Great Unsolved Crimes

by Rodney Castleden

  Both Titus Oates and the Earl of Shaftesbury had alibis. So they personally could not have been Godfrey’s murderers.

  On Friday 11 October, Godfrey had a letter that worried him intensely. It is not known who wrote the letter, but it was probably his murderer. He afterwards went out and turned down an invitation to dinner the next day, because he did not know he would be free. He then said, ‘You ask for news? Why, I’ll tell ‘ee. In a short time you will hear of the death of someone.’ When he returned home he spent the evening burning papers. The next day he got up rather early and dressed with unusual care. He first put on his best coat, then changed it for an older one. Some time after nine o’clock, Godfrey left his house. Shortly afterwards he was seen near St Giles-in-the-Fields, and heard asking to be directed to Primrose Hill. He was sighted near Paddington Woods.

  He got home again from this country walk by midday and shortly after that one his fellow vestrymen met him in the Strand and asked him to dine with him. Godfrey was unable to accept as he was in a hurry. After two o’clock on the Saturday, he was never seen alive again; his body was found the following Thursday.

  All London buzzed with speculation as to what had happened to Sir Edmund Godfrey. There were lots of wild stories, but what people kept returning to was the idea that he had taken the depositions about the Popish Plot; he was obviously the Popish Plot’s first victim.

  A pointer to the identity of the murderers was the remarks made by two bishops an hour or two before the discovery of the body. They said they had heard that Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey’s body had been found, with a sword sticking through it, in Leicester Fields, in other words the open lands west of Leicester Square. The two bishops were strong supporters of the Country party, great friends of the Earl of Shaftesbury. This foreknowledge strongly suggests that Godfrey was murdered by members of the Country party.

  One of the noble members of the Country party was the Earl of Pembroke. He was described as ‘a madman when he was sober and a homicidal maniac when he was not.’ The mad earl had drinking bouts that went on for days, and he died of drink at the age of thirty. At this time he was still in his mid-twenties. He was a very violent man, and he lived close to Leicester Fields. On 3 February 1678 he had killed one of his drinking companions by kicking him to death – in the chest. This was by no means his first murder. He had certainly murdered at least six people and perhaps as many as sixteen. Somehow, up to this point, he had evaded justice. Following the 3 February killing, the mad earl was indicted by a Middlesex jury. At the head of that jury, and therefore acting as prosecutor, was none other than Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey. Godfrey had shown exceptional bravery during the time of the plague. Leading the indictment against the murderously violent Earl of Pembroke was perhaps the bravest thing he did, and he may have lost his life because of it.

  When the earl stood trial on 4 April in front of the House of Lords, he pleaded benefit of clergy. In Henry VII’s time, a distinction was made between those in holy orders and those who, even though they were secular people, were ‘clerks’ to the extent that they could read. Under Henry VII’s odd ruling, these secular clerks were allowed to claim benefit of clergy only once. When they had claimed it, they were to be branded on the left thumb, so that the courts could see on future occasions that the benefit had been used up. Under Edward VI the branding was stopped and benefit of clergy was extended to all members of the House of Lords. Now any member of the Lords could escape punishment for any first offence except murder, even if he could not read – an early example of dumbing-down.

  Pembroke was charged with manslaughter, not murder, so he was legally able to claim benefit of clergy. He was immediately freed, though the Lord Chief Justice warned him, ‘Your Lordship must give me leave to tell you that no man can have the benefit of that statute but once; and I would have Your Lordship take notice of it as a caution to you for the future.’ The Lords must have known Pembroke’s record well, and the Lord Chief Justice was spelling out to him that he would not be able to commit any more serious crimes with impunity.

  Godfrey knew that he was a marked man as far as the Earl of Pembroke was concerned. Pembroke was going to kill him. When Pembroke was released, Godfrey went abroad for the sake of his health. He had only just returned in September when Titus Oates came knocking at his door.

