Primrose Hill, 17 October 1678: the death of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey

On 21 February 1679, Robert Green and Lawrence Hill were hanged at Tyburn for the murder of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey. A week later, on 28 February, Henry Berry was hanged for the same killing. All three protested their innocence on the scaffold. The Crown’s witnesses, William Bedloe and Miles Prance, had already been caught lying on the only piece of their account that could be checked. Prance had retracted his confession twice before the trial and would plead guilty to perjury on his Godfrey testimony in 1686. The wider Popish Plot for which the three men were prosecuted was a fabrication by Titus Oates and Israel Tonge; the modern scholarly consensus, after Kenyon 1972, is unequivocal on that. Approximately fifteen Catholic priests and laymen were executed across 1678 to 1681 in the wider prosecutions.

No scholarly analysis since John Pollock’s The Popish Plot in 1903 has produced a finding the field has accepted. The convictions of Green, Berry, and Hill have never been formally vacated. The gap between what the official record produced, three convictions and three executions, and what every modern analysis has concluded that record was worth, nothing, is the spine of the file.

The five days between Godfrey’s last documented movement on Saturday 12 October 1678 and the discovery of his body on Primrose Hill on Thursday 17 October sit at the centre of that gap. This is how that interval has been read, in three layers kept separate.

The documented account

Edmund Berry Godfrey was born at Sellindge in Kent on 23 December 1621, the son of Thomas Godfrey, a member of the Long Parliament. He went into business as a wood and coal merchant in Westminster, prospered, and from approximately 1659 served as a magistrate of the City of Westminster. He was knighted in September 1666 for his service during the Great Plague of 1665, when he had remained in the city. By the autumn of 1678 he was 56, Protestant, unmarried, and one of the best-known active justices of the peace in Westminster.

On 28 September 1678 Godfrey took the formal sworn depositions of Titus Oates and Israel Tonge, who had brought documents alleging a Jesuit conspiracy to assassinate Charles II, install his Catholic brother James, Duke of York on the throne, and re-Catholicise England. The story would become known as the Popish Plot. Burnet and others record that Godfrey told friends, including Edward Coleman, secretary to the Duchess of York and himself a Catholic, of the depositions before they were laid before the Privy Council. Coleman would be tried on Oates’s evidence and executed at Tyburn on 3 December 1678, the first of the major Plot victims.

On the morning of Saturday 12 October 1678 Godfrey left his house in Hartshorn Lane, near Charing Cross. He was seen in St Martin’s Lane and at Marylebone in the course of the morning. He did not return. His household raised the alarm. By 16 October the disappearance was the talk of Westminster, and rumours of Catholic foul play were already in circulation.

On the evening of Thursday 17 October 1678, two men, named in the contemporary accounts as John Brown and a baker, found a body in a ditch on the south side of Primrose Hill, north of London. The corpse was face down. Godfrey’s own sword had been driven through his body from the breast so that the point came out at his back; the blade ran into the soil beneath. His hands were in the pockets of his breeches. His money and rings were intact. His shoes were clean.

A coroner’s inquest sat at the White House tavern on Primrose Hill with the surgeons Zachariah Skillard and Nicholas Cambridge as medical witnesses. They reported a circular ligature mark around the neck, bruising across the body, signs of strangulation, and no fresh bleeding at the sword wound. The medical opinion was that death had occurred four to five days earlier, that strangulation was the immediate cause, and that the sword had been driven through the corpse after death. The clean shoes were inconsistent with his having walked through the muddy ground around the ditch. The verdict was wilful murder by persons unknown.

The death turned the unverified Oates depositions into a national emergency. Parliament reconvened on 21 October 1678. Anti-Catholic violence in London surged. Catholic householders were arrested in numbers. The phrase “Remember Godfrey” passed into Whig political vocabulary and remained in circulation for decades.

On 7 November 1678 William Bedloe, a confidence man already known to the authorities, presented himself before the Privy Council and testified that Godfrey had been murdered on the evening of 12 October in the courtyard of Somerset House by Catholic servants of Queen Catherine of Braganza and the Duke of York, and that the body had been carried out four nights later and dumped on Primrose Hill. Bedloe named Samuel Atkins, secretary to Samuel Pepys, as present at the killing. Atkins proved through naval witnesses that he had been on a yacht at Greenwich that evening and was acquitted. Bedloe was demonstrably lying on the only checkable detail of his account.

