Authors: Antonia Fraser
As yet, the Queen’s relationship with her husband had not quite attained that halcyon quality on which observers were to comment in the following eighteen months. A year later Lady Sutherland would cry out that the Queen was ‘now a mistress, the passion her spouse has for her is so great’.
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She was not alone in the view. It had taken the shenanigans of the Popish Plot and the Queen’s own behaviour to achieve this ‘extraordinary favour’.
In 1678 Charles
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, out of neurotic guilt, could not take it for
granted that his wife’s virtue would protect her. Supposing Wakeman as well as Coleman had been indiscreet, who knew what might be charged against her, however unfairly? In the ensuing proceedings of the Council there is no doubt that the King displayed extreme jumpiness on anything which pertained to the Queen’s household, or might prove to do so. Otherwise it is not possible to understand how this sensible and indeed cynical man allowed the fabrications of Oates and his accomplices to have any official credence at all.
Even without the investigations of the Council, the autumn of 1678 bid fair to be a time of unusual tension. A new session of Parliament had been promised by the King, which prospect enchanted no-one but excited not a few. Then in early October an event took place which transformed the whole situation from one of measured enquiry and political anticipation into – strident panic. This was the death of a Protestant magistrate, named Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, which took place some time between the evening of 12 October, when he left his house to go out to dinner, and 17 October, when his battered corpse was discovered on Primrose Hill. Much later Lord Halifax would sapiently observe, concerning the Popish Plot, that ‘the angry buzz of a multitude is one of the bloodiest noises in the world’. The news of the murder (for so it was naturally assumed to be) of Godfrey had a cataclysmic effect on London society. As Serjeant Maynard later declared to the House of Commons, ‘The world was awakened.’
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From now on the angry buzz of the multitude would sound in everybody’s ears – King, courtiers, opposition members, Catholic priests, Anglicans, foreign envoys alike – and drown the sweeter strains of reason and common-sense.
The death of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey has still not been satisfactorily explained three hundred years later. When Godfrey’s bruised body was discovered, he had been dead for some days. Murder was the obvious plausible explanation, either by random muggers taking advantage of Godfrey’s night walk, or by any one of the enemies a magistrate can acquire in the exercise of his profession. One of these was the drunken Earl of Pembroke, known for his maniacal assaults. But the injuries
on Godfrey’s body were mysterious; although he seemed at first sight to have been killed by his own sword, the autopsy showed that this wound had actually been inflicted after death.
So another more complicated theory has arisen that Godfrey, who suffered from melancholia, committed suicide; his body was then treated so as to make the cause of death look like murder. There could be two reasons for this: either to avoid the penal laws applied to the estate of a suicide, or, more melodramatically, to throw the responsibility for the crime onto someone else – or onto some persons else, the Papists. But this would have been an elaborate, even over-elaborate, way of going about things. There is no proof that such a concealment ever took place, while random mugging in the seventeenth century was at least a common phenomenon.
As in another classical mystery, the Gowrie House Plot, no one theory of the death of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey seems able to explain all the known facts. For all the optimism of researchers in the field of historical crime, perhaps the whole truth never will be known.
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From the point of view of the biographer of Charles
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, the true explanation of Godfrey’s death is of secondary importance compared to the furore its discovery caused at the time. It was most unfortunate, with the nerves of London society already on the edge, that Godfrey had recently taken Oates’ deposition on oath and was reputed to have given Coleman an informal warning. He was a personal friend of Danby and Bishop Burnet (as well as of Samuel Pepys). Popular imagination suffered from no difficulties in unravelling the cause of Godfrey’s death, and at once. It was quite clearly the wicked Jesuits at work. Godfrey had been killed because he knew too much. On 21 October, only a few days after the discovery of Godfrey’s corpse, Parliament was recalled. The King still hoped that this assembly could be held to the purpose for which it was intended: to reimburse him for the cost of the army still in Flanders. Anticipating criticism, he explained that although he
had not disbanded the army as promised, at least his forces were being employed in ensuring a peaceful situation in Europe. As to the alleged conspirators, he was careful to begin his speech with a firm disassociation from them: he would take as much care as he could ‘to prevent all manners of practices by that sort of men, and others too, who have been tampering … and contriving how to introduce Popery amongst us’.
