Various
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 377, March 1847
On Christmas day, 1657, good John Evelyn went to London, in spite of many severe penalties incurred thereby, to receive the holy sacrament from a priest of the Church of England.36 Mr. Gunning, afterwards Bishop of Ely, was the officiating clergyman, and preached a sermon appropriate to the festival. As he was proceeding with the Eucharist, the place where they were worshipping was beset by Oliver’s ruffians, who, pointing their muskets at the communicants, through the doors and windows, threatened to shoot them as they knelt before the altar. Evelyn surmises that they were not authorised to go so far as that, and consequently they did not put their threat into execution; but both priest and people were taken prisoners, and brought under guard before the magistrates to answer for the serious misdemeanour of which they had been guilty. Before whom should the gentle friend of Jeremy Taylor find himself standing as a culprit, but these worshipful Justices, Whalley and Goffe! It was, doubtless, by their orders that the solemnities of the day had been profaned.
Evelyn seems to have got off with only a severe catechizing; but many of his fellow-worshippers were imprisoned, and otherwise severely punished. The examination was probably conducted by the theologically exercised Goffe, for the specimen preserved by Evelyn is worthy of his genius in every way. The amiable confessor was asked how he dared to keep “the superstitious time of the Nativity;” and was admonished that in praying for kings, he had been praying for Charles Stuart, and even for the king of Spain, who was a Papist! Moreover, he was told that the Prayer-book was nothing but the Mass in English, and more to the like effect; “and so,” says Evelyn, “they dismissed me, pitying much my ignorance.”
This anecdote, accidentally preserved by Evelyn, shows what kind of characters they were. They seem to have been as sincere as any of their fanatical comrades, though it is always hard to say of the Puritan leaders which were the cunning hypocrites, and which the deluded zealots. Whatever they may have been, their time was short, so far as England is concerned with them; and in three years after this event, they suddenly disappeared. So perfectly did they bury themselves from the world, that from the year 1660, till the romance of Scott37 again brought the name of Whalley before the world, it may be doubted whether any thing was known in England of lives, which in another hemisphere were protracted almost into another generation. Nobody dreamed there was yet an American chapter in the history of the regicides.
Yet, considering the known disposition of the colonies, and their inaccessible fastnesses, it is remarkable that only three of the fugitives found their way across the Atlantic. Another, indeed, there was, a mysterious person, of whom it is only known, that though concerned in the regicide, he was not probably one of “the judges.” He lived in Rhode Island till he was more than a hundred years old, begetting sons and daughters, to whom he bequeathed the surname of Whale. Whoever he was, he seems to have been a sincere penitent, whose conscience would not let him rest. He slept on a deal board instead of a bed, and practised many austerities, accusing himself as a man of blood, and deprecating the justice of God. The particulars of his guilt he never disclosed; and as his name was probably an assumed one, it is difficult to surmise what share he had in the murder of his king. There was in Hacker’s regiment one Whalley, a lieutenant; and Stiles, the American writer, thinks this Whale may have been the same man. But then, what did this Whalley perpetrate to account for such horrible remorse? Considering Hacker’s active part in the bloodiest scene of the great tragedy, and the conflicting testimony in Hulet’s trial,38 as to the man that struck the blow; and coupling this with the fact, that an effort was made to procure one of several lieutenants to do the work,39 I confess I once thought there was some reason to suspect that this fellow’s accusing conscience was terribly earned, and that he at least had been one of the masks that figured on the scaffold. This surmise, though shaken by nothing that came out on the state trials, I have since discharged, in deference to the opinion of Miss Strickland,40 who is satisfied that the greybeard was Hulet, and the actual regicide, Gregory Brandon.
The American history of the regicides begins with the 27th of July following the Restoration, when Whalley and Goffe landed at Boston, bringing the first news that the king had been proclaimed, of which it seems they had tidings before they were clear of the Channel. Proscribed as they were, they were heroes among the colonists, and even Endicott, the governor, ventured to give them a welcome. The inhabitants of Boston and its environs paid them many attentions, and they appeared at large with no attempt at concealing their names and character. The Bostonians were not all Republicans, however; and several zealously affected Royalists having been noticed among their visiters, they suddenly conceived the air of Cambridge more salubrious than that of Boston, and took up their abode in that village, now a mere suburb of the city. There they freely mingled with other men, and were admitted as communicants in the Calvinistic meetings of the place; and sometimes, it appears, they even ventured, like the celebrated party at the Peak, “to exhibit their gifts in extemporaneous prayer and exposition.” On visiting the city, they once received some insult, for which the assailant was bound over to keep the peace; though, if he had but known it, he was so far from having done any wrong in the eye of law, that he was entitled to a hundred pounds reward, for bringing before a magistrate either of the worthies who appeared against him. The authorities, however, had received no official notice of the Restoration, and chose to go on as if still living under the golden sway of the second Protector.
