2 Regicides on the run IGravesend to Milford

I am banished from my own house; but feasted in the house of God.

William Goffe, Diary¹

On the evening of 26 August 1765, a rebellious mob gathered on King Street in Boston. Incensed by legislation passed by the British government—especially revenue-yielding laws like the Stamp Act that required the American colonies’ official printed and legal matter to have Parliament’s stamps affixed—the mob was planning its next move. Fuelled by a potent mixture of anger and alcohol, they broke into the house of William Story, register of the Court of Admiralty, then that of Benjamin Hallowell, comptroller of the customs for Boston. Destroying property and dispersing papers as they went, the mob was warming up for an assault on one of the finest houses in Boston, that of Lieutenant Governor Thomas Hutchinson. Pre-warned of an attack, Hutchinson had barred his windows and doors, but his defences provided little resistance to the axe that was thrust through his front door. Before long, Hutchinson’s house was swarming with rebels, and for over two hours they broke down its interior walls, threw down slate from its roof, laid waste to its garden, and ransacked its contents. These contents included cash, furniture, hangings, and paintings, but also hundreds—if not thousands—of documents. By 4 a.m. the house was but a shell, and blowing through the streets were sheets of paper, many torn from books, that had hitherto been stored safely in Hutchinson’s study and library.²

One such document was the diary of the regicide William Goffe, which he had kept during his first seven years in America in the 1660s. The diary had later been passed to the Puritan minister John Russell in Hadley, Massachusetts, before being passed to Russell’s son in 1692. Russell’s son then moved to Barnstaple, before handing on the diary to his own son in 1711. John Russell’s grandson then kept hold of the diary until his death in 1758, at which point it was passed on to the Mather library, a depository of documents relating to colonial America derived largely from the respective collections of Richard, Increase, and Cotton Mather. Cotton Mather’s son, Samuel, kept the library together and married Thomas Hutchinson’s sister, which meant that Hutchinson had access to the library including, fatefully, Goffe’s diary.³ Had Hutchinson not removed the diary to the governor’s house, it would not have been destroyed when the house was attacked that summer evening in 1765.

Fortuitously, some early entries were transcribed and stored elsewhere before the diary disappeared,⁴ and they offer a tantalizing glimpse into the movements and psychological state of the regicides in their early days after the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660. It is from these entries that we know of Goffe’s reaction to Charles II’s return to England. Mid-May, Charles was proclaimed King at Gravesend; on 25 May he arrived in person at Dover. To those who had fought against the Stuarts in the civil wars, and who remained loyal to the Good Old Cause, the plight of Parliament, and the New Model Army, few things could have been more disastrous. There may have been ‘much rejoicing among the people’, Goffe noted, ‘but God’s people lamented over the great profaneness with which that joy was expressed’. Inauspiciously, ‘many dogs did that day run mad; and died suddenly in the town’.⁵ Considering that Whalley and Goffe had signed Charles I’s death warrant, and had been so prominent in the politics of the 1650s, they were sure that they would not be exempt from prosecution and execution. Assuming the aliases William Stephenson and Edward Richardson—they were, indeed, the sons of Stephen Goffe and Richard Whalley—they wasted no time in racing to Gravesend on the south bank of the River Thames. Waiting for them there was The Prudent Mary.

At seventy-six feet long and twenty-seven feet wide, The Prudent Mary could hold over one hundred people. Acquired by the British Navy in 1652, it had seen action against the Dutch at the Battle of Kentish Knock in 1652 and at the Battle of the Gabbard the following year, before being returned to its owners. Mid-May 1660 it sat in harbour ready to sail for the New World; The Prudent Mary was to be the regicides’ method of escape to a place, they hoped, more accommodating to them than Charles II’s England. Also on board were various individuals who would become people of note in the American colonies, some through their protection of Whalley and Goffe and others through their own achievements. Marmaduke Johnson would go on to print John Eliot’s ‘Indian Bible’, a translation of the Geneva Bible and the first Bible printed in British North America. Major Daniel Gookin would become selectman (a town official) for Cambridge and attend meetings of the governor and Council of Massachusetts, as well as sessions of the general court. William Jones would become deputy governor of Connecticut.

On 14 May 1660, eleven days before Charles II himself landed at Dover as the restored king, The Prudent Mary left Gravesend with Whalley and Goffe on board. Just four days after that departure, the House of Lords decreed that members of the regicide court were to be seized, pending trial and, most likely, execution. Charles II backed this decree by issuing a proclamation on 6 June that gave the regicides two weeks to appear before him. If they failed to do so, they would forfeit any chance of a royal pardon. Even if Whalley and Goffe had received this news, it is very unlikely they would have returned to London. Two men who had been so enthusiastic about and publicly complicit in the execution of Charles I, and who had been so prominent in the civil wars, Commonwealth, and Protectorate, were not going to be pardoned. The opportunity of becoming martyrs and dying for the Good Old Cause might have been attractive. But more appealing was the chance of remaining loyal to that cause and staying alive, while promulgating their principles and faith in the New World.

Cambridge and Boston

Whalley and Goffe could have gone into exile much closer to home, like several of their co-regicides. They could have joined John Lisle and Cornelius Holland in Switzerland, William Say and Andrew Broughton in the Netherlands, Hardress Waller in France, or John Barkstead and John Hewson in Germany.⁶ But there were several reasons why New England was an attractive location for two old Roundheads. Influential members of the New England administration, past and present, had been on their side against Charles I. Matthew Cradock, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Company in the late 1620s, had worked against the king in the Long Parliament; Edward Winslow of Plymouth County had returned to England to fight for Cromwell; Edward Hopkins, a founder of the New Haven and Connecticut colonies, had served under Cromwell in England in the 1650s; and John Leverett was active in the Massachusetts Bay general court in the 1650s and 1660s, having fought for Parliament in Thomas Rainsborough’s cavalry in the 1640s.⁷ There was also significant sympathy and correspondence between Puritan ministers on both sides of the Atlantic. New England ministers like John Wheelwright and John Cotton had been friends and correspondents of Cromwell. Goffe may have been able to use the colonial contacts of John Allin, a former New England Puritan minister, whom the regicide would have met during his time as major general of Berkshire, Hampshire, and Sussex; based in Rye, Sussex, Allin was founding a ‘city on a hill’ which looked forward intensely to the imminent Second Coming of Christ.⁸ Also, having signed the death warrant of a king and taken part in the English Republic, Whalley and Goffe would have been attracted by the ‘godly republicanism’ of the Massachusetts Bay colony: a ‘free state’ that was almost independent from England, whose laity had significant power in the running of their virtually independent churches, and whose civic leaders—terrified of the potential of tyrannical and arbitrary power in the hands of rulers—worked to make themselves accountable to the people.⁹

On 27 July 1660 Whalley and Goffe arrived in America mid-way between Boston and Charlestown. They had survived the 3,000-mile journey, spiritually and providentially emboldened by the belief that God had chosen not to abandon them on such a perilous voyage. While most who crossed the Atlantic in the mid-seventeenth century survived, and many may have enjoyed the exhilarating adventure, the regicides’ ten weeks at sea would have tested their physical and psychological endurance. The claustrophobia and discomfort of being penned in a seventy-six-foot wooden vessel would have been compounded by stories of shipwrecks, pirates, and sea-monsters and the realities of tumbling waves, driving rain, pervasive illness, and rancid odours. This turbulent vulnerability placed the Puritan passengers face-to-face with their God’s wrath and compassion, bonding them in a way that would later aid Whalley and Goffe in their journey through New England.¹⁰