  Some commentators on the episode have made the melancholy disposition of Godfrey their focus, with suicide as their solution to the mystery. But Godfrey had plenty to be melancholy about. He knew the earl of Pembroke’s record and he knew that he must be the object of the earl’s hatred. The Titus Oates depositions and his reticent handling of them made him an object of hatred by the Country party generally. And the earl of Pembroke was an enthusiastic member of the Country party. Pembroke now had two reasons for wanting to do him violence. Godfrey’s behaviour immediately before his disappearance shows that he was expecting to die. His fellow-vestrymen would shortly hear of ‘the death of someone’. He was not afraid if they ‘came fairly’ and he would put up a fight for his life. He spent an evening burning his papers.

  The frightening letter that Godfrey received was probably an invitation that he was unable to decline. It has been suggested that it might have come from the desk of the Lord Chief Justice, saying that they needed to discuss the handling of the Titus Oates affair. The letter might have been from Pembroke, pretending to be the Lord Chief Justice, luring Godfrey into a fatal ambush.

  It looks as if during the afternoon when he went missing Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey fell into the clutches of the earl of Pembroke, who held him prisoner. The strange pattern of injuries on Godfrey’s body speak loudly of Pembroke. He had got his 3 February victim down onto the ground and kicked him to death in the chest. Godfrey too had massive bruising on his chest. Two years later, Pembroke murdered a man called Smeeth in exactly the same way. The method of killing had become so familiar to everyone that ‘a Pembroke blow’ was a stock phrase. There really seems little doubt that the bruises on Godfrey’s chest were inflicted by a drunken earl. Pembroke got away with killing Godfrey. He got away with killing Smeeth too. There was a petition of mercy for him. The king took an unusual step in requiring the petitioners to sign, and lodging the signed petition in the patent roll; it is virtually a membership list for the Country party. The Country party evidently found Pembroke useful, in spite of his appalling behaviour, in spite of his terrifying record as a many times unconvicted murderer. And there was no doubt some satisfaction that Pembroke had murdered Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, who had thrown cold water on the Popish Plot.

  The Country party exploited Berry’s murder (which they probably condoned, as Pembroke was not pursued) by giving him a lavish and highly politicized funeral. Godfrey’s body was exposed to public view, to help inflame the public against his supposedly Catholic murderers. Seventy-two Protestant clergymen marched in front of the coffin in the funeral cortege and more than a thousand ‘persons of distinction’ walked behind it. In a particularly theatrical gesture, the preacher was flanked by two bodyguards in the pulpit, just in case the Papists should break in and try to carry out another murder.

  The killing of Sir Edmund may therefore have been nothing directly to do with the Popish Plot, though the Country party used it to whip up anti-Catholic fear. Godfrey’s death probably had much more to do with the earl of Pembroke’s revenge. There can be little doubt that wherever Godfrey thought he was going that Saturday afternoon, he ended up a prisoner in Pembroke’s house, where he was starved, abused and tortured for several days. At the end of his imprisonment, Godfrey was killed in Pembroke’s accustomed manner – repeated kicks in the chest. The sword thrusts were added to distract attention from the chest injuries, which were now too well known as Pembroke’s fingerprints. No doubt Pembroke’s unquestioning servants were told to dump the body, as on many previous occasions, and they initially left it in Leicester Fields, where it was not unknown for the bodies of duellists and suicides to be found. Word passed round the Country party
that that was what was happening. Then, perhaps sobering up early on Thursday afternoon, the seventh Earl of Pembroke realized that Godfrey’s corpse had been left compromisingly close to his home, and ordered his servants to take it further away from his house and that was when it was moved to Greenbury Hill.

  If this scenario is what really happened, several crimes were committed and several injustices were inflicted in relation to this case. Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey was cruelly and sadistically murdered. Three innocent men were wrongly convicted and hanged for his murder, apparently selected on the basis of their names recalling the name of the crime scene. The sadistic murderer, the seventh Earl of Pembroke, went entirely unpunished – not for the first and not for the last time.

  The Man in the Iron Mask: Criminal or Victim?

  In 1698, a mysterious prisoner was transferred to the Bastille, the notorious prison-fortress in Paris reserved for political prisoners, people who had fallen foul of France’s autocratic ruler, Louis XIV. The transferred prisoner had already been in prison for at least eleven years. It was said that no one was allowed to know who he was and his face was hidden behind a mask. He lived on in his cell at the Bastille until his death in 1703, but rumours about his unexplained incarceration and his identity continued to develop during the next three centuries.