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The King would willingly have kept his eyes fixed on the European horizon, where his own interests lay. But in London the chase was on. Oates’ accusations and Godfrey’s death represented an opportunity for harrying the ‘Catholic’ Court which an experienced politician like Shaftesbury was hardly likely to neglect. As Shaftesbury observed, memorably and no doubt truthfully, on the subject of the Popish Plot, ‘I will not say who started the Game, but I am sure I had the full hunting of it.’
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Oates, for example, was in touch with that focus of the opposition, the Green Ribbon Club. Although John Evelyn wrote from the point of view of the Court that the testimony of such a ‘profligate wretch’ should not be taken ‘against the life of a dog’, the members of the Green Ribbon Club saw Oates in quite a different light: as a most apposite swallow on the eve of the assembly of Parliament.
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London was in ferment. So profound was the atmosphere of fear and agitation that fashionable ladies took to going about with precautionary pistols in their muffs. Indeed, the rumours which now abounded concerning the presence of priests everywhere can best be compared to the fear of German parachutists landing disguised in Britain during World War
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. But the search for weapons, supposedly concealed by the rabid Catholics in preparation for their insurrection, produced a singularly unheroic armoury – ‘from the Widow Platt, one old gun’, and so on. Nevertheless, so fierce was the fervour that another Catholic widow was advised by a JP to marry a Protestant to cover herself; while Christopher Wren, as royal Surveyor, duly searched the cellar of the House of Commons for a latter-day Guy Fawkes, and was ordered to put padlocks on the communicating doors of the Spanish Ambassador’s house, to fence in this notorious Papist.
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Shortly after the recall of Parliament, Oates had some further resounding revelations to make. He charged five Catholic peers – Lords Arundell of Wardour, Powis, Petre, Stafford and Belasye – with plotting to kill the King. These were honourable men who had on the whole led slightly obscurer lives than their position in society warranted – for the sake of practising their proscribed religion in peace. They had a great deal to lose by involving themselves in any plot, nor was there a shred of evidence against them. The King burst into laughter at the idea of the aged Lord Arundell as commander of the insurgent forces. Lord Powis was a man of over sixty, liberal-minded enough to have helped the Quakers in their own religious troubles on occasion. William Howard, Lord Stafford was a Fellow of the Royal Society. A devout Catholic, he was also, like many of his co-religionists, a loyal adherent of the established order. Nevertheless the five Catholic peers were arrested on the orders of the House of Commons. Their vast combined ages made them a touching group of dignity at bay, reminiscent of those long-bearded Roman senators who decided to await the barbarian hordes in silence, motionless within the Capitol.
On 2 November Shaftesbury judged the time ripe to demand the exclusion of the Duke of York from the Privy Council, in a speech quite as dramatic in its effect as his famous cry over Holland: ‘
Delenda est Carthago!
’ A Bill was introduced into both Houses to debar Catholics from sitting – a far stronger measure than the Test Act of 1673, which had only been concerned with the actual office-holders. The royal households were also attacked, but the servants of the Queen were once more excepted – an even greater tribute to her prudence than that of 1673. The King appeared to bow. He persuaded the Duke of York that it would be unwise to attend the Privy Council, and, as to the Catholics, he told both Houses that ‘he was ready to join with them in all the ways and means that might establish a firm security for the Protestant religion’.
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Although the measure was passed, Danby fought a brilliant rearguard action which was to prove the last triumph of the parliamentary organization he had sought so hard to establish. James was excluded from the Act. The measure had thus netted
the mice but lost the lion, since one Catholic heir presumptive, still legally at liberty to sit, was worth a clutch of Catholic MPs and peers excluded. Nor was the King himself quite so meek as he pretended. As the dirty tide of prejudice swilled through Whitehall, leaving behind its debris of false accusation, the King did not lose his own balance. William of Orange had on occasion complained of the English Court, how it blew hot and cold, and how his uncle should pay heed to the words of a pilot he had heard at the helm of a ship during a storm: Steady, steady, steady. Charles
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’s conduct at this juncture showed steadiness. He refused to allow his old friend Father Huddleston to be included in the general proclamations against the Catholic priests. But he tried and failed to protect his armed forces, and disbandment was once more pressed to the clamour of MPs determined to prove a Catholic connection with the Army.