On 21 December 1678 Miles Prance, a Catholic silversmith and part-time servant of Queen Catherine, was arrested, held in Newgate, threatened with torture, and confronted with Bedloe. On 23 or 24 December he confessed. His account matched Bedloe’s and named Robert Green, Henry Berry, Lawrence Hill, and two Catholic priests, Gerald and Kelly. He retracted the confession twice before holding to it at trial.

Robert Green (a labourer at Somerset House), Henry Berry (a porter), and Lawrence Hill (a servant to the treasurer of the Queen’s chapel) were tried at King’s Bench from 10 February 1679 before Lord Chief Justice Sir William Scroggs. The Crown evidence was Prance’s confession and Bedloe’s corroboration. The defendants were uneducated; Green could not read or write; they had no effective representation. Defence witnesses who could place Hill elsewhere on 12 October were dismissed by Scroggs from the bench. The jury convicted on the second day. Green and Hill were hanged at Tyburn on 21 February 1679. Berry, a Protestant, was hanged a week later. All three protested their innocence at the scaffold. Londoners took to calling Primrose Hill “Greenberry Hill” after the three hanged men.

The Plot prosecutions continued into 1680. By 1681 the political tide had turned. Charles II, who had privately disbelieved Oates from the outset, dissolved the Oxford Parliament in March 1681 and the prosecutions collapsed. Oates was convicted of perjury on 8 May 1685, pilloried, whipped from Aldgate to Newgate, and imprisoned. Prance pleaded guilty to perjury on his Godfrey evidence in 1686 and was fined, pilloried, and whipped. The convictions of Green, Berry, and Hill have never been formally vacated. The historical consensus since the late Victorian period is that the three were innocent.

One vector stands separately on the documented record. Godfrey was foreman of the Middlesex grand jury that in April 1678 indicted Philip Herbert, 7th Earl of Pembroke, for the manslaughter of Nathaniel Cony; Pembroke, a violent peer with a documented pattern of lethal violence, was discharged on his peerage privilege. Within six months of that discharge, the foreman who had indicted him was dead on Primrose Hill.

The evidence

The Oates and Tonge depositions of 28 September 1678 survive in the State Papers Domestic, Charles II, SP 29 series, at the National Archives at Kew. The Privy Council minutes of October 1678 document the search and the early investigation. The 17 October coroner’s inquest survives in the King’s Bench records and in the contemporaneous press, including the London Gazette and the pamphlet literature of late 1678.

The state of the body as recorded at inquest is the load-bearing physical evidence. Face down in the ditch. Sword from breast to back, into the soil. Hands in the breeches pockets. Money and rings on the body. Shoes clean. No fresh blood at the wound. A ligature mark around the neck. A four-to-five day death interval. These elements are documented in the contemporaneous record and are the points on which every later analysis turns.

The Bedloe testimony of 7 November 1678 and his trial testimony, the Prance confession of December 1678 with the two retractions, and the trial testimony are documented in the printed Tryals of Robert Green, Henry Berry and Lawrence Hill (London, 1679) and in the State Papers. The Atkins acquittal at King’s Bench in February 1679 is the documented proof that Bedloe lied on the only checkable detail. The execution broadsides for Tyburn on 21 and 28 February 1679 sit in the British Library and the Early English Books Online corpus. The 1685 perjury conviction of Oates and the 1686 perjury conviction of Prance are documented in the State Trials and in Kenyon 1972.

The Pembroke vector sits in The Tryal of Philip Earl of Pembroke and Montgomery (London, 1679) and in the Journal of the House of Lords for April 1678. The diary of John Evelyn and the correspondence of Samuel Pepys discuss the case as the central political event of the autumn. The full proceedings of Green, Berry, and Hill sit in volume 7 of Cobbett’s Complete Collection of State Trials (1809).

The principal modern scholarly analyses are the documented spread of competing findings: Pollock 1903 (first serious modern treatment), Carr 1936 and Williamson 1955 (Pembroke), Kenyon 1972 (standard scholarly history of the Plot; Pembroke had “by far the strongest motive” without committing; the killing cannot now be settled with certainty), Knight 1984 (Pembroke directed by the Whig “Peyton Gang”), Fraser 1979 (robbers or a private enemy), Marshall 1999 (suicide with staging by the brothers; Harris H-Net 1999 reviewed as circumstantial), and McKenzie 2022 (most recent intervention; publisher bills it a “solution”; reception still in progress).

