Various
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 377, March 1847
THE CAVE OF THE REGICIDES;
AND HOW THREE OF THEM FARED IN NEW ENGLAND
“Oliver Newman” is a poem which I opened with trembling; for the last new poem that ever shall be read from such an one as Southey, is not a thing that can be looked upon lightly. Then it came to us from his grave, “like the gleaming grapes when the vintage is done;” and the last fruit of such a teeming mind must be relished, though far from being the best; as we are glad to eat apples out of season, which, in the time of them, we should hardly have gathered. But this is not to the purpose. I was surprised to find the new poem built on a history which novelists and story-tellers have been nibbling at these twenty years, and which seems to be a peculiarly relishable bit of news on an old subject, if we may judge by the way in which literary epicures have snatched it up piecemeal. In the first place, Sir Walter Scott, who read every thing, got hold of a “North American publication,”20 from which he learned; with surprise, that Whalley the regicide, “who was never heard of after the Restoration,” fled to Massachusetts, and there lived concealed, and died, and was laid in an obscure grave, which had lately been ascertained. Giving Mr. Cooper due credit for a prior use of the story, he made it over, in his own inimitable way, and puts it into the mouth of Major Bridgenorth, relating his adventures in America. Southey seems next to have got wind of it, reviewing “Holmes’ American Annals,”21 in the Quarterly, when he confesses he first thought of King Philip’s war as the subject for an epic – a thought which afterwards became a flame, and determined him to make Goffe (another regicide) the hero of his poem. A few details of the story got out of romance and gossip into genuine history, in a volume of “Murray’s Family Library;”22 and the great “Elucidator” of Oliver Cromwell’s mystifications condenses them again into a single sentence, observing, with his usual buffoonery, that “two of Oliver’s cousinry fled to New England, lived in caves there, and had a sore time of it.” And now comes the poem from Southey, full of allusions to the same story, and, after all, giving only part of it; for I do not see that any one has yet mentioned the fact, that three regicides lived and died in America after the Restoration, and that their sepulchres are there to this day.
In truth, the new poem led me to think there might be some value in a certain MS. of my own, – mere notes of a traveller, indeed, but results of a tour which I made in New England in the summer of 18 – , during which, besides visiting one of the haunts of the fugitives, I took the pains to investigate all that is extant of their story. I found there a queer little account of them, badly written, and worse arranged; the work of one Dr. Stiles, who seems to have been something of a pious Jacobin, and whose reverence for the murderers of King Charles amounts almost to idolatry. He was president of Yale College, at Newhaven, and thoroughly possessed of all the hate and cant about Malignants, which the first settlers of New England brought over with them as an heir-loom for their sons. A member of his college told me, that Stiles used to tell the undergraduates that silly story about the king’s being hanged by mistake for Oliver, after the Restoration; and that he only left it off when a dry fellow laughed out at the narration, and on being asked what there was to laugh at, replied, “hanging a man that had lost his neck.” After reading the doctor’s book on the Regicides, I cannot doubt the anecdote, for he carries his love of Oliver into rapture; talks of “entertaining angels” in the persons of Goffe and Whalley, and applies to them the beautiful language in which St. Paul commemorates the saints – “they wandered about, being destitute, afflicted, tormented; they wandered in deserts, and in mountains, and in dens and caves of the earth —of whom the world was not worthy.” The book itself is the most confused mass of repetition and contradiction I ever saw, and yet proved to me vastly entertaining. In connexion with it, I got hold of several others that helped to “elucidate” it; and thus, with much verbal information, I believe I came to a pretty clear view of the case. I can only give what I have gathered, in the off-hand way of a tourist, but perhaps I may serve some one with facts, which they will arrange much better, in performing the more serious task of a historian.
After spending several weeks in the vicinity of New York, I left that city in a steamer for a visit to the “Eastern States;” our passage lying through the East River and Long Island Sound, and requiring about five hours sail to complete the trip to Newhaven. I found the excursion by no means an agreeable one. The Sound itself is wide, and our way lay at equal distances between its shores, which, being quite low, are not easily descried by a passenger. Then there came up a squall, which occasioned a great swell in the sea, and sickness was the consequence among not a few of the company on board. Altogether, the steamer being greatly inferior to those on the Hudson, and crowded with a very uninteresting set of passengers, I was glad to retreat from the cabin, going forward, and looking out impatiently for the end of our voyage.
