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’.