The killing of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey - in Oktober 1678 -
has been called the greatest murder mystery in English history. Its
consequences were certainly appalling, a wave of hatred and violence unleashed
against English Roman Catholics, resulting in more then twenty judicial murders
and over a hundred imprisonments.
Godfrey
was known as a decent and scrupulous man, courageous and rigidly honest. This
is why his murder caused such widespread outrage among British Protestants, and
why they allowed themselves to be persuaded that their Catholic countrymen were
about to burn them all at the stake. The man whose sick imagination invented
this ‘Popish Plot’ was paranoid clergyman named Titus Oates, who is remembered
as one of the most malevolent and vicious individuals in English history.
Edmund
Berry Godfrey was born on 23 December 1621, the son of a Kentish gentleman of
independent means. Educated at Westminister School and Christ Church, Oxford,
he was prevented from entering his chosen profession, the law, by increasing
deafness and ill health. His father solved the problem of a career by lending
him a thousand pounds – worth about forty thousand pounds in today’s money –
with which he and a friend named Harrison bought a wood-wharf at Dowgate, near
Thames Street in the City of London, and proceeded to sell wood and coal to
their fellow Londoners. It was a good time to be in the fuel business. Winters
were often so cold that the Thames froze solid. And the uncertainties of the
Civil Wear between the Roundheads and the Royalists enabled them to charge high
prices. By 1649, when King Charles lost his head. Godfrey and Harrison were
already wealthy men. And the excitement of a business career had cause an
enormous improvement in Godfrey’s health. In 1658, when Godfrey took a house in
Greens Lane, a road that ran between the Strand and the river (somewhere near
present day Villiers Street) he was the only coal merchant outside the city
followed in his father’s footsteps by becoming a Justice of the Peace for
Westminister and Middlesex.
He
showed himself severe but fair minded. Harsh towards tramps and vagabonds, he
was compassionate towards those whose misery and poverty was no fault of their
own – in one case, he supported a family at a rate of ten pounds a year for
several years until they were able to support themselves.
In the
Great Plague of 1665, Godfrey wass one of the few rich men who remained in
London. This may not have been entirely a matter of altruism – in those days,
it was firmly believed that smoke could offer protection from the plague, and
enormous fires were kept burning permanently in the streets, provided with fuel
from Godfrey’s coal and wood yard. Godfrey took charge of the digging of the
largest mass grave in England – with plague deaths at two thousand a week,
individual burials had become impossible. Every night, carts drove through the streets, their
drivers shouting ‘bring out your dead’; blotched bodies, stinking of black
vomit, were tossed onto the pile.
Godfrey
himself seems to have have no fear of the plague. When he heard that a rgave
robber had taken refuge in a house full of plague victims, where the constables
were afraid to follow him, he strode in with drawn sword and dragged the man out by the scruff of the neck. Later,
the same man met him in the street, and hurled himself of him with a heavy
cudgel; Godfrey held him at bay with his sword until constableas arrived to
drag him away.
Since
it was believed that dogs and cats spread the plague, thousands were
exterminated. Nobody realized that the real culpit was the rats carrying the
Bubonic Plague germ and who bred in their thousands among the garbage that lay
in London’s streets. Fortunately, the winter that year was so cold that the
plague slowly began to lose its grip. It was finally brought to an end by the
Great Fire of London, which began in September 1666 and burned half the city in
four days. Here again, Godfrey displayed his usual courage and industry, and
soon after the end of the fire, King Charles II knighted him.
Three
year later, Godfre again revealed his courage in a conflict with the king.
Alexander Frazier, one of the kig;ss physicians, owef him thirty pounds for
firewood – over a thousand pounds in modern money – and obviously had no
intention of paying. As a member of the king’s household, Frazier could be taken
to a court of law. Godfrey obtained a warrant from the Sheriff and had Frasier
arrested by bailiffs. The king was so enraged that he ordered the bailiffs to
be whipped, but Godfrey ignored the king’s command to have the warrant
cancelled. Imprisoned in the porter’s lodge at Whitehall, he went on hunger
strike until, after six days, the king finally gave way. Fortunately, Charles
was entirely lacking in vindictiveness, and bore Godfrey no grudge. It is not
clear whether Godfrey ever received his thirty pounds.
And so,
in his late forties, Godfrey was one of the most respected and well-loved
figures n London. What strange twist of fate led him to become the victim of
unknown murderes, less than ten years later?
Some
weeks before his disappearance, Godfrey was nervous, and it was clear that he
expected to be killed. To one female acquaintance he remarked: “Have you not
heard that I am to be hanged?”
Yet if
Godfrey knew he was going to be murdered, why did he not have leave
behind some clue that would bring the killers to justice? On the contrary, on
the morning of his disappearance, he burnt all the papers that might have
indicated who had killed him, and why.
On the
morning of Saturday, 12 Oktober, 1678, Godfrey rose early and dressed in no
less than three pairs of stockings – it was an icy cold day. When his
housekeeper brought in his breakfast, Godfrey was talking to a man she did not
recognize, and who remained there for a long time. At eight o’clock, he had
left his house near Charing Cross, and walked up St. Martin’s Lane. Two
acquaintance who said good morning noticed that he seemed to be withdrawn and
depressed. In those days, there were fields north of Oxford Street, and two
hours ;ater, Godfrey was seen near the little village of Paddington. Then about
an hour later, he was seen walking back through the muddy fields towards
London. This must have at about eleven o’clock in the morning.
Yet at
about that same hour, an acquaintance named Richard Adams called at Godfrey’s
house, and was told by the servants: “Was have cause to fear Sir Edmund is made
away.”
Sir
Edmund had arranged to dine that day with s friend called Wynned at a house not
far from his home. When he failed to arrive by midday (which was the time they
dinned in the seventeenth century), Wynnel went to Godfrey’s home, where the
servants were looking upset and shaken. One of them told him: “Ah Mr Wynnel!,
you will never see him more.”
Wynnel
asked why. “They say the Papist have been watching him for a long time, and
that now they are very confident they have got him.”
Wynnel’s efforts to extract further
information were unsuccessful.
To be continued >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
No comments:
Post a Comment