Shout at the grave . . .
Triumphant joys that reach the skies.
George Coade, A Letter to a Clergyman, Relating to His Sermon on the 30th of January (1773), 67
Following Goffe’s death in 1679—then the death of John Dixwell, the third regicide in America, ten years later—the story of the regicides went unheard beyond the tales told furtively by their friends and supporters in Hadley, Hartford, or New Haven. American history progressed for eighty or so years with little, if any, wider interest in the fugitive signatories of Charles I’s death warrant. In 1685 Charles’s second surviving son, James, had become the first openly Catholic British monarch since 1558. His short-lived establishment of the Dominion of New England—along with its insensitive royal governor, Sir Edmund Andros, the prospect of whom had exercised Leete so much in the 1660s—pointedly challenged local autonomy in places like Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island. However, the overthrow of James II in the Glorious Revolution of 1688–9 brought an end to this particular brand of encroachment of royal power over the American colonies; more fundamentally, it provided another model for deposing a monarch.
The colonies’ economic and political independence was further nurtured during Robert Walpole’s tenure as first minister under Kings George I and II (1721–42), which was characterized by a relatively indulgent approach to the territories across the Atlantic. Yet the colonies’ crucial role as a theatre of war in the conflict between England and France—the Seven Years’ War in Europe and the French and Indian War in America (1754–63)—had more serious consequences. It brought to the fore claims that the British government, in its financial demands on the colonists for their military defence, once again was trespassing on their rights and liberties. The colonists’ successes in the war against the French and Native Americans also kindled a sense of self-confident nationalism that would soon be turned against their colonial overlords across the Atlantic. The colonies’ assemblies, meanwhile, had been using their power to enact legislation and to vote on taxation and spending, countering the authority of colonial governors, thus setting a course for self-government that would become enshrined in the Declaration of Independence of 1776. It was against this backdrop of increasing colonial self-confidence and burgeoning independence that interest in Whalley and Goffe reawakened.
In 1793 the president of Yale College, Ezra Stiles, published his Poem, Commemorative of Goffe, Whaley, & Dixwell (1793). Writing under the pseudonym ‘Philagathos’, he noted that figures like Nathanael Greene and Richard Montgomery, major generals in the American revolutionary war, had been given memorials, while other American heroes had given their names to garrisons: Alexander Hamilton, Henry Knox, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson. ‘Yet scarce are mention’d in the historic page’, Stiles lamented, ‘Thy mother Britain’s best-deserving sons’. These sons, who fled from the ‘second Charles’s rage’, were William Goffe, Edward Whalley, and John Dixwell. Stiles was not the only one to perceive this neglect. Aedanus Burke, chief justice of South Carolina, wrote to Stiles suggesting that subscriptions be requested for the erection of a monument to Whalley, Goffe, and Dixwell which could be placed in front of Yale College to provide ‘the youth a good lesson, and conspicuous example, that the fame of great men, who undergo hazards and suffer in the cause of public freedom, is not to perish utterly’.1
For Stiles and Burke, the English regicides who had fled to America represented not only the successful fight against Charles I’s ‘tyranny’ in the 1640s but also the effective resistance to Charles II’s renewed allegedly ‘tyrannical’ efforts after 1660. Whalley and Goffe, in particular, were seen as defenders of liberty on both sides of the Atlantic. The implication of Stiles’s poem was that the regicides’ fame might disappear without a monument, as the names of Whalley, Goffe, and Dixwell were not readily on the tongues of the American Revolutionaries. The Massachusetts delegation to the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia—John Adams, Samuel Adams, Thomas Cushing, and Robert Treat Payne—had made a visit to Dixwell’s grave in 1774, yet we should not attach too much weight to this fact. Adams’s diary for 17 August of that year suggests that this was only one brief stop on a more extensive tour of New Haven which also took in three congregational meeting houses and the library and chapel at Yale. No ink is spilt lauding Dixwell as one of Adams’s heroes. He was more concerned with considering whether the Parliament of Great Britain had any right to legislate in the colonies.2