The theories

Everything in this section is a hypothesis. The convictions of Green, Berry, and Hill are not a candidate hypothesis; they are a documented miscarriage of justice in which three innocent men were hanged on perjured testimony. Nothing below is a finding.

A. Catholic killing in revenge for the Oates depositions. The Crown’s contemporary explanation, prosecuted through Bedloe and Prance: Bedloe was proved a liar on the Atkins identification; Prance retracted twice and was later convicted of perjury; the wider Plot is a Kenyon-consensus fabrication. Kenyon rejects the weaker variant (some other Catholic faction) on motive given the political consequences that followed.

B. Killing by, or on the orders of, Philip Herbert, 7th Earl of Pembroke. Carr (1936) is the foundational modern proponent; Williamson (1955) supported it; Kenyon (1972) records the motive without committing. Godfrey was foreman of the grand jury that indicted Pembroke for the Cony manslaughter in April 1678, Pembroke had a documented pattern of lethal violence, and Godfrey was dead within six months of the discharge. No contemporary investigation named Pembroke and no documentary evidence places him at the killing.

C. Pembroke acting on the directing instruction of the Whig “Peyton Gang”. Knight (1984): Pembroke the instrument, an opposition faction the principal, the purpose to give the Plot a martyr; the directing assumption is circumstantial. A counter-thesis naming Shaftesbury as principal (L’Estrange, 1687) is rejected by Kenyon on motive.

D. Suicide, with the body staged as murder by Godfrey’s brothers. Source: L’Estrange (1687); revived in scholarly form by Marshall (1999). Godfrey, depressed and indebted, took his own life; his brothers Michael and Benjamin staged the sword wound and moved the body to Primrose Hill to avoid Crown forfeiture of the estate. Consistent with the clean shoes, no bleeding at the sword wound, and the ligature mark. Fraser (1979) treats it as over-elaborate; Harris (1999) records that the field has not converged on it.

E. Random street robbers, or a private enemy from magisterial duties. Fraser (1979), as the “obvious plausible explanation”: money and rings on the body, clean shoes, the four-to-five day interval, and the staged sword wound do not fit opportunistic street violence. Produces no name.

F. An unresolved residual. David Hume in the eighteenth century called the case “insoluble” and historians who have looked closest have repeated the formulation. Kenyon (1972) writes the matter cannot now be settled with certainty. McKenzie (2022) is the most recent intervention; the publisher bills it as offering a solution and reception is still in progress.

What remains unknown

Godfrey left his house on the morning of Saturday 12 October 1678 and on the medical finding was dead by that night or the next. His body lay somewhere for four to five days before two men found it in a ditch on Primrose Hill on the evening of Thursday 17 October. The strangulation was complete before the sword went through him. His shoes were clean. His money was on him. His killer or killers have never been identified.

Three innocent men were hanged at Tyburn for the killing. Robert Green and Lawrence Hill on 21 February 1679. Henry Berry on 28 February. They were convicted on the testimony of two perjurers, before a chief justice who dismissed their defence witnesses from the bench, on a Crown account whose only checkable detail had been proved a lie at a separate trial that same month. Approximately fifteen Catholic executions across 1678 to 1681 followed in the wider Plot prosecutions Oates and Tonge had fabricated.

So we will not tell you a Catholic cell killed him, because Bedloe and Prance lied. We will not tell you Pembroke killed him, because no contemporary investigation named him and he was never charged. We will not tell you the Peyton Gang directed him, because Knight’s directing assumption is circumstantial. We will not tell you Shaftesbury arranged it, because Kenyon does not find the motive. We will not tell you Godfrey hanged himself, because Marshall’s case rests on circumstantial inference. We will not tell you robbers killed him, because Fraser’s reading does not account for the staging.

David Hume called the case insoluble. Kenyon agreed it cannot now be settled. McKenzie 2022 is the most recent intervention and the field has not converged on it. The convictions of Green, Berry, and Hill have never been formally vacated. The file has been open for three hundred and forty-seven years.

Primrose Hill, 17 October 1678: the death of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey

The documented account

The evidence

The theories

What remains unknown

Sources

Primary

Secondary