  The masked prisoner was mentioned in a letter to an aunt from the Princess Palatine, the king’s sister-in-law. She commented that the man was treated very well, but that two musketeers stood beside him at all times with orders to kill him at once if he took off the mask. He had to keep the mask on all the time, even when he was eating, even when he was asleep, even when he was dying. No one at court knew who he was.

  The writer and philosopher Voltaire found himself a prisoner in the Bastille for several months in 1717, and this gave him an opportunity to speak to people who had served the Man in the Mask. Much later, in his 1751 book The Age of Louis XIV, Voltaire said the prisoner had been made to wear an iron mask as early as 1661, at which time he was held prisoner on the island of Sainte Marguerite. He was said to have been young, tall and handsome in 1661, though it is difficult to see how anyone could have known whether he was handsome or not if he was wearing a mask continuously. He wore lace and fine linen, played the guitar, and there was a clear implication that he was at least a gentleman, and probably an aristocrat.

  In his later writings, Voltaire made tantalizing hints that the prisoner was Louis XIV’s brother. The man was sixty years old when he died, Voltaire said, and he looked strikingly like ‘someone very famous’. France’s most famous face was that of Louis XIV, who was also in his sixties at the time in question. The same hints were being dropped by Joseph de Lagrange-Chancel, another writer, who resided at Versailles during the reign of Louis XIV and was imprisoned on Sainte Marguerite in the 1720s. According to him, Saint-Mars, the prison governor, was deferential towards the masked man and called him ‘my prince’. Later in the century a descendant of Saint-Mars said that the masked man was called ‘Tower’ by the prison staff and that he did not have to wear the mask all the time, only when there were visitors or when he was being transferred. Prison officials removed their hats and remained standing in the prisoner’s presence.

  All of these details were intended to indicate that the prisoner was a very high-ranking nobleman indeed. The references to the mask vary. Some say it was made of iron. Etienne de Junca, deputy governor of the Bastille, said he never saw the prisoner without his black velvet mask. De Junca’s journal notes that the masked man was buried under the name M. de Marchiel. Another writer discovered a death certificate, which gave the masked man’s name as Marchioly and his age at death as ‘about forty-five’.

  Hints that he was Louis XIV kept resurfacing later in the eighteenth century. In 1789, a journalist called Frederic-Melchior Grimm claimed that he knew Louis XIV had an identical twin brother; his source was a royal valet. Louis XIII, the father of the twins, was afraid there would be a power struggle between the boys and decided to have the second of the two babies taken away to be reared in secret. The disinherited son was never told who he was, but when he was a young adult he saw a portrait of his royal brother and guessed. Once he knew the truth, he was confined and made to wear the mask, presumably because his exact likeness to the king would immediately give away who he was and so endanger Louis XIV’s position. Many people believed the journalist’s account, even though it was probably fictitious, and it was developed and embroidered with picturesque anecdotal detail by other writers as the years passed. It was said that when the Bastille was stormed by the people of Paris, the imprisoned prince’s skeleton was discovered, still wearing its iron mask; there is no record that this actually happened.

  It was a commonplace in France that Louis XIV might not have been the son of Louis XIII. Louis XIII and his wife Anne of Austria thoroughly disliked one another. Their marriage was certainly not consummated in the first four years, and there was a long wait of twenty-three years before their first child, Louis XIV, was born. It was seen as a miracle – or a trick. There were rumours that the child was really the son of the queen’s lover, the Duc de Beaufort. He then became a candidate for the prisoner in the mask, imprisoned in case he should reveal the dangerous truth that the king was illegitimate, and not entitled to sit on the French throne. Others too had shared the queen’s bed, the Duke of Buckingham among them. Perhaps the man in the mask was Buckingham’s son. Another variation on this royal theme was that the man in the mask was really a woman, the daughter of Louis XIII and Anne of Austria. Louis XIII needed a son to inherit the throne, and swapped his unwanted daughter for somebody else’s son. The daughter was then masked

  and confined.

