Conclusion - A Bipartisan Martyr? In Search of the Real Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey

Summary

Less than four years after he acceded to the throne, James II and VII’s stubborn adherence to his Catholic faith would cost him his three kingdoms. That most unprescient of princes had however seen clearly enough a decade earlier, when he predicted that the discovery of Godfrey’s body, on 17 October 1678, would ‘cause … a great flame in the Parliament’ that was about to meet. Inevitably, it was the ‘usual suspects’ – the Catholics – who felt the heat. In addition to striking a committee to investigate the magistrate’s death, the House of Commons immediately addressed the king to remove ‘all Popish recusants’ from within twenty miles of London and from any public office and revived a bill ‘for hindering Papists to sit in either House of Parliament’. On 21 November, the Commons debated a proviso proposed by the more moderate Upper House that would have exempted James, the most prominent Catholic in the kingdom, from the provisions of the act. The MP Sir Thomas Meres objected, arguing that the stakes were too high, and the times too dangerous, for such ill-judged indulgence: ‘On one side, the reason against the Proviso is, prudence and safety. On the other, civility, gratitude, and compliment. I would be on the civil side, were not the safety of the nation concerned’. Meres concluded ominously: ‘No doubt but Sir Edmundbury Godfrey was civil to go to Somerset House, &c. and he was civil to Mr Coleman to compare notes [i.e. of Oates’s informations] with him: But he lost his life by it’.

The proviso passed by the narrowest of margins (158 for and 156 against), but in the event it was clear that the time for civility was past: as the secretary of state Henry Coventry spoke in defence of the measure, several members chanted ‘Coleman’s letters, Coleman’s letters’. These letters, as we have seen, revealed that the duchess of York’s former secretary, a zealous Catholic convert, had solicited foreign aid to promote both a repeal of the penal laws against recusants and the dissolution of the intolerantly Anglican Cavalier Parliament. There was little doubt that Coleman’s schemes had enjoyed the sanction and probably the active encouragement of his patron, the king’s brother and heir apparent James.