From Charlestown it was a short journey to Boston itself, with a ferry connecting the two settlements. Well-established roads through North End would have taken the regicides south towards Boston’s dock and cove, near to which the main civic institutions were situated. To the south was Boston’s fort, to the south-west the common, and to the west the road to Cambridge and Harvard College. To the east were the cold and choppy Atlantic waters, which brought tall ships into Boston’s natural harbour. A burgeoning shipbuilding, fishing, and trading port, in the late seventeenth century Boston’s population grew between twenty and forty per cent each decade; when the regicides arrived there were approximately 3,000 inhabitants (a population nearby Cambridge would not reach until the early nineteenth century). Though they had travelled as Richardson and Stephenson, the regicides did not hide their true identity from the eminent Bostonians who greeted them. On the contrary, they presented themselves openly and were received warmly. One of the first individuals to greet them was Governor John Endecott, Massachusetts Bay’s chief magistrate, who governed and administered the colony alongside the deputies (representatives from outlying areas) and assistants (a coterie of prominent colonists) of its general court.¹¹

Whalley and Goffe had arrived in American colonies facing both opportunities and challenges. The low temperatures that characterized the ‘little ice age’ of the time made the north-eastern colonies less susceptible to the diseases that ravaged the more southern and swampy English colonies of Maryland and Virginia, but they brought with them piercing cold, storms, and blizzards. The acquisition of land for settlement and farming inevitably led to conflict with the indigenous populations from whom that land was being appropriated, including: the Pennacook and Massachusetts to the north of Boston, the Nipmuck to the west, and Pokanoket to the south; the Wampanoag in Plymouth Colony; and the Mohegan, Pequot, and Narragansett around Rhode Island and Connecticut. The English colonists also faced competition for trade and territory from other European nations keen to expand their overseas empires: the French colonized the area around the Great Lakes, up the Lawrence River and east towards Newfoundland and Nova Scotia; the Spanish had been in Florida since the early 1500s; while the Dutch colony of New Netherland sat ominously close to the west of Connecticut and New Haven.

Though the Puritan settlers of North America had fled the religious divisions and persecution of early Stuart Britain, the colonies themselves soon became factionalized. In a colony like Massachusetts Bay, Anglican intolerance of Puritans was replaced with Puritan intolerance of Anglicans, Catholics, or Quakers; Whalley and Goffe arrived in Boston just weeks after the execution there of the Quaker Mary Dyer, who repeatedly disobeyed the law banning those of her faith from the Massachusetts Bay colony. Puritans further split over key points of church organization: the relationship between church and state, and the relative power between minister and congregation. Whalley and Goffe’s moderate Puritanism had much in common with the colonists they first met. The two regicides disputed the claims of their more radical sectarian fellows that the civil magistrate should have no say in religious affairs. Goffe and Whalley, who has been described as ‘arguably the most eirenic and moderate of the major generals’,¹² therefore fitted in comfortably with the style of Massachusetts Puritanism advocated by the likes of John Cotton, the foremost minister of that colony.¹³ Indeed, two days after arriving in America, Whalley and Goffe felt sufficiently content to take part in public worship with the Massachusetts Bay Puritans.¹⁴

In 1660 John Crowne, who later became a playwright for Charles II,¹⁵ was a Harvard College undergraduate observing Cambridge’s recent arrivals. He noted how Whalley and Goffe ‘held meetings in their house, where they preached and prayed and gained . . . applause’; they showed no ‘penitence for the horrid murder for which they fled’, to the extent that Whalley ‘did frequently and openly’ claim ‘that if what he had done [against] the king were to be done he [would] do it again’.¹⁶ The residents of Cambridge and Boston knew that there were regicides in their community. On 11 August John Davenport wrote to the governor of Connecticut, John Winthrop Jr, that he knew the identity of the recently arrived gentlemen and hoped to meet them.¹⁷ It was not quite so well known how dangerous such an association might prove.

A month after the regicides’ arrival in America, Parliament passed the Act of Indemnity and Oblivion specifying those men whose crimes against the Stuarts would be forgiven and forgotten. Whalley and Goffe were not on the list. In the space of those four weeks, the two regicides fraternized with some of the colony’s most significant dignitaries and they stayed initially with Daniel Gookin, with whom they had crossed the Atlantic. They met the president of Harvard, Reverend Charles Chauncey. They heard the scholar and divine John Norton (in whose house Crowne was residing) lecture on Hebrews II, xvi, before being ‘lovingly entertained, with many ministers’ at his house.¹⁸ On the night of Norton’s lecture, Whalley and Goffe saw for the first time the published proclamation from the House of Lords calling for those who had sat in judgement of Charles I to be arrested and their estates secured. Goffe chose to meditate on Hebrews XIII, v–vi, with its striking final verse: ‘Let your conversation be without covetousness; and be content with such things as ye have: for he hath said, I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee. So that we may boldly say, The Lord is my helper, and I will not fear what man shall do unto me’. To Goffe’s mind, human punishment remained a very real possibility; he could have chosen few verses more appropriate to soothe his state of mind.

The colonial hosts continued to support and welcome their guests. They were asserting their autonomy from Charles II’s England and maintaining connections with individuals representative of the Good Old Cause with whom they had significant sympathy. Yet they also knew that they relied on trade with England for the strength of their precarious economy and benefited from the protection of English ships against colonial encroachments by the French and Dutch.¹⁹ For the moment, however, they chose to prioritize their sympathy for the Good Old Cause. Crowne noted that the king’s commands for the regicides’ apprehension, issued by printed proclamation, were not carried out, to the ‘best of [his] remembrance’. He even went so far as to suggest that the Boston authorities did not issue this proclamation; ‘otherwise it would have been impossible for the murderers to escape’.²⁰ Chauncey showed ‘much affection’, insistent that ‘the Lord had brought’ the regicides to America ‘for good both to them and ourselves’. The Cambridge farmer and religious leader Edmund ‘Elder’ Frost received them ‘with great kindness and love’. Many others visited them.²¹

Despite this support, Goffe’s state of mind remained troubled. The last surviving entry in his diary, dated 6 September 1660, tantalizingly describes him waking with his ‘heart being oppressed with much deadness’; his ‘spirit was confused’. The anxiety Goffe exhibited in his diary, in his early days in America, was consistent with the worries he had previously expressed in England. He seemed to have an apprehensive temperament. When he was appointed major general in 1655, Goffe worried about his ‘great inability to manage this great trust, as I ought’. He conceded that he had been ‘a little discouraged, because things were so exceeding long in settling’.²² Moreover, his millenarian enthusiasm and self-doubting caused an anxiety which would plague him for the rest of his time in America.

Trials and executions

Just over a month after the last surviving entry in Goffe’s diary, those regicides who had not fled England began to face their punishments for bringing Charles I to trial and for being complicit in his execution (see Figure 5). Charles II appreciated that a peaceful and successful restoration of the monarchy would be compromised if retribution were widespread and if there were bloodshed on a grand scale. Nonetheless, there was no way that indemnity and oblivion, forgiving and forgetting, would include the most prominent and unrepentant architects of the regicide. Oliver Cromwell was not allowed to rest in peace: his body was exhumed and displayed as that of a traitor in 1661. So were the corpses of Henry Ireton, Cromwell’s son-in-law and general in the Parliamentary army, and John Bradshaw, president of the High Court of Justice for Charles I’s trial.