We can garner from the biography of Ezra Stiles, the first man to write a full-length account of the regicides in America, some reasons why they may not have received more attention up to this point. When the regicides were still alive, many colonists judged it prudent not to advertise knowledge of their existence or to inform Royalist agents of their location as they wished to avoid implicating themselves in illegal protection of the fugitives. This secrecy continued into the eighteenth century, observed Stiles’s biographer, because the regicides’ ‘ashes [were] liable to violation’ if they were discovered. Any detailed and open research into the regicides was described as ‘impracticable’. Very little had been committed to paper; ‘The select few, to whom the secret was originally entrusted, handed it down with singular care, by verbal tradition’.3
It was a little odd, then, for Stiles to complain under the pseudonym ‘Philagathos’ that the regicides had not yet been commemorated publicly—few people would have known or would have openly admitted to knowing who Whalley, Goffe, and Dixwell were. This was not a simple case of neglect: it was a combination of ignorance, feigned ignorance, and covertness. In the aftermath of the American Revolution, though, ‘the graves of the enemies of tyrants were sure of protection, if not of veneration’, so ‘the difficulty of obtaining the history of these judges became sensibly diminished’.4 The argument went, then, that a full and open account of the regicides in America could not be written safely until after the Revolution.
Reading Stiles’s biography, we might be tempted to think that he was the first to ‘rediscover’ the regicides in America after their disappearance from public memory. His biographer had a hagiographical interest in promoting his subject’s originality. Yet in fact there had already been interest in the regicides decades before the publication of Stiles’s poem or his History of Three of the Judges of Charles I (1794). In the years running up to the American Revolution, material about the regicides on the run in New England was collected and printed. Much of this information focused on events in 1661. In 1769, for example, came the publication of the report made to Governor Endecott by the Royalist agents Kellond and Kirke that gave a precise account of their pursuit of the regicides in the summer of 1661. Readers in the late 1760s would learn of Kellond and Kirke’s departure from Boston on 7 May 1661; their arrival in Hartford on 10 May; their meeting with Governor Winthrop; their first encounter with Deputy Governor Leete on 11 May; their reports about the protection of the fugitives in New Haven by Davenport and Jones; and the humiliating treatment suffered at the hands of Leete. Also available in print in 1769 were two letters to William Leete: the first from 4 July 1661 informing him that ‘the non attendance with diligence to execute the King’s majesty’s warrant for the apprehending of Colonel Whaley and Goffe will much hazard the present state of these colonies’, and the second about the public appearance in New Haven of Whalley and Goffe. Furthermore, in 1769 readers could peruse the Declaration of the Commissioners of the United Colonies about the fugitives, signed at Hartford on 5 September 1661, which stated publicly that ‘all such person or persons, that since the publication of his Majesties order have wittingly and willingly entertained or harboured . . . Whalley and Goffe, or hereafter shall do the like, have and will incur his Majesty’s highest displeasure’.5
Two years later, A Chronological Table of the Most Remarkable Events in the Province of the Massachusetts-Bay, from the Year 1602 . . . to the Year 1770 (1771) included incidents relating to Charles I and the regicides. In 1634, it was noted, Charles I had prevented troublesome MPs—John Pym, John Hampden, Arthur Haselrig, and Oliver Cromwell—from travelling to New England. Even more significant for our purpose here was the table of ‘remarkable events’ which included the arrival of Whalley and Goffe in America, their concealment outside New Haven, their residence in Hadley, and the appearance of the ‘deliverer of Hadley’, Goffe.6
It was the loyalist Thomas Hutchinson, lieutenant governor and later governor of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, author of The History of the Colony of Massachusetts-Bay (1764), who had described the story of the regicides, which had then inspired much of this material.7 ‘The story of these persons has never yet been published to the world’, Hutchinson declared. Yet Hutchinson had an interest in how Whalley and Goffe—and their protectors—were portrayed. From their first appearance on the printed page, the regicides in America became political pawns whose story was filtered according to the agenda of the author telling that story. Once the Mather library papers—including Goffe’s diary—had been scattered or destroyed at the time of the Stamp Act in 1765, Hutchinson’s account of the fugitives became the principal source for the regicides’ time in America. Hutchinson took advantage of this short-lived print monopoly (there were contrasting oral histories, as we shall see) to fashion ‘a lesson in obedience’ and ‘to quell resistance to king, Parliament and his own authority’.8 Hutchinson was loyal to George III in the same way, he tried to argue, that New England colonists had been loyal to the Stuart monarchy.
