Chapter 7

We do not propose to unriddle this mystery, but to show that the most recent and industrious endeavour to solve the problem is unsuccessful. We cannot deny that Godfrey may have been murdered to conceal Catholic secrets, of which, thanks to his inexplicable familiarity with Coleman, he may have had many. But we have tried to prove that we do not KNOW him to have had any such Catholic secrets, or much beyond Oates’s fables; and we have probably succeeded in showing that against the Jesuits, as Sir Edmund’s destroyers, there is no evidence at all.

Had modern men of science, unaffected by political and religious bias, given evidence equivalent to that of the two surgeons, one might conceive that Godfrey was probably slain, as Macaulay thought, by hotheaded Catholics. But I confess to a leaning in favour of the picture of Godfrey sketched by L’Estrange; of the man confessing to hereditary melancholy; fretted and alarmed by the tracasseries and perils of his own position, alarming his friends and endangering himself by his gloomy hints; settling, on the last night of his life (Friday, October 11), with morbid anxiety, some details of a parish charity founded by himself; uncertain as to whether he can dine with Welden (at about one) next day; seen at that very hour near his own house, yet dining nowhere; said to have roamed, before that hour, to Paddington Woods and back again; seen vaguely, perhaps, wandering near Primrose Hill in the afternoon, and found dead five days later in the bush-covered ditch near Primrose Hill, his own sword through his breast and back, his body in the attitude of one who had died a Roman death.

Between us and that conclusion--suicide caused by fear--nothing stands but the surgical evidence, and the grounds of that evidence are disputed.

Surgical evidence, however, is a fact ‘that winna ding,’ and I do not rely on the theory of suicide. But, if Godfrey was murdered by Catholics, it seems odd that nobody has suggested, as the probable scene, the Savoy, which lay next on the right to Somerset Yard. The Savoy, so well described by Scott in Peveril of the Peak, and by Macaulay, was by this time a rambling, ruinous, labyrinth of lanes and dilapidated dwellings, tenanted by adventurers and skulking Catholics. It was an Alsatia, says Macaulay, more dangerous than the Bog of Allen, or the passes of the Grampians. A courageous magistrate might be lured into the Savoy to stop a fight, or on any similar pretence; and, once within a rambling old dwelling of the Hospital, would be in far greater peril than in the Queen’s guarded residence. Catholic adventurers might here destroy Godfrey, either for his alleged zeal, or to seize his papers, or because he, so great a friend of Catholics as he was, might know too much. The body could much more easily be removed, perhaps by water, from the Savoy, than from the guarded gates of Somerset House. Oates knew the Savoy, and said falsely that he had met Coleman there.* If murder was done, the Savoy was as good a place for the deed as the Forest of Bondy.

*State Trials, vii. 28.

* * *

NOTE I.

CHARLES II. AND GODFREY’S DEATH.

The Duke of York, speaking of Bedloe’s evidence before the Lords (November 8), says, ‘Upon recollection the King remembered he was at Sommerset House himself, at the very time he swore the murder was committed:... his having been there at that time himself, made it impossible that a man should be assaulted in the Court, murder’d, and hurryd into the backstairs, when there was a Centry at every door, a foot Company on the Guard, and yet nobody see or knew anything of it.* Now evidence was brought that, at 5 P.M. on Saturday, October 12, the Queen decided to be ‘not at home.’ But Bedloe placed the murder as early as 2 P.M., sometimes, and between two o’clock and five o’clock the King may, as the Duke of York says, have been at Somerset House. Reresby, in his diary, for November 21, 1678, says that the King told him on that day that he was ‘satisfied’ Bedloe had given false evidence as to Godfrey’s murder. The Duke of York probably repeats the King’s grounds for this opinion. Charles also knew that the room selected by Bedloe as the scene of the deed was impossible.

Life of James II, i. pp. 527, 528.

NOTE II.

PRANCE AND THE WHITE HOUSE CLUB.

The body of Godfrey was found in a ditch near the White House Tavern, and that tavern was used as a club by a set of Catholic tradesmen. Was Prance a member? The landlord, Rawson, on October 24, mentioned as a member ‘Mr. PRINCE, a silversmith in Holborn.’ Mr. PRANCE was a silversmith in Covent Garden. On December 21, Prance said that he had not seen Rawson for a year; he was asked about Rawson. The members of the club met at the White House during the sitting of the coroner’s inquest there, on Friday, October 18. Prance, according to the author of ‘A Letter to Miles Prance,’ was present. He may have been a member, he may have known the useful ditch where Godfrey’s corpse was found, but this does not rise beyond the value of conjecture.*

*Lords’ MSS. pp. 46, 47, 51.

