There is difficulty in identifying as Jesuits the ‘Jesuits’ accused
by Bedloe. The chief is ‘Father Le Herry,’ * called ‘Le Ferry’ by Mr.
Pollock and Mr. Foley. He also appears as Le Faire, Lee Phaire, Le Fere,
but usually Le Fevre, in the documents. There really was a priest styled
Le Fevre. A man named Mark Preston was accused of being a priest and a
Jesuit. When arrested he declared that he was a married layman with a
family. He had been married in Mr. Langhorne’s rooms, in the Temple,
by Le Fevre, a priest, in 1667, or, at least, about eleven years before
1678.** I cannot find that Le Fevre was known as a Jesuit to the English
members of the Society. He is not in Oates’s list of conspirators. He
does not occur in Foley’s ‘Records,’ vol. v., a very painstaking work.
Nor would he be omitted because accused of a crime, rather he would be
reckoned as more or less of a martyr, like the other Fathers implicated
by the informers. The author of ‘Florus Anglo-Bavaricus’ *** names
‘Pharius’ (Le Phaire), ‘Valschius’ (Walsh), and ‘Atkinsus,’ as denounced
by Bedloe, but clearly knows nothing about them. ‘Atkinsus’ is Mr.
Pepys’s clerk, Samuel Atkins, who had an alibi. Valschius is Walsh,
certainly a priest, but not to be found in Foley’s ‘Records’ as a
Jesuit.
*Brit. Mus. Addit. MS. 11055, 245.
**Lords’ Journals, xiii. 331, 332. Lords’ MSS., p. 99.
***Liege, 1685, p. 137.
That Le Fevre was the Queen’s confessor I find no proof. But she had
a priest named Ferrera, who might be confused with Le Faire.* He was
accused of calling a waterman to help to take two persons down the river
on November 6, 1678. He was summoned before the Lords, but we do not
know that he came. Ferrera MAY have been the Queen’s confessor, he was
‘one of the Queen’s priests.’ In 1670 she had twenty-eight priests as
chaplains; twelve were Portuguese Capuchins, six were Benedictines, two,
Dominicans, and the rest seculars.** Mrs. Prance admitted that she knew
‘Mr. Le Phaire, and that he went for a priest.’*** Of Le Fevre, ‘Jesuit’
and ‘Queens confessor,’ I know no more.
*Lords’ MSS., p. 49.
**Maziere Brady, Episcopal Succession in England, p. 124 (1876).
***Lords’ MSS p. 52.
It appears that Mr. Pollock’s authority for styling Le Fevre ‘the
Queen’s confessor’ is a slip of information appended to the Coventry
notes, in the Longleat MSS., on Bedloe’s deposition of November 7.* I
do not know the authority of the writer of the slip. It is admitted
that the authority of a slip pinned on to a letter of Randolph’s is
not sufficient to prove John Knox to have been one of the Riccio
conspirators. The same slip appears to style Charles Walsh a Jesuit of
the household of Lord Bellasis. This Walsh is unknown to Foley.
*Pollock, pp. 155, 157, note 2, in each case.
As to Father Pritchard, a Jesuit, Bedloe, in the British Museum MS.,
accuses ‘Penthard, a layman.’ He develops into Pridgeot, a Jesuit.*
Later he is Father Pritchard, S.J. There was such a Jesuit, and,
according to the Jesuit Annual Letter of 1680, he passed sixteen years
in the South Wales Mission, and never once went to London. In 1680 he
died in concealment.** It is clear that if Le Fevre was the Queen’s
confessor, the sentries at Somerset House could prove whether he was
there on the day of Godfrey’s murder. No such evidence was adduced.
But if Le Fevre was not the Queen’s confessor, he would scarcely have
facilities for smuggling a dead body out of ‘a private door.’
*Longleat MS., Pollock, p. 386.
**Foley, v. 875-877.