Hutchinson had his own political troubles in mind when delivering his lesson on Whalley and Goffe. By the time the first volume of his History had been published, Hutchinson was becoming increasingly alienated from what has been called the ‘liberating, meliorating, freshening spirit of the time’—a spirit embodied by James Otis in the 1761 Writs of Assistance case.9 Great Britain had been granting writs to customs officers that allowed them to search property at their own whim without taking any responsibility for damage caused during the search. Such writs expired on the king’s death; so George II’s death in October 1760 provided an opportunity for Otis to challenge the writs as a violation of the British constitution, of Magna Carta, of natural law, and of the colonists’ rights as British subjects. John Adams enthusiastically—if romantically—suggested that ‘then and there the child Independence was born’.10 Hutchinson disagreed with Otis’s view of the writs. At the same time, he was mulling over the seventeenth century, the regicides in America, and the historical relationship between crown and colonies. As one commentator puts it, ‘if seventeenth-century New Englanders . . . could support the right of the king to seize the regicides, Hutchinson’s contemporaries needed to grant their king the right to issue writs for the seizure of contraband from New England warehouses’; ‘the Puritans of the 1660s and 1670s became the antecedents of conservative and loyal whigs a century later’.11
Hutchinson therefore portrayed the regicides as individuals with few friends in the colonies and described them as men suffering wretchedly for their crimes in the 1640s and 1650s. ‘They were in constant terror’, he noted, ‘their lives were miserable and constant burdens’. They were not Puritan heroes keeping alive the values of the English Republic among disloyal colonists by evading the Stuart authorities, but miserable fugitives hiding from strangers who would happily claim their bounty and return the regicides to London to face justice.12 Peter Oliver, one of Hutchinson’s loyalist contemporaries, concurred with him and called Hutchinson a man with ‘an acumen of genius united with a solidity of judgment and great regularity of manners’. Oliver, former chief justice of the superior court of Massachusetts Bay and one of the judges in the trial after the Boston Massacre of 1770, argued that Goffe ‘chose to breathe away a wearisome existence in the lonely hermitage of a dreary wilderness’; there was more of the ‘enthusiast’ in Goffe’s diary, he claimed, than the ‘great man’.13
In essence, Hutchinson was trying to excuse his colonial predecessors from complicity in the shelter of criminals and to give the impression that they were loyal to the crown in the seventeenth century, just as his contemporaries were in the eighteenth. For a start, Hutchinson argued, Whalley and Goffe were not ‘among the most obnoxious’ of Charles I’s judges. This assertion, however, demonstrates ignorance, wilful or otherwise, of the events of the late 1640s and especially Goffe’s hostile behaviour towards Charles I at the Putney Debates and at the Windsor Prayer Meeting. Furthermore, Hutchinson noted, the regicides ‘appeared grave, serious and devout, and the rank they had sustained commanded respect’. Who could blame the Massachusetts Bay authorities, then, for welcoming the regicides so warmly? This warm reception, Hutchinson continued, was not ‘any contempt of the authority in England’. Even though Whalley and Goffe were known to have been two of his father’s judges, Charles II had not yet been proclaimed king ‘when the ship that brought them left London’. This was also wishful thinking on Hutchinson’s part: warmly welcoming Whalley and Goffe was a tacit—or not-so-tacit—snub to the Stuart dynasty, whether or not Charles had been proclaimed. There had already been rumours circulating in New England about the fall of the English Republic.14 In any case, why, the colonists might have wondered, were Whalley and Goffe in New England instead of safely ensconced at home? Because, as the regicides surely would have informed them, the king was returning.
