The Glorious Revolution

by Edward Vallance

  Sergeant Maynard, in a speech before the House of Commons, captured the impact of Godfrey’s ‘murder’ on the revelations of a Popish Plot: ‘What ground was there for Godfrey’s death? Nothing but in relation to Mr Oates’ information. How many lies and stories were made to persuade the world about it? But when the murder was discovered the world was awakened.’4

  Oates and Tonge’s story, which had been treated with some scepticism by the King and court, now gripped the capital. Parliament quickly moved to put in place measures to secure the King from the popish threat and on 30 October Charles issued a proclamation banishing all Catholics from within twenty miles of London. The impact of Oates’s testimony before the Commons was to lead to the drafting of a bill to exclude Catholics from both Houses. The momentum behind the bill was increased by Oates’s testimony that leading Catholic peers, including the Duke of Norfolk and the Earl of Berkshire, were secretly commissioned by the Pope to act as officers to lead a massive popish army. (Another name included on Oates’s list of officers in this army was that of John Lambert, the Cromwellian general who had been in prison since 1660 and was now quite insane; the Commons skimmed over this slip-up).

  On 28 October there were rumours of another Gunpowder Plot and the cellars were searched for explosives. The celebrations of 5 November themselves were marked by the burning of many effigies of the Pope and the delivering of countless sermons on the dangers of popery. The governor of the East India Company wondered whether he should send his wife and children out of town for fear of a papist massacre of Protestants.

  Further weight was added to the news of the plot by the evidence of William Bedloe, a fantasist in the mould of Oates and Tonge, whose imagination was fired by the £500 reward for the discovery of Godfrey’s murderers. His career as a professional criminal, robber, highwayman and confidence trickster hardly made him a watertight witness but Bedloe cunningly turned his ill repute to his advantage. He had indeed, he said, been ‘a great rogue, but had I not been so I could not have known these things’.5 Bedloe claimed that Godfrey had been murdered in Somerset House as part of plan involving the Catholic Lords Powis and Belasyse to restore popery by force. He had heard that the Jesuits intended to depose Charles II and put him in a convent where he would be offered the throne again if he would acknowledge Catholicism as England’s national religion. If he refused, the government would then be left in the hands of the Catholic lords. However, according to Bedloe, the rather bizarre idea of getting the King to a nunnery (akin to putting a fox in a hen house) was dropped in the summer of 1678 in favour of a straightforward assassination by the Jesuits Keynes and Conyers at Newmarket, while the King took his early-morning walk. The opposition Lords Shaftesbury, Ormonde, Monmouth and Buckingham would be killed with him. However, Oates’s revelations had scuppered this plot and so Bedloe claimed he had fled to Bristol.

  The motive that Bedloe gave for Godfrey’s murder, that the Jesuits wanted to gain access to Oates’s original depositions so that they could trip him up in court, made no sense, as in English common law sworn depositions could not be brought in as evidence by either side. Similarly the inclusion of Shaftesbury and other opposition peers as targets for Jesuit assassins was fairly obviously a sop to Whig opinion. It was equally unlikely that the Catholic lords named would have been able to raise the huge numbers of men, forty thousand in the London area, that Bedloe claimed would be armed in the plot. Nonetheless, Bedloe’s story was soon corroborated by the evidence of a Catholic silversmith, Miles Prance, who had worked at the Queen’s Chapel in Somerset House. Prance had been taken into custody on the information of a lodger in his house, who, tellingly, was in arrears on his rent. Identified by Bedloe as one of those present at Somerset House at the murder of Godfrey, Prance made a confession that an Irish priest named Fitzgerald had commissioned him, along with three other men, Hill, Berry and Green, to kill the magistrate, as one of the Queen’s enemies. Prance recanted this story before the King as ‘a thing invented by him and a perfect lie’ but a spell in the condemned cell in Newgate changed his mind.6 Denied heat or light in his cell, Prance was found by the Anglican clergyman William Lloyd, who had been harassing him day and night to confess, almost frozen to death on the morning of 11 January 1679. In exchange for his life, Prance admitted he was one of the murderers and gave evidence on oath as to the complicity of the others. On the strength of his testimony, Green, Berry and Hill were hanged for murder in February 1679.