A story is told of one of the regicides, while living at Cambridge, which deserves preservation, as it not only illustrates the open manner in which thy went to and fro, but also shows how well exercised were the soldiers of Cromwell in military accomplishments. A fencing-master had appeared at Boston, challenging any man in the colonies to play at swords with him; and this bravado he repeated for several days, from a stage of Thespian simplicity, erected in a public part of the town. One day, as the mountebank was proclaiming his defiance, to the terror and admiration of a crowd of bystanders, a country-bred fellow, as it seemed, made his appearance in the assembly, accepting the challenge, and pressing to the encounter with no other weaponry than a cheese done up in a napkin for a shield, and a broom-stick, well charged with puddle water, which he flourished with Quixotic effect as a sword. The shouts of the rabble, and the confusion of the challenger, may well be imagined; but the countryman, throwing himself into position, lustily defied the man of foils to come on. A sharp command to be gone with his nonsense, was all the notice which the other would vouchsafe; but the rustic insisted on having satisfaction, and so stubbornly did he persist in brandishing his broomstick, and opposing his cheese, that the gladiator, in a towering fury, at last drove at him desperately enough. The thrust was very coolly received in the soft and savoury shield of the countryman, who instantly repaid it by a dexterous daub with his broom, soaking the beard and whiskers of the swordsman with its odorous contents. A second and more furious pass at the rustic was parried with masterly skill and activity, and rewarded by another salute from the broomstick, which ludicrously besmeared the sword-player’s eyes; the crowd setting up a roar of merriment at his crest-fallen appearance. A third lunge was again spent upon the cheese, amid shouts of laughter; while the broomsman calmly mopped nose, eyes, and beard, of his antagonist’s puffing and blowing physiognomy. Entirely transported with rage and chagrin, the champion now dropped his rapier, and came at his ridiculous adversary with the broadsword. “Hold, hold, my good fellow,” cried Broomstick, “so far all’s fair play! but if that’s the game, have a care, for I shall certainly take your life.” At this, the confounded gladiator stood aghast, and staring at the absurd apparition before him, cried out, amid the jeers of the mob, “Who is it? there were but two in England that could match me! It must be Goffe, Whalley, or the Devil!” And so it proved, for it was Goffe.
In November, came out the Act of Indemnity, by which it appeared that Goffe and Whalley were not included in the amnesty which covered a multitude of sins. It was nevertheless far in February before the governor had entered upon even a formal inquiry of his council, as to what he should do with the fugitives; a formality which, empty as it was, must have occasioned their abrupt departure from Massachusetts. At Newhaven, a concentrated Puritanism seems to have offered them a much safer asylum;41 and as a brother-in-law of Whalley’s had lately held a kind of pastoral dignity in that place, it is not improbable that they received pledges of protection, should they choose it for their city of refuge. One now goes from Boston to Newhaven, by railroad and steamer, in less than a day; but in those times it was very good travelling which brought them to their Alsatia in less than a fortnight. There they were received as saints and confessors; and Davenport, the strait-laced pastor of the colony, seems to have taken them under his especial patronage. He seems to have been a kind of provincial Hugh Peters, though he was not without his virtues: and there was far more fear of him before the eyes of the local authorities, than there was of King Charles and his Council. His Majesty was in fact completely browbeaten and discomfited, when his warrant was afterwards brought into collision with the will of this doughty little Pope: and to him the regicides owed it, that they finally died in America.
