had not only observed the cane and scabbard outside of the ditch, on
the bank, but also a dead body within the ditch, under the
brambles.* By five o'clock the rain had ceased, but the tempestuous
evening was dark, and it was night before Constable Brown, with a
posse of neighbours on foot and horseback, reached the ditch.
Herein they found the corpse of a man lying face downwards, the feet
upwards hung upon the brambles; thus half suspended he lay, and the
point of a sword stuck out of his back, through his black camlet
coat.** By the lights at the inn, the body was identified as that
of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, a Justice of the Peace for Westminster,
who had been missing since Saturday October 12. It is an undeniable
fact that, between two and three o'clock, before the body was
discovered and identified, Dr. Lloyd, Dean of St. Asaph's, and
Bishop Burnet, had heard that Godfrey had been found in Leicester
Fields, with his own sword in his body. Dr. Lloyd mentioned his
knowledge in the funeral sermon of the dead magistrate. He had the
story from a Mr. Angus, a clergyman, who had it from 'a young man in
a grey coat,' in a bookseller's shop near St. Paul's, about two
o'clock in the afternoon. Angus hurried to tell Bishop Burnet, who
sent him on to Dr. Lloyd.*** Either the young man in the grey coat
knew too much, or a mere rumour, based on a conjecture that Godfrey
had fallen on his own sword, proved to be accurate by accident; a
point to be remembered. According to Roger Frith, at two o'clock he
heard Salvetti, the ambassador of the Duke of Tuscany, say: 'Sir E.
Godfrey is dead. . . the young Jesuits are grown desperate; the old
ones would do no such thing.' This again may have been a mere guess
by Salvetti.****

*Pollock, Popish Plot, pp. 95, 96.
**Brown in Brief History, iii. pp. 212-215, 222.