Titus Oates, a Popish Plot, and the Mysterious Murder of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey

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In the summer of 1678 a defrocked preacher named Titus Oates claimed to have knowledge of a Catholic plot to kill King Charles II and to replace him with his crypto-Catholic brother. At first the story gained no traction, reported as it was by a man of dubious reputation, but when Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey (the man who had first investigated Oates’ story) was found dead people started listening. This week we’ll lay it all out for you: who was Titus Oats? What’s the deal with Godfrey’s death? And what happened when people came to believe that there was a plot against Charles? 

Host: Samantha

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Further Reading
John Philipps Kenyon, The Popish Plot. St. Martin’s Press, (1972).

Roger L'Estrange, A brief history of the times, (1688).

Alan Marshall, "Godfrey, Sir Edmund Berry (1621–1678), magistrate," Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, (2004).

---, "Oates, Titus (1649–1705), informer," Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, (2004).

---, The Strange Death of Edmund Godfrey: Plots and Politics in Restoration London, Sutton Publishing, (1999).

Richard Tuke, Memoirs of the life and death of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, (1682).

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This episode is part of our True Crime series.

Music: "Evening Melodrama" by Kevin Macleod (www.incompetech.com)