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November was ever a notorious season for anti-Popish demonstration. There was a new venom in the celebration of Guy Fawkes Day in 1678. Pope-burnings had been on the increase recently: one such conflagration had been provoked by the arrival of Mary of Modena as a bride in November 1673; in 1677 a figure of the Pope was burnt in the streets of London and the presence of some yowling cats imprisoned inside the effigy was generally held to add to the artistic effect. In 1678 there were several effigies to be seen.
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Further west in the city, at the beleaguered Palace of Whitehall, the Court attempted to put on an equally bold, if less outrageous, show. This was for the birthday of Queen Catharine, which by an unlucky coincidence fell about the same time. She was forty. ‘I never saw the Court more brave,’ wrote John Evelyn on 15 November. But the flickering of the anti-Popish bonfires and the cries of the rabble made a coarse accompaniment to celebrations in aid of a gentle Queen. Besides, the King was more occupied in fighting off the attacks on his wife than in dancing attendance on her birthday. On 24 November, at the second of his two meetings with Oates during that month, the King listened to accusations coupling Queen Catharine with Wakeman in trying to poison him.
Oates had now been joined by a worthy accomplice, ‘Captain’
William Bedloe (he had no right to the military title but had found it useful in his early career as a confidence trickster). Like Oates, Bedloe knew the Jesuit organization from the inside, having been employed by them on sundry missions, and was able to profit from his knowledge to make some lethal accusations against the priests in the royal household. Bedloe was now a member of the criminal underworld.
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Attaching himself to Oates’ soaring coat-tails, he offered evidence on the Godfrey murder which was, despite his scandalous past, received with joyous credulity. The importance of Bedloe was that, having joined in the anti-Popish hue and cry, he was prepared to perjure himself without hesitation. He could thus provide the essential ‘first-hand’ witness to these rumoured misdeeds which would be required by a judge at a proper trial. He could ‘corroborate’ Oates. Or he could himself be ‘corroborated’ by much vaguer witnesses.
Not for one instant could the King credit that his wife had conspired to poison him. Throughout the examination of Oates, the King had represented the voice of common-sense, pointing out for example that Oates had called the Spanish Prince Don Juan, an alleged conspirator, tall and dark, whereas he was actually short with red hair. When Oates in his new testimony mentioned the Queen’s apartments where the plotting was supposed to have taken place (he could not even describe them), the King reacted swiftly. He confined Oates to his rooms in Whitehall under guard; there the perjurer remained briefly until the Council had him released.
At the end of November, Coleman, a less innocent figure, was tried for high treason. The presiding judge, William Scroggs, spoke of him being condemned by ‘his own papers’, which had been seized; they were in fact ruled treasonable by the judges before the trial. (The testimony of Oates and Bedloe proved dangerously lame on examination and was quickly glossed over at the end of the trial.) It was thus for the treason of his papers that Coleman was condemned to death and executed on 3 December.
How different were the fates of Oates and Bedloe: despite this demonstration of the perjured nature of their evidence,
both received State apartments in Whitehall; Bedloe was granted a modest allowance at the request of the House of Commons. Oates’ state was more splendid: with his allowance of £1,200 a year, he might have been a national hero – Admiral Nelson himself.
In view of the King’s instantaneous strong defence of the Queen, and in view of their success in other areas, it can be argued that Oates and Bedloe made a psychological error in trying to implicate Catharine in the first place. Charles blamed Shaftesbury, the fair-haired villain, at the time.
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But Shaftesbury, with his superior intelligence (and superior knowledge of the King’s mind), had not attempted to attack the Queen. Of course the element of calculation in Oates’ behaviour, once he had tasted the heady wine of popular approval, should not be exaggerated; it would have been an elementary precaution to have ascertained the nature of the Queen’s apartments, for example. Yet Oates, in concentrating on the Queen, had touched on one of the King’s few genuinely sensitive spots: he might let Clarendon go without too much regret, and sacrifice Danby perforce; but, as he had already shown over the prospect of a divorce, Catharine was another matter.