NOTE III.

THE JESUIT MURDERERS.

There is difficulty in identifying as Jesuits the ‘Jesuits’ accused by Bedloe. The chief is ‘Father Le Herry,’ * called ‘Le Ferry’ by Mr. Pollock and Mr. Foley. He also appears as Le Faire, Lee Phaire, Le Fere, but usually Le Fevre, in the documents. There really was a priest styled Le Fevre. A man named Mark Preston was accused of being a priest and a Jesuit. When arrested he declared that he was a married layman with a family. He had been married in Mr. Langhorne’s rooms, in the Temple, by Le Fevre, a priest, in 1667, or, at least, about eleven years before 1678.** I cannot find that Le Fevre was known as a Jesuit to the English members of the Society. He is not in Oates’s list of conspirators. He does not occur in Foley’s ‘Records,’ vol. v., a very painstaking work. Nor would he be omitted because accused of a crime, rather he would be reckoned as more or less of a martyr, like the other Fathers implicated by the informers. The author of ‘Florus Anglo-Bavaricus’ *** names ‘Pharius’ (Le Phaire), ‘Valschius’ (Walsh), and ‘Atkinsus,’ as denounced by Bedloe, but clearly knows nothing about them. ‘Atkinsus’ is Mr. Pepys’s clerk, Samuel Atkins, who had an alibi. Valschius is Walsh, certainly a priest, but not to be found in Foley’s ‘Records’ as a Jesuit.

*Brit. Mus. Addit. MS. 11055, 245.

**Lords’ Journals, xiii. 331, 332. Lords’ MSS., p. 99.

***Liege, 1685, p. 137.

That Le Fevre was the Queen’s confessor I find no proof. But she had a priest named Ferrera, who might be confused with Le Faire.* He was accused of calling a waterman to help to take two persons down the river on November 6, 1678. He was summoned before the Lords, but we do not know that he came. Ferrera MAY have been the Queen’s confessor, he was ‘one of the Queen’s priests.’ In 1670 she had twenty-eight priests as chaplains; twelve were Portuguese Capuchins, six were Benedictines, two, Dominicans, and the rest seculars.** Mrs. Prance admitted that she knew ‘Mr. Le Phaire, and that he went for a priest.’*** Of Le Fevre, ‘Jesuit’ and ‘Queens confessor,’ I know no more.

*Lords’ MSS., p. 49.

**Maziere Brady, Episcopal Succession in England, p. 124 (1876).

***Lords’ MSS p. 52.

It appears that Mr. Pollock’s authority for styling Le Fevre ‘the Queen’s confessor’ is a slip of information appended to the Coventry notes, in the Longleat MSS., on Bedloe’s deposition of November 7.* I do not know the authority of the writer of the slip. It is admitted that the authority of a slip pinned on to a letter of Randolph’s is not sufficient to prove John Knox to have been one of the Riccio conspirators. The same slip appears to style Charles Walsh a Jesuit of the household of Lord Bellasis. This Walsh is unknown to Foley.

*Pollock, pp. 155, 157, note 2, in each case.

As to Father Pritchard, a Jesuit, Bedloe, in the British Museum MS., accuses ‘Penthard, a layman.’ He develops into Pridgeot, a Jesuit.* Later he is Father Pritchard, S.J. There was such a Jesuit, and, according to the Jesuit Annual Letter of 1680, he passed sixteen years in the South Wales Mission, and never once went to London. In 1680 he died in concealment.** It is clear that if Le Fevre was the Queen’s confessor, the sentries at Somerset House could prove whether he was there on the day of Godfrey’s murder. No such evidence was adduced. But if Le Fevre was not the Queen’s confessor, he would scarcely have facilities for smuggling a dead body out of ‘a private door.’

*Longleat MS., Pollock, p. 386.

**Foley, v. 875-877.

IV. THE FALSE JEANNE D’ARC.

Who that ever saw Jeanne d’Arc could mistake her for another woman? No portrait of the Maid was painted from the life, but we know the light perfect figure, the black hair cut short like a soldier’s, and we can imagine the face of her, who, says young Laval, writing to his mother after his first meeting with the deliverer of France, ‘seemed a thing all divine.’ Yet even two of her own brothers certainly recognised another girl as the Maid, five years after her death by fire. It is equally certain that, eight years after the martyrdom of Jeanne, an impostor dwelt for several days in Orleans, and was there publicly regarded as the heroine who raised the siege in 1429. Her family accepted the impostor for sixteen years. These facts rest on undoubted evidence.

