2 - An Inside Job? The Earl of Danby and Other Court Suspects

Summary

The moral panic ignited by the death of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey in October 1678 persisted even after his supposed murderers, Robert Green, Henry Berry and Lawrence Hill, were safely under lock and key. In January 1679, the French ambassador Barillon reported that three thousand daggers, each inscribed with Godfrey’s name and the day of his death, had been purchased by the wives of ‘people of quality … to defend themselves from the massacre with which the Protestants claim to be threatened if the Catholics were the masters’. The countess of Shaftesbury and other timorous ladies supposedly secreted ‘little pocket pistols’ in their fur muffs to defend themselves against papist attacks. The then chief justice of the Common Pleas Francis North (older brother to Roger) described how the ‘Murder and Exposing’ of the magistrate’s body to public view had stirred up the ‘Violence & Rage’ of the people to such a ‘Height against the Papists that No Reason could be heard but Every foolish story against them passed for Gospel’. But Catholics were not the only suspects. In addition to reports that traced Godfrey’s last movements to Somerset House or Arundel House, ‘it was whispered that he was seen last at the Cock-pitt’ in Whitehall, residence of the Anglican lord treasurer, Thomas Osborne, earl of Danby, where the magistrate had been ‘threatned by the E[arl]’, and ‘one Christian’ – the minister’s servant – was ‘suspected in the business’.

Just as in modern times the theory of a lone shooter, in the person of the obscure misfit Lee Harvey Oswald, was woefully incommensurate with the scale of emotion unleashed by the 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy, so too the execution of three ordinary working men for Godfrey’s murder was, for contemporaries, anticlimactic and deeply unsatisfying. In both cases, conspiracy theories of appropriate grandiosity filled the void. The fact that Green, Berry and Hill had resolutely maintained their innocence – despite a stream of hopeful rumours that they had or were about to confess – fed suspicions not so much that justice had erred but that the true masterminds of the crime remained at large, still pulling the strings. There were from the first whispers that Godfrey’s murder was part of a cover-up orchestrated by the court to suppress the investigation of the Plot, rumours that inevitably trended upwards to the duke of York and even the king.