  The circulation of many of these stories was politically motivated. Louis XIV had many enemies and it suited them to cast doubt on his legitimacy. Just a year after giving birth to Louis XIV (if indeed she did give birth to Louis), Anne of Austria gave birth to his younger brother, Philippe. Louis’ enemies would have liked to see Louis toppled and replaced by his younger brother.

  Louis XIV was invited to a house party at Vaux-le-Vicomte, the beautiful new chateau of his minister, Nicolas Fouquet. When he saw the palace he was deeply envious and resentful. Louis started work on his own big project after that – Versailles. Meanwhile, he had Fouquet arrested and imprisoned. Some believe that it was Fouquet who was required to put on the mask. Fouquet officially died in 1680; Louis, it was said, had promised to release him that year, but then changed his mind when he discovered that his mistress had also slept with Fouquet. In order to keep his vengeful change of mind secret, Louis had Fouquet’s death staged and kept the poor man more severely confined by making him wear the mask.

  In the nineteenth century, the Man in the Iron Mask became fiction, however much historical truth there may have been in the story at the start of the eighteenth century. Alexandre Dumas’ novel and the various films based on it created the image most of us now have of the masked prisoner. Dumas was interested in many of the exotic by-ways of French history. This one may have been of special interest to him because his grandfather, the Marquis de la Pailleterie, grew up at the court of Versailles.

  The identity of the man in the mask is still extremely elusive. The most popular theory, that he was the identical twin brother of Louis XIV, is in fact the least likely. The king wore platform shoes and high wigs and these created an illusion of height, but he was really quite a short man, rather like Lord Farquaad in the 2001 film Shrek. The man in the mask was described as tall. The death certificate for the man in the mask said he was about forty-five; the king was sixty-six. On this circumstantial evidence alone, the prisoner and the king could not possibly have been identical twins.

  Most researchers believe the man in the mask must have been either a nobleman or the servant of a nobleman. One candidate falling into this last category was Eustache Danger, a valet arrested and imprisoned in 1669 for some unknown offence. It is just possible that the governor of the Bastille
kept a prisoner selected at random in a mask just to impress others with the supposed importance of one of his prisoners, and therefore his own credit and status as governor.

  Another candidate for the mask with a very similar name is Eustache Dauger de Cavoye. He was a French soldier, arrested in 1668 perhaps for taking part in satanic rituals and imprisoned indefinitely (again perhaps) because he knew that one of the king’s mistresses was also a satanist. Alternatively, Dauger may have been confined because he was an illegitimate half brother of Louis XIV.

  The Comte de Vermandois is another possibility. He was one of Louis XIV’s illegitimate children, who is supposed to have died of smallpox in 1683, while on a military campaign. In the eighteenth century, some people believed the count did not die but was instead imprisoned for striking the king’s legitimate son. This is very unlikely, as Louis made a point of treating his illegitimate offspring well.

  The Duke of Monmouth is an English candidate for the celebrity prisoner. An illegitimate son of Charles II, Monmouth led a rebellion against James II, Charles’s brother, and had to be sentenced to death for high treason. James, it was said, was unwilling to order the execution of his nephew, so in 1685 another convict was publicly executed in his place while Monmouth himself was spirited away to be secretly imprisoned in France.

  There was a confusing welter of speculation about the identity of the prisoner in the eighteenth century. The most reliable information about him comes from the early correspondence between Saint-Mars, the prison governor, and his superiors. The earliest surviving records date from July 1669, when Louis XIV’s minister the Marquis de Louvois, entrusted a masked prisoner to the care of Benigne D’Auvergne de Saint-Mars, governor of Pignerol prison. Louvois’ letter gave the man’s name as Eustache Dauger and the place of his arrest as Dunkirk. Louvois was concerned that no one should be able to hear what Dauger had to say and instructed Saint-Mars to prepare a cell with several doors to ensure that the cell was soundproof. Dauger was to be warned that he would be summarily executed if he talked about anything other than his immediate needs. Saint-Mars was to visit him once a day with food and drink, but the prisoner would not need much because he was ‘only a valet’.