Here it was that I first caught sight of two bold headlands, looming up, a little retired from the shore, and giving a dignity to the coast at this particular spot, by which it is not generally distinguished. We soon entered the bay of Newhaven, and the town itself began to appear, embosomed very snugly between the two mountains, and deriving no little beauty from their prominent share in its surrounding scenery. I judged them not more than four or five hundred feet high, but they are marked with elegant peaks, and present a bold perpendicular front of trap-rock, which, with the bay and harbour in the foreground, and a fine outline of hills sloping away towards the horizon, conveys a most agreeable impression to the approaching stranger of the region he is about to visit. A person who stood looking out very near me, gave me the information that the twin mountains were called, from their geographical relations to the meridian of Newhaven, East and West Rocks, and added the remark, for which I was hardly prepared, that West Rock was celebrated as having afforded a refuge to the regicides Goffe and Whalley.
My fellow-passenger, observing my interest in this statement, went on to tell me, in substance, as follows. A cleft in its rugged rocks was once actually inhabited by those scape-goats, and still goes by the name of “The Regicides’ Cave.” Newhaven, moreover, contains the graves of these men, and regards them with such remarkable veneration, that even the railroad speed of progress and improvement has been checked to keep them inviolate; – a tribute which, in America, must be regarded as very marked, since no ordinary obstacle ever is allowed to interfere with their perpetual “go-ahead.” It seems the ancient grave-yard, where the regicides repose, was found very desirable for a public square; and as a mimic Père-la-Chaise had just been created in the outskirts of the town, away went coffins and bones, grave-stones and sepulchral effigies, and monumental urns, to plant the new city of the dead, and make way for living dogs, as better than defunct lions. Such a resurrection the towns-folk gave to their respectable grandfathers and grandmothers; but not to the relics of the regicides. At these shrines of murder and rebellion, the spade and the mattock stood still; and their once restless tenants, after shifting between so many disturbances while living, were suffered to sleep on, in a kind of sepulchral limbo, between the marble in Westminster Abbey, to which they once aspired, and the ditch at Tyburn, which they so narrowly escaped.
I was cautioned by my communicative friend not to speak too freely of ‘the Regicides.’ I must call them “the Judges,” he said; for, in Newhaven, where Puritanism perpetuates some of its principles, and all of its prejudices, it appears that such is the prevailing euphuism which is employed, as more in harmony with their notions of Charles as a sinful Malignant, and of the Rebellion as a glorious foretaste of the kingdom of the saints. “The Judges’ Cave” is therefore the expression by which they speak of that den of thieves on West Rock; and they always use an equally guarded phrase when they mention those graves in the square, – graves, be it remembered, that enclose the ashes of men, who should have been left to the tender mercies of the public executioner, had they only received in retribution what they meted out to their betters.
Newhaven, in addition to these treasures, boasts another Puritan relic, of a different kind. The early settlers founded here a Calvinistic college, which has become a very popular sectarian university, and my visit at this time was partly occasioned by the recurrence of the annual commemoration of its foundation. I suspect the person who leaned over the bulwarks of the steamer, and gave me the facts – which I have related in a very different vein from that in which I received them – was a dissenting minister going up to be at his college at this important anniversary. There was a tone in his voice, as was said of Prince Albert’s, when he visited the savans at Southampton, which sufficiently indicated his sympathies.23 The regicides were evidently the calendared saints of his religion, and their adventures his Acta Sanctorum. He was nevertheless very civil and entertaining, and I was glad, on arriving at the quay, to find no worse companion forced upon me in the carriage which I had engaged (as I supposed for myself alone) to take me into the city. There was so great a rush for cabs and coaches, however, that there was no going single; and I accordingly found myself again in close communication with my narrative fellow-traveller, who soon made room for two others; grave personages with rigid features and polemical address, which convinced me that I was in presence of the dons and doctors of a Puritan university.
