Murder of a Magistrate: (or the victim of the Popish Plot) - Softcover

Inhaltsangabe

Captain John Fenwick is asked by King Charles II to investigate the death of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, who had recently taken a deposition from Titus Oates and Israel Tonge, the initiators of the "Popish Plot". Though Godfrey's body had been found, impaled on his own sword, on Primrose Hill, the physician who had examined the corpse was certain that he had been strangled several days earlier and subsequently moved to where the body was found. Unlike the various politicians, seeking to turn the murder into an attack on "popery" and the removal of the Duke of York (later King James II) from the succession using the testimony of liars and rogues, Fenwick follows a course of seeking evidence
Godfrey was an eccentric, with a wide range of acquaintances and interests, including often frequenting "low" taverns and living with his housekeeper and his secretary. Fenwick learns of several men who had threatened him or who had been harmed by his decisions as a magistrate, but none seem to have a strong enough motive, the wherewithal to carry out the murder in the way it was, or the temperament to carry it out in that manner. Godfrey's household are shifty and unfriendly, continuing to believe that Godfrey had killed himself, in spite of the evidence to the contrary. Godfrey's interest in ecstatic conversion seems irrelevant. Similarly, his brother-in-law and business partner appears to have no motive. But several members of the "King's Head Club" (later called the "Green Ribbon Club" or the "Peyton Gang", of which Godfrey was a member, and of which a select dozen met at a tavern he owned in Hammersmith) are fierce haters of "papists", using his murder to further their aims. Some are cunning and adroit turncoats, having served Cromwell during the "Interregnum". Others are men of violence, who Fenwick believes felt that Godfrey might well cast doubt upon the veracity of Oates's and Tonge's statements. But attempting to find reliable evidence more than a week after the corpse was discovered, with uncertainty as to where the murder had taken place or where the corpse had been concealed for several days, makes his task exceptionally hard. But, assisted by his sone William and the Excise, he gets far enough to identify a suspect, who cannot, however, be named.

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