On a cold Saturday afternoon in October 1678, the Westminster justice of the peace Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey left his home in Charing Cross and never returned. Within hours of his disappearance, London was abuzz with rumours that the magistrate had been murdered by Catholics in retaliation for his investigation into a supposed "Popish Plot" against the government and the Church of England. Five days later, speculation morphed into a full-scale moral panic after Godfrey’s body turned up in a ditch in Primrose Hill, beaten, strangled, and then posthumously run through with his own sword in an apparent clumsily staged suicide.
In this talk, professor of history Andrea McKenzie discusses her recent book, Conspiracy Culture: the Mysterious Death of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey (2022), and revisits this very old cold case, uncovering new evidence and offering a solution to a murder mystery that has baffled scholars and armchair detectives for centuries.
But this is also a story of how conspiracy theories about the death of one man transformed English political culture, eroding public faith in authority and official sources of information. Rumours and speculation that Godfrey had been murdered by "papists"—with king Charles II’s chief minister and his Catholic wife and brother heading the list of suspects—stoked the passions and divisions that culminated in the Exclusion crisis, the most serious challenge to the British monarchy since the Civil War.
The partisan parliamentary investigation into Godfrey’s death had momentous long- and short-term effects, not only creating the first modern political parties (“Whigs” and “Tories”) but triggering a judicial persecution of innocent Catholic priests and laymen which constitutes one of the darkest chapters in British history.
Andrea McKenzie is a professor of history at the University of Victoria, where she has taught since 2004. Her research area is seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English legal and cultural history, with a specialization in crime, print and manuscript culture and conspiratorial politics. She has published numerous articles on such topics as criminal biographies, last dying confessions, execution and trial accounts, peine forte et dure (judicial pressing), fake news and arson reporting, spouse murder, early modern shorthand, and Restoration politics. She has written two monographs: Tyburn’s Martyrs: Execution in England, 1675-1775 (published in 2007) and, most recently, a historical whodunit: Conspiracy Culture in Stuart England: the Mysterious Death of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey (2022). She is currently completing a book on rumour, news and belief during the "Popish Plot," a moral panic, political and constitutional crisis in England, c. 1678-81.
Deans' Lecture Series
Research is continually reshaping the way we live and think. In these online talks you'll hear from distinguished members of the faculties at the University of Victoria and learn about their research interests.