Figure 5. View of a regicide trial from A Looking Glass for Traytors (1660)

Before these exhumations, the trials of the regicides had begun on 11 October 1660.²³ Twenty-nine of those regicides who were still alive were brought to trial and found guilty of ‘imagining and compassing the king’s death’—that is, treason. The first regicide to be executed, Thomas Harrison, was hauled to the gallows two days later. Harrison was quick to take advantage of the public exposure afforded him by his trial and his speech on the scaffold to defend the Good Old Cause and to lay claim to martyrdom. Indeed, Harrison was at the vanguard of those regicides who disrupted the proceedings of the judicial theatre. Various tactics were adopted, some humorous and some more serious. The defendants challenged and rejected potential members of the jury until the legal limit of such challenges was reached. They accused the court of denying them their right to legal counsel. They refused to plead according to English legal custom and insisted that God would judge them, not a court whose authority they refused to recognize. They pointed out that this assembly included turncoats who had fought against Charles II and supported Cromwell but had now changed sides to save their own skins. These turncoats, however, now sat in judgement on crimes in which they themselves had been implicated.²⁴

Executions in the seventeenth century were popular and public events. In front of an assembled crowd, the criminals on the scaffold were meant to repent their sins in their last speeches and prayers. There was a discrepancy between theory and practice, however, especially when those individuals on the scaffold were being executed for crimes of conscience. The regicides in 1660 could look back to a number of ‘model’ deaths including martyrdoms and the crucifixion of Christ himself and, more recently, those of the Protestant martyrs in the reign of Queen Mary (1553–8). With some irony, too, they could have contemplated how well Charles I himself had died on 30 January 1649. The dying regicides followed the traditional formula: highlighting how godly their lives had been even up to the moment of their deaths; forgiving those who had sent them to the scaffold and the executioner who would end their lives; and dying without fear in the conviction and belief that their actions would secure them a place in Heaven. Harrison and his co-regicides did all of these things and their dying words—or alleged dying words—were distributed by their sympathizers in print. Thus Charles II’s opponents hoped that the king and his courtiers would not be able to manipulate the theatre of the regicides’ trials and executions simply to glorify the Stuart monarchy and erase the memory of the civil wars and republic. On the contrary, the spirit and principles of that cause were revisited, revocalized, and reprinted.²⁵

Those who were hanged, drawn, and quartered included Hugh Peters, a figure closely associated with New England.²⁶ Peters had arrived in Boston in 1635 and spent the years preceding the English civil war in Salem where he administered the church and took a close interest in the foundation of the Connecticut colony. Peters returned to England in 1641 and, following the outbreak of war, became closely involved in the Parliamentary army as an inspirational and provocative preacher. In 1648 he openly supported and encouraged Pride’s Purge, which resulted in the expulsion from Parliament of those MPs who would not put Charles I on trial. Peters was not exempt from punishment in 1660: he was executed on 16 October. Peters and the regicides who died alongside him exploited the public nature of their executions to insist that God had ordained the execution of Charles I. They were doing God’s work and would not shy away from that godly and honourable cause. News of their fate reached Whalley and Goffe: in Boston they discussed Peters’s execution, and they were among those ‘that durst not condemn what . . . Peters had done’.²⁷

John Jones was the eighth person to be put to death for involvement in the regicide. Born to humble parents in Wales, Jones had gained repute in the 1640s fighting for Parliament in the civil wars, first as a captain of foot and later as governor of Anglesey.²⁸ Most notably, Jones was the forty-second signatory of Charles I’s death warrant. In chains in Newgate gaol during September and October 1660, Jones pondered his imminent death. He spoke with some optimism about his fate and the impending martyrdom of the regicides. They were going to ‘reign with the King of Kings in everlasting glory’. Jones recognized, however, that there were some regicides who would not. Not because their cause was unworthy of martyrdom or because they had abandoned it, but because they had run away from the ‘justice’ that the Restoration authorities were now meting out. By avoiding the scaffold, these regicides were denying themselves the opportunity to declare publicly, one last time, in their dying speeches and prayers, their commitment to the Good Old Cause. More importantly, by remaining alive and not dying for that cause, they were not fulfilling the formula for martyrdom laid down by Christ. The regicides on the run were not dying for their cause, and they could not contemplate with unbridled enthusiasm the place in Heaven that such a death would earn them. Instead, Jones lamented, ‘in what sad condition are our dear friends beyond the sea, where they may be hunted from place to place, and never be in safety . . . how much have we gotten the start of them, for we are at a point, and are now going to Heaven?’²⁹ Whalley and Goffe must have been two of the men that Jones had in mind.

One observer noted there was some hope that those regicides who had been found guilty of treason, but not yet executed, would be kept alive. ‘God seems a little to balance things’, he said, ‘that we have yet some competent liberty’.³⁰ The House of Commons had passed the bill to have them executed, but it did not get through the House of Lords. Indeed, some thought the best course was to let the bill ‘sleep’ in the Lords without a definitive vote either passing it or rejecting it. In July 1661 Charles II told Lord Chancellor Clarendon that he was ‘weary of hanging except upon new offences’, though ‘I cannot pardon [the regicides]’. Clarendon’s solution was that ‘the bill should sleep in the Houses [of Parliament], and not be brought’ to the king.³¹ That way, Charles had not pardoned the regicides for their role in the trial and execution of his father, and Parliament had not overtly endorsed keeping the remaining regicides away from the gallows. Instead, the issue would be left gradually to seep from people’s minds in the same way that the regicides would be left gradually to rot away in prison. They would not receive a pardon or have the opportunity to garner public sympathy, and the streets of London would not reek of bloodied corpses.

Quite predictably, Whalley and Goffe and their protectors in America were very interested in the fate of the regicides in England. News and newsbooks arrived from England; information, not all of it accurate, circulated around the colonies, sometimes reaching the ears of Whalley and Goffe. It was reported in New England, for example, that three other regicides—Lord Monson, Sir James Harrington, and Sir Henry Mildmay—would lose their titles and honours and suffer the annual indignity of being pulled to the Tyburn gallows from the Tower of London, with ropes around their necks, before being taken back to the Tower where they would remain as prisoners. They would not die as martyrs but would understand the fate that the state could inflict on them, if it so chose. News also came through Boston that Presbyterians, Independents, Anabaptists, and Quakers were all ‘declared enemies of the state’, alongside an exaggerated account of the fate of those regicides in the Tower who had been found guilty of treason but were not going to be executed. Instead, like Monson, Harrington, and Mildmay, they were to be dragged to Tyburn each year where they would stand for six hours with their faces and hands covered in blood. Another letter confirmed that the Lords had not passed the bill for the execution of the remaining regicides.³² Whalley and Goffe could not have expected similar treatment, should they be caught and transported back to England. Their signatures on the king’s death warrant, initial flight, refusal to be brought to ‘justice’, and continued espousal of the republican cause would have secured their execution.

