Abbreviations and conventions

Cal. S.P. Col.

Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America and West Indies

Cal. S.P. Dom.

Calendar of State Papers Domestic

CMHS

Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society

CNYHS

Collections of the New York Historical Society

DRCHNY

Documents Relative to the Colonial History of New York

Jordan and Walsh, King’s Revenge

Don Jordan and Michael Walsh, The King’s Revenge: Charles II and the Greatest Manhunt in British History (London, 2012)

NEHGR

New England Historical and Genealogical Register

Pagliuco, Great Escape

Christopher Pagliuco, The Great Escape of Edward Whalley and William Goffe (Charleston, SC, 2012)

PMHS

Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society

PNHCHS

Papers of the New Haven Colony Historical Society

Spencer, Killers

Charles Spencer, Killers of the King: The Men Who Dared Execute Charles I (London, 2014)

Stiles, History

Ezra Stiles, A History of Three of the Judges of Charles I (Hartford, CT, 1794)

Welles, History

Lemuel Aiken Welles, The History of the Regicides in New England (New York, 1927)

Welles, Tercentenary

Lemuel Aiken Welles, ‘The Regicides in Connecticut’, Tercentenary Commission of the State of Connecticut (New Haven, CT, 1935)

A study of the regicides in America brings with it some challenges with regard to sources. On a fundamental level, people who are on the run, attempting to disguise their identity and location, tend to leave behind few concrete clues. That is not to say that no correspondence by—or relating to—Whalley and Goffe survives. It does, and it tells us a good deal about their time in America. But there are still large gaps that need to be filled with speculation and supposition, or recourse to oral histories that themselves become corrupted as they are passed from generation to generation, embellished to enhance their drama or to promote the role of a particular individual or family in the regicides’ tale.

All dates correspond to the Julian Calendar, not the Gregorian as introduced in 1752, but the new year is considered to start on 1 January, not 25 March as in contemporary practice. Spelling and punctuation have been modernized when appropriate.

Here, take this gift,

I was reserving it for some hero, speaker, or general,

One who should serve the good old cause, the great idea, the progress and freedom of the race,

Some brave confronter of despots, some daring rebel;

But I see that what I was reserving belongs to you just as much as to any.

Walt Whitman, ‘To a Certain Cantatrice’, Leaves of Grass