The root of all bitterness . . . was the unhappy rebellion in England, against the noble prince . . . King Charles the First. The virulent ferment of that measure excited the seeds that were sown before, and hereby an anti-monarchical spirit, and prejudice against the king, his person and government, became so strongly rooted in the country as not to be easily or speedily, if ever, totally eradicated.
Gershom Bulkeley, Bulkeley’s Will and Doom, or the Miseries of Connecticut by and under an Usurped and Arbitrary Power (1692)1
Between the Declaration of Independence, the military defeat of the British in 1783, and the publication of the first full-length study of the regicides in America in 1794, America was preoccupied with taking its first steps as an independent nation. This independence had come about through a potent combination of imperial mismanagement, complaints about trade, grievances concerning colonial taxation without representation in Parliament, ideologies promoting individual freedoms and rights and the overthrow of ‘tyrannical’ rulers, and a deepening sense of national ‘American’ consciousness. The shackles of George III’s rule had been shaken off, just as Charles I’s and James II’s had been in Britain the previous century. But this political carte blanche soon became overwritten with debates over America’s social, economic, political, cultural, and diplomatic future. The Constitutional Convention of 1787 betrayed disagreements over the share of power between the nation, the locality, and the individual. The most appropriate transition from monarchy to republic varied according to different commentators. Also open to conflicting interpretations was America’s recent history, with the blame for British imperial tyranny sometimes laid squarely at the feet of the king, and sometimes at those of his Parliament. From these debates about America’s past, present, and future arose Ezra Stiles’s History of Three of the Judges of Charles I (1794)—a mix of political philosophy, historical research, gossip, and myth—the eccentricity of which appropriately reflected the excited and sometimes contradictory rediscovery of Whalley and Goffe in the eighteenth century.
Considering Ezra Stiles’s strongly critical view of Charles I and the 30 January commemorations, it makes sense that he was the author of the first full-length study of the regicides in America. Stiles spent several years researching his book, began writing it in January 1793, finished it that April, then published it in 1794—exactly three decades after Whalley, Goffe, and Dixwell had appeared in the first volume of Hutchinson’s History of Massachusetts-Bay. Stiles’s work was not the first response to Hutchinson, but it certainly became the most comprehensive. His approach to the regicides and the colonists who protected them was very different from Hutchinson’s. Once again the story of Whalley, Goffe, and Dixwell was interpreted through a personal ideological lens, and Stiles did so to re-explain the loyalties of seventeenth-century colonists and to place the regicides among the American and French revolutionaries of the late eighteenth century. While Hutchinson saw the regicides as miserable outcasts and strangers among a vast majority of colonists loyal to the crown, Stiles portrayed them as ‘martyrs of freedom’, heroes, and proto-revolutionaries in colonies sympathetic to their brand of rebellion.2
Stiles was convinced that Hutchinson could not have offered his readers the full story of the regicides because he had relied on incomplete documentary evidence. The clandestine nature of the regicides’ existence in America would not have lent itself to an extensive and complete paper trail. Furthermore, Hutchinson’s focus on the History of Massachusetts-Bay would have allowed him to ignore much of William Leete’s behaviour and to gloss over the regicides’ friends in other colonies. Stiles himself could not make use of much documentary evidence about the regicides because so much of it had been destroyed or dispersed when Hutchinson’s house was ransacked in 1765. Stiles’s response was to embark on a different kind of research by visiting as many places related to the regicides as possible and meeting as many of their friends’ descendants as he could. By employing the methodology of oral history, Stiles was able to gather more information than his predecessor and to shift the interpretative focus from Hutchinson’s allegedly loyalist Boston towards the more troublesome and proto-republican New Haven.3 Yet it was a notoriously difficult approach that perhaps gave undue prominence to misremembered ‘facts’, folk myths, or individuals who self-servingly and inappropriately exaggerated their ancestors’ roles in the regicides’ story.