Moreover, Hutchinson claimed, it was thought in Massachusetts that only seven regicides would be put on trial and it was not until the end of November 1660 that the colonies received the news that Whalley and Goffe were excluded from the Act of Indemnity and Oblivion. While Hutchinson admitted that there were those in Boston who would ‘stand by’ the regicides and offer them ‘pity and compassion’, he preferred to hail those who were not loyal to Whalley and Goffe and who actively sought to capture them. He wrote of the information conveyed to London by Thomas Bredon, the ‘hue and cry’ that went up in the colonies to detain the regicides, and the warrant dated 8 March 1661 to secure them. Following the royal mandate of 5 March, Hutchinson insisted, ‘there is no doubt that the court were now in earnest in their endeavours to apprehend them’. Kellond and Kirke were appointed to capture Whalley and Goffe, Hutchinson noted, as he attempted with a certain degree of desperation to demonstrate the historical loyalty of the Massachusetts Bay colonists to their British overlords: the colony had not surrendered its charter to England in 1638 and it did not expect to do so in subsequent years as no one was causing a fuss; the colonists had not proclaimed Charles II king in 1660 merely because, Hutchinson claimed, they did not know the appropriate ceremonial protocol.15
Hutchinson gave less attention to the behaviour of the New Haven magistrates. Admittedly, he was writing the history of Massachusetts Bay, yet he made a curious decision in his account of the regicides to gloss over the behaviour of William Leete and the lack of assistance extended to Kellond and Kirke at the point when Whalley and Goffe were closest to discovery and capture. His history, in fact, relegated the fugitives’ treatment in New Haven to a footnote and mentioned Leete only cursorily, when Whalley and Goffe appeared openly in New Haven ostensibly to surrender on 22 June 1661: ‘They let the deputy governor Mr Leete know where they were, but he took no measures to secure them’.16
Hutchinson also tried to redeem the colonists by pointing out that few of them were willing to aid and abet the regicides’ flight: in New Haven, he argued, they remained undiscovered ‘by the fidelity of their three friends’. Hutchinson himself listed four names—John Davenport, William Jones, Richard Sperry, and another farmer named Burrill—but overlooked other highly placed men like William Leete and Matthew Gilbert who were crucial to their protection. After Whalley and Goffe had moved to Hadley, Hutchinson claimed, ‘very few persons in the colony’ knew about their presence. Furthermore, Hutchinson was keen to mention that those who had once entertained the fugitives later repented, thought they had left America, or simply did not know where Whalley and Goffe had gone. Mr Mitchell of Cambridge, who fraternized with Whalley and Goffe on their arrival in America in 1660, later reflected, ‘Since I have had opportunity by reading and discourse to look a little into that action for which these men suffer [the trial and execution of Charles I] I could never see that it was justifiable’. Governors Endecott and Bradstreet claimed, respectively, that Whalley and Goffe ‘went towards the Dutch at Manhadoes and took shipping for Holland’ and that ‘after their being at New-Haven he could never hear what became of them’.17 Hutchinson did not point out that these alleged penitents were very few among the wider network of individuals who had protected the regicides. Nor does he consider the possibility that Mitchell, Endecott, and Bradstreet were covering their backs and trying to avoid retribution from London either by expressing repentance or by feigning ignorance.
It was no accident that Hutchinson printed the August 1661 declaration of loyalty from the colony of Massachusetts Bay to Charles II above the footnote that contained the story of the regicides on the run:
FORASMUCH as Charles the second is undoubted King of Great Britain and all other his Majesty’s territories and dominions thereunto belonging, and hath been some time since lawfully proclaimed and crowned accordingly: we therefore do, as in duty we are bound, own and acknowledge him to be our sovereign lord and King, and do therefore hereby proclaim and declare his sacred Majesty Charles the second to be lawful King of Great Britain, France and Ireland, and all other the territories thereunto belonging. God save the King.