  (However, the assassins named in Bedloe’s original testimony, Ireland, Grove and Pickering, were not exonerated. New evidence from Stephen Dugdale, a former land steward to the Catholic Lord Aston and by far the most reputable of the elaborators of the Popish Plot, condemned them, as well as Lord Strafford, and to a lesser extent Lords Belasyse and Arundel. Mobs gathered at Newgate and the Recorder of London’s house demanding that ‘justice’ be done and on 24 January Ireland and Grove were executed.)

  There is almost unanimous agreement among historians that the men who went to the gallows for Godfrey’s murder were innocent. There were no regicidal Jesuits lurking in corners to kill the King, the Queen was not concocting potions with her doctor to poison her husband and there was no secret Catholic army that could be used to return England to popery. Speculation on who did kill Godfrey began almost immediately after his body was discovered and has continued to the present day. As in any good murder mystery, almost all of the dramatis personnae have been viewed as potential suspects. It has been suggested that Oates and Tonge killed Godfrey to lend weight to their story of a Popish Plot. Sir Edmund’s work as a magistrate has also raised the possibility that he was slain by someone who had previously appeared before him in the dock. The prime candidate in this respect is the notoriously violent Philip Herbert, 7th Earl of Pembroke, whom Godfrey had found guilty of murder. Another suggestion has been that the magistrate was simply the victim of a random killing by persons unknown, though the fact that he still had cash on his person makes a bungled mugging unlikely.

  By far the most plausible explanation is that the magistrate was not murdered at all but took his own life. The bruising on his neck was most likely made not by the hands of his killer but by a noose around his throat, which explains why his neck was broken. The discovery of Godfrey’s private correspondence has revealed a perplexing character who was prone to bouts of severe depression. Doubtless Oates and Tonge’s revelations weighed heavily on his mind and the burden may have been made greater by the threat of blackmail by Oates. Godfrey was unmarried and it is possible that both he and Oates were part of a clandestine homosexual community in London. Oates had been dismissed from his previous position as ship’s chaplain on the frigate the Adventurer for homosexual practices. He was known to frequent a club in Fullers’ Rent, Holborn, which seems to have been a meeting place for both gay men and Roman Catholics. It has been suggested that it was this gay Catholic community that funded Oates’s education at the Jesuit College in Valladolid. Oates could have demanded that the magistrate investigate their claims about a Popish Plot or face having his sexual proclivities made public. Equally, Godfrey may have been having second thoughts about the wisdom of conveying Oates and Tonge’s allegations to Edward Coleman, a convert to Roman Catholicism and secretary to the Duchess of York.

  It appears that Godfrey’s brother, Michael, a man with connections to City Whig politicians, decided to kill two birds with one stone, at once rubbing out the stain on his family’s honour brought by a suicide (and thereby the loss of his brother’s estate to the Crown, as required by law in all cases of self-murder) and making considerable political capital out of Edmund’s death for his Whig allies. He, or some of his accomplices, stabbed the magistrate’s corpse with his own sword and transported his body to Primrose Hill to make it look like he had been murdered. There are other signs that Godfrey’s death was manipulated for political ends. His will asked only for a pauper’s burial, reflecting his rather austere character, but he was given what amounted to an unofficial stat
e funeral, attended by hundreds of thousands of mourners, including leading Whig peers and MPs. William Lloyd preached his funeral sermon on the text of 2 Samuel 3:33–4, ‘Died Abner as a fool dieth?’ and was guarded in the pulpit from further Jesuit subterfuge by two burly curates. Commemorative daggers were fashioned with the legend ‘Memento Godfrey, 12 October 1678’ for Protestants’ self-defence. Despite his apparently poor qualifications – he was a friend of Catholics like Coleman and the Irish healer and ‘stroker’ Valentine Greatrakes – Godfrey had been transformed into a Protestant martyr to rival Cranmer, Latimer and Ridley. The funeral and the pamphlets and sermons that commemorated his death were excellent propaganda for those whose real aim was less to investigate the Plot than to exclude the Catholic James, Duke of York, from succeeding to the throne.7

