about the Plot in general throws his account of Godfrey’s death into high relief. His later information was exactly similar in character to that offered by all the other witnesses. It was vague and incoherent and full of absurdities. The contrast to the elaboration and detail of his previous evidence is striking. Compared with Bedloe’s account of the murder the testimony of Prance shows another noteworthy feature. The evidence of the two men hardly covers the same ground at all. In almost every particular it offers remarkable points of difference. Up to the date of October 12 the two stories run in different lines altogether. According to Prance two priests, named Gerald and Kelly, had, by means of menace and abstract arguments, induced him to join with them and four others, Green, Hill, Berry, and Vernatt, in the murder of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, on the score that “he was a busy man and going about to ruin all the Catholics in England.”[258] One Leweson, a priest, was also to have a hand in the business. Bedloe’s tale on the contrary was that Le Fevre, Pritchard, Keynes, and Walsh, four Jesuits, had employed him to effect an introduction to Godfrey for them. Le Fevre afterwards offered him £4000, to be paid by Lord Bellasis through Coleman, if he would undertake to kill “a very material man” in order to obtain some incriminating papers in his possession, without which “the business would be so obstructed and go near to be discovered” that the great Plot would come to grief.[259] At this point the stories begin to converge, and at the same time retain strikingly different features. Prance’s account ran that on October 12 Gerald, Green, and Hill decoyed Godfrey as he came down the Strand from St. Clement’s into Somerset House at about 9 o’clock in the evening under pretence of a quarrel. Green, Gerald, Hill, and Kelly then attacked him. Green strangled him with a twisted handkerchief, knelt with all his force upon his chest and “wrung his neck round,” while Berry and Prance kept watch.[260] On the nights of Saturday and Sunday the body was left in Hill’s lodgings in Somerset House, and on Monday was removed to another room across the court. There Hill shewed it to Prance by the light of a dark lantern at past 10 o’clock at night: “Gerald and Hill and Kelly and all were there.”[261] Prance had no knowledge of seeing Bedloe in the room. At midnight on Wednesday, October 16, the corpse was placed in a sedan chair and carried, as Prance said, by Gerald, Green, Kelly, and himself as far as Soho Church. Hill met them there with a horse, on which he put the body and rode with it to Primrose Hill.[262] Bedloe’s finished account gave a picture very unlike this. He stated that on Monday, October 14, between 9 and 10 o’clock P.M. Le Fevre took him to a room in Somerset House and showed him the body of the murdered man lying under a cloak. He recognised the body to be that of Sir Edmund Godfrey. Besides Le Fevre he only saw in the room Walsh, a servant of