In response to Hutchinson’s History, a wag contributor to the Boston Gazette and Country Journal of 20 November 1769 wrote a letter from the long-dead Whalley and Goffe, on ‘the 30th of October. We had almost said the 30th of January’: ‘We mean soon to send a letter to a late historian, to set him right, if he inclines to be set right, in regard to some transactions in our day, which have been greatly misrepresented to the world’. The letter left blanks instead of naming Hutchinson outright but readers knew the figure in question and annotated their copies accordingly. Hutchinson has been described as ‘the most hated man in all of North America’ in the late eighteenth century; his treatment of Whalley and Goffe may have helped to set him on that course.18
The Boston Gazette’s contributor wrote ‘We had almost said the 30th of January’ because that was the date of Charles I’s execution, and by invoking this date they brought to the fore a key reason why the regicide, and regicides, remained a recurring feature of American life—but not necessarily in a way that Hutchinson would have supported. That date was now supposed to be marked each year by a day of contrition and humiliation. In 1662 a statute was passed in essence stating that ‘every thirtieth of January shall be set apart to be observed in all the churches in England and Ireland, and Wales as an anniversary of fasting and humiliation’.19 The statute also pointed to ‘all your majesty’s dominions’, including those colonies across the Atlantic. Virginia, for example, set aside 30 January as a fast day so that ‘our sorrows may expiate our crimes and our tears wash away our guilt’.20 The date also provided opportunities for 30 January sermons to lament former disobedience and reflect on current disloyalty to the monarch. Ezra Stiles noted, for example, that 30 January sermons were preached at the Episcopalian Trinity Church, Newport, Rhode Island, until 1769.21
There was also an interest in the American colonies in printing 30 January sermons that had originally been preached in England. Charles Moss’s sermon of 30 January 1769 was delivered at Westminster in London before later being printed by Joseph Crukshank in Philadelphia. This sermon was read against the backdrop of colonial affairs as an anti-rebellion, anti-revolutionary treatise. ‘Domestic union’, it argued, ‘was never more ardently to be wished than at present, when our fellow-subjects in the New World have been withdrawing their affections and their duty from their mother country’.22 True to its 30 January roots, Moss’s sermon contained an implied warning that affection and loyalty to the king could be withdrawn, just as it had been in the 1640s. Charles’s character was attacked in 1750, for example, prompting Boston Episcopalians to respond with a series of contributions to the Boston Evening Post. Traducing Charles’s reputation and celebrating his execution, one argued, was a threat to episcopacy and monarchy, and a ‘great danger of the state’.23 In New England, however, there were very few Episcopalians: they constituted about 0.2 per cent of the population c. 1700, rising to approximately four per cent by the 1770s.24
Crucially, not everyone lamented rebellion or remembered Charles I with a tear in their eye, and the commemoration sermons only proved provocative to those who looked back to the regicide with admiration. Puritans especially were less predisposed than Episcopalians to follow the rulings of Anglican monarchs and bishops, including those concerning the executed king who was now fashioned as ‘King Charles the Martyr’. Puritan America, in contrast, was inclined to view the 30 January commemoration with hostility rather than enthusiasm, and they looked to their seventeenth-century history with pride in their ancestors’ actions against the crown: many Puritans had emigrated to America in the first place because of antipathy to the Stuarts; during the 1640s and 1650s, American Puritans, especially in New England, sympathized with the Parliamentary cause, the regicide, the Commonwealth, and the Protectorate; in 1650 John Cotton preached to his Boston congregation and justified Charles I’s execution in the context of the civil wars; regicide fitted the end-of-the-world-view of Congregationalists who saw it as a precursor to the advent of Christ’s Kingdom; Puritan colonists regarded Oliver Cromwell with respect and affection because they considered him to be doing God’s work; then John Endecott in the 1650s paid Cromwell what he called an ‘anniversary acknowledgement of our obligation’, an ironic precursor to the annual act of commemoration that would soon take place for Charles I.25
