Coleman had notice of his danger, and secreted a part, but not the whole, of his papers. The remainder were seized, and clearly proved that he had maintained a correspondence with the confessor of Louis XIV., the object of which was the reconversion of England. Besides appearing before the council, Gates made oath to the truth of his Narrative, which he published before Sir Edmundbury Godfrey, a zealous Protestant, and active justice of peace, and yet one that lived on good terms both with Non–conformists and Papists. Very shortly afterwards Godfrey was murdered. He was found in a ditch, with his own sword sticking in his body, which had not been plundered; and marks of strangling were thought to be visible about his neck, and some contusions on his breast. It has ever been a mystery by whom this crime was perpetrated; it was of course charged on the Papists, and retorted by them on the contrivers and assertors of the plot. But the support given to Gates’s story by this event, conjointly with Coleman’s papers, threw the whole country into a ferment. Vast crowds flocked to behold the corpse; the funeral excited equal interest, and the wish of its conductors to inflame the people is visible in some extraordinary precautions said to have been taken against a danger which no man could have apprehended seriously. The following account is taken from a contemporary of high tory principles, and animated by a most especial hatred of Gates. [Illustration: This medal appears to have been struck in ridicule of the notion that Godfrey had murdered himself; he is represented as walking with the halter about his neck, apparently towards Primrose Hill, seen in the distance with its double head. The legend, “Ergo pares sumus,”—Therefore we are alike,—intimates that those, and those only, who can believe the well–known story of St. Denys, could believe the Papistical account that Godfrey had killed himself.]