Massachusetts Bay

Whalley and Goffe were in a curious situation, which might explain why Goffe’s ‘spirit was confused’: it might have been more dignified to remain in England, to face their ideological foes, and to die proudly alongside those who remained committed to the fight against the Stuarts. Whalley and Goffe might have interpreted their flight to New England as a cowardly act that might deny them their privileged position in Heaven. Alternatively, they might have revelled in outwitting the Restoration authorities by remaining loyal to their cause in life rather than in death, no matter how much sympathy the dying words of their co-regicides may have inspired. Perhaps their exile was to be temporary. Perhaps the Restoration of the monarchy would be another short-lived constitutional experiment in the long line of attempts at governmental stability that had characterized the 1650s. In the early 1660s the regicides in America could hope, but they could not know for certain.

In February 1661 there was speculation that no more of Charles I’s judges were going to be put to death.³³ Yet Whalley and Goffe could not feel safe: a £100 bounty had been put on each head by the king in September 1660;³⁴ at the end of November news of their exclusion from the Act of Indemnity reached New England. Their hosts, once so welcoming, started to wonder about the wisdom of offering the regicides protection, or at least of allowing them to remain in Boston without risk of prosecution. Though hardly a secret that Whalley and Goffe were among them, certain influential figures realized that this was potentially provocative to Charles II and the Restoration authorities. Samuel Maverick told the lord chancellor, the earl of Clarendon, that the colonists’ loyalty could be gauged by their ‘courteous entertainment’ of Whalley and Goffe.³⁵ News of the regicides’ presence in Boston would soon be relayed in London, as Captain Thomas Bredon, a Bostonian and a Royalist, had recently sailed for England where he was unlikely to keep this inflammatory information to himself.³⁶ Bredon, moreover, had been openly abused by the marshall general who taunted the captain, ‘speak against Whalley and Goffe if you dare, if you dare, if you dare’. Governor Endecott himself had told Bredon that nothing would happen to the regicides, so long as there was no commission, no formal royal investigation (perhaps backed up by the king’s representatives in person), forthcoming from England.³⁷

Endecott and the colonists might have wondered whether such a commission would appear as, for the most part, they were used to being left alone. The board of governors of the Massachusetts Bay colony historically had escaped the direct oversight of king and ministers. Its local rights were shielded by a charter granted by Charles I on 4 March 1629, the legal protection of which enabled a not insignificant degree of independence.³⁸ There had since been flashpoints when that charter may have been threatened, and the Navigation Act of 1651 did challenge the colonies’ control of their own trade: it prohibited foreign ships (principally Dutch ones) from carrying goods from outside Europe to England and its colonies. But agents had rarely been required to travel from the colonies to London to defend those colonies’ interests. Technically, the colonies were not permitted to pass legislation that contradicted English law, but equally they did not have to send that legislation to England for scrutiny. Massachusetts Bay had also been judicious in preserving its independence in the civil war years. While sympathetic to the Parliamentary cause, it had not overtly come out on Parliament’s side, and it had ducked away from Parliamentary supremacy over colonial affairs. Massachusetts Bay had also left aside the question of whether Parliament would recognize its charter; it issued writs in its own name; and its general court re-passed any legislation emanating from Parliament that would be to their advantage.³⁹

Charles II in 1661 was concerned that his newly recovered empire was to be economically advantageous to him. Threats to Massachusetts Bay’s proud self-governance and sovereignty would have imperilled that by disturbing the colony’s existing political and economic systems, while causing unnecessary tension with a potentially lucrative trading post.⁴⁰ Even the furious deposition from Bredon about the disloyalty of Massachusetts Bay, and the colony’s protection of the regicides, elicited a careful and moderate response. Bredon reported to the Council for Foreign Plantations, a body of forty-nine commissioners appointed by Charles II in 1660 to advise on colonial matters and oversee foreign trade, in London on 11 March. He informed it that in Massachusetts Bay the Act of Parliament and the king’s proclamation against the regicides were ‘vilified’ and described as ‘malignant pamphlets’. He reported that ‘if any speak for the king’s interest, they are esteemed as against their frame of policy or government and as mutineers’, while the regicides kept uttering inflammatory statements about an impending ‘change of government in England’.⁴¹

The Council for Foreign Plantations professed to be keen that the colonists of Massachusetts Bay should be brought ‘to such a compliance as must be necessary, as they are an English colony, which ought not and cannot subsist but by a submission to and protection from his Majesty’s crown and government’. But the Council passed the matter over to Charles II and his privy council, preparing a letter to Massachusetts Bay that communicated ‘all possible tenderness, avoiding all matters which might set the people at a greater distance or stir them to any fears or distrust that it is not safe for them to submit cheerfully and wholly to the King’s authority and protection, taking no notice of their adherence to Goffe and Whalley’.⁴²

Before Bredon’s deposition, the colonists of Massachusetts Bay had begun to hedge their bets in case Charles II was not going to be quite so moderate and was indeed going to pursue the regicides abroad: there had been movements in Boston to consider the arrest of Whalley and Goffe. Governor Endecott had summoned the court of assistants on 22 February 1661, for a meeting in which the apprehension of the regicides was raised. If the colonists arrested Whalley and Goffe, relations with Charles II might be improved. The king, in return, might be less inclined to undermine the autonomy of the colony, while encouraging more trade between England and New England. Ultimately, though, the court would not ratify the arrest: the Massachusetts Bay authorities were not willing to sacrifice the independence of their commonwealth. Nonetheless, Whalley and Goffe realized that a safer haven was required. Within four days they were on the move. It is probable that their host had tipped them off: Daniel Gookin took part in the court’s discussions about the regicides’ future and would have informed his guests of their potentially precarious and dangerous situation. The royal declaration of 22 September 1660 remained in force with £100 resting on each regicide head, with the clear implication that aiding and abetting the regicides in America was a criminal act. Aside from the financial incentive provided for capturing Whalley and Goffe, some colonists might also have feared for the autonomy or very existence of their colonies if they provoked Charles II by sheltering the men who had signed his father’s death warrant.

New Haven

The regicides’ next residence was New Haven, the core of which was approximately one hundred households in a grid formation around a green. It took the two men nine days to complete this journey of approximately 150 miles, which passed through Springfield and Hartford. They were hosted in Hartford and given a guide, Simon Lobdell, by Governor John Winthrop. Whalley and Goffe would have been travelling through dense forest in the midst of a New England winter, but they would have realized the advantages of their new location. First, New Haven was the Puritan colony furthest from Boston, one of the first places to be searched should the Restoration authorities cross the Atlantic. Second, New Haven had proved to be the colony most resistant to the Restoration of Charles II: news of the king’s return to England had arrived there on 27 July 1660 and its open rejection of a Stuart monarchy was considered a real possibility. Third, because of its open hostility, and perhaps because it was operating independently of an English proprietor—there was no individual ruling the colony answerable only to the king—New Haven harboured little hope of Charles II issuing them a charter guaranteeing legal recognition and protection. It was therefore barely worth cooperating with Charles against Whalley and Goffe.⁴³ Fourth, one of the leading figures in New Haven was William Jones, son-in-law of Governor Theophilus Eaton, with whom the regicides had crossed the Atlantic and become friendly on The Prudent Mary. Fifth, New Haven was the home of John Davenport, a preacher who delivered a sermon encouraging his congregation to ‘hide the out-casts’.⁴⁴ Davenport was a friend and correspondent of Whalley’s brother-in-law, William Hooke, who had spent time in New Haven during the 1640s.

