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.’

The moral panic ignited by the death of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey in October 1678 persisted even after his supposed murderers, Robert Green, Henry Berry and Lawrence Hill, were safely under lock and key. In January 1679, the French ambassador Barillon reported that three thousand daggers, each inscribed with Godfrey’s name and the day of his death, had been purchased by the wives of ‘people of quality … to defend themselves from the massacre with which the Protestants claim to be threatened if the Catholics were the masters’. The countess of Shaftesbury and other timorous ladies supposedly secreted ‘little pocket pistols’ in their fur muffs to defend themselves against papist attacks. The then chief justice of the Common Pleas Francis North (older brother to Roger) described how the ‘Murder and Exposing’ of the magistrate’s body to public view had stirred up the ‘Violence & Rage’ of the people to such a ‘Height against the Papists that No Reason could be heard but Every foolish story against them passed for Gospel’. But Catholics were not the only suspects. In addition to reports that traced Godfrey’s last movements to Somerset House or Arundel House, ‘it was whispered that he was seen last at the Cock-pitt’ in Whitehall, residence of the Anglican lord treasurer, Thomas Osborne, earl of Danby, where the magistrate had been ‘threatned by the E[arl]’, and ‘one Christian’ – the minister’s servant – was ‘suspected in the business’.

Just as in modern times the theory of a lone shooter, in the person of the obscure misfit Lee Harvey Oswald, was woefully incommensurate with the scale of emotion unleashed by the 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy, so too the execution of three ordinary working men for Godfrey’s murder was, for contemporaries, anticlimactic and deeply unsatisfying. In both cases, conspiracy theories of appropriate grandiosity filled the void. The fact that Green, Berry and Hill had resolutely maintained their innocence – despite a stream of hopeful rumours that they had or were about to confess – fed suspicions not so much that justice had erred but that the true masterminds of the crime remained at large, still pulling the strings. There were from the first whispers that Godfrey’s murder was part of a cover-up orchestrated by the court to suppress the investigation of the Plot, rumours that inevitably trended upwards to the duke of York and even the king.

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.

In April 1686, the Tory propagandist Roger L’Estrange, who had recently been given a warrant to reopen the investigation into Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey’s death, wrote to William Lloyd, bishop of St Asaph, soliciting information. Lloyd had in October 1678 been the curate of Godfrey’s parish, St Martin-inthe- Fields, and well-acquainted with the magistrate and many of his circle; he also had viewed the body and interrogated some of the leading Plot witnesses and suspects, including the three innocent men hanged for Sir Edmund’s murder. L’Estrange’s three original letters and the shorthand drafts of three of the bishop’s five replies – which have until now remained undeciphered – are housed in the Gloucestershire Archives. Extracts from the bishop’s responses were cited in L’Estrange’s 1688 Brief History of the Times, as though confirming the author’s suicide hypothesis. However, after successfully decoding the shorthand, using the key included with the papers and comparing text from Lloyd’s drafts with L’Estrange’s published excerpts, I was able to determine that in fact Lloyd had said very much the opposite, not only maintaining that Godfrey had been murdered, but darkly hinting that he knew by whom.

William Lloyd is perhaps best known for delivering Godfrey’s funeral sermon and hence has a reputation as a fanatical antipapist, hardly improved by Roger North’s characterisation of him in the reign of Anne as ‘a crazy grey haired Profet’. His biographer Tindal Hart seems to dismiss Lloyd simultaneously as a religious maniac who in his old age embarrassed visitors to court with his anti-Catholic and millenarian prognostications, and a political opportunist in his prime who ‘strove … to run with the hare while hunting with the hounds’. Lloyd was both ‘a noted latitudinarian and friend of Non-conformists’ and a court clergyman during the reign of Charles II, becoming chaplain in ordinary to the king in 1666, and bishop of St Asaph in 1680. He had also been made chaplain and almoner to the duke of York’s Anglican daughter Mary in November 1677, the same month as her marriage to the Dutch Calvinist William of Orange – of which Protestant match Lloyd, along with most of the nation, heartily approved. Lloyd would later become one of the ‘Seven Bishops’ prosecuted in 1688 by James II for seditious libel for petitioning against the king’s Declaration of Indulgence, which would have granted Catholics freedom of worship.

The contemporary lawyer and writer Roger North, whose conspiracist views about the origins of the Popish Plot would have a profound impact on the debate over Godfrey’s death, believed that the key to the mystery could be reduced to ‘a single point’: ‘cui bono’ (who benefits?). If William Lloyd had invoked the same principle to pin the magistrate’s murder on the Jesuits, the villains that North had in mind were not Catholics, but the self-styled champions of Protestantism: ‘the Faction, or Fanatic Party’ – otherwise known as ‘Whigs’. North, the younger brother of the chief justice of the Common Pleas, Francis North, one of the presiding judges during the Exclusion Crisis and Rye House Plot, was not just well-connected, but close to the centre of political action in his own right, becoming king’s counsel in 1682 and serving as a Tory MP in 1685. After the Revolution of 1688/9, he became a non-juror, refusing to swear allegiance to the new monarchs William and Mary. North’s Examen, a history of the later reign of Charles II, was a defence both of the king and the author’s brothers, Francis and Dudley North, crown servants whose actions had come under attack by the Whig historian White Kennett.

While Roger North shared the same loyalist sympathies as his fellow Tory chronicler Roger L’Estrange, he diverged sharply from him as to the cause of Godfrey’s death. North was adamant that Godfrey had not committed suicide. Rather, he had been ‘wilfully and most barbarously murdered’ – not by ‘Thieves’ or ‘Papists’, but ‘by the Procurement of those very execrable Villains, behind the Curtain, who first gave Life and Birth to the Plot, and inspired the wicked Testimony of it’. According to North, ‘the Contrivers of this horrid Plot’ cast about them for convincing proof of the conspiracy they had invented. What better way than to find ‘a Magistrate that is popular, and some Way concerned about this Discovery’ and to ‘take and kill him, and expose the Body in a Manner as may be most apt to stir Passion in the People; for, if you can fill them with Anger and Terror, all at once, any Work, you would have, is done’.