1678) was an English Roman Catholic craftsman who was caught up in and perjured himself during the Popish Plot and the resulting anti-Catholic hysteria in London during the reign of Charles II.
Prance was born on the Isle of Ely, the son of a Roman Catholic, and he rose quickly from his humble origins as an apprentice goldsmith to servant-in-ordinary to Catherine of Braganza, Charles II's queen.
[1] Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey died in October 1678; he disappeared from his home and was found dead at Primrose Hill, having apparently been strangled and run through with a sword some days before his death.
Godfrey, though normally tolerant in matters of religion, had been militating against the Jesuits around the time of the Popish Plot, the great wave of anti-Catholic hysteria which swept across England in 1678 due to the lies of Titus Oates about a Catholic conspiracy to assassinate the Royal Family.
Bedloe, with the assistance of Wren and Hale, evidently decided to enhance his public standing as a "discoverer" of the Plot by denouncing Prance, who as a Catholic of rather humble social background, without influential friends to protect him, was particularly vulnerable to such an accusation.
Kenyon argues that the lack of a plausible motive is the central flaw with all theories about Godfrey's murder; none of the named suspects, on careful analysis, had a sufficient reason to kill him.
[8] Only the deranged Philip Herbert, 7th Earl of Pembroke, who was apparently not suspected at the time, now seems to have had a strong enough motive for the murder, since he had a bitter personal grievance against Godfrey.
He offered evidence against Thomas Whitbread (alias Harcourt) and John Fenwick, two of the leading Jesuit priests, in June 1679 and received a £50 pension from the King in January 1680.
The fact that he had been ill-treated and possibly tortured to make him confess became widely known (Elizabeth Cellier published a pamphlet on the case, and was prosecuted for seditious libel as a result) and caused his credit to sink further.