The problematic and contentious nature of remembering regicide and regicides in sermons would persist in America for at least 150 years. When the Restoration authorities tried to introduce the 30 January commemoration across the Atlantic, it was in Massachusetts that one of the most dramatic examples of resistance occurred. Waite Winthrop—member of the Massachusetts governor’s council and major general in the Massachusetts militia—called in the warrant which gave instructions for the January observation and ‘suppressed’ it. New Hampshire, too, in 1684 saw resistance to the royal commemoration. Furthermore, in 1688 when the sheriff of Suffolk County and the constables of Boston were instructed to enforce the 30 January statute, riots ensued.26 In 1708 the Puritan Samuel Sewall was given the almanac of Edward Holyoke, future president of Harvard, in which the 30 January fast had simply been crossed out.27
This sedition was also reflected in American colonists’ interest in subversive ‘commemorations’ of the regicide back in England. James Peirce’s sermon, preached at Exeter on 30 January 1717, was printed in Boston around a decade after its original delivery.28 It is no wonder that Boston readers would have been interested in Peirce’s sentiments, as he questioned the validity of the 30 January sermon as a whole. Though Peirce was by no means a republican, some of his ideas would feed into American revolutionary theories about opposition to tyrants. Peirce expressed dissatisfaction with the essential premises and assumptions behind the commemoration, reflecting the complexities involved in remembering the death of Charles I: such ‘remembering’ revisited painful debates over whether it was treasonable in 1649 to execute a king who had shed the blood of his own subjects.29 If Peirce were compelled to commemorate the day, then he would do it in his own subversive manner. Peirce’s first complaint was with the notion that he and his congregation were complicit in regicide and should therefore lie prostrate in humble penitence. ‘The curse is causeless’, he argued, ‘when the person against whom ’tis levelled is innocent’.30
This would have had some resonance with residents of Boston, about eighty years and a few thousand miles removed from the regicide. The people who were complicit in Charles’s death were those who ‘put the king upon invading the rights of his subjects’.31 Peirce shifted attention to Charles’s evil counsellors, while still implicating the king in the infringement of his subjects’ liberties. Parliament, he continued, was the ‘bulwark of our civil liberties, against the encroachments of an arbitrary power’; ‘it was the duty of . . . subjects to stand by them and defend them’ against ‘the arbitrary power of our kings’.32 Kings were to be obeyed, but resisted when they became tyrants.33 Peirce’s sermon was ‘earnestly desir’d by many of the hearers to . . . appear in the world’,34 which it did, quite literally, when Bennet Love, a Boston bookseller, had it printed in the New World.
Jonathan Mayhew adopted similar ideas in 1750 in the West Meeting House in Boston, in a sermon that has become one of the most celebrated from the colonial period. Mayhew was moved to challenge the ‘slavish doctrine of passive obedience and non-resistance’ which was usually ‘warmly asserted’ in 30 January sermons,35 and he addressed the central issue of national culpability. 30 January was meant to be a day of national, indeed international, penitence. In contrast, Mayhew argued that the rebellion and regicide—if they could even be given those terms—were not ‘national’ acts. Furthermore, they had little to do with mid-eighteenth-century America: descendants of so-called ‘rebels’ could not be implicated in their ancestors’ crimes, especially if they were not crimes in the first place. God’s ‘permission of providence’ permitted civil rulers to govern, he argued, and obedience to them was necessary when they worked for ‘the good of society’. But there were limits to this obedience: ‘when humble remonstrances fail . . . and when the public welfare cannot be otherwise provided for and secured’, subjects should ‘rise unanimously even against the sovereign himself . . . to vindicate their natural and legal rights’.36 This had been the case, Mayhew implied, under Charles I, a ruler who was ‘a terror to good works’ and who had acted ‘directly counter to the sole end and design of [his] office’.37 The doctrine of non-resistance to ‘hereditary, indefeasible, divine right’ kings was ‘fabulous and chimerical’.38 Nations had the right to resist and, if necessary, dethrone their monarch to vindicate ‘their liberties and just rights’.39
