Scarcely ever has a fact so problematical been attended by such weighty results. Sir Edmund Godfrey left his house on October 12, 1678. On October 17 his corpse was found in the fields at the foot of Primrose Hill. From that moment belief in the Popish Plot was rooted in the mind of the nation. The excitement throughout the country rose to the mark of frenzy. Godfrey’s death seemed clear evidence of the truth of Oates’ sanguinary tales, and the prelude to a general massacre of Protestants. It became an article of faith that he had been murdered by the Catholics. To deny it was to incur the most awkward suspicion. No man thought himself safe from the same fate. Every householder laid in a stock of arms. Posts and chains barricaded the streets of the city. Night after night the Trained Bands stood to arms and paraded the town as if an insurrection were expected before morning. During the winter which followed, wrote Shaftesbury, “the soberest and most peaceable of the people have, either in town or country, hardly slept for fear of fire or massacring by the Papists.” Alderman Sir Thomas Player declared that when he went to bed “he did not know but the next morning they might all rise with their throats cut.” And this state of things continued, as sober Calamy remarked, “not for a few weeks or months only, but for a great while together.” It was regarded as most fortunate that the Protestants did not seek to avenge Godfrey and anticipate their own doom by exterminating the Roman Catholics.[136] Upon the death of a London magistrate was grounded the firm conviction of the reality of the Popish Plot, under cover of which the Whig party was all but successful in deranging the legitimate succession to the throne, and even perhaps in overturning the monarchy itself. Of the instruments by which Shaftesbury turned the Plot to this end, none was more powerful than the belief in Godfrey’s murder. In one connection or another that event appeared in almost all the state trials of the two following years, in the debates in Parliament, in the pulpit, on the stage.[137] The part which it played in the electioneering methods of the Whigs was still more formidable, and Godfrey’s corpse was a central figure in the grand annual ceremonies of Pope Burning, which were arranged by the Green Ribbon Club.[138] Without the mystery of Godfrey’s death it is possible that the agitation of the plot would have burnt itself out in the course of a few months. As it was, the fuel was fanned into a blaze of unexampled fierceness, which did not die down until nearly three momentous years in English history had passed.