The government at home seems really to have been in earnest in the matter, and a royal command was not long in reaching Endicott, requiring him to do all his power for the arrest of the runaways. He seems to have been scared into something like obedience, and two zealous young royalists offering their services as pursuers, he was obliged to despatch them to Newhaven. So vigorously did these young men prosecute their errand, that but for the bustling fanaticism of Davenport, they would certainly have redeemed the honour of the colonies, and given their lordships at Westminster Hall the trouble of two more state trials. For its own sake, no one, indeed, can be sorry that such was not the result. But when one thinks how many curious details of history would have transpired on the trials of such prominent rebels, it seems a pity that they could not have been made serviceable in this way, and then set, with Prynne, to do penance among the old parchments in the Tower.
The governor of the Newhaven colony, one Leete, lived a few miles out of the town, but not far enough off to be out of the control of Davenport, whose spiritual drill had got him in good order for the expected encounter. That painstaking pastor had, moreover, felt it his duty to give no uncertain blast of preparation on his Sabbath-day trumpet, and had sounded forth his deep concern for the souls committed to his care, should they, by any temptation of the devil, be led to think it scriptural to obey the king and magistrate, instead of him, their conscience-keeper and dogmatist. With a skill in the application of holy writ, peculiar to the Hugh Peters’ school of divinity, he had laboriously pounded his cushion, in some thirty or forty illustrations of the following text from the prophet Isaiah: “Hide the outcasts, bewray not him that wandereth. Let mine outcasts dwell with thee, Moab! be thou a covert to them from the face of the spoiler.”42 After this exposition, there was of course no dispute as to duty. The Pope is a deceiver, and Catholic Councils are lies; but when was a Puritan preacher ever doubted, by his followers, to be an oracle from heaven?
It was in vain that the loyal pursuers came to Newhaven, after the little general had thus got his forces prepared for the contest. Wellington, with the forest of Soignies behind him, at Waterloo, was not half so confident of wearing out Napoleon, as Davenport was of beating back King Charles the Second, in his presumptuous attempt to govern his Puritan colonies. Accordingly, when the pursuers waited on Governor Leete, they found his conscience peculiarly tender to the fact, that they were not provided with the original of his Majesty’s command, which he felt it his duty to see, before he could move in the business. He finally yielded so far, however, as to direct a warrant to certain catchpoles, requiring them to take the runaways, accompanying it, as it would seem, with assurances of affectionate condolence, should they happen to let the criminals, when captured, effect a violent escape. A preconcerted farce was enacted, to satisfy the forms of law, the bailiffs seizing the regicides, a mile or two from town, as they were making for East Rock; and they very sturdily defending themselves, till the officers had received bruises enough, to excuse their return without them. But after this pleasant little exercise, the regicides had an escape of a more really fortunate character, and quite in the style of King Charles Second’s Boscobel adventures. For while cooling themselves under a bridge, they discovered the young Bostonians galloping that way, and had only time to lie close, when a smart quadrupedal hexameter was thundered over their heads, as they lay peering up through the chinks of the bridge at their furious pursuers. No doubt the classic ear of Goffe, the Oxford Master of Arts, was singularly refreshed with the delightful prosody, which the retiring horse-hoofs still drummed on the dusty plain; but they seem to have been so seriously alarmed by their escape, that if they ever smiled again, they certainly had little cause for their good-humour; for that very day they took to the woods, and entered upon a long and wretched life of perpetual apprehension, from which death, in any shape, would have been, to better men, a comfortable relief. They immediately directed their course towards West Rock, where, with an old hatchet which they found in the forest, they built themselves a booth in a spot which is still called, from the circumstance, “Hatchet-Harbour.” Here they became acquainted with one Sperry, the woodman who finally fitted up the cave, and introduced them to their life in the rock.
It seems that on stormy days, and sometimes for mere change of air, the poor Troglodytes would come down the mountain, and stay a while with the woodman at his house. They had lived about a month in their cave, when such an excursion to the woodman’s had nearly cost them their liberty. The pursuers, meantime, had accomplished a wild-goose chase to New York, and had returned, after more perils and troubles than the regicides were worth. Somehow or other, they got scent of their game this time, and actually came upon them at Sperry’s before they had any notice of their approach. Fortune favouring them, however, they escaped by a back-door, and got up to their nest, without giving a glimpse of themselves to the pursuers, or even leaving any trace of their visit to favour a suspicion that they had recently been in Sperry’s protection. But Leete, who had received at last the original warrant, and thus was relieved of his scruples, seems to have been so alarmed about this time, that he sent word to the fugitives that they must hold themselves ready to surrender, if it should prove requisite for his own safety and that of the town. To the credit of the poor men, on receiving this notice, they came out of their cave like brave fellows, and went over to their cowardly protector, offering to give themselves up immediately.
