Part 13

We do not propose to unriddle this mystery, but to show that the most recent and industrious endeavour to solve the problem is unsuccessful. We cannot deny that Godfrey may have been murdered to conceal Catholic secrets, of which, thanks to his inexplicable familiarity with Coleman, he may have had many. But we have tried to prove that we do not KNOW him to have had any such Catholic secrets, or much beyond Oates’s fables; and we have probably succeeded in showing that against the Jesuits, as Sir Edmund’s destroyers, there is no evidence at all.

Had modern men of science, unaffected by political and religious bias, given evidence equivalent to that of the two surgeons, one might conceive that Godfrey was probably slain, as Macaulay thought, by hotheaded Catholics. But I confess to a leaning in favour of the picture of Godfrey sketched by L’Estrange; of the man confessing to hereditary melancholy; fretted and alarmed by the tracasseries and perils of his own position, alarming his friends and endangering himself by his gloomy hints; settling, on the last night of his life (Friday, October 11), with morbid anxiety, some details of a parish charity founded by himself; uncertain as to whether he can dine with Welden (at about one) next day; seen at that very hour near his own house, yet dining nowhere; said to have roamed, before that hour, to Paddington Woods and back again; seen vaguely, perhaps, wandering near Primrose Hill in the afternoon, and found dead five days later in the bush-covered ditch near Primrose Hill, his own sword through his breast and back, his body in the attitude of one who had died a Roman death.

Between us and that conclusion--suicide caused by fear--nothing stands but the surgical evidence, and the grounds of that evidence are disputed.

Surgical evidence, however, is a fact ‘that winna ding,’ and I do not rely on the theory of suicide. But, if Godfrey was murdered by Catholics, it seems odd that nobody has suggested, as the probable scene, the Savoy, which lay next on the right to Somerset Yard. The Savoy, so well described by Scott in Peveril of the Peak, and by Macaulay, was by this time a rambling, ruinous, labyrinth of lanes and dilapidated dwellings, tenanted by adventurers and skulking Catholics. It was an Alsatia, says Macaulay, more dangerous than the Bog of Allen, or the passes of the Grampians. A courageous magistrate might be lured into the Savoy to stop a fight, or on any similar pretence; and, once within a rambling old dwelling of the Hospital, would be in far greater peril than in the Queen’s guarded residence. Catholic adventurers might here destroy Godfrey, either for his alleged zeal, or to seize his papers, or because he, so great a friend of Catholics as he was, might know too much. The body could much more easily be removed, perhaps by water, from the Savoy, than from the guarded gates of Somerset House. Oates knew the Savoy, and said falsely that he had met Coleman there.* If murder was done, the Savoy was as good a place for the deed as the Forest of Bondy.

*State Trials, vii. 28.

* * *

NOTE I.

CHARLES II. AND GODFREY’S DEATH.

The Duke of York, speaking of Bedloe’s evidence before the Lords (November 8), says, ‘Upon recollection the King remembered he was at Sommerset House himself, at the very time he swore the murder was committed:... his having been there at that time himself, made it impossible that a man should be assaulted in the Court, murder’d, and hurryd into the backstairs, when there was a Centry at every door, a foot Company on the Guard, and yet nobody see or knew anything of it.* Now evidence was brought that, at 5 P.M. on Saturday, October 12, the Queen decided to be ‘not at home.’ But Bedloe placed the murder as early as 2 P.M., sometimes, and between two o’clock and five o’clock the King may, as the Duke of York says, have been at Somerset House. Reresby, in his diary, for November 21, 1678, says that the King told him on that day that he was ‘satisfied’ Bedloe had given false evidence as to Godfrey’s murder. The Duke of York probably repeats the King’s grounds for this opinion. Charles also knew that the room selected by Bedloe as the scene of the deed was impossible.

Life of James II, i. pp. 527, 528.

NOTE II.

PRANCE AND THE WHITE HOUSE CLUB.