One commentator has summarized A History of Three of the Judges of Charles I as ‘Stiles at his worst . . . a tedious hodgepodge of fact and fancy, compounded mainly out of dim recollections by old men and women of things their grandfathers had told them fifty years before’.4 On 16 July 1785, for example, Stiles met Captain Tim Bradly of Woodbridge, who as a boy had lived with the son of Richard Sperry, the owner of the farm near West Rock just outside New Haven, where the regicides had sheltered in 1661. Richard Sperry’s son had often told Bradly the story of the regicides and the location of the Judges Cave near to the Sperry farm. Stiles was shown the remains of the old Sperry farmhouse where he noted the ruins of its chimney and cellar. Two days later, Stiles visited Joseph Sperry who told him more about the ‘traditions of the regicides’ and directed him to a cave about half a mile from Sperry’s house. He noted, however, that Sperry’s story was not ‘sufficiently discriminative’ to provide a full account of the regicides’ movements, so he tried to piece together what he could: Whalley and Goffe had fled from New Haven, first to Richard Sperry’s house, then to a ‘thicket of woods and wilderness behind the mountain’. Sperry would occasionally entertain the fugitives in his house, until ‘one day or night some persons riding up to the house’, who were thought to be enemies, caused the regicides to flee to some nearby woods and then to the cave atop West Rock. There was some talk, too, of their residing at a ‘lodge and fort four miles distant northwest’ and at ‘a rivulet in Meriden’ twenty miles from New Haven.5
It was Stiles who was in large part responsible for the early myth-making that emerged in the regicides’ story. A number of factors conspired to create these myths about the regicides. First, Stiles relied heavily on oral tradition in the towns where Whalley and Goffe had once resided, and spoke to families who were keen to associate their forebears, whether accurately or inaccurately, with the regicides. These families had received stories of the two men and had handed them down in a narrative chain with each link adding embellishments and distortions. By the time Stiles got to hear them, these tales had been circulating for over a century. Second, so much of the regicides’ story in New England was, and is, incomplete and obscure. The myths of the regicides originated from a time long before more detailed discoveries about the regicides came to light: so little was known about their time in New England that something had to be put in its place. This lack of certainty, therefore, left plenty of scope for writers to indulge their imaginations and fill the vacuum provided by historical obscurity.
Third, the regicides became key historical figures in the birth of modern America: they had fought for liberty and, in turn, had received protection from the forerunners of the American Revolution who had guaranteed the regicides’ own personal liberty. Such an unsubtle narrative works best if Whalley and Goffe are credited with swashbuckling heroic deeds and spells of intense danger, rather than the real story of prolonged periods of spiritual introspection, boredom, cold, and survival through handouts and a little trade. We can never know for sure whether all the features of the regicide myths have a basis in reality; so we need to test the veracity of the details by comparing their likelihood to our more concrete knowledge of Whalley and Goffe, their movements, and their personalities.
At least three of Stiles’s myths concern Kellond and Kirke’s pursuit of the regicides to New Haven, an episode replete with opportunities for dramatic embellishment as it was the point at which the regicides were closest to being captured. Whalley and Goffe were in New Haven between March and August 1661. Kellond and Kirke were sent to pursue and capture them in May and they travelled from Boston through Hartford and Guilford. Deputy Governor Leete delayed them; and they arrived in New Haven on 13 May. On the day Kellond and Kirke were due to arrive, one story in Stiles’s History goes, Whalley and Goffe had gone for a walk to the ‘neck bridge’ which Kellond and Kirke would have to cross if they were to enter New Haven. According to the story, the town sheriff (a Mr Kimberly), eager to arrest them, overtook them ‘with a warrant to apprehend them’ but, somewhat laughably, the regicides hid behind a tree, before defending themselves ‘with their cudgels’, because they were ‘expert at fencing’. While Kimberly ran away to get back-up, the regicides ran off into the woods.6
The story, however, does not tally with our knowledge of actual events and common sense. Leete’s successful attempt to delay Kellond and Kirke’s arrival in New Haven had given Whalley and Goffe plenty of time to leave. It is true that they may have waited until 13 May (a Monday) to avoid travelling on the Sabbath. But if they were to leave on that day, they would have left as early and discreetly as possible without choosing to walk brazenly across a major route into New Haven. We also have no evidence that the New Haven magistrates had already issued a warrant for the regicides’ apprehension. In fact, they delayed matters until 17 May, by which time Whalley and Goffe were long gone and Kellond and Kirke had given up the chase. Whalley and Goffe are sometimes viewed as warlike figures, principally because they had held the title of ‘major general’ and had fought with distinction in the English civil wars. It is easy to assume, therefore, that they were fencing experts, swinging their cudgels with devastating effect. But a brief perusal of Goffe’s diary (see Appendix III) suggests that the regicides’ concerns were spiritual now rather than military. Finally, we know that William Jones of New Haven accompanied Whalley and Goffe from Westville to their cave at West Rock on 15 May. It is reasonable to suppose, therefore, that Jones would have assisted them in their journey from New Haven to Westville two days earlier. No mention of Jones is made in the Kimberly myth.
