Unleashing the Animal Kingdom in the Popish Plot

chapter 18 “Crouch for Employment”: Unleashing the Animal Kingdom in the Popish Plot Bruce Janacek On 17 November 1681, a procession wound its way through London as processions had for many years on this day, the anniversary of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth.1 This procession began where most did, outside the city walls to the east, in Whitechapel. It entered the city through Aldgate, wove between the Royal Exchange and the Poultry, passed by Saint Paul’s Cathedral, exited the City walls through Ludgate, and then turned north to Smithfield, a place of notorious memory, for it was here that many Protestants had been martyred in the flames under Mary’s reign.2 A young man on horseback led the procession, portraying Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey—the London justice of the peace who had been murdered three years before by suspected Jesuit assassins who had never been brought to justice.3 The figure of Godfrey was spattered with blood, a napkin had been twisted around his neck, and he hung his head to one side, as if dead.4 Godfrey had been a prominent local official, a prosperous wood and coal merchant, and a magistrate on the Westminster and Middlesex commission of the peace, earn- ing a reputation of pursuing justice with a strong sense of duty.5 The worst fears of his friends and supporters were realized on 17 October 1678 when Godfrey’s body was discovered lying face down in a ditch, five days after he had 1 David Cressy, Bonfires and Bells: National Memory and the Protestant Calendar in Elizabethan and Stuart England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 177–84. 2 Tim Harris, London Crowds in the Reign of Charles ii (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 103. “…thence to Smithfield, the old place of Popish Cruelty, (where so many scores of holy Martyrs sealed the Truth of the Gospel with their blood)….” The Impartial Protestant Mercury, 15–18 Nov. 1681, no. 60v. 3 Harris, London Crowds. 4 The Procession: Or, The Burning of the Pope In Effigie, In Smithfield-Rounds, On the 17th of November 1681. Being Queen Elizabeth’s Birth-day. Describing The several Pageants, and rare Devices of the Pope, Cardinals, Jusuits, Friers, and many others. As likewise a Pageant of several Effigies in a Pillory drawn by Horses upon a Sledge. Several painted Pieces, and Fire-works, &c. Far exceeding whatever has been exposed in this nature. With the signification of the several Hierogliphicks (London, 1681), 2. 5 “Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey,” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��6 | doi �0.��63/9789004�633�4_0�9 <UN> 310 Janacek been reported missing. He had been run through with a sword, but his face and body were also badly bruised and his neck indicated the bruising associated with strangulation. His disappearance and death occurred only weeks after taking a deposition in investigation of widespread rumors that papal agents were slipping unnoticed and blending into London’s crowded, polyglot popu- lation, bent on assassinating Charles ii and his key advisers in order to bring Charles’s Catholic brother James to the throne, immediately returning England into Rome’s welcoming arms.6 Thus the fury in this procession was fired in the white-hot crucible known then as it is now as the Popish Plot.7 So while it was indeed a celebration of the queen of glorious memory, this procession intended to send a menacing message to those who dreamed of returning England to the Catholic fold and, as it had done in past years, hopefully incite and anger the crowds about Godfrey’s unsolved murder. However, dramatizing the death of Sir Godfrey was only one of many layers of meaning in this procession. One record we have of this particular procession, in its very typical, very long title, promised its readers that it included “the signification of the several Hierogliphicks.” Hieroglyphics indeed, for this procession employed images that from our distant vantage point surely do appear to be as mysterious as ancient Egyptian ideographs. However, the significance of the images portrayed and displayed by the anonymous designers and pro- ducers of this pageant were very clear to those who crowded along those nar- row streets and watched the menacing, deliberately horrifying procession pass. While there had been processions on this day before, in addition to the usual mockery of popes, cardinals, and the lot of Roman Catholic hierarchy, this particular procession deliberately and powerfully employed the animal kingdom in its polemic. This procession clarified the power of animals—literally and figuratively—even in seventeenth-century London’s teeming, filthy, urban confines. Knowledge of the animal kingdom was widespread. Domesticated animals provided sustenance while preserved wild creatures provided wonder and fas- cination for those fortunate enough to visit, for example, Elias Ashmole’s curi- osity cabinet. Of course, the instincts and behavior of animals had served to 6 For an examination of the credibility of the accusations and rumors of the Popish Plot, see Rachel Weil, “‘If I did say so, I lyed’: Elizabeth Cellier and the Construction of Credibility in the Popish Plot Crisis,” in Political Culture and Cultural Politics in Early Modern England, ed. Susan D. Amussen and Mark A. Kishlansky (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 189–209, esp. 189–94. 7 Tim Harris, Restoration: Charles ii and His Kingdoms (London: Penguin Books, 2006), 137–39. <UN>.

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