To unravel the threads of the story is a task very difficult. My table is strewn with pamphlets, papers, genealogies, essays; the authors taking opposite sides as to the question, Was Jeanne d’Arc burned at Rouen on May 30, 1431? Unluckily even the most exact historians (yea, even M. Quicherat, the editor of the five volumes of documents and notices about the Maid) (1841-1849) make slips in dates, where dates are all important. It would add confusion if we dwelt on these errors, or on the bias of the various disputants.

Not a word was said at the Trial of Rehabilitation in 1452-1456 about the supposed survival of the Maid. But there are indications of the inevitable popular belief that she was not burned. Long after the fall of Khartoum, rumours of the escape of Charles Gordon were current; even in our own day people are loth to believe that their hero has perished. Like Arthur he will come again, and from Arthur to James IV. of Scotland, from James IV. to the Duke of Monmouth, or the son of Louis XVI., the populace believes and hopes that its darling has not perished. We destroyed the Mahdi’s body to nullify such a belief, or to prevent worship at his tomb. In the same way, at Rouen, ‘when the Maid was dead, as the English feared that she might be said to have escaped, they bade the executioner rake back the fire somewhat that the bystanders might see her dead.’* An account of a similar precaution, the fire drawn back after the Maid’s robes were burned away, is given in brutal detail by the contemporary diarist (who was not present), the Bourgeois de Paris.**

*Quicherat, iii. p. 191. These lines are not in MS. 5970. M. Save, in Jehanne des Armoises, Pucelle d’Orleans, p. 6 (Nancy, 1893), interpolates, in italics, words of his own into his translation of this text, which improve the force of his argument!

**Quicherat, iv. p. 471.

In spite of all this, the populace, as reflected in several chronicles, was uncertain that Jeanne had died. A ‘manuscript in the British Museum’ says: ‘At last they burned her, or another woman like her, on which point many persons are, and have been, of different opinions.’*

*Save, p. 7, citing Bibliotheque de l’Ecole des Chartes, ii., Second Series.

This hopeful rumour of the Maid’s escape was certain to arise, populus vult decipi.

Now we reach a point at which we may well doubt how to array the evidence. But probably the best plan is first to give the testimony of undoubted public documents from the Treasury Accounts of the town of Orleans. In that loyal city the day of the Maid’s death had been duly celebrated by religious services; the Orleanese had indulged in no illusions. None the less on August 9, 1436, the good town pays its pursuivant, Fleur-de-lys, ‘because he had brought letters to the town FROM JEHANNE LA PUCELLE’! On August 21 money is paid to ‘Jehan du Lys, brother of Jehanne la Pucelle,’ because he has visited the King, Charles VII., is returning to his sister, the Maid, and is in want of cash, as the King’s order given to him was not fully honoured. On October 18 another pursuivant is paid for a mission occupying six weeks. He has visited the Maid at Arlon in Luxembourg, and carried letters from her to the King at Loches on the Loire. Earlier, in August, a messenger brought letters from the Maid, and went on to Guillaume Belier, bailiff of Troyes, in whose house the real Maid had lodged, at Chinon, in the dawn of her mission, March 1429. Thus the impostor was dealing, by letters, with some of the people who knew the Maid best, and was freely accepted by her brother Jehan.*

*Quicherat, v. pp. 326-327.

For three years the account-books of Orleans are silent about this strange Pucelle. Orleans has not seen her, but has had Jeanne’s brother’s word for her reappearance, and the word, probably, of the pursuivants sent to her. Jeanne’s annual funeral services are therefore discontinued.

Mention of her in the accounts again appears on July 18, 1439. Money is now paid to Jaquet Leprestre for ten pints and a chopine of wine given to DAME JEHANNE DES ARMOISES. On the 29th, 30th, and on August 1, when she left the town, entries of payments for quantities of wine and food for Jehanne des Armoises occur, and she is given 210 livres ‘after deliberation with the town council,’ ‘for the good that she did to the said town during the siege of 1429.’

The only Jehanne who served Orleans in the siege was Jehanne d’Arc. Here, then, she is, as Jehanne des Armoises, in Orleans for several days in 1439, feasted and presented with money by command of the town council. Again she returns and receives ‘propine’ on September 4.* The Leprestre who is paid for the wine was he who furnished wine to the real Maid in 1429.

*Quicherat, v. pp. 331-332.

It is undeniable that the people of Orleans must have seen the impostor in 1439, and they ceased to celebrate service on the day of the true Maid’s death. Really it seems as if better evidence could not be that Jeanne des Armoises, nee Jeanne d’Arc, was alive in 1439. All Orleans knew the Maid, and yet the town council recognised the impostor.

