Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gvvz8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-22T20:28:42.793Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

4 - ‘Managery … behind the Curtain’? Oppositional Plots and Whig Lords

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 December 2022

Andrea McKenzie
Affiliation:
University of Victoria, British Columbia
Get access

Summary

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’.

Type
Chapter
Information
Conspiracy Culture in Stuart England
The Mysterious Death of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey
, pp. 123 - 158
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2022

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×