The regicides’ absence from New Haven during Kellond and Kirke’s search of the town undermines the veracity of two other myths. The first relates to 13 May 1661, when the agents approached the town and, about a mile from New Haven, allegedly passed over the aforementioned ‘neck bridge’ under which Whalley and Goffe were now hiding.7 The close proximity of hunters and hunted makes for a tense and dramatic episode but this part of the story is only credible if we make two assumptions. First, that the regicides were still in New Haven and had not left the town earlier than this, as soon as news of the royal commissioners’ impending arrival became known. And, second, that Whalley and Goffe stayed on main thoroughfares, despite the likelihood of encountering Kellond and Kirke travelling in the opposite direction. The regicides may not indeed have had many, if any, alternative roads on which to travel. But this view does require us to believe that both commissioners and regicides were following somewhat contorted routes to their destinations. The regicides would have travelled west from New Haven to Westville while the commissioners were travelling west from Guilford to New Haven: their paths need not have met at all. Ezra Stiles suggests that the only time of day that the regicides could have hidden under the bridge, without drowning in up to eight feet of water, would have been noon,8 which would also have been a sensible time for Kellond and Kirke to be crossing the bridge, after travelling nearly twenty miles from Guilford that morning. But it is an unlikely time for the regicides to be leaving New Haven, when they knew that the royal commissioners were on their way. As early as 1831, it was noted that accounts of the bridge myth were ‘extremely contradictory’.9
Even more improbable is the section of the myth that has the regicides returning to New Haven that night to go back to William Jones’s house. According to tradition, this was ‘a preconcerted and contrived business, to show that the magistrates at New Haven had used their endeavours to apprehend them before the arrival of the pursuers’.10 Quite why Whalley and Goffe hiding under a bridge would have exonerated the New Haven magistrates from their deliberate inability to catch the regicides is unclear. Also, the magistrates must have known that Kellond and Kirke would wish to search the town, in which case, if we follow the myth, they must have expected the commissioners to do this, and then depart, remarkably quickly—so quickly that the regicides could return safely that same night. But we know that the New Haven magistrates, led by Leete, were in fact planning to challenge and stall Kellond and Kirke. In any case, Whalley and Goffe would have expected the commissioners to search Jones’s house; so they would have been unlikely to return there quite so soon.
This expectation makes a third myth even less likely. This tale, too, has the regicides returning to New Haven and discovering that they need to evade Kellond and Kirke, who are still searching the town. Whalley and Goffe apparently had to shift their residence because the commissioners were in close pursuit and the regicides did not want to implicate their hosts, such as Davenport or Jones, in the sheltering of fugitives. They therefore went to the home of a Mrs Eyers, ‘a respectable and comely lady’, but she saw Kellond and Kirke approaching her house and ushered the fugitives out of the back door towards the woods. Whalley and Goffe, however, returned to the house immediately and were concealed by Mrs Eyers. In good conscience, then, Mrs Eyers could tell Kellond and Kirke truthfully and politely that she had seen Whalley and Goffe earlier that day walking towards the woods. She failed to add, of course, that she had also seen the regicides return to her house.11 Or so the story goes. Mrs Eyers does not appear in any other sources associated with the regicides. Nor is it likely that the regicides, when given the opportunity of disappearing into the woods, would return immediately to a house which they knew Kellond and Kirke were approaching and about to search thoroughly. The fact they were not actually in the town of New Haven also undermines the Eyers myth, as dramatic and comic as it might be.