Here the redoubtable Davenport again interfered, and though all the colony began to be of another opinion, he fairly drubbed the prudent Leete into a postponement of the time of surrender; and Goffe and Whalley were accordingly respited for a week, during which they lived in painful suspense, in the cellar of a neighbouring warehouse, supplied with food from the governor’s table, but never admitted to his presence. Meantime, the bustling pastor preached and exhorted, and stirred up all the important settlers to take his part against the timorous counsels of the governor, and finally succeeded in preventing the surrender altogether; and the fugitives went back to their cave, never again to show themselves openly before men, though their days were prolonged through half another lifetime.
It seems incredible that there was any real call for such singular caution, under the loose reign of Charles the Second: yet it is remarkable how timid they had become, and how long they supported their patient mousing in the dark. Nothing seems to have inspired them with confidence after this. The pursuers returned to Boston, and made an indignant report of the contempt with which his Majesty’s authority had been treated at Newhaven; all which had no other effect than to give colour to a formal declaration of the united colonies of New England, that an ineffectual though thorough search had been made. On this the hue-and-cry was suffered to stop; but the regicides still kept close, and shunned the light of day. Who would have believed that the lusty Goffe and Whalley, whose fierce files of musqueteers seemed once their very shadow, could have subsided into such decorous subjects, as to live for three lustres in the heart of a village, so quietly, that, save their feeder, not a soul ever saw or heard of them. Yet so it proved; for so much do circumstances make the difference between the anchorite and the revolutionist, and so possible is it for the same character to be very noisy and very still.
After two months more in the cave, they probably found it time to go into winter quarters, and accordingly shifted to a village a little westward of Newhaven, where one Tompkins received them into his cellar. There they managed to survive two years, during which their only recreation seems to have been, the sorry one of hearing a maid abuse them, as she sung an old royalist ballad over their heads. Even this was some relief to the monotony of their life in the cellar, and they would often get their attendant to set it agoing. The girl, delighted to find her voice in request, and little dreaming what an audience she had in the pit, would accordingly strike up with great effect, and fugue away on the names of Goffe and Whalley, and their fellow Roundheads, another Wildrake. Perhaps the worthies in the cellar consoled themselves with recalling the palmy days, when the same song, trolled out on the night air from some royalist pothouse, had been their excuse for displaying their vigilant police, and putting under arrest any number of drunken malignants.
If they had any additional consolation, it seems to have been derived from an enthusiastic interpretation of Holy Writ, in which, after the manner of their religion, they saw their own peculiar history very minutely foreshadowed. They had heard of the sad end of Hugh Peters, and his confederates, which they were persuaded was the slaying of the two witnesses, predicted in the Apocalypse;43 and they now looked in sure and certain hope for the year 1666, which they presumed would be marked by some great revolution, probably on account of its containing “the number of the Beast.”44 But after two years in this cellar, there arrived in Boston certain royal commissioners, in fear of whom they again retreated to their cave, and stayed there two months, till the wild beast drove them away. About the same time, an Indian getting sight of their tracks, and finding their cave, with a bed in it, made such an ado about his discovery, that they were obliged to abandon Newhaven for ever. It is probable that Davenport now counselled their removal, and provided their retreat; for one Russell, the pastor of Hadley, a backwood settlement in Massachusetts, engaged to receive and lodge them; and thither they went by star-light marches, a distance of an hundred miles, through forests, where, if “there is a pleasure in the pathless woods,” they probably found it the only one in their journey. Rogues as they were, who can help pitying them, thus skulking along by night through an American wilderness, in terror of a king, three thousand miles away, who all the while was revelling with his harlots, and showing as little regard for the memory of his father as any regicide could desire.