  Until November 1678 the Popish Plot had not been linked to the problem of the Duke of York’s religion. Oates himself had attempted to keep James out of the plot (probably out of fears for his own safety had he implicated him) and he insisted that the Jesuits had forged the Duke’s signature and seal on Coleman’s letters. However, the testimony of Coleman was too damning for this damage-limitation exercise to work. Excerpts from the letters of the kind, ‘We have here a mighty work upon our hands … no less than the conversion of three Kingdoms … There were never such hopes of success since the death of Queen Mary, as now in our days’8 were hardly ambiguous, and Coleman’s verdict on James that he was ‘converted to such a degree of zeal and piety as not to regard anything in the world in comparison of God Almighty’s glory, the salvation of his own soul and the conversion of our poor Kingdom’ effectively condemned his royal master.9 The Earl of Shaftesbury moved on 2 November that the Duke be removed from the King’s presence and the motion received a considerable amount of support, even from figures linked to the court. The next day it was agreed that James should cease to attend the Privy Council, its Committees ‘and all places where any affairs of the nation were agitated’. The Commons also moved to produce a new test act that would exclude Catholics, including James, from the court as well as Parliament unless they had sworn the oaths of allegiance and supremacy and taken a new anti-Catholic declaration, more impervious to Jesuitical equivocation than that included in the original Test Act of 1673. However, opposition from the Lords and pressure from the King and James himself meant that when the bill was finally sent down, on 21 November, it contained a proviso exempting the Duke from its provisions. In this form the bill was passed in the Commons by a mere two votes.

  The opposition’s disappointment at losing this vote was reflected when members belatedly discussed the King’s Speech the following day. Some MPs urged that it was pointless to talk about securing the King’s person unless the succession was also discussed. The speaker, Edward Seymour, probably prompted by the Council, responded by suggesting that the Commons draw up an act limiting the powers of a Catholic monarch, denying him control of the army, the revenue and all appointments in Church and State, and another to ensure that Parliament continued to exist on the King’s death instead of being automatically dissolved. The opposition remained dissatisfied, producing a bill which would take the radical step, not tried since 1642, of putting the militia in Parliament’s hands. The King would not permit this contravention of the Militia Act of 1661, which had reversed the Civil War ordinance, and vetoed the bill on 30 November.

  The boundaries of debate had now been set. The Parliaments of 1679, 1680 and 1681 would all be dominated on the one hand by proposals from the crown for measures to ‘limit’ the power of a Catholic successor and on the other by proposals from the Whigs to exclude the Duke of York from succeeding to the throne. Titus Oates’s incredible story of a Popish Plot, probably manufactured for no greater reason than to earn himself some food and lodging at Parliament’s expense, had been co-opted into a wider political struggle over the religious affiliations of the heir to the throne and the prerogative powers of the King. Charles’s first minister, the Earl of Danby, was impeached on 19 December after revelations from Ralph Montagu, the former ambassador to Paris, showed that Danby had been negotiating with Louis XIV for a secret treaty and financial subsidy.

  This news again put the Commons into a state of near hysteria. William Harbord believed that Montagu had more to tell but would ‘not press it upon him, because poisoning and stabbing are in use’. He was afraid, he said, ‘that the King will be murdered every night. A peer, and an intimate of the Earl of Danby said, “There would be a change in the government in a year.” He has poison both liquid and in powders.’ Danby was impeached for high treason and the articles alleged that he had concealed evidence about the plot and ‘reproachfully discountenanced the King’s witnesses in the discovery of it, in favour of popery’.10 The Lords, however, refused to commit Danby to prison, and on 30 December 1678 Charles prorogued Parliament, complaining of how he had been ill used. On 24 January he announced to his councillors that the Cavalier Parliament, which had sat since 1661, had been rendered impotent by faction fighting and that he was to call for fresh elections for a Parliament that would meet in March 1679.