One final myth needs debunking: it relates to the regicides’ arrival in Boston after their journey across the Atlantic and it has a feature in common with one of the New Haven stories: the regicides’ fencing prowess. The presence of fencing in two different tales might be considered to corroborate them: if two groups of people are talking about the same skill in two different places, we might consider that both groups are responding to something they have both witnessed. Equally, we might err on the side of scepticism and prefer to view the recurrence of one feature as the result of New Haven residents receiving the story from Boston (or vice versa) and attaching it to their own local folklore. Folklore is in fact what the Boston fencing myth appears to be. Allegedly the regicides encountered a ‘gallant gentleman’ who had set up a stage on which he challenged other men ‘to play with him at swords’. One of the regicides, apparently disguised in ‘rustic dress’ and armed with a cheese wrapped in a napkin as a shield and a dirty mop as a sword, mounted the stage. The regicide used the cheese to defend himself from the gentleman’s sword and employed the mop to give him ‘a pair of whiskers’. When the gentleman attempted a second thrust, his opponent once again employed the cheese to good effect and wiped the man’s eyes with the mop. When the gentleman made a third thrust, the same thing happened: the cheese stopped his sword and the dirty mop slowly wiped his face. Understandably irked, the gentleman threw down his small sword and lunged at his adversary with a broad sword. The regicide, however, stopped him with the words, ‘hitherto you see I have only played with you, and not attempted to hurt you; but if you come at me now with the broad-sword, know, that I will certainly take your life’.12
This last quotation does not ring true. It is hardly credible that a devoutly religious man, enjoying the protection of Bostonians, would threaten mortal injury to a man he had just goaded with cheese and a mop. As the regicide was in disguise, it suggests that this event may have happened towards the end of 1660 or in the first two months of 1661 when Whalley and Goffe, though known to be wanted men, were still in Boston until advised to leave by Daniel Gookin. Furthermore, if the regicide were in disguise, he surely realized the danger he was in and the need to keep a low profile. It is scarcely likely, therefore, that he would stand on a public stage and humiliate a Bostonian in a comic manner that would be sure to gain wide circulation. The myth is simply a fabrication based on a few superficial details gleaned about Whalley and Goffe: that they had been accomplished soldiers a decade and a half earlier; that they had been resident in Boston at some point; and that they might have had the need to disguise themselves. It follows the predictable structure of an adventure story and includes comic features to encourage the story’s dissemination. The story of a mysterious figure bringing public attention to himself is internally inconsistent and culminates in a threat of murder delivered by a man we know was extremely godly and grateful for the protection he had been given by the people of Boston.
Following Stiles’s History, other early first histories of Whalley and Goffe included some adventure-stories, though use of phrases like ‘the tradition is’ and ‘the report is’ suggests that there were some reservations about treating the stories as gospel truth.13 Even the earliest narrators of the regicides’ flight were not able to approach the New Haven stories with complete seriousness. One referred to their ‘original quaintness’ and submitted that they might ‘perhaps afford some amusement to the curious’.14 Another dismissed them as ‘not all congruous, or otherwise credible; but they are worth the use of a leisure hour’.15 But, as we shall see, the following century authors like Margaret Sidney and W.H. Gocher had fewer reservations as they happily used Stiles’s stories in their own works16 and mixed them with historically accurate characters and events, which caused myth to become fact in the undiscerning mind.