A fuller exploration of Davenport’s ‘out-casts’ sermon suggests just how appropriate it was to the situation in New Haven in the late winter and spring of 1661. ‘Withhold not countenance, entertainment, and protection from such, if they come to us from other countries, as from France or England or any other place’, Davenport preached, before quoting Hebrews XIII, 2–3: ‘Be not forgetful to entertain strangers; for thereby some have entertained angels unawares. Remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them; and them which suffer adversity, as being yourselves also in the body’. Davenport went on to be even more specific, invoking God’s injunctions to Moab: ‘provide safe and comfortable shelter and refreshment for my people in the heat of persecution and opposition raised against them . . . While we are attending to our duty in owning and harbouring Christ’s witnesses, God will be providing for their and our safety, by destroying those that would destroy his people’.⁴⁵

Just one day before the authorities of the Massachusetts Bay colony issued a warrant for the regicides’ arrest, Whalley and Goffe arrived at Davenport’s house. However, the arrest warrant was a half-hearted attempt to catch them: Governor Endecott would have known that Whalley and Goffe had left his jurisdiction and that few, if any, Bostonians would be inclined to chase them through the New England woods in inclement weather. By issuing the warrant, Endecott could give the impression that he was following orders from England and attempting to arrest the regicides. Yet by delaying the warrant until the regicides were safely out of his colony, he could be sure for the time being that this warrant would have no practical effect.

Whalley and Goffe stayed with Davenport until the end of April with only one diversion. They visited Milford on 27 March, perhaps to give the impression that they were travelling south to join the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam, which was just over seventy miles away. Very soon another mandate for the apprehension of the regicides arrived in Boston. It was dated 5 March and signed by Edward Nicholas, Charles II’s secretary of state:

CHARLES R.

Trusty and well-beloved,—We greet you well. We being given to understand that Colonel Whalley and Colonel Goffe, who stand here convicted for the execrable murder of our royal father, of glorious memory, are lately arrived at New England, where they hope to shroud themselves securely from the justice of our laws;—our will and pleasure is, and we do hereby expressly require and command you forthwith upon the receipt of these our letters, to cause both the said persons to be apprehended, and with the first opportunity sent over hither under a strict care . . . We are confident of your readiness and diligence to perform your duty; and so bid you farewell.

Given at our court at Whitehall, the fifth day of March, 1660–1.

By his Majesty’s command,

Edw. Nicholas.⁴⁶

This mandate was addressed ‘To our trusty and well-beloved the present governor, or other magistrate or magistrates of our plantation of New England’. The colonial authorities may have been mistaken or mischievous in their interpretation of the wording but were aided by Edward Nicholas’s questionable syntax. The colonial authorities read the address as if it included an extra comma: ‘to . . . the present governor, or other magistrate or magistrates[,] of our plantation of New England’. This way, the mandate could be read as if it were addressed to ‘the present governor . . . of New England’. Nicholas, however, may have intended the address to refer to a ‘governor’ of any colony in which the mandate was read, while only the ‘magistrate or magistrates’ had to pertain to New England. Whatever Nicholas’s intentions, once it arrived in America, the mandate was read as if it were addressed to ‘the present governor . . . of New England’, leading to anxiety, consternation, and delay.

This anxiety did not come from nowhere: there was a history of fears that the American colonies were to come under the control of a general governor (or governor general). The company that had founded New Haven, including John Davenport, had passed through Boston during the 1630s, when the Massachusetts Bay charter was under threat from Charles I’s government and the arrival of a governor general, endangering the colony’s self-governance, looked ominous.⁴⁷ The September before Nicholas’s mandate, there had already been fears that a royal governor was going to be sent from England to deal with complaints levelled against Massachusetts.⁴⁸ The March mandate, following on from this, was perceived as a threat to the autonomy of the individual colony—was there going to be an overall governor of New England?

As such a figure as the ‘governor . . . of New England’ did not exist, the ensuing deferral of the 5 March mandate’s execution could be disguised under the cloak of bureaucratic confusion and hesitation. Governor Endecott of Massachusetts Bay dithered for over a week, long enough for news of the regicides’ renewed danger to reach them and for preparations for the journey towards another safe haven to be made. Whalley and Goffe left Davenport’s house on 30 April, two days after the Massachusetts arrest warrant arrived in New Haven. They moved to the safer residence of William Jones, their companion during the Atlantic crossing, whose father was the regicide executed six months previously. William Jones’s attitude towards Charles II and the Stuart monarchy can be gleaned from the oath of fidelity he swore to the king when he was chosen magistrate for New Haven the following year. He took the oath ‘with subordination’ to the king but hoped that Charles would ‘confirm the government for the advancement of Christ’s gospel, kingdom and ends in this colony, upon the foundations already laid’. His oath, however, included a more controversial addition that ‘in case of alteration of the government in the fundamentals thereof’ he would be free from ‘the said oath’.⁴⁹ Jones was willing to go through the motions of declaring loyalty to the king—the king who, through Parliament, had ordered the execution of his father—but demonstrated clearly that his primary loyalty was to the godly government and community of New Haven. If Charles encroached on that government, then Jones would free himself from his bonds of fidelity to the king. His loyalty to Charles II was conditional and limited: so limited, in fact, that he enthusiastically protected those who had signed Charles I’s death warrant.

Governor Endecott’s commission

Governor Endecott signed the 5 March mandate on 6 May. He appointed two English Royalists resident in Boston, a merchant named Thomas Kellond and a sea captain named Thomas Kirke, to search for Whalley and Goffe and to carry letters, dated 7 May, to the deputy governor of New Haven, the governor of Connecticut, and the governor of ‘Manhatoes’ or New Netherland, to aid in that project.⁵⁰ This was not a wholly popular move: some magistrates thought that Endecott had assumed too much authority for himself in ordering the arrest and appointing Kellond and Kirke. John Hull noted that ‘Many very honestly minded of the deputies, and some among the magistrates, could not consent to own the governor’s acting without the Council in executing the King’s Majesty’s warrant for apprehending Colonels Whalley and Goffe. Though they own it a duty to be done, yet his acting without the major part of the Council assembled made them loath to own the act at all’.⁵¹

Popular or not, Endecott made the right noises to suggest that he was keen to apprehend the regicides. Whalley and Goffe, he wrote, were ‘guilty of so execrable a murder’; the Boston officials had ‘not been wanting’ in their efforts to capture the regicides; and he was confident that his fellow governors (or deputy governors) would carry out their duty to Charles II in a ‘faithful’, ‘effectual’, and ‘speedy’ manner.⁵² Endecott acted, though, as if Whalley and Goffe had fled to the Dutch jurisdiction of New Netherland under Governor Peter Stuyvesant. On paper, at least, Endecott gave the impression that the regicides had fled from justice by hiding in the ‘remote parts’ of the Dutch colony far to the west of where they actually were. Endecott asked, therefore, that Stuyvesant apprehend Whalley and Goffe and return them to an area of English jurisdiction so that they could be returned to Boston.⁵³ Endecott was playing the old game of appearing diligent in the pursuit of the regicides, while expending his energies in a direction that he knew would come to nothing. Perhaps that is an uncharitable assessment. Perhaps Endecott genuinely thought that Whalley and Goffe had decided they would be safer in a colony outside English jurisdiction. Perhaps he had heard about their trip to Milford in the direction of New Netherland.