  The elections saw any candidate associated with the government, or with the Duke of York, struggle to get a seat. Sir John Werden lost the Reigate election, ‘not that they [the electorate] had any dislike to him, but they said he was secretary to the Duke and because he voted in the last Parliament for his master’s continuance in the Lord’s house’.11 A petition from a group of Middlesex freeholders to their newly elected members reflected what the public expected from Parliament: measures to promote the safety of the King, the maintenance of the Protestant religion, liberty and property and the strengthening of habeas corpus. When Parliament did meet at the beginning of March, the Commons pressed on with Danby’s impeachment, despite the King’s attempts to pardon him, and then when this failed, send him into hiding. Finally, realising the situation was helpless, Danby gave himself up to Black Rod on 15 April and the following day was incarcerated in the Tower.

  In addition to pursuing the King’s ministers, Parliament continued to investigate the Popish Plot and Sir Robert Southwell expressed the hope that ‘popery be laid fast for one age’. Oates published his history of the plot in April and continued to give depositions for new MPs who had not yet heard the full story. However, in trying again to embellish his tale, Oates suffered some setbacks. On 25 April he called a man named Lane before the Lords’ Committee on Examinations to support his claim that Danby had tried to suppress his evidence, tying in neatly with the Commons proceedings. However, Lane denied all knowledge of the matter, instead haranguing Oates himself and, much worse, the King, whom he described as an associate of ‘whores, rogues, pimps and panders, and that the King never went sober to bed’.12 Significant new witnesses proved in short supply and the Lords were sluggish in their prosecution of the Catholic peers.

  The lack of new evidence did not prevent MPs from raising the issue of the succession. On 27 April the Commons debated the preservation of the King but this soon turned into a discussion of the Duke of York. It was resolved unanimously that James’s Catholicism and his position as heir to the throne were a red rag to would-be popish plotters. (The vote, of course, was impossible to challenge as it accused the Duke of nothing.) The Commons was then instructed to draw up an abstract of ‘such matters as concern the Duke of York, relating to the plot’. The King intervened via Lord Chancellor Finch to tell the House that, while he would never consent to the alteration of the succession, he was prepared to accept legislation to differentiate between a Protestant and a papist successor; to provide for Parliament’s automatic sitting on his own death; to transfer powers of ecclesiastical, judicial and military appointment to Parliament during the reign of a Catholic monarch; and to recognise that Parliament enjoyed the sole right to raise money.

  Southwell noted three types of response in the Commons to the King’s offer. One group responded favourably and were ready to draw up these measures; another group doubted the
effectiveness of limitation measures in restraining a popish successor and wanted instead the Princess of Orange, Mary Stuart, to succeed. The most interesting response, however, came from those who muttered that ‘his majesty is so backward in agreeing to the execution of Pickering and the priests who have been condemned … that they are for present laws of defence against popery, and that the model laid down in the speech should even presently be put in practice’.13

  On 11 May the Commons voted a motion to bring in a bill to exclude James from the throne but before the House broke up, MPs resolved nem. con. to stand by Charles with their lives and fortunes in defence of the King’s person and Protestant religion, adding, ‘if his majesty shall come by any violent death (which God forbid!) that they will revenge it to the utmost upon the papists’.14 Here MPs were recalling the ‘association’ made in 1584 in defence of Elizabeth I, again from the threat of a Catholic assassination plot. Despite these protestations of loyalty, the Exclusion bill passed its second reading on 21 May. The King was sufficiently alarmed to take the advice of Sir William Temple and Danby (still counselling Charles from the Tower) to prorogue Parliament.

  Rumours of Catholic plotting continued while Parliament was no longer in session. In the provinces, the veneer of legal due process barely concealed a pogrom against Catholic priests. Philip Henry reported that two priests were hung, drawn and quartered, one at Denbigh and one at Chester, ‘as were several others in other counties’.15 Catholics were accused by the Earl of Burlington of starting fires ‘almost every second night’. Although the prosecution of the plot suffered some setbacks, especially the acquittal of Sir George Wakeman on 18 July, the lapsing of the Licensing Act added fuel to the fire as press censorship, always a difficult task at the best of times, became nigh impossible. Seditious libels upon court figures abounded, some even targeting the King. One balladeer called on Charles to cease ‘thus to pollute our isle;/ Return, return to thy long-wished exile’.16 Tracts such as Charles Blount’s An Appeal to the Country from the City played on public fears by suggesting that, should James succeed to the throne, the result would be a massacre of Protestants such as the French Huguenots had suffered on St Bartholomew’s Day in 1572.