“Go-ahead!” sung out somebody, as soon as our luggage was strapped behind; and away we drove, in full chase, with drays and cabs, towards the central parts of the city. The newer streets are built, I observed, with snug little cottages, and intersect at right angles. The suburban Gothic, so justly reprobated by the critics of Maga, is not quite as unusual as it ought to be; but a succession of neat little shrubbery-plots around the doors, and a trim air about things in general, suits very well the environs of such a miniature city as Newhaven. I never saw such a place for shade-trees. They are planted every where; little slender twigs, boxed carefully from wheels and schoolboys, and struggling apparently against the curse, “bastard slips shall not thrive;” and venerable overarching trees, in long avenues, so remarkable and so numerous that the town is familiarly called, by its poets, the “City of Elms.”
The Funereal Square, of which I had already learned the history, was soon reached, and we were set down at a hotel in its neighbourhood. Its “rugged elms” are not the only trace of the fact, that the rude forefathers of the city once reposed in their shadow; for, in the middle of the square, a church of tolerable Gothic still remains; in amiable proximity to which appear two meeting-houses, of a style of architecture truly original, and exhibiting as natural a development of Puritanism, as the cathedrals display of Catholic religion. Behind one of these meeting-houses protrudes, in profile, the classic pediment of a brick and plaster temple, of which the divinity is the Connecticut Themis, and in which the Solons of the commonwealth biennially enact legislative games in her honour. Still farther in the back-ground are seen spire and cupola, peering over a thickset grove, in the friendly shade of whose academic foliage a long line of barrack-looking buildings were pointed out to me as the colleges.
These shabby homes of the Muses were my only token that I had entered a university town. The streets, it is true, were alive with bearded and mustached youth, who gave some evidences of being yet in statu pupillari; but they wore hats, and flaunted not a rag of surplice or gown. In the old and truly respectable college at New York, such things are not altogether discarded; but, at Newhaven, where they are devoutly eschewed as savouring too much of Popery, not a member of its faculties, nor master, doctor, or scholar, appears with the time-honoured decency which, to my antiquated notion, is quite inseparable from the true regimen of a university. The only distinction which I remarked between Town and Gown, is one in lack of which Town makes the more respectable appearance of the twain; for the college badges seem to be nothing more than odd-looking medals of gold, which are set in unmeaning display on the man’s shirt ruffles, or dangle with tawdry effect from their watch ribbons. I have no doubt that the smart shopmen who flourish canes and smoke cigars in the same walks with the collegians, very much envy them these poor decorations; but in my opinion, they have far less of the Titmouse in their appearance without them, and would sooner be taken for their betters by lacking them. My first impressions were, on the whole, far from favourable, therefore; as from such things in the young men, I was forced to judge of their alma mater. And I must own, moreover, that my subsequent acquaintance with the university did little to diminish the disappointment which I unwillingly felt in this visit to one of the most popular seats of learning in America. I certainly came prepared to be pleased; for I had met in New York several persons of refined education, who had taken their degrees at this place; but, to dismiss this digression from my main purpose, I must say that the Commencement was any thing but a creditable affair. After carefully observing all that I could unobtrusively hear and see, I cannot speak flatteringly of the performances, whether the matter or the manner be considered. I can scarcely account for it that so many educated men as took part in the exercises should make no better exhibition of themselves. One oration delivered by a bachelor of arts, was vociferated with insolence so consummate, that I marvelled how the solemn-looking divines, whom it occasionally seemed to hit, were able to endure it. In all that I heard, with very few exceptions, there was a deficiency of good English style, of elevated sentiment, and even of sound morality. Many of the professors and fellows of the University are confessedly men of cultivated minds, and even of distinguished learning: yet this great celebration was no better than I say. I can account for it only by the sectarian influences which imbue every thing in Newhaven, and by the want of a thoroughly academic atmosphere, which sectarianism never can create. It was really farcical to see the good old president confer degrees with an attempt at ceremony, which seemed to have no rubric but extemporary convenience, and no purpose but the despatch of business. All this may seem to have nothing to do with my subject; yet I felt myself that the regicides had a good deal to do with it. In this college, one sees the best that Puritanism could produce; and I thought what Oxford and Cambridge might have become under the invading reforms of the usurpation, had the Protectorate been less impotent to reproduce itself, and carry out its natural results on those venerable foundations.