Kellond and Kirke began to travel westwards, seemingly following Endecott’s tip-off, but new intelligence soon determined their route. Accompanied by a guide called John Chapin, they left Boston on the evening of 7 May and arrived on 10 May in Hartford, through which Whalley and Goffe themselves had travelled, where they met Governor Winthrop. The following day, the search in Hartford began, though Winthrop assured Kellond and Kirke that the regicides had already left in the direction of New Haven.⁵⁴ With Winthrop’s assurance that a thorough search of Hartford would still be made, Kellond and Kirke wasted no time in travelling to Guilford where they met Deputy Governor William Leete on 11 May. Because Governor Francis Newman of New Haven had died on 18 November the previous year, Leete was the present chief magistrate of New Haven. Alongside him was New Haven’s general court, which had begun in 1639 as seven ‘pillars’ of the church community (its numbers later grew), who elected a magistrate and four deputies largely responsible for judicial issues in the colony.⁵⁵

Leete claimed to Kellond and Kirke that he had not seen Whalley and Goffe for nine weeks, around the time they had first arrived in New Haven. It is quite possible that Leete had not seen them in person, but this did not mean that the regicides had already moved on. Kellond and Kirke believed reports that Whalley and Goffe had been seen in New Haven more recently. Kellond and Kirke then met a man named Dennis Crampton, who openly told them that John Davenport was housing the regicides and that Deputy Governor Leete was aware of the secret. Davenport allegedly had recently acquired a suspiciously large quantity of provisions—enough, perhaps, to provide for two extra grown men. Other rumours suggested that the regicides had been spotted travelling between Davenport’s and William Jones’s respective residences and that they had been seen recently in nearby Milford (where they had been in March), inflammatorily suggesting that ‘if they had but two hundred friends to stand by them, they would not care for Old or New England’.⁵⁶

As it would be on other occasions, Kellond and Kirke’s pursuit was hampered. They requested horses to transport them from Guilford to New Haven to assist the search. The horses duly arrived, but not until the colonial authorities had stalled for a little more time.⁵⁷ 11 May 1661 was a Saturday. The evening was drawing in. Deputy Governor Leete could not countenance, he claimed, anyone travelling within his jurisdiction during the approaching Sabbath. Furthermore, the government in London and its Royalist agents had undermined their cause through a mistaken use of language. Their commission was addressed to the ‘governor of New England’. New Haven Colony usually had a governor; Connecticut Colony had a governor; Plymouth Colony had a governor; but New England as a whole had no such individual as the governor of New England. So Leete insisted—and we can see him stalling for time here—that he would have to consult his fellow magistrates before recognizing Kellond and Kirke’s commission and assembling a search party. Leete, however, would give the commissioners a letter to hand to the magistrate in New Haven, their next destination.⁵⁸

But this next destination would have to wait for another thirty-six hours or so—the time between Kellond and Kirke’s meeting with Leete and sunrise on the following Monday, after their enforced Sabbath day in Guilford. This delay, of course, allowed plenty of time for the regicides to hear of their impending danger and make preparations to leave William Jones’s house. And word would certainly spread because Leete had been careful to read Kellond and Kirke’s letter out loud, so anyone present in the room would know the exact nature of their business and could forewarn the fugitives. There were reports that a local Native American had left the town in the direction of New Haven; a John Meigs was accused of preparing to leave for New Haven. But Leete refused a request from Kellond and Kirke that Meigs be brought in and interrogated. Never again would the regicides be pursued so closely by men who wished to play their part in avenging the execution of Charles I. Kellond and Kirke’s intelligence was good but almost useless if they could not intercept their prey. Hearing of the Royalists’ impending arrival, Whalley and Goffe set off for Westville about two miles outside New Haven, while Kellond and Kirke spent the same Saturday night frustrated in their Guilford inn.

The delay in Guilford over the weekend of 11–12 May 1661 allowed news about Kellond and Kirke to reach others as well as the regicides. Leete may have given the commissioners a letter to hand to a New Haven magistrate on their arrival but, apparently, he also sent a note to another New Haven magistrate, Matthew Gilbert, to make sure he would not be present when Kellond and Kirke arrived, and therefore the process would be hindered even further while Gilbert was looked for. Also, Leete assured Kellond and Kirke that he would follow them from Guilford to New Haven, but he managed to contrive a couple of hours’ delay to frustrate Kellond and Kirke even more. Then, to add to the farce, when Leete appeared in the court chamber, he notified Kellond and Kirke that he did not think Whalley and Goffe were in New Haven after all. Leete told them he would arrange a search of Davenport’s and Jones’s respective houses—but only once the local freemen had assembled. Kellond and Kirke told Leete that the king’s honour was being ‘despised and trampled upon’ and they believed Leete was ‘willing’ that Whalley and Goffe should abscond. We can imagine the commissioners’ blood pressure rising as Leete met the New Haven deputies and magistrates for almost six hours until he emerged to make the same statement he had made before the meeting began. Again, Kellond and Kirke told Leete that Charles II ‘would resent such horrid and detestable concealments and abettings of such traitors’ and insisted that Leete honour the warrants they presented from Governors Endecott and Winthrop.⁵⁹

The tense and comical proceedings in New Haven suggest that a wider issue was at stake: not only did the colonial authorities resent the commissioners’ attempts to arrest Whalley and Goffe, but the colonists also disliked the royal commissioners and the government they represented, as the discussion on Monday 13 May 1661 in the New Haven court chamber indicates. The ‘governor of New England’ ambiguity was a useful excuse to delay their proceedings with Kellond and Kirke. On that edgy May evening, Kellond and Kirke asked the New Haven magistrates ‘whether they would own his Majesty or no’—that is, would they respect his authority and yield by giving up the regicides? This depended, the colonial authorities replied, on ‘whether his Majesty would own them’—in short, would Charles respect their independence and refrain from introducing a sinister overbearing figure like a ‘governor of New England’?

The New Haven magistrates, however, did convene the general court four days later and issued warrants to search for Whalley and Goffe in each plantation. Yet, once again, this action paid mere lip-service to the royal commissioners: the magistrates knew the regicides were only two miles away; so a search of a region like Virginia was not going to reap many rewards. Perhaps they had a genuine interest in finding the regicides once they had lodged their protest about a ‘governor of New England’. On 14 May Kellond and Kirke had abandoned their dealings with the New Haven authorities who had displayed such determined and comical recalcitrance. They had carried out a cursory search of New Haven and offered a financial reward to find Whalley and Goffe. But they returned to Boston via New Netherland where Stuyvesant commanded a search of private boats, found nothing, and refused any more assistance. The commissioners had got within two miles of the two men they were after, but the colonists of New Haven had ensured they would not get any closer.⁶⁰ Kellond and Kirke retired to their new 250-acre estates outside Boston: a sizeable reward from the Massachusetts Bay general court for an ineffectual mission. Perhaps such a generous pay-off was designed to deter Kellond and Kirke from pursuing their search any further.

Surrender?