She is again heard of on September 27, 1439, when the town of Tours pays a messenger for carrying to Orleans letters which Jeanne wrote to the King, and also letters from the bailli of Touraine to the King, concerning Jeanne. The real Jeanne could not write, but the impostor, too, may have employed a secretary.*

*Quicherat, v. p. 332.

In June 1441 Charles VII. pardoned, for an escape from prison, one de Siquemville, who, ‘two years ago or thereabouts’ (1439), was sent by the late Gilles de Raiz, Marechal de France, to take over the leadership of a commando at Mans, which had hitherto been under ‘UNE APPELEE JEHANNE, QUI SE DISOIT PUCELLE.’* The phrase ‘one styled Jehanne who called herself Pucelle’ does not indicate fervent belief on the part of the King. Apparently this Jeanne went to Orleans and Tours after quitting her command at Mans in 1439. If ever she saw Gilles de Raiz (the notorious monster of cruelty) in 1439, she saw a man who had fought in the campaigns of the true Maid under her sacred banner, argent a dove on an azure field.**

*Quicherat, v. p. 333.

**She never used the arms given to her and her family by Charles VII.

Here public documents about the impostor fall silent. It is not known what she was doing between August 9, 1436, and September 1439. At the earlier date she had written to the town of Orleans; at the later, she was writing to the King, from Tours. Here an error must be avoided. According to the author of the ‘Chronicle of the Constable of Alvaro de Luna,’ * the impostor was, in 1436, sending a letter, and ambassadors, to the King of Spain, asking him to succour La Rochelle. The ambassadors found the King at Valladolid, and the Constable treated the letter, ‘as if it were a relic, with great reverence.’

*Madrid, 1784, p. 131.

The impostor flies high! But the whole story is false.

M. Quicherat held at first that the date and place may be erroneously stated, but did not doubt that the False Pucelle did send her ambassadors and letter to the King of Spain. We never hear that the true Maid did anything of the sort. But Quicherat changed his mind on the subject. The author of the ‘Chronicle of Alvaro de Luna’ merely cites a Coronica de la Poncella. That coronica, says Quicherat later, ‘is a tissue of fables, a romance in the Spanish taste,’ and in this nonsense occurs the story of the embassy to the Spanish King. That story does not apply to the False Pucelle, and is not true, a point of which students of Quicherat’s great work need to be warned; his correction may escape notice.*

*Revue des Questions Historiques, April 1, 1881, pp. 553-566. Article by the Comte de Puymaigre.

We thus discard a strong trump in the hand of believers that the impostor was the real Maid; had a Pucelle actually sent ambassadors to Spain in 1436, their case would be stronger than it is.

Next, why is the false Pucelle styled ‘Jeanne des Armoises’ in the town accounts of Orleans in 1439?

This leads us to the proofs of the marriage of the false Pucelle, in 1436, with a Monsieur Robert des Armoises, a gentleman of the Metz country. The evidence is in a confused state. In the reign of Louis XIV. lived a Pere Vignier, a savant, who is said to have been a fraudulent antiquary. Whether this be true or not, his brother, after the death of Pere Vignier, wrote a letter to the Duc de Grammont, which was published in the ‘Mercure Galant’ of November, 1683. The writer says that his brother, Pere Vignier, found, at Metz, an ancient chronicle of the town, in manuscript, and had a copy made by a notary royal. The extract is perfectly genuine, whatever the reputation of the discoverer may be. This portion of the chronicle of the doyen of Saint-Thibaud de Metz exists in two forms, of which the latter, whoever wrote it, is intended to correct the former.

In the earlier shape the author says that, on May 20, 1436, the Pucelle Jeanne came to Metz, and was met by her brothers, Pierre, a knight, and Jehan, an esquire. Pierre had, in fact, fought beside his sister when both he and she were captured, at Compiegne, in May 1430. Jehan, as we have already seen, was in attendance on the false Maid in August 1436.

According to the Metz chronicle, these two brothers of the Maid, on May 20, 1436, recognised the impostor for their sister, and the account-books of Orleans leave no doubt that Jehan, at least, actually did accept her as such, in August 1436, four months after they met in May. Now this lasting recognition by one, at least, of the brothers, is a fact very hard to explain.

M. Anatole France offers a theory of the easiest. The brothers went to Lorraine in May 1436, to see the pretender. ‘Did they hurry to expose the fraud, or did they not think it credible, on the other hand, that, with God’s permission, the Saint had risen again? Nothing could seem impossible, after all that they had seen.... They acted in good faith. A woman said to them, “I am Jeanne, your sister.” They believed, because they wished to believe.’ And so forth, about the credulity of the age.