On the day following that of the Commencement, I took a drive to West Rock. I was so happy as to have the company of a very intelligent person from the Southern States, and of a young lady, his relative, who was very ambitious to make the excursion. It was a pleasant drive of about three miles to the foot of the mountain, where we alighted, the driver leaving the horses in charge of themselves, and undertaking the office of guide. It was somewhat tedious climbing for our fair friend; but up we went, over rough stones, creeping vines and brushwood, that showed no signs of being very frequently disturbed; our guide keeping the bright buttons of his coat-skirts before us, and in some other respects reminding me of Mephistopheles on the Hartz. It certainly was very accommodating in Nature, to provide the lofty chambers of the regicides with such a staircase; for in their day it must have defied any ordinary search, and when found must have presented as many barriers of brier and thicket, as grew up around the Sleeping Beauty in the fairy tale.
As we reached what seemed to be the top of the rock, we came suddenly into an open place, but so surrounded by trees and shrubs, as effectually to shut in the view. Here was the cave; and very different it was from what we had expected to find it! We had prepared ourselves to explore a small Antiparos, and were quite chagrined to find our grotto diminished to a mere den or covert, between two immense stones of a truly Stonehengian appearance and juxtaposition. I doubted for a moment whether their singular situation, on the top of this mountain, were matter for the geologist or the antiquary; and would like to refer the question to the learned Dean of Westminster, who hammers stones as eloquently as some of his predecessors have hammered pulpits. The stones are well-nigh equal in height, of about twenty feet perpendicular, one of them nearly conical, and the other almost a true parallelopiped. Betwixt them another large stone appears to have fallen, till it became wedged; and the very small aperture between this stone and the ground beneath, is all that justifies the name of a cave, though there are several fissures about the stones, in which possibly beasts might be sheltered, but hardly human beings. To render the cave itself large enough for the pair that once inhabited it, the earth must have been dug from under the stone, so as to make a covered pit; and even then, it was hardly so good a place as is said to have been made for “a refuge to the conies,” being much fitter for wild-cats or tigers. I could scarcely persuade myself, that English law could ever have driven a man three thousand miles over the sea, and then into such a burrow as this! But so it was; and it was retribution and justice too.
Bad as it was, it looked more agreeable Goffe and Whalley, than a cross-beam and two halters, or even than apartments in the Tower of London. They had it fitted up with a bed, and other “creature-comforts” of a truly Crusoe-like description. The mouth of the cave was screened by a thick growth of bushes, and the place was in several other respects well suited to their purposes. The parallelopiped, of which I have spoken, was easily climbed, being furnished with something like stairs, and its top commands a fine view of the town, the bay, and the country for miles around. It served them, therefore, as a watch-tower, and must have been very useful as a means of protection, and as an observatory for amusement. I mounted the stone myself, and tried to fancy how different was the scene two hundred years ago. There the exile would sit hour after hour, not as one may sit there now, to see sails and steamers entering and leaving the harbour, and post-coaches and railroad cars passing and re-passing continually; but to gaze in astonishment and fear, if one lone ship might be descried coming up the bay, or if a solitary horseman was to be seen or heard pursuing his journey in the valley below.
