Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 22.djvu/39

 affronts offered him by both parties in the council—some condemning his officiousness and others his remissness in not disclosing his interviews with Oates earlier. Threats, adds Oates, were held out that his conduct would form a subject for inquiry when parliament met on 21 Oct. As the panic occasioned by Oates's revelations increased, Godfrey, according to Burnet, became ‘apprehensive and reserved;’ ‘he believed he himself should be knocked on the head.’ ‘Upon my conscience,’ he told a friend, ‘I shall be the first martyr; but I do not fear them if they come fairly: I shall not part with my life tamely’. But he declined the advice of his friends to go about with a servant.

On Saturday morning, 12 Oct. 1678, Godfrey left home at nine o'clock, was seen soon afterwards at Marylebone, called about parochial business on one of the churchwardens of St. Martin's-in-the-Fields at noon, and according to somewhat doubtful evidence was met late in the day between St. Clement's Church in the Strand and Somerset House. He did not return home that night. His servants, knowing his regular habits, grew alarmed. On the following Thursday evening (17 Oct.) his dead body was found in a ditch on the south side of Primrose Hill, near Hampstead. He lay face downwards, transfixed by his own sword. Much money and jewellery were found untouched in his pockets; his pocket-book and a lace cravat were alone missing. Next day an inquest was held at the White House, Primrose Hill. Two surgeons swore that there were marks about the neck which showed that Godfrey died of suffocation, and was stabbed after death. Other witnesses showed that the body was not in the ditch on the preceding Tuesday, and that it must have been placed there when dead. An open verdict of wilful murder was returned. The body was carried to Godfrey's house. Burnet saw it, and noticed on the clothes ‘drops of white wax lights,’ such as Roman catholic priests use, but no mention was made of this circumstance at the inquest. The funeral was delayed till 31 Oct. On that day the body was borne to Old Bridewell, and publicly lay in state. A solemn procession afterwards accompanied it through Fleet Street and the Strand to the church of St. Martin's-in-the-Fields, where it was buried, and a sermon preached by William Lloyd, the vicar. Two proclamations, offering a reward of 500l. for the discovery of the murderers, were issued respectively on 20 and 24 Oct.

Godfrey was undoubtedly murdered. The public, panic-stricken by Oates's desperate allegations, promptly laid the crime at the door of Roman catholic priests, and popular indignation against the papists was roused to fever heat. Medal-portraits of Godfrey were struck, in which the pope was represented as directing the murder. Ballads and illustrated broadsides expressed similar sentiments. ‘An Hasty Poem,’ entitled ‘Proclamation promoted; or an Hue and Cry and inquisition after treason and blood,’ appeared as early as 1 Nov. 1678 (, Cat. Broadsides in possession of Soc. Antiq. Lond. 134). Sober persons who mistrusted Oates from the first, and were convinced of the aimlessness from a catholic point of view of Godfrey's murder, suggested that ‘being of a melancholy and hypochondriacal disposition’ Godfrey might have committed suicide. It was also rumoured that he was pursuing some secret amours, and was in heavy debt to the parish of St. Martin's-in-the-Fields. But these allegations were unsupported by evidence, and the theory of suicide is quite untenable.

A parliamentary committee under the presidency of Shaftesbury sat to investigate Oates's statements and Godfrey's murder. On 10 Nov. Bedloe, one of Oates's chief allies, informed the committee that the murderers were two of Lord Belasyse's servants. The king disbelieved the allegation. Danby, lord high treasurer, who discredited the testimony of Oates and his gang, was himself charged in a paper signed ‘J. B.’ and sent to members of parliament with being privy to a plot to take Godfrey's life. Danby's secretary, Edward Christian, deemed it wise to rebut in a pamphlet the absurd charge, which was repeated by Fitzharris in 1680 (cf. Reflections upon a Paper entitled Reflections upon the Earl of Danby in relation to Sir Edmund Barry Godfrey's murder, 1679; Vindication of the Duke of Leeds, 1711). At length on 21 Dec. 1678, Miles Prance, a Roman catholic silversmith, who sometimes worked in the queen's chapel at Somerset House, was arrested on the false testimony of a defaulting debtor as a catholic conspirator. Much torture and repeated cross-examinations elicited from him a confession of complicity in Godfrey's murder, 24 Dec. Certain catholic priests, according to Prance, decided on Godfrey's murder because he was a zealous protestant and a powerful abettor of Oates, and they and their associates dogged his steps for many days. On 12 Oct. he was enticed into the courtyard of Somerset House, where the queen lived, on the pretext that two of her servants were fighting there. The murderers were awaiting him. He was straightway strangled in the presence of three priests, Vernatti, Gerald, and Kelley, by Robert Green, cushionman in the queen's chapel,