by hanging was impossible as the marks on his neck showed that he had had his neck broken with his cravat, which was too short to effect a breakage by "drop". An investigation by pathologist Keith Simpson (appendix in John Dickson Carr's Death of Edmund Godfrey) concurred, concluding that if the body had been suspended, the marks would have been higher up on the body than they were. The circumstances of Godfrey's death were established and documented by two doctors, Zachariah Skillard and Nicholas Cambridge, for an inquest held at the White House tavern in Primrose Hill. Historian J. P. Kenyon argues that neither Catholics nor Whigs had a sufficient motive. The Catholics were almost certain to be blamed for the murder, with calamitous consequences; while neither Shaftesbury nor his colleagues, whatever their faults, were likely to murder an innocent man of their own social class whom many of them knew and liked, on the mere speculation that it would bring them some benefit. He discounts Oates' involvement on the ground that he was a physical coward; Bedloe's conduct suggests that he had heard something about the murder from his underworld connections but was not directly involved. Modern analysis American mystery writer John Dickson Carr analyzed all of these theories in The Murder of Sir Edmund Godfrey (1936), exposing their weak points and contradictions. He concluded that Philip Herbert, 7th Earl of Pembroke had taken revenge on Godfrey, who had prosecuted him that April for the murder of Nathaniel Cony. Herbert was convicted of manslaughter and exercised his privilege of peerage to escape punishment, leaving him without the use of that Get Out of Jail Free card which he sorely needed after nearly killing a peer in a dispute shortly after his conviction. British popular historian Hugh Ross Williamson reached the same conclusion in Historical Whodunits (1955). British professional historian J. P. Kenyon concurred (1974), but allowed that the matter could not now be settled with certainty. The author Stephen Knight suggested in The Killing of Justice Godfrey (1984) that Herbert murdered Godfrey on the orders of the "Peyton Gang". Alan Marshall's The Strange Death of Edmund Godfrey, Plots and Politics in Restoration London (1999) offers a comprehensive examination of Godfrey's life and death. Marshall follows the principle of Ockham's razor in concluding that Godfrey most likely killed himself. He suggests Godfrey's brothers made the death appear to be a