The age was not promiscuously credulous. In a RESURRECTION of Jeanne, after death, the age did not believe. The brothers had never seen anything of the kind, nor had the town council of Orleans. THEY had nothing to gain by their belief, the brothers had everything to gain. One might say that they feigned belief, in the hope that ‘there was money in it;’ but one cannot say that about the people of Orleans who had to spend money. The case is simply a puzzle.*

*Anatole France, ‘La Fausse Pucelle,’ Revue de Famille, Feb. 15, 1891. I cite from the quotation by M. P. Lanery d’Arc in Deux Lettres (Beauvais, 1894), a brochure which I owe to the kindness of the author.

After displaying feats of horsemanship, in male attire, and being accepted by many gentlemen, and receiving gifts of horses and jewels, the impostor went to Arlon, in Luxembourg, where she was welcomed by the lady of the duchy, Elizabeth de Gorlitz, Madame de Luxembourg. And at Arlon she was in October 1436, as the town accounts of Orleans have proved. Thence, says the Metz chronicle, the ‘Comte de Warnonbourg’ (?) took her to Cologne, and gave her a cuirass. Thence she returned to Arlon in Luxembourg, and there married the knight Robert des Hermoises, or Armoises, ‘and they dwelt in their own house at Metz, as long as they would.’ Thus Jeanne became ‘Madame des Hermoises,’ or ‘Ermaises,’ or, in the town accounts of Orleans, in 1439, ‘des Armoises.’

So says the Metz chronicle, in one form, but, in another manuscript version, it denounces this Pucelle as an impostor, who especially deceived tous les plus grands. Her brothers, we read (the real Maid’s brothers), brought her to the neighbourhood of Metz. She dwelt with Madame de Luxembourg, and married ‘Robert des Armoize.’* The Pere Vignier’s brother, in 1683, published the first, but not the second, of these two accounts in the ‘Mercure Galant’ for November.

*Quicherat, v. pp. 321-324, cf. iv. 321.

In or about 1439, Nider, a witch-hunting priest, in his Formicarium, speaks of a false Jeanne at Cologne, protected by Ulrich of Wirtemberg, (the Metz chronicle has ‘Comte de Warnonbourg’), who took the woman to Cologne. The woman, says Nider, was a noisy lass, who came eating, drinking, and doing conjuring feats; the Inquisition failed to catch her, thanks to Ulrich’s protection. She married a knight, and presently became the concubine of a priest in Metz.* This reads like a piece of confused gossip.

*Quicherat, v. pp. 324-325.

Vignier’s brother goes on to say (1683) in the ‘Mercure Galant,’ that his learned brother found the wedding contract of Jeanne la Pucelle and Robert des Armoises in the charter chest of the M. des Armoises of his own day, the time of Louis XIV. The brother of Vignier had himself met the son of this des Armoises, who corroborated the fact. But ‘the original copy of this ancient manuscript vanished, with all the papers of Pere Vignier, at his death.’

Two months later, in the spring of 1684, Vienne de Plancy wrote to the ‘Mercure Galant,’ saying that ‘the late illustrious brother’ of the Duc de Grammont was fully persuaded, and argued very well in favour of his opinion, that the actual Pucelle did not die at Rouen, but married Robert des Armoises. He quoted a genuine petition of Pierre du Lys, the brother of the real Maid, to the Duc d’Orleans, of 1443. Pierre herein says he has warred ‘in the company of Jeanne la Pucelle, his sister, jusqu’a son absentement, and so on till this hour, exposing his body and goods in the King’s service.’ This, argued M. de Grammont, implied that Jeanne was not dead; Pierre does not say, feue ma soeur, ‘my late sister,’ and his words may even mean that he is still with her. [‘Avec laquelle, jusques a son absentement, ET DEPUIS JUSQUES A PRESENT, il a expose son corps.’)*

*The petition is in Quicherat, v. pp. 212-214. For Vienne-Plancy see the papers from the Mercure Galant in Jeanne d’Arc n’a point ete brulee a Rouen (Rouen, Lanctin, 1872). The tract was published in 100 copies only.

Though no copy of the marriage contract of Jeanne and des Armoises exists, Quicherat prints a deed of November 7, 1436, in which Robert des Armoises and his wife, ‘La Pucelle de France,’ acknowledge themselves to be married, and sell a piece of land. The paper was first cited by Dom Calmet, among the documents in his ‘Histoire de Lorraine.’ It is rather under suspicion.