Whalley and Goffe were not yet to know that their pursuers had retreated with their tails firmly put between their legs by the authorities of New Haven. While Leete played for time, it is generally thought that the regicides were spirited away to a mill, two miles north-west of New Haven, where they remained for forty-eight hours before being taken to ‘Hatchet Harbour’ a further three miles away from New Haven.⁶¹ On 15 May they began their stay at the site that has become legendary and synonymous with the regicides on the run: the Judges Cave at West Rock, just north-west of New Haven. Two days later, probably to divert attention from the regicides’ real whereabouts, Leete issued a warrant for the search of Milford.⁶² On the surface, the search of Milford was presented as an earnest affair: Thomas Sanford, Nicholas Campe, James Tapping, and Lawrence Ward investigated all ‘dwelling houses, barns or other buildings’.⁶³ But quite predictably they yielded no results. Whalley and Goffe’s cave, meanwhile, stood on a peak overlooking land owned by a farmer, Richard Sperry. While the regicides were lucky to avoid the cave during the bitter winter months, New Haven summers could be rainy with gusts of wind exceeding fifty kilometres per hour; so, in particularly bad weather, Whalley and Goffe retired to Sperry’s house.⁶⁴ The New Haven wildlife, too, could pose a problem: one night Whalley and Goffe awoke to the sight of a mountain lion that, like the bad weather, precipitated a speedy retreat to Sperry.

At this point it seems that the regicides may have been prepared to surrender themselves. Word had reached them that Davenport was still under suspicion of protecting the fugitives. Leete had offered, after all, to arrange a search of Davenport’s house exactly a month earlier. Although Leete knew that nothing would be found, he had put Davenport firmly in the frame for providing sanctuary to the regicides. Whalley and Goffe would not have wished to endanger anyone, least of all Davenport. Presumably they had heard from Sperry or Jones that Kellond and Kirke had long gone from New Haven, but they may have been concerned that further instructions or individuals would appear from London, urging their capture and the punishment of anyone who offered them protection. Whalley and Goffe also might have anticipated the actions of those in New Haven who, fearing for their colony’s autonomy, might have been preparing a rapprochement with Charles II, which would have involved surrendering the regicides to the king. We should consider, in addition, the psychological state of two individuals who had been on the run and in hiding for almost four months. The last of those months had been spent, for the most part, in the open air, at the mercy of the elements, bereft of the conviviality and fraternity they had enjoyed when they first arrived in America. They had had a good run but perhaps this run was coming to an end. Perhaps the prospect of surrender and a glorious martyrdom was now preferable to the undignified, uncertain, and interminable existence in a cave.

So after a brief sojourn in a neighbouring colony to give the impression they had not been just outside New Haven the whole time, Whalley and Goffe appeared publicly in New Haven on 22 June, making their whereabouts known to the newly appointed Deputy Governor Gilbert. Davenport could not be accused now of clandestinely hiding them—they had appeared openly, had they not? But just as the New Haven authorities had little interest in catching the regicides at the start of May, they made no moves to capture them now. In the event, Whalley and Goffe did not actually give themselves up. There is a suggestion that the two men requested a short period of time to themselves, perhaps to make their peace with God before submitting themselves to the authorities, but they used that time to evade their captors and escape through a cornfield to their cave.⁶⁵ It is hard to believe that Leete and Gilbert did not choose to look the other way. Davenport later corroborated the story that Whalley and Goffe actually intended to give themselves up during their time in New Haven. He claimed that Leete, aware of the regicides’ intentions, waited two days until other New Haven magistrates were present before making any moves to apprehend the fugitives. Two days were more than sufficient, however, for them to move on again, and though ‘diligent search was renewed’ with many ‘sent forth on foot and horseback’, the search was in vain.⁶⁶ Of course it was, and the New Haven authorities intended it to be so: they had given the impression that they were engaged in serious attempts to arrest the regicides but they had been sufficiently shrewd in their delay to ensure that Whalley and Goffe were long gone before their half-hearted and fruitless search began.

Observers were not fooled by the colonial authorities’ apparent inability to capture Whalley and Goffe. Too many chances were being missed, too many feet were being dragged, for the government in England not to think that there was wilful protection of the regicides taking place. Even before the inflammatory behaviour of Leete and Gilbert, the Massachusetts Bay authorities’ London agent had written to inform them that the Council for Foreign Plantations in London had noticed the tardiness in capturing the regicides. It seemed that Charles II’s government was happy to interpret the colonists’ behaviour as deliberate obstruction rather than innate incompetence. It did not help that the New England colonists seemed reluctant to proclaim Charles II as king: Connecticut did so in March 1661, New Haven in June, and Massachusetts Bay in August—about fifteen months after Charles’s return to England. Indeed the Restoration government passed on to the Massachusetts Bay authorities its displeasure at rumours, circulated by Thomas Bredon, that there was ‘much opposition to the agreeing’ of the Bay’s proclamation of the king. The Council for Foreign Plantations was already predisposed to interpret the colonists’ actions as disloyal.⁶⁷

The fear that Charles II’s government seemed unhappy with the colonial authorities’ attempts to capture the regicides was seemingly sufficient to spur Massachusetts Bay into further action. On 10 June its general court received a report from one of its committees, which it swiftly ratified, insisting that ‘the apprehending of Colonel Whalley and Colonel Goffe ought to be diligently and faithfully executed’. The general court also declared that ‘in case (for the future) any legally obnoxious and flying from the civil justice of the state of England, shall come over to these parts, they may not here expect shelter’. On 19 June the general court made a further declaration that if ‘any opportunity present to write for England, the governor is desired by the first conveyance to certify his Majesty or the secretaries of state, what himself and the Council have acted touching searching for [Whalley and Goffe], in the prosecution of his Majesty’s warrant’.⁶⁸ Massachusetts may not yet have officially proclaimed Charles II as its king, but it was attempting to make some loyal noises.

In July 1661, Leete—by this time governor of New Haven—received a missive from the general court in Boston. The letter demanded that Leete arrest Whalley and Goffe, without any more of his characteristic dithering. Leete was warned that his behaviour threatened ‘the present state of these colonies and your own particularly’. And there was to be no more pretence that the regicides had fled, because they had been spotted in New Haven within the last fortnight. News had reached Massachusetts that Whalley and Goffe had been willing to surrender towards the end of June but that Gilbert had been remiss in not guarding or arresting them. ‘How this will be taken is not difficult to imagine’, Leete was told, ‘to be sure not well’.⁶⁹ Though these threats were vague, they should have been intimidating to a colony as fragile as New Haven.