The importance of Stiles’s study, however, does not rest on amusing folklore. It was written and published against the background of the revolutions in British America and France; it would have taken a particularly myopic and tedious antiquarian to have missed the relevance of the English regicides to Stiles’s own revolutionary period. Deeply sympathetic to both revolutions, Stiles presented Whalley, Goffe, and Dixwell as prophets and heralds from an earlier age. Hence Stiles’s lengthy essay on tyrannicide and his enthusiastic and sympathetic depiction of the regicides,17 describing them as moving ‘in a great sphere’ and acting in a ‘great cause’.18
While Stiles was clearly preoccupied with undermining Hutchinson’s interpretation of the regicides, he was also researching and writing during a period characterized by debate and anxiety over the possibility of monarchy in America. There were fears in the 1787–8 debate on the proposed constitution that the new republic would give way to a monarchical tyranny in the form of a president who was not yet subject to any democratic control. There were those who supported some form of monarchy to curb the more impetuous democratic ambitions of post-Revolution Americans. Those who had read their classical history would have known that there were powerful precedents for republics turning into monarchies. And those who viewed George Washington’s early presidency would have seen elements that smacked of monarchy: a king-like procession from Mount Vernon to New York in 1789; an inauguration referred to as a ‘coronation’; several pseudo-monarchical state portraits; and a court with routines and etiquette not dissimilar to those found in London or Versailles. Republicans like Thomas Jefferson and James Madison were aiming, it has been argued, ‘to prevent the United States from becoming a . . . British-backed monarchy’ led by Federalists like George Washington, John Adams, and Alexander Hamilton. The 1790s has been described as ‘one of the most passionate and divisive decades in American history’.19 It was also the decade in which Stiles was researching, writing, and publishing the history of three prominent anti-monarchists.
Stiles may also have been reacting to the trend among some prominent revolutionaries over the previous two decades to reinterpret the history of the Stuarts: seventeenth-century Parliament had become the enemy, a forebear to the eighteenth-century Parliament that was passing legislation like the Stamp Act that provoked the colonies by infringing their liberties.20 In this interpretation, Charles I was a victim of Parliamentary tyranny, rather than himself an historical parallel to a tyrannical George III. Parliament had ‘usurped’ Charles’s prerogatives; now it was tyrannically doing the same to the colonies. These colonies had not historically been under Parliamentary jurisdiction, so they were not now. As domains of the crown, they were ‘dependent’ solely on the person of the king; but the crown, through contracts with the original colonial proprietors and chartering companies, in the seventeenth century had bestowed upon the colonies a guarantee that they would govern by their own laws. The early Stuarts became constitutional models for the likes of Benjamin Franklin, when he wrote to Samuel Cooper in June 1770 that Parliament seemed ‘to have been long encroaching on the rights of their and our sovereign’, or for Alexander Hamilton in The Farmer Refuted (1775) when he argued that the colonists were ‘losing sight of that share which the king has in the sovereignty, both of Great-Britain and America’.21
This interpretation of Charles I as victim was at odds with the prevalent view that had otherwise been developing in the mid to late eighteenth century. While there had been some criticism of Oliver Cromwell in America for infringing civil liberties in England through his use of a standing army (the presence of which was feared in the colonies),22 by the 1760s Cromwell received more praise than vilification, and Charles I vice versa. This in part reflected a Puritan reaction to the rise of the Church of England in the colonies, while Great Awakening ministers from the 1740s had seen in Cromwell’s ‘zeal and enthusiasm’ the qualities of a model Christian as they evangelically promoted personal spiritual introspection above church hierarchy and ceremony.23 But, more importantly, the civil war and its leading characters were invoked in direct parallel to the American experience in the years leading up to the American Revolution. In the 1770s Samuel Sherwood observed ‘tyranny and oppression’ being exercised by the British government, just as it had been previously during ‘the reign of the Stuart family’, while the Boston Sons of Liberty hailed Cromwell as a ‘glorious fellow’.24 The lawyer James Otis wrote under the pseudonym John Hampden—the man who had challenged Charles I’s Ship Money levy in 1637—when attacking the ‘arbitrary and wicked proceedings of the Stuarts’ in his Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved (1764). John Adams damned ‘the execrable race of the Stuarts’, and saw himself as a descendant of the seventeenth-century Parliamentary cause, in his Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law (1765).25
