So far the matter is clear. Sir Edmund Godfrey was an intolerable obstacle to the Jesuit party. He was in possession of a secret the disclosure of which would utterly ruin them. He recognised himself that his life was in danger and went in expectation of being assassinated. His murder was, like Charles the First’s execution, a cruel necessity. Two men gave evidence as to his death. The one, Bedloe, contradicted himself beyond belief. Nevertheless he was able to recognise and accuse the other, Prance, whose minute and consistent descriptions of time and place mark him as a partner in the crime. The inference therefore is sound that, as Bedloe accused correctly a man whom he knew by sight and not by name, some of the men whose names he gave directly in his account of the murder were probably the real criminals. These were Le Fevre, the Jesuit confessor of the queen, Charles Walsh, a Jesuit attached to the household of Lord Bellasis, and Charles Pritchard, a third member of the Society of Jesus. With them were associated the Roman Catholic silversmith, Miles Prance, whom Bedloe recognised as the man whom he had taken for a waiter in the queen’s chapel, and a servant of Lord Bellasis, whom he named as Mr. Robert Dent.[282] Strictly, it is only a matter of conjecture that these men undertook the deed, but it is supported by considerable probability. They were singularly unfitted for the task. Godfrey had to be killed and his corpse to be disposed in such a way that the crime might not be traced to its true source. The men to do this were not professional criminals. They did not know, what constant experience has demonstrated, that the most apparently simple crimes are the hardest to bring home to their authors. Their proper course was to waylay the magistrate in the darkness of a narrow street, strip his body of every article of value, and leave it to be supposed that the murder had been committed for a vulgar robbery. Instead of this they determined to dispose the corpse in such a way that Godfrey might be thought to have committed suicide. The disposal would need time, and to gain the time necessary it was needful that they should choose a spot to which they could have free access, and where they would be undisturbed. As the most secret spot known to them they chose exactly that which they should have most avoided, the queen’s palace, Somerset House. To decoy Godfrey was not difficult, for, contrary to the practice of the day, he went abroad habitually without a servant.[283] The court of Somerset House was not, as the Duke of York afterwards declared in his memoirs, crowded with people; on the contrary, it was understood that the queen was private, and orders were given that visitors were not to be admitted in their coaches.[284] The queen’s confessor and his friends however could doubtless secure an entrance. Here Godfrey was murdered, and in Somerset House his body remained for four nights. In what place it was kept cannot be decided.