Should Charles II decide to swipe away the New Haven colonists’ territory, they would have had no legal defence. John Davenport and his company had founded the colony through the purchase of land from indigenous tribes, not through a royal patent or warrant. In the mid-1640s there had been unsuccessful attempts to gain a patent, first (rather ambitiously) through using the Massachusetts Bay charter as evidence for New Haven’s own right to settle, and then through a proposed joint patent with Connecticut. Then, in 1651, New Haven petitioned the Council of State in London, which passed on the petition to the Council of Trade and then the Committee for Foreign Affairs, before the project failed.⁷⁰ New Haven was essentially, then, a ‘squatter’ colony.⁷¹ To compound this lack of legal protection, New Haven was economically precarious: immigration was falling, a costly effort to set up a trading post on the Delaware had failed in 1641, attempts at direct trading with England had foundered in 1646, and there remained commercial or military threats from Native Americans and the Dutch. Furthermore, the rigid godly system of government set up by Davenport and the colony’s other founders had its detractors, while New Haven now found itself squabbling with Massachusetts Bay, its bigger, more powerful, and more successful colonial neighbour.⁷²

Despite—perhaps because of—this fragility, the New Haven general court came out on the offensive. On 1 August its answer to the general court in Boston was prepared. Aware that New Haven’s standing with Charles II would be ‘worse . . . than the other colonies’,⁷³ the officials conceded their ‘not so diligent attendance’ to the warrant to capture the regicides. But they maintained that this was ‘not done out of any mind to slight or disown his majesty’s authority’ or ‘out of favour’ to Whalley and Goffe.⁷⁴ They stood by their treatment of Kellond and Kirke three months previously. The commissioners might have had more success, the court suggested, if they had brought the correct commission and not one addressed to a ‘general governor’ of New England, the spectre of whom was sinister and threatening. And as for Whalley and Goffe’s second escape, in June, the New Haven authorities maintained that the fault lay with Deputy Governor Gilbert’s ignorance or incompetence and a sincere belief that Whalley and Goffe were intending to give themselves up.⁷⁵ Furthermore, the court was not going to stomach the somewhat hypocritical rebuke from Massachusetts Bay: Boston and Cambridge, as well as other places, had entertained and protected the regicides. To add to its injured pride, the court insisted that Whalley and Goffe were not ‘hid any where in this colony’.⁷⁶ This statement, however, was disingenuous: the regicides were only three miles away from the man committing these words to paper.

Three weeks later Colonel Thomas Temple sent some intelligence about the regicides to William Morrice, Charles II’s secretary of state. In a letter dated 20 August 1661, Temple told Charles’s court about the attempts by Kellond and Kirke to find the regicides. He underlined his insistence that Whalley and Goffe were still in America, ‘concealed in some of the southern parts until they may find a better opportunity to make their escape’. Temple clearly did not believe Davenport’s claim that the regicides were willing to surrender: two individuals whom he described as ‘two of the most considerable persons’ in the colonies had convinced him otherwise. One, named as ‘Pinchin’, was perhaps John Pinchon, deputy to the Massachusetts general court; the other, Captain Richard Lord, was one of the original proprietors of Hartford. They had apparently combined in a ‘secret design’, known only to them, ‘to apprehend and secure’ Whalley and Goffe. Whatever this plan was, it did not work. Perhaps ‘Pinchin’ and Lord, too, were engaged in a ruse to fool the Restoration authorities—pretending they and the Massachusetts general court were loyal to Charles II by talking up their ‘plan’ to capture the regicides, while actually doing nothing about it.⁷⁷ Even if their plan were genuine, it would have been short-lived as Captain Lord died in May 1662. Whatever was the case, the regicides remained at large.

Following their appearance in New Haven in June, Whalley and Goffe had returned to their cave to the north-west of the town. They remained there until 19 August 1661 before travelling to nearby Milford where for at least two years they lodged at the house of a Micah or Michael Tomkins. Whalley and Goffe remained in hiding for some considerable time and in Milford depended on friends who would turn a blind eye or keep their mouths closed. Tomkins’s house was in the centre of the town—would no one have noticed the extra supplies arriving there? Did Whalley and Goffe really never venture outside for two years? John Davenport, their old friend and protector, visited them regularly while prominent members of the Milford community probably shared private prayer meetings with them: Robert Treat, future governor of Connecticut and great-grandfather of a signatory of the Declaration of Independence; Roger Newton, Harvard graduate and second pastor of Milford Church; and Benjamin Fenn, magistrate and commissioner of the United Colonies of New England for New Haven along with, of all people, William Leete.

Guilt and repentance?

Once Whalley and Goffe had avoided the clutches of those who wished to capture them, their New England protectors began to express concern and contrition. Just how genuine this penitence was is questionable. Leete, for one, attempted to rewrite history. He claimed that, upon meeting Kellond and Kirke in Guilford on 11–12 May, he had given them a letter to deliver to Matthew Gilbert in New Haven that instructed the magistrate to begin an immediate search of the town. Yet Kellond and Kirke could not find Gilbert so the search was never carried out. Leete further claimed that, once he had arrived in New Haven on 13 May, he had begun writing out a search warrant himself but had been prevented by Gilbert and another magistrate, Robert Treat of Milford. Gilbert and Treat persuaded Leete, he claimed, that such a warrant could not be issued until the general court had been convened.⁷⁸ Leete wrote to John Norton, who had entertained Whalley and Goffe, about the regicides’ situation and even travelled to Boston to ‘disburden his heart’ to Norton. Norton, in turn, wrote on Leete’s behalf to Richard Baxter, the Presbyterian minister who briefly had been appointed chaplain in ordinary to Charles II, but who previously had served as a chaplain in Whalley’s regiment during the civil war. Baxter held Whalley in such esteem that he dedicated to the regicide his Apology Against the Modest Exceptions of Mr T. Blake (1654). This dedication had a prescient epistle: ‘think not your greatest trials are all over . . . The tempter, who hath had you on the waves, will now assault you in the calm; and hath his last game to play on the mountain, till nature cause you to descend’.⁷⁹

Norton told Baxter that Leete was allegedly ‘depressed in his spirit’ because of his inept attempts to capture Whalley and Goffe. But, if we are to believe this claim at all, was Leete ‘depressed’ and concerned because he had not done that which he ought to have done, or because he was afraid that his protection of the regicides would incur anger and punishment from London? Norton suggested that Leete was ‘not without fear of some displeasure that may follow’: Leete had been warned that the neglect of the regicide warrants would ‘prove uncomfortable’ despite the rather desperate claim that ‘his neighbours attest, they see not what he could have done more’.⁸⁰ There was plenty more that Leete could have done: he knew it and maybe feared that Charles II might know it too. But one observer noted that all Leete’s ‘pitiful letter’ had done was to remind the English court of the New Haven magistrate’s behaviour, when he might have been better off saying nothing and letting English minds remain preoccupied with domestic issues. Robert Newman, formerly of New Haven but resident in England in the early 1660s, noted that he had heard of no danger to the likes of Gilbert and thought the business ‘would have died’, had it not been for Leete’s whimpering.⁸¹

Davenport also lied about his involvement in protecting the regicides. He wrote from New Haven to the English court in August 1661 and reflected on the regicides’ time in that colony. Davenport protested his ‘innocence in reference to the two colonels’ and claimed that his actions might be ‘misrepresented’. He highlighted his age—he was in his early sixties—and stressed the ‘weakness’ of his ‘body’ to excuse his inability to travel to London. His letter, he hoped, would vindicate him against those individuals who ‘railed’ against him and implicated him in the protection of the regicides. He claimed that he had been industrious in attempting to catch Whalley and Goffe—as the governor and magistrates of New Haven had been—but pronounced with some audacity that God’s ‘overruling providence’ had thwarted them. Davenport clearly was not content to join the English court in condemning the regicides. Thus, on the one hand, Davenport protested his innocence of shielding the regicides; on the other hand, he implied that such protection was not really a crime at all because it was part of God’s plan.⁸² Few would have been convinced by Davenport’s pleas of innocence: it was an open secret that Davenport and his associates in New Haven had done their utmost to trick Kellond and Kirke and keep the regicides at liberty. As Whalley’s brother-in-law wrote to Davenport himself in 1661, ‘I am almost amazed sometimes to see what cross capers some of you do make. I should break my shins should I do the like’.⁸³