A Marshall

The Westminster magistrate and the Irish stroker: Sir Edmund Godfrey and Valentine Greatrakes, some unpublished correspondence

One of the more absorbing events in the great drama of the Popish Plot, which swept through English political life in the autumn of 1678, was the discovery of the corpse of a Westminster magistrate, Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, in a ditch near Primrose Hill on 17 October 1678. This event, which sparked off a great deal of panic in London and gained some notoriety at the time, has continued to perplex historians, both professional and amateur, ever since. The speculation as to how Godfrey met his death and who did the deed, has tended to obscure the fact that we still know surprisingly little about this prominent Westminster merchant and justice of the peace before his demise. Despite an intensive historical investigation of Godfreys murder, if murder it was, a lack of evidence has always been the main problem for any historian attempting to analyse Godfreys character and career prior to his death. This was compounded by the allegation that on the night before his disappearance Godfrey burnt a large number of his personal papers. However, located in the collections of the National Library of Ireland is a small white leather-backed volume containing seventeenth-century copies of the correspondence of Sir Edmund Godfrey to his close friend the Irish healer and stroker Valentine Greatrakes. This letterbook is a significant addition to the historical record in that it contains what may be the only surviving personal letters of the ‘murdered’ magistrate during the late 1660s and early 1670s.

“Memorialls for Mrs Affora”: Aphra Behn and the Restoration Intelligence World

Focusing on the “Memorialls for Mrs Affora”, the instructional document issued by the Secretary of States office to Aphra Behn in advance of her spying mission to the Low Countries from July to December 1666, this article explores the culture and conventions of Restoration espionage, and Behns role within it. In doing so, it seeks to position Behns role and correspondence in relation to both the practices of her male and female contemporaries, and the textual aesthetics that characterized correspondence related to espionage—both overt and clandestine—in the latter half of the seventeenth century. Whereas Behn is often seen by literary scholars to occupy a curious position as a female spy for Charles IIs government, this article argues that knowledge of the networks and subtleties that sustained espionage activity during the Restoration complicates that view. Its observations about the textual strategies deployed by Behn and other spies in espionage materials also prompt further thinking about her use elsewhere of the letter form and character development.

Colonel Thomas Blood and the Restoration Political Scene

Thomas Blood was born in Sarney, county Meath in Ireland around the year 1618. The circumstances surrounding his early life are obscure but his father was said to have been a blacksmith and ironworker of ‘no inferior credit’. Bloods first real appearance in the historical record occurs during the survey taken in Ireland in the period 1654–6. In this he is listed as a protestant who had owned some 220 acres of land at Sarney since at least 1640. In between these dates, however, Blood had evidently undertaken some sort of military service. The evidence concerning this military service is both slight and contradictory and there is at least the possibility that his later claims about an army career were partly bogus, or certainly inflated to suit his particular company.