These were not isolated examples. In the wake of the Stamp Act in 1765, which imposed a direct tax on the colonies by way of revenue stamps on printed documents, Patrick Henry, another Son of Liberty, told the Virginia burgesses that Julius Caesar had his Brutus, Charles I had his Cromwell, and ‘He did not doubt but some good American would stand up, in favour of his country’.26 In the same year, when the Anglican Church in Connecticut refused to observe a fast day, a ‘comic liturgy’ was printed and acted out, in which ‘We beseech thee, O Cromwell to hear [our prayers]’ replaced the customary ‘We beseech thee to hear us, good Lord’. Between 1774 and 1775 The American Chronicle of the Times was published, the fourth book of which had Cromwell appearing as ‘lord protector of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts Bay’, mustering his loyal generals Thomas Fairfax and John Lambert, and the rest of his ‘brave warriors’. The Son of Liberty Joshua Brackett was the proprietor of the Cromwell’s Head inn in Boston, the exterior sign of which hung sufficiently low that its visitors had to lower their heads in reverence to the lord protector’s visage.27 John Dickinson, the ‘penman’ of the American Revolution, could not fully explain the events of the 1770s without looking back to the reign of Charles I.28 Other seventeenth-century republican heroes like Algernon Sidney and John Milton became required reading for the Founding Fathers. Thomas Paine’s Common Sense owed a debt to Milton, whom George Washington also read;29 Sidney’s Discourses Concerning Government inspired Thomas Jefferson, among many others.
While there was not necessarily a direct causal link between the English and American Revolutions, the Anglo-American memory of regicide and the regicides in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries contributed a model of resistance to tyrants. The political philosophy that developed in this environment and crossed the Atlantic did not make the American Revolution inevitable, but it did offer a framework of thought and language for that Revolution. A number of connections were made between the seventeenth-century Anglo-American experience of repression, civil war, revolution, and Restoration, and the eighteenth-century American experience of resistance and revolution.
First, the independent, proto-republican spirit of seventeenth-century Puritans fleeing, then resisting, the repression of British monarchs was seen as sowing the seeds of American political independence a century and a half later. In 1797 Benjamin Trumbull published the first volume of his Complete History of Connecticut which, ‘published in conformity to act of congress’, included the story of the regicides and—crucially—referred to ‘the spirit of republicanism’ displayed by many of the New Haven magistrates. The regicides and their proto-republican protectors could scarcely have been portrayed in a more positive fashion. Whalley and Goffe were described as ‘gentlemen of singular abilities’ who had ‘moved in an exalted sphere’; ‘their manners were elegant, and their appearance grave and dignified, commanding universal respect’.30 They were ‘universally esteemed, by all men of character, both civil and religious’ in Boston and Cambridge. Furthermore, Trumbull noted, when it became clear that Whalley and Goffe were wanted men and Governor Endecott assembled his magistrates to discuss their apprehension, ‘their friends were so numerous, that a vote could not . . . be obtained to arrest them’. Some of these ‘friends’ continued to stand by the regicides; others advised Whalley and Goffe to abscond. Upon their arrival in New Haven, Trumbull continued, the regicides continued to enjoy unstinting hospitality: ‘the more the people became acquainted with them, the more they esteemed them, not only as men of great minds, but of unfeigned piety and religion’. Even when the colonists’ personal safety and the ‘liberties and peace’ of their country seemed to be at risk from a vengeful Charles II, William Leete and his friends viewed Whalley and Goffe as ‘the excellent in the earth, and were afraid to betray them, lest they should be instrumental in shedding innocent blood’.31
Trumbull’s knowledge of the dates of the regicides’ travels and his reference to the myths found in Stiles’s History, published three years previously, suggest that Stiles was Trumbull’s principal source for his history of the regicides. As with Stiles, Trumbull’s focus on the warm admiration for the regicides in New England suggested his enthusiastic sympathy towards Whalley and Goffe, as well as a connection between the English and American revolutionaries. Indeed, the colonists’ spirit of resistance, independence, and republicanism had arguably been fomented by the