From this perspective it was nonsensical to Mayhew that every January people continued to regard Charles I with ‘warmth and zeal’ and to view the regicides with contempt.40 Charles had paid ‘no regard to the constitution and the laws of the kingdom’; he had a ‘natural lust for power’; he employed ‘wicked counsellors’, including the ‘fiend’ Archbishop Laud; he raised taxes ‘without the consent of Parliament’; and he contravened his coronation oath by ‘assuming a power above the laws’.41 Thus, Mayhew argued, Charles had become a tyrant, ‘unkinged himself’, and ‘forfeited his title to the allegiance of the people’. The 1640s, therefore, technically had not witnessed a rebellion against a king; the regicide was not actually regicide, and Mayhew was unsure if it even counted as murder.42 So Mayhew issued a fundamental challenge to the 30 January commemoration: Charles could not be a martyred king if he were neither king nor martyr. Mayhew’s sermon became famous because his theory of limited submission was applied to the American Revolution. His arguments about the withdrawal of loyalty to ‘unkinged’ tyrants were used against George III, two decades after the sermon’s original delivery. John Adams viewed Mayhew as a ‘prime mover’ for American liberty.43 ‘If the orators on the 4th of July really wish to investigate the principles and feelings which produced the Revolution’, Adams argued, ‘they ought to study . . . Dr Mayhew’s sermon’.44
This provocative and ultimately revolutionary sermon was prompted by the annual ceremony of a conservative and fawning 30 January commemoration. Interest in the revolutionary concept of regicide persisted because Americans were obliged by statute to think about the act every January. Nevertheless, the conservative nature of the 30 January sermon could provoke reactions very different from those that were intended; the very foundations of the sermons were challenged and these challenges could prompt revolutionary ideas. Ritualized grief had been exported over 3,000 miles to British Americans, many of whom would rather celebrate than lament Charles I’s demise. On 30 January 1766, for example, a crowd of several hundred people assembled in Marblehead, Massachusetts and set fire to effigies of English MPs. They demonstrated that the day could be used for rebellious gestures against the mother country rather than humble contemplation of the heinous act of killing a king. And many took the opportunity, when invited to meditate publicly on the regicide, to do so with delight. Fast days, by the 1770s, were viewed by Thomas Gage, a British army officer stationed in America, as ‘an opportunity for sedition to flow from the pulpit’.45
In New York in 1773 there appeared a sermon from the 1740s in which the Exeter merchant George Coade had responded ‘to all the sermons that ever have been, or ever shall be, preached’ on 30 January.46 His pamphlet was initially a reply to a sermon delivered by Bishop Benjamin Hoadly at Westminster on 30 January 1721 and it was first published in England in 1747. The Library of Congress copy of Coade’s treatise has the annotation ‘Jonathan Hedges His Book 1773’, which suggests that it was being purchased and read in the years preceding the American Revolution. Coade, like the other preachers and writers discussed above, had heard and read many 30 January sermons and felt moved to counter their claims. He shook the very foundations of those sermons by declaring that Charles was ‘a staunch bigot’; he infringed ‘the rights of his subjects’ and violated ‘the fundamental laws of the realm’; he used his ‘despotic power against the constitution’; he ‘declared his encouragement of Popery’; he treated MPs in a way which was ‘illegal and arbitrary’; and he raised money without the ‘consent or authority of Parliament’.47 Because of these despotic actions (and more), Coade noted that ‘a multitude of people began to take refuge in . . . foreign plantations’.48 The descendants of these refugees were now buying and reading Coade’s views on the monarch who had driven their forefathers away and whose memory they were compelled to remember with remorse and humiliation. Coade’s response to the 30 January sermons pre-dated Mayhew’s more famous treatise but its central premise was the same: if the prince subverted the constitution, if he violated the fundamental laws of the nation, then he forfeited his office—he unkinged himself—and could be resisted and deposed.49
