distinct ‘molly’ culture, as it was called, had begun to emerge in London in the later sixteenth century, but only came to fruition in the latter half of the seventeenth and the first half of the eighteenth centuries.

  Although accusations of sodomy often became a catch-all term for a wayward life, or any number of sins against God, in Oates’s case it may have been more complicated than this. There seems little doubt that he was a paedophile. His associations with schools and schoolboys, the accusation that, as we shall see, he was to make against William Parker, and other hints suggest that he was not only an unpleasant man to be around, but positively dangerous to young boys. His physical characteristics also meant that he was hardly ever ignored. He was not a prepossessing sight, with his limp, his red face, bull neck and enormous chin, but he was certainly noticeable. His ‘harsh and loud’ brassy voice also began to be matched by a raucous and difficult personality. Roger North was later to note that Oates’s ‘common conversation was larded with lewd oaths, Blasphemy, Saucy, Atheistical, and every way offensive discourse’.39 Yet even given this background, Oates’s motivation for his career as an informer remains ultimately uncertain. What turned Oates into the man he became?

  The hostility he encountered at Cambridge was but one element in a craving for respectability. He was also a man who thrived on fantasies. He saw himself becoming the saviour of the nation and making a mark in the world. Certainly his later writings were to illuminate many an imaginary invention in which he played a central role fighting against demon Popes and Jesuits. At the same time these creations reveal another craving: a craving for acceptance. It was Oates as the shrewd and secretive man of action who emerged most forcefully. In his statements and writings all the people he came across are foolishly depicted accepting him as a uniquely trustworthy individual. He portrayed himself as the arch manipulator, the hero, or superman, who despite his outward appearance managed to infiltrate their designs. He was to be England’s saviour, able to convey from one important European individual to another letters concerning the great designs of the time. Of course, as these lies spun ever further out of control it must have been very difficult for Oates to distinguish between reality and fantasy. Another common theme in his life was disguise. Who he really was, what he was and where he was going remained a mystery in the increasingly unhappy and unhinged world he inhabited. So Oates’s fantasy world was used to cover the sordid reality of life. In fact there were no big secrets to uncover, and even if there had been, he above all would not have been trusted with them. Reality lay rather in back-alley meetings, stealing, begging, poverty, vice, fear, hatred and failure. Oates failed at most of the things he set out to do – except one. For a time he was genuinely honoured by some as the ‘saviour of the nation’, as he had always desired.

  Having left Cambridge in disgrace and without a degree, Oates nevertheless contrived to slip into undeserved holy orders and he soon became a curate. By March 1673 he appeared to be prospering and was presented with a living at Bobbing in Kent by Sir George Moore, in whose possession it lay.40 This proved another short residence as Oates’s bad habits once more came to the fore. The somewhat loud-mouthed irreligious boy had by now also become a drunken thief. While drunk he tended to reveal his Baptist upbringing by proclaiming on religious matters and shocking the local worshippers. As a result Oates was soon turned out of the living, and in the manner of a bad penny immediately returned to Hastings to trouble his family once more. In Hastings Samuel Oates senior was still ensconced in his own parish church. Uncharacteristically, for a time, he showed some paternal affection towards his errant son and promptly made him a curate. The young Titus, however, had higher ambitions and he soon set his sights on the local schoolmaster’s post, unfortunately occupied by William Parker, the son of a local magistrate.

  Then, at Easter 1675 Titus Oates had his first known brush with the law.41 He deposed before the mayor of Hastings allegations of Parker’s sexual abuse of his charges. Naturally the schoolmaster was arrested and bound over. The fact that the charge was sexual was probably more of a reflection of Oates’s desires than William Parker’s, but while Parker was already safely defamed the Oates family decided to add insult to injury by further accusing the young man’s father of treasonable words. This being a government matter, the mayor immediately informed Secretary of State Sir Joseph Williamson. This time the case failed and, with charges of defamation imminent, Titus Oates decided to make himself scarce by going to sea. In May–June 1675 he was appointed as a naval chaplain on the Adventure under her Captain Sir Richard Routh. The ship was bound for one of England’s more miserable colonial possessions of the day, the city of Tangier, in order to convey the new governor Lord Inchquin to his post. On board, Oates’s predilection for sodomy once more got him into trouble. He was caught, and only the fact that he was a chaplain seems to have saved him from a severe punishment. The Adventure reached Tangier in June. According to his own version of events, Oates had his first encounters with Roman Catholic plotters there, but the sojourn in the city was a brief one. Oates was soon back in England, and as a result of his activities he was expelled from the navy. He then lived in London for a while. With two legal actions still outstanding in Hastings – both of which might find against him – there was no point in Oates going back there, the more so since his own father was by now also lodging in London, an absentee rector as a result of the Parker affair. Moreover, Samuel had had yet another change of heart in his religious beliefs and he had returned to his old Baptist ways. Titus himself was soon picked up and arrested in September 1676 on account of the Parker affair. He was returned to Hastings and then placed in Dover Castle. By some means he contrived to escape back to London, where his life now began a cycle of poverty and misery.42

  Around Bartholomew-tide in 1676 William Smith, once Titus’s teacher, was startled to meet his former pupil in his local tavern.43 By now dressed in the clerical garb that he almost always wore for the rest of his life, Titus was introduced to a club at the Pheasant in Fuller’s Rents by the actor Matthew Medburne. Smith later claimed that Medburne had picked up Oates in the ‘Earl of Suffolk’s cellar at Whitehall’ and proceeded to introduce him to the delights of club life; on this point there seems no reason to doubt him. Matthew Medburne was a zealous Catholic dramatist and comic actor on the London stage. Oates may seem to be odd company for such a man, but it is just possible that the association may have had sexual overtones, although this is unclear. A Mr Mekins kept the tavern in Fuller’s Rents at which the club met and it consisted of several members, some of whom were Catholic and others Protestant. They included men such as William Smith himself and Edmund Everard, who may well have been a failed informer of the mid-1670s, and others, for example Jones, a priest, and one Keymash.44 Smith was to claim that it was not a political club in any sense, and that politics in fact was banned as an item of conversation (however unlikely this seems). Paul Hammond has speculated that the club may well have been a covert place for flagellant meetings
.45 Although indeed there are some engravings that depict Oates being flogged and a number of references that refer to him flogging others, there appears to be little real evidence of this. Whatever the true nature of the club, Oates appears soon to have inveigled himself into the company of some of its members.

  As a result of his membership, he was appointed Protestant chaplain to the household of the Roman Catholic Earl of Norwich at Arundel House in London. As usual, Oates was no sooner in place than he was in trouble, and after a few months he was again out of a job. Undaunted, he now decided on the Roman Catholic Church as his vocation. Having found a suitable priest, he was received into the church around 3 March 1677. In his later writings as the selfappointed scourge of Rome, Oates was to claim he was never a true Catholic in his heart but that the conversion was a cover for his first real attempt to infiltrate Catholic designs. Oates’s reception into the Roman Catholic Church proved a critical point in his life and naturally enough it had more than an element of farce about it. A Father Berry, alias Hutchinson, a whirligig priest who was also somewhat mentally unbalanced, received him into the bosom of the church. A former Protestant clergyman, Berry himself had turned Jesuit, then secular priest, only to return to the established church of England and then back to Roman Catholicism once more. Given his history he proved an apt teacher for such a pupil as Titus Oates.46 Oates was later to claim that as a result of this conversion he was shortly afterwards admitted into the secret cabals of the Jesuits, and that once admitted he was to be sent abroad as a novice to carry dispatches for the Society of Jesus. In retrospect this was highly unlikely.