1 - The Usual Suspects: The Case against the Catholics

Summary

On 31 October 1678, the Anglican clergyman William Lloyd preached the funeral sermon of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey to an audience overflowing the pews of the church of St Martin-in-the-Fields, which had a normal capacity of about four hundred people. By all accounts it was an anti-Catholic tour de force. According to the contemporary Roger North, ‘the Crowd was prodigious and so heated that any Thing called a Papist, were it cat or Dog, had probably gone to Pieces in a Moment’. So high were emotions running – fear as well as grief and anger – that Lloyd was supposedly flanked on either side by two burly ministers ‘to guard him from being killed … by the Papists’ (North adding ironically, ‘Three Parsons in one Pulpit! Enough of itself, on a less Occasion, to excite Terror in the Audience’).

William Lloyd was a natural choice to deliver Godfrey’s funeral sermon in that he was both a friend of the deceased and the vicar of St Martin-in-the-Fields, Sir Edmund’s parish. He was also the dean of Bangor and something of a rising star in the Anglican Church (he would be made bishop of St Asaph in 1680 and of Worcester in 1699). Lloyd’s eulogy was critical in Godfrey’s construction as a Protestant martyr: a sacrifice to a ‘bloody religion’ whose blood, like Abel’s, cried out to God for vengeance. His text was 2 Samuel 3:33–4, in which David mourned the death of Saul’s cousin Abner, who had died as a result of a treacherous ambush: ‘And the King lamented over Abner, and said, Died Abner as a fool dieth? Thy hands were not bound, nor thy feet put into fetters: as a man falleth before wicked men, so fellest thou. And all the people wept again over him.’ Just as Abner was ‘an eminent man, both in dignity, and also in usefulness among his people’, Godfrey ‘was perhaps the Man of our Age that did the most good in that Station [of justice of the peace]’; Abner’s ‘Sufferings’ and ‘bloody violent death’ also paralleled Godfrey’s. With a pathos that would not have been lost on his auditors, Lloyd took on Godfrey’s voice: ‘I spent my life in serving you. It was my business to do Justice and shew Mercy. See what I had for it, Insnared and Butcher’d by wicked Men against Justice and without Mercy.’