As the New York publication of Coade’s pamphlet showed, discussions of loyalty to an allegedly tyrannical king and parallels between Charles I and George III became especially relevant in the 1770s. During this decade Charles I did not just feature as a villain in colonial sermons on 30 January: he became an all-year-round bête noire. For example, John Allen’s sermon from 3 December 1772, at the Second Baptist Church of Boston, went to seven printings and five editions within two years. Its dedication claimed that Charles’s ‘violat[ion of] the people’s rights’ cost him his life. Allen, in the sermon itself, maintained that Charles had fallen ‘into the hands of wicked men’. Following their love of liberty inscribed in Magna Carta, ‘people and Parliament’ fought against Charles and demonstrated that they ‘rever’d their rights and liberties, above his life, power and prerogative’. Allen included a barely disguised threat that any monarch acting like Charles I—under the influence of evil counsellors—would suffer a similar fate.50 Abraham Keteltas, on 5 October 1777, at the First Presbyterian Church of Newburyport, Massachusetts, invoked the British tradition of standing up to tyrants, including Charles I, who had ‘invaded the rights of his people’.51 Other pamphlets published in America made a direct comparison between George III and Charles I. In a satirical dialogue between George and the Devil, the Devil suggested that the king’s subjects’ desire for liberty could ‘blast’ his great designs, ‘as happened to . . . Charles’.52
Even those 30 January sermons that purported to be loyal were not necessarily straightforward in their praise of Charles I. Charles Inglis, rector of Trinity Church, New York, took a conventional text for his commemoration sermon in 1780: ‘Fear God. Honour the King’.53 There was much in the sermon that was predictable considering Inglis’s loyalist stance in the wake of the American Revolution: ‘there must be some who preside’, he preached, ‘and others, over whom that presidency is exercised’.54 Subjects, therefore, were obliged to respect the authority of monarchs, to obey their laws, and to support their peaceful and stable reign.55 Yet it took Inglis half an hour to mention Charles I in a sermon commemorating the king’s martyrdom. When he eventually mentioned the name of the king whose sacrifice he was meant to be remembering, Inglis deliberately chose not to give a detailed account of the ‘rise, progress and effects’ of the civil wars.56 Inglis may have been more concerned to discuss immediate political events in colonial America; perhaps it was more important to pay reverence to the congregation or to implore them to be more religious, as was happening in eighteenth-century 30 January sermons in England.57 Most likely, Inglis was avoiding reopening the debate about Charles’s role in the ‘rise’ and ‘progress’ of the civil wars.58 Among the colonists the general view of the civil wars and regicide centred on a king infringing the liberties of his subjects, either of his own volition or at the behest of evil counsellors. Either way, invoking the reasons for his execution reopened the uncomfortable question of why Charles had been executed in the first place.
By 1780, Inglis noted, the obligation to mark Charles’s martyrdom had been ‘disregarded by some people’.59 Indeed, in 1770 Ezra Stiles had expected that there would be a 30 January sermon at Trinity Church, Newport, just as there had been in previous years. But, he noted, George Bisset, assistant minister at Trinity, ‘declined and omitted it this day’.60 Stiles was not upset by the omission. He argued that 30 January ‘ought to be celebrated as an anniversary thanksgiving’, not of a king but of a nation that ‘had so much fortitude and public justice, as to make a royal tyrant bow to the sovereignty of the people’. Stiles proceeded to list Charles’s crimes: ruling without Parliament; forcing loans; imposing harsh fines and arbitrary imprisonments; promoting Archbishop Laud, ‘that scourge of justice, religion and humanity’; and placing the colonies under ‘episcopal and military government’. In short, Stiles was questioning why anyone should commemorate the ‘martyrdom’ of a king who had ‘established maxims of civil and religious polity utterly subversive of all the principles of Runnymede [Magna Carta] liberty and the English constitution’. Through his own policies, the ‘despotic deluded’ Charles had forfeited his throne, and his life, to his people.61