At Hadley, pastor Russell received them into his kitchen, and then into a closet, from which, by a trap-door, they were let down into the cellar – there to live long years, and there to die, and there – one of them – to be buried, for a time. While dwelling in this cellar, poor Goffe kept a record of his daily life; and it is much to be regretted that this curious journal perished, at Boston, in the succeeding century, during the riots about the Stamp Act, in which several houses were burned. Scraps of it still exist, however, in copies; and enough is known of it, to prove that the exiles were kept in constant information of the progress of events in England; that Goffe corresponded with his wife, addressing her as his mother, and signing himself Walter Goldsmith; and that pastor Russell was supplied with remittances for their support. One leaf of the diary which, fortunately, was copied, is a mournful catalogue of the regicides, and their accomplices, all classed according to their fate, with some touching evidences of the melancholy humour in which the records had been set down. It is a table of sixty-nine as great rogues, or as deluded fanatics, as have left their names on the page of English history; but there they stand on Goffe’s list, a doleful registry indeed, but all noted by the wanderer as his friends, “faithful and just to him.” Twenty-six are marked as certainly dead; others, as condemned and in the Tower; some as fugitives, and some, as quietly surviving their ruin and disgrace. How dark must have been the past and the future alike, to men whose histories were told in such chronicles; but thus timorously from their “loop-hole of retreat,” did they look out on the Great Babel; and saw their cherished year of the Beast go by, and still no change; and then consoled themselves with hoping there was some slight error in the vulgar computation; and so hoped on against hope, and kept in secret their awful memories, and perchance with occasional misgivings of judgment to come, pondered them in their hearts.
“Some slain in war,
Some haunted by the ghosts they had deposed;”
At Hadley they had one remarkable visiter, from whom they probably learned much gloomy gossip about things at home. In 1665, John Dixwell joined them, having made his escape to the colonies with astonishing secrecy. He seems to have been a venturous fellow, who was far from willing to spend his days in a cellar, and accordingly he soon left them to their own company, and went, nobody knows where; but it is certain that in 1672 he appeared in Newhaven as Mr. James Davids, took a wife, and settled down with every sign of a determination to die in his bed. The first Mrs. Davids dying without issue, we find him, a few years after, married again, begetting children, and supporting the reputation of a grave citizen, who kept rather shy of his neighbours, and was fond of long prosy talks with his minister – the successor of Davenport, who seems to have rested from his labours. I wonder if those talks were so prosy! The good wife of the house, no doubt, supposed Mr. Davids and her husband engaged in edifying conclave upon the five points of Calvinism: but who does not envy that drowsy New England pastor the stories he heard of the great events of the Rebellion, from the lips of one who had himself been an actor therein! How often he filled his pipe, and puffed his pleasure, or laid it down at a more earnest moment, to hear the stirring anecdotes of Oliver; how he looked; how he spoke and commanded! What unwritten histories the pastor must have learned of Strafford, – of Laud, – of Pym pouncing on his quarry, – of how the narrator felt, when he sat as a regicide judge, – and of that right royal face which he had confronted without relenting, with all its combined expressions, of resignation and resolution, of kingly dignity and Christian submission.
Time went on, and the Hadley regicides wasted away in their cellar, while Dixwell thus flourished like a bay-tree in green old age. A letter from Goffe, to his “mother Goldsmith,” written in August, 1674, of which a copy is preserved, shows that years had been doing their work on the once bold and stalwart Whalley. “Your old friend Mr. R.,” he says, using the feigned initial, “is yet living, but continues in that weak condition. He is scarce capable of any rational discourse (his understanding, memory, and speech, doth so much fail him,) and seems not to take much notice of any thing … and it’s a great mercy to him, that he hath a friend that takes pleasure in being helpful to him … for though my help be but poor and weak, yet that ancient servant of Christ could not well subsist without it. The Lord help us to profit by all, and to wait with patience upon him, till we shall see what end he will make with us.”
