"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 Pere-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
oi polloi, 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 _praenomen_ 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]
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 Scott[37] 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,
"Some slain in war,
Some haunted by the ghosts they had deposed;"
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.
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--
"Why dost thou, tyrant, boast abroad,
Thy wicked works to praise."
After this, though for forty years the righteous blood of a murdered
king had been crying against him, Dixwell's hoar hairs were suffered to
come to the grave in a peace he had denied to others, in 1688. Meantime,
that king had lain in his cerements at Windsor, "taken away from the
evil to come," and undisturbed alike by the malice that pursued his
name, and the far more grievous contempt that fell on his martyr-memory
from the conduct of his two sons, false as they were to his honour,
recreant to his pure example, and apostate to the holy faith for which
he died. Such sons had at last accomplished for the house of Stuart that
ruin which other enemies had, in vain, endeavoured; and two weeks after
James Davids was laid in his grave, came news which was almost enough to
wake him from the dead. "The glorious Revolution," as it is called, was
a "crowning mercy" to the colonies; and the friends of the late regicide
now boldly produced his will, and submitted it to Probate. It devised to
his heirs a considerable estate in England, and described his own style
and title as "John Dixwell, _alias_ James Davids, of the Priory of
Folkestone, in the county of Kent, Esquire."
After my visit to West Rock, I went in the early twilight to the graves
of the three regicides. I found them in the rear of one of the
meeting-houses, in the square, very near together, and scarcely
noticeable in the grass. They are each marked by rough blocks of stone,
having one face a little smoothed, and rudely lettered. Dixwell's
tomb-stone is far better than the others, and bears the fullest and most
legible inscription. It is possibly a little more than two feet high, of
a red sand-stone, quite thick and heavy, and reads thus:--"I. D. Esq.,
deceased March y{e} 18th, in y{e} 82{d} year of his age, 1688-9." To
make any thing of Whalley's memorial, I was obliged to stoop down to it,
and examine it very closely. I copied it, head and foot, into my
tablets, nor did I notice, at the time, any peculiarity, but took down
the inscription, as I supposed correctly, "1658, E. W." While I was busy
about this, there came along one of the students, escorting a young
lady, who bending down to the headstone of Goffe's grave, examined it a
few minutes attentively, and then started up, and went away with her
happy protector, exclaiming, "I must leave it to Old Mortality, for I
can see nothing at all." I found it as she had said, and left it without
any better satisfaction; but, during the evening, happening to mention
these facts, I was shown a drawing of both Goffe's and Whalley's
memorials; by help of which, on repeating my visit early next morning, I
observed the very curious marks which give them additional interest.
Looking more carefully at Whalley's headstone, one observes a 7 strongly
blended with the 5, in the date which I had copied; so that it may be
read as I had taken it, or it may be read 1678, the true date of
Whalley's demise. This same cipher is repeated on the footstone, and is
evidently intentional. Nor is the grave of Goffe less curious. The stone
is at first read, "M. G. 80;" but, looking closer, you discover a
superfluous line cut under the M, to hint that it must not be taken for
what it seems. It is in fact a W reversed, and the whole means, "W. G.
1680;" the true initials, and date of death of William Goffe. If Dixwell
was not himself the engraver of these rude devices, he doubtless
contrived them; and they have well accomplished their purpose, of
avoiding detection in their own day, and attracting notice in ours.
There was something that touched me, in spite of myself, in thus
standing by these rude graves, and surveying the last relicts of men
born far away in happy English homes, who once made a figure among the
great men, and were numbered with the lawful senators of a free and
prosperous state! I own that, for a moment, I checked my impulses of
pity, and thought whether it would not be virtuous to imitate the Jews
in Palestine, who, to this day, throw a pebble at Absalom's pillar, as
they pass it in the King's Dale, to show their horror of the rebel's
unnatural crime. But I finally concluded that it was better to be a
Christian in my hate, as well as in my love, and to take no worse
revenge than to recite, over the ashes of the regicides, that sweet
prayer for the 30th of January, which magnifies God, for the grace given
to the royal martyr, "by which he was enabled, in a constant meek
suffering of all barbarous indignities, to resist unto blood, and then,
according to the Saviour's pattern, to pray for his murderers."
Two hundred years have gone, well-nigh, and those mean graves continue
in their dishonour, while the monarchy which their occupants once
supposed they had destroyed, is as unshaken as ever. Nor must it be
unnoticed, that the church which they thought to pluck up, root and
branch, has borne a healthful daughter, that chaunts her venerable
service in another hemisphere, and so near these very graves that the
bones of Goffe and Whalley must fairly shake at Christmas, when the
organ swells, hard-by, with the voices of thronging worshippers, who
still keep "the superstitious time of the Nativity," even in the
Puritans' own land and city. What a conclusion to so much crime and
bloodshed! Such a sepulture--thought I,--instead of a green little
barrow, in some quiet churchyard of England, "fast by their fathers'
graves!" Had these poor men been contented with peace and loyalty, such
graves they might have found, under the eaves of the same parish church
that registered their christening; the very bells tolling for their
funeral, that pealed when they took their brides. How much better the
"village Hampden," than the wide-world's Whalley; and how enviable the
uncouth rhyme, and the yeoman's honest name, on the stone that loving
hands have set, compared with these coward initials, and memorials that
skulk in the grass!
Sta, viator, _judicem_ calcas!
A judge, before whose unblenching face the sacred majesty of England
once stood upon deliverance, and awaited the stern issues of life and
death; an _unjust judge_, who, for daring to sit in judgment, must yet
come forth from this obscure grave, and give answer unto Him who is
judge of quick and dead.