The body of Godfrey was found in a ditch near the White House Tavern, and that tavern was used as a club by a set of Catholic tradesmen. Was Prance a member? The landlord, Rawson, on October 24, mentioned as a member ‘Mr. PRINCE, a silversmith in Holborn.’ Mr. PRANCE was a silversmith in Covent Garden. On December 21, Prance said that he had not seen Rawson for a year; he was asked about Rawson. The members of the club met at the White House during the sitting of the coroner’s inquest there, on Friday, October 18. Prance, according to the author of ‘A Letter to Miles Prance,’ was present. He may have been a member, he may have known the useful ditch where Godfrey’s corpse was found, but this does not rise beyond the value of conjecture.*

*Lords’ MSS. pp. 46, 47, 51.

NOTE III.

THE JESUIT MURDERERS.

There is difficulty in identifying as Jesuits the ‘Jesuits’ accused by Bedloe. The chief is ‘Father Le Herry,’ * called ‘Le Ferry’ by Mr. Pollock and Mr. Foley. He also appears as Le Faire, Lee Phaire, Le Fere, but usually Le Fevre, in the documents. There really was a priest styled Le Fevre. A man named Mark Preston was accused of being a priest and a Jesuit. When arrested he declared that he was a married layman with a family. He had been married in Mr. Langhorne’s rooms, in the Temple, by Le Fevre, a priest, in 1667, or, at least, about eleven years before 1678.** I cannot find that Le Fevre was known as a Jesuit to the English members of the Society. He is not in Oates’s list of conspirators. He does not occur in Foley’s ‘Records,’ vol. v., a very painstaking work. Nor would he be omitted because accused of a crime, rather he would be reckoned as more or less of a martyr, like the other Fathers implicated by the informers. The author of ‘Florus Anglo-Bavaricus’ *** names ‘Pharius’ (Le Phaire), ‘Valschius’ (Walsh), and ‘Atkinsus,’ as denounced by Bedloe, but clearly knows nothing about them. ‘Atkinsus’ is Mr. Pepys’s clerk, Samuel Atkins, who had an alibi. Valschius is Walsh, certainly a priest, but not to be found in Foley’s ‘Records’ as a Jesuit.

*Brit. Mus. Addit. MS. 11055, 245.

**Lords’ Journals, xiii. 331, 332. Lords’ MSS., p. 99.

***Liege, 1685, p. 137.

That Le Fevre was the Queen’s confessor I find no proof. But she had a priest named Ferrera, who might be confused with Le Faire.* He was accused of calling a waterman to help to take two persons down the river on November 6, 1678. He was summoned before the Lords, but we do not know that he came. Ferrera MAY have been the Queen’s confessor, he was ‘one of the Queen’s priests.’ In 1670 she had twenty-eight priests as chaplains; twelve were Portuguese Capuchins, six were Benedictines, two, Dominicans, and the rest seculars.** Mrs. Prance admitted that she knew ‘Mr. Le Phaire, and that he went for a priest.’*** Of Le Fevre, ‘Jesuit’ and ‘Queens confessor,’ I know no more.

*Lords’ MSS., p. 49.

**Maziere Brady, Episcopal Succession in England, p. 124 (1876).

***Lords’ MSS p. 52.

It appears that Mr. Pollock’s authority for styling Le Fevre ‘the Queen’s confessor’ is a slip of information appended to the Coventry notes, in the Longleat MSS., on Bedloe’s deposition of November 7.* I do not know the authority of the writer of the slip. It is admitted that the authority of a slip pinned on to a letter of Randolph’s is not sufficient to prove John Knox to have been one of the Riccio conspirators. The same slip appears to style Charles Walsh a Jesuit of the household of Lord Bellasis. This Walsh is unknown to Foley.

*Pollock, pp. 155, 157, note 2, in each case.

As to Father Pritchard, a Jesuit, Bedloe, in the British Museum MS., accuses ‘Penthard, a layman.’ He develops into Pridgeot, a Jesuit.* Later he is Father Pritchard, S.J. There was such a Jesuit, and, according to the Jesuit Annual Letter of 1680, he passed sixteen years in the South Wales Mission, and never once went to London. In 1680 he died in concealment.** It is clear that if Le Fevre was the Queen’s confessor, the sentries at Somerset House could prove whether he was there on the day of Godfrey’s murder. No such evidence was adduced. But if Le Fevre was not the Queen’s confessor, he would scarcely have facilities for smuggling a dead body out of ‘a private door.’

*Longleat MS., Pollock, p. 386.