Introduction. The Bottomless Pit: Conspiracy Theories and the Death of a Westminster Magistrate

Summary

The middle-aged man who left his house near Charing Cross on the morning of Saturday 12 October 1678 didn’t know it, but the cause and circumstances of his death, probably later that same day, would become one of the most famous of all British unsolved mysteries. Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey (the full name by which he would be known to posterity) was a justice of the peace for Westminster and Middlesex, an unpaid official tasked to keep the peace and to receive criminal complaints. He had been knighted in 1666 for his courage and diligence in discharging his duties during the plague and the Great Fire of London, remaining at his post when other officials fled. Godfrey’s body was found on the evening of Thursday 17 October, five days after he had gone missing, several miles from his home, face-down in a ditch near Primrose Hill, impaled with his own sword. The forensic evidence – there was little or no blood, there seemed to be bruises on the body and a ligature mark around the neck – indicated that the wound had been inflicted post mortem and Sir Edmund had in fact been strangled or garrotted. Robbery was quickly ruled out, as neither Godfrey’s rings nor the substantial sum of money he had been carrying had been stolen. The fact that the dead man’s clothes were dry and his shoes clean, despite the wet weather and the muddy conditions, convinced contemporaries that the body had only recently been dumped at the scene. The tracks of a cart, a bent grate and some straw scattered nearby seemed to corroborate this theory. Wilder rumours, which would persist into modern times, also circulated – that Godfrey had been sequestered and starved, possibly tortured, for days before being murdered by asphyxiation.

Within hours of his disappearance, Godfrey’s household was in confusion, with friends and acquaintances worried and speculating over the magistrate’s whereabouts. And within days, Godfrey’s two brothers had raised the alarm, informing the Privy Council, and demanding that a search be launched. The contemporary lawyer Roger North would view the rumours that ran ‘as wild Fire in a Train, and … spread all over the Town’ the very afternoon of Godfrey’s disappearance as in itself evidence of a deeply laid ‘Party Intrigue’.