3 - ‘The Devil in his Clothes’: Suicide Theories, Then and Now

Summary

In the third volume of his Brief History of the Times (1688), The Mystery of the Death of Sir E.B. Godfrey Unfolded, Roger L’Estrange tells a story to demonstrate how dangerous it was in the autumn of 1678 even to suggest that Sir Edmund had committed suicide. On the evening of Thursday 17 October, Captain Thomas Paulden was at Mrs Duke’s coffee-house in Northumberland House near Charing Cross (only steps from Godfrey’s home in Hartshorn Lane) when he heard the news of the discovery of the body. Paulden deposed that several of the ‘Horsemen’ who had accompanied the constable and others to the scene told him that, judging from the posture of the dead man, Godfrey had ‘fall’n upon his own Sword’. At this, however, the crowd of people gathered around began to mutter, ‘These are the Rogues that Murther’d him Themselves, and would make People believe, that he did it himself’. The message was clear: those harbouring doubts that Godfrey had been murdered, and by the Catholics, had best keep their opinions to themselves. According to L’Estrange, ‘The Belief or Dis-belief to this Story was at This Time become Effectually the Test of a Protestant, or a Papist; and the Credit of it Promoted by All ways Imaginable by Reports, and Post-Letters’ and enforced ‘By Menaces, Promises and Extreme Cruelties’.

Roger L’Estrange was a gifted propagandist whose version of events and arguments – including his insistence that Godfrey committed suicide – have profoundly influenced all subsequent accounts. This was in part due to his enhanced authority as official investigator: in 1686, James II, anxious to debunk the Plot, gave him carte blanche to re-open the investigation into Godfrey’s death. But, even more importantly, this was because of the scores of witness statements he obtained, both from ‘true copies’ of original depositions handed over by authorities and from new interviews with surviving witnesses. For most of this evidence, later lost or destroyed, L’Estrange is the only source, even if – as scholars acknowledge – a highly partisan and problematic one. While L’Estrange boasted of omitting none of the witness depositions from his Brief History, he reproduced few of them at length, choosing instead to weave together different snippets at different times to make the case that Godfrey had killed himself.