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’.