Boys grew to be men, and little girls marriageable women, while they thus dwelt in the cellar; and the people of Hadley passed in and out of their pastor’s door, and doubled and trebled in number around his house, and not a soul dreamed that such inhabitants lived amongst them. This remarkable privacy accounts for the historical fact, given as a story in “Peveril of the Peak.”45 It occurred during the war of King Philip, in 1675, the year following the date of Goffe’s letter, and when Whalley must have been far gone in his decline, so that he could not have been the hero, as is so dramatically asserted by Bridgenorth to Julian Peveril. It was a fast day among the settlers, who were imploring God for deliverance from an expected attack of the savages; and they were all assembled in their rude little meeting-house, around which sentinels were kept on patrol. The house of the pastor was only a few rods distant; and probably, through the miserable panes that let in all the sun-light of their cellar, Goffe watched the invasion of the Indians, and all the horrors of the fight, till the fires of Dunbar began to burn again in his old veins, and, overcoming his usual caution, sent him forth to his last achievement in this world, and perhaps his best. On a sudden, as the settlers were giving up all for lost, and about to submit to a general massacre, a strange apparition was seen among them exhorting them to rally in the name of God. An old man, with long white locks, and of unusual attire, led the last assault with the most daring bravery. Not doubting that it was an angel of God, they followed up his blows, and in a short time repulsed the savages; but their deliverer was gone. No clue or trace could be found of his coming or going. He was to them as Melchisedek, “without beginning of life, or end of days;” and their confirmed superstition that the Lord had sent his angel in answer to their prayers, though quite in accordance with their enthusiasm, was doubtless not a little encouraged by the wily pastor himself, as an innocent means of preventing troublesome inquiries. In many parts of New England it was long regarded as a miracle, and the final disclosure of the secret has spoiled the mystery of a genuine old wives’ tale.
About three years after this, Whalley gave his soul to God, and was temporarily buried in the cellar, where he had lived a death-in-life of fourteen years. Russell was now in a great fright, and with good reason, for a new crown officer was at work in New England, with a zealous determination to bring all offenders to justice, and if not the offenders themselves, then somebody instead of them. Edward Randolph, who has left a judge Jeffreys’ reputation in America to this day, was a Jehu for the government, and his feelings towards the regicides are well touched off by Southey, in the words put into his mouth in “Oliver Newman:” —
“Fifteen years,
They have hid among them the two regicides,
Shifting from den to cover, as we found
Where the scent lay. But, earth them as they will,
I shall unkennel them, and from their holes
Drag them to light and justice.”
Alarmed by the energetic measures of such a man, Goffe, who was now released from his personal attentions to his friend, appears to have departed from Hadley for a time; while Russell gave currency to a report, that when last seen, he was on his way towards Virginia. It was soon added, that he had been actually recognised in New York, in a farmer’s attire, selling cabbages; but he probably went no further than Newhaven, where he would naturally visit Dixwell, and so returned to Hadley, whence his last letter bears date, 1679, and where he undoubtedly died the following year.
How the two bodies ever got to Newhaven has long been the puzzle. It seems that Russell buried Goffe at first in a grave, dug partly on his own premises, and partly on those adjoining, intending by this stratagem to justify himself, should he ever be forced to deny that the bones were in his garden. But, in the years 1680 and 1684, Randolph’s fury being at its height, he probably dug up the remains of both the regicides, and sent them to Newhaven, where they were interred secretly by Dixwell and the common gravedigger of the place. Some suppose, indeed, that they were not removed till the sad results of the Duke of Monmouth’s rebellion had put the colonists in terror of the inexorable Jeffreys. The fate of Lady Alicia Lisle, – herself the widow of a regicide, – who had suffered for concealing two of the Duke’s followers, may very naturally have alarmed the prudent Russell, and led him to remove all traces of his share in harbouring Goffe and Whalley. His friendship for two “unjust judges” seems to have led him to dread the acquaintance of a third. As for Dixwell, he lived on in Newhaven, maintaining the character of Mr. James Davids with great respectability, and so quietly, that Randolph seems never to have suspected that a third regicide was hiding in America. He had one narrow escape, nevertheless, from another zealous partisan of the crown, quite as lynx-eyed, and even more notorious in American history. In 1686, Sir Edmund Andross paid a visit to Newhaven, and was present at the public worship of the inhabitants, when James Davids did not fail to be in his usual place, nor by his dignity of person and demeanour to attract the special notice of Sir Edmund, who probably began to think he had got scent of Goffe himself. After the solemnities were over, he made very particular inquiries as to the remarkable-looking worshipper, but suffered himself to be diverted from more searching measures, by the natural and unstudied description which he received of Mr. Davids and his interesting family. It was well that they could answer so unaffectedly, for Andross was ready to pick a quarrel with them, conceiving himself to have received a great affront at the religious exercise which he had honoured with his presence. It seems the clerk had felt it his duty to select a psalm not incapable of a double application, and which accordingly had hit Sir Edmund in a tender part, by singing “to the praise and glory of God” the somewhat insinuating stave —