While the fugitives lived in this den, they were regularly supplied with daily bread and other necessaries of life, by a woodman, who lived at the foot of the rock. A child came up the mountain daily with a supply of provisions, which he left on a certain stone, and returned without seeing any body, or asking any questions of Echo. In this way he always brought a full basket and took back an empty one, without the least suspicion that he was becoming an accessory in high treason, and, as it is said, without ever knowing to whom, or for what, he was ministering. As a Brahmin sets rice before an idol, so the little one fed the stone, or left the basket to “the unseen spirit of the wood;” and well it was that the little Red-riding-hood escaped the usual fate of all lonely little foresters, for it seems there were mouths and maws in the mountain which cheesecakes would not have satisfied. The dwellers in the rock had a terrible fright one night from the visit of some indescribable beast – a panther, or something worse – that blazed its horrid eyes into their dark hole, and growled so frightfully, that if all the bailiffs of London had surrounded their den, they would have been less alarmed. It seemed some motherly tigress in search of her cubs, and when she discovered the intruders, she set up such an ululation of maternal grief as made every aisle of the forest ring again, and so scared the inmates of her den, that, as soon as they dared, they took to their heels down the mountain, ready to hear any hue and cry on their track, rather than hers. This story was told us by our guide, who gave it as the reason for their final desertion of the place.
On the stone which I climbed, I found engraven a great number of names and initials, with dates of different years. Apparently they had been left there by visiters from the university. In more than one place, some ardent youth, in his first love with democracy, had taken pains to renew the inscription, which tradition says Goffe and Whalley placed over their retreat. “Opposition to tyrants is obedience to God.” I suppose there will always be fresh men to do Old Mortality’s office for this inscription, for the maxim is one which has long been popular in America among patriotic declaimers. How long it will continue generally popular, may indeed be doubted, since the abolitionists have lately adopted it, and in their mouths it becomes an incendiary watchword, which the supporters of slavery have no little reason to dread. I myself saw this motto on an anti-slavery placard set up in the streets of New York.
I inferred from this inscription, and the names on the rock, that the spot is visited by some with very different feelings from those which it excited in me and my companions. Our valuable conductor, it is true, spoke of “the Judges” with as much reverence as so sturdy a republican would be likely to show to any dignity whatever; and really the honest fellow seemed to give us credit for more tenderness than we felt, and tried to express himself in such a manner, when telling of the misery of the exiles, as not to wound our sensibilities. But I fear his consideration was all lost; for, sad as it is to think of any fellow-man reduced to such extremity as to take up a lodging like this, we could only think how many of the noble and the lovely, and how many of the true and loyal poor, had been brought by Goffe and Whalley to greater miseries than theirs. I could not force myself, therefore, to the melting mood; it was enough that I thought of January 30, 1648, and said to myself, “Doubtless there is a God that judgeth in the earth.” The lady recalled some facts from Lord Clarendon’s History, and said that her interest in the spot was far from having anything to do with sympathy for the regicides. Her patronising protector expressed his surprise, and jokingly assured me that she regarded it as a Mecca, or he would not have given himself the trouble of waiting on her to a place he so little respected. She owned that she was hardly consistent with herself in feeling any interest at all in the memorial of regicides; but I reminded her that Lord Capel kissed the axe which completed the work of rebellion, and deprived his royal master of life;24 and we agreed that even the intelligent instruments of that martyrdom acquired a sort of reliquary value from the blood with which they were crimsoned.
The troglodytes, then, were but two; but there was a third fugitive regicide who came to Newhaven, and now lies there in his grave. This was none other than John Dixwell, whose name, with those of Goffe and Whalley, may be found on that infamous death-warrant, which some have not scrupled to call the Major Charta. Dixwell’s is set among the οἱ πολλοι, who, in the day of reckoning, were judged hardly worth a hanging; but Whalley’s occupies the bad eminence of being fourth on the list, and next to the hard-fisted autograph of Oliver himself; while William Goffe’s is signed just before the signature of Pride, whose miserable penmanship that day, it will be remembered, cost his poor body an airing on the gibbet, in the year 1660. Scott, by the way, gives Whalley the prænomen Richard; but there it is on the parchment, too legible for his soul’s good – Edward Whalley. Shall I recur to the rest of their history in England before I come to my American narrative? Perhaps in these days of “elucidations,” when it is said that every thing about two hundred years since is, for the first time, undergoing a calm but earnest review, I may be indulged in recapitulating what, if every body knows, they know only in a great confusion with other events, which impair the individual interest.
Of Dixwell, comparatively little is known, save that his first act of patriotism seems to have consisted in leaving his country. Enough that he served in the parliamentary army; sat as judge, and stood up as regicide in that High Court of Treason in Westminster Hall; was one of Oliver’s colonels during the Protectorate; became sheriff of Kent, and no doubt hanged many a rogue that had a better right to live than himself; and finally sat in parliament for the same county in 1656.25 His experiences after the Restoration are not known, till he emerged in America almost ten years after the last-mentioned date.
Whalley was among the more notorious of the rebels. He was cousin to Oliver, and one of the few for whom Oliver sometimes exhibited a savage sort of affection. He proved himself a good soldier in a bad cause, at Naseby; and a furious one at Banbury. When the rogues fell out among themselves, he was the officer that met Cornet Joyce as he was convoying the king’s majesty from Holmby,26 and offered to relieve the royal prisoner of his protector; an offer which Charles with great dignity refused, preferring to let them have all the responsibility in the matter, and not caring a straw which of the two villains should be his jailor. At Hampton Court, however, fortune decided in favour of Whalley, and put the king, for a time, into his power; till like fortune put it into the king’s power to get rid of his brutality by flight, an accident for which our hero got a hint of displeasure from parliament. Just at this point Cromwell addressed a letter to his “dear cousin Whalley,”27 begging him not to let any thing happen to his majesty; in which his sincerity was doubtless as genuine as that of certain patriots in the Pickwick history, who, out of regard to certain voters coming down to the election, with money in their hands and tears in their eyes, besought the senior Weller not to upset the whole cargo of them into the canal at Islington. After getting out of this scrape, and doing the damning deed that got him into a worse one, he fleshed his sword against the king’s Scottish kinsmen, at Dunbar, where he lost a horse under him, and received a cut in his wrist,28 though not severe enough to prevent his writing a saucy letter to the governor of Edinburgh castle. He was the man that took away the mace, when Cromwell broke up his Barebones’ parliament. Then he rode through Lincoln, and five other counties, dealing with recusant Anabaptists,29 as one of the “Major Generals;” demurred a little, at first, at the king-manufacturing conference, but finally came into the project; and, from a sense of duty, so far overcame his republican scruples as to allow himself to take a seat in the House of Lords, as one of the Oliverian peerage.30 If titles were to be had with estates, like the Lordship of Linne, he was surely entitled to his peerage, for he was growing fat on the Duke of Newcastle’s patrimony, with part of the jointure of poor Henrietta Maria, when, God be praised, the day of reckoning arrived; and my Lord Whalley, surmising that, should any one come to the rope, he was likely to swing if he remained in England, made off beyond seas.
Goffe, too, was of the Cromwellian cousinry, having married a daughter of Whalley.31 He was a soldier, but could do a little exposition besides, when there was any call for such an exercise; as, for instance, at that celebrated groaning and wrestling which was performed at Windsor, and ended in resolving on the murder of the king,32 after extraordinary supplication and holding forth. When father Whalley removed the mace, son-in-law Goffe led in the musqueteers, and bolted out the Anabaptists, against whom he rode circuit through Sussex and Berks, growing rich, and indulging dreams of disjointing the nose of Richard, and thrusting himself into the old shoes of the Protector, as soon as they should be empty.33 He, too, sacrificed his feelings so far as to become a lord; and, perhaps, thinking that royal shoes would fit him as well as republican ones, he at last consented to making Oliver a king.34 Nor were his honours wholly of a civil character, for he was made an M.A. at Oxford, and so secured himself a notice in Anthony Wood’s biographies, where his story concludes with a set of mistakes, so relishably served up, that I must give it in the very words of the Fasti, as follows: – “In 1660, a little before the restoration of King Charles II., he betook himself to his heels to save his neck, without any regard had to his majesty’s proclamation; wandered about fearing every one that he met should slay him; and was living at Lausanna in 1664, with Edmund Ludlow, Edward Whalley, and other regicides, when John l’Isle, another of that number, was there, by certain generous royalists, despatched. He afterwards lived several years in vagabondship; but when he died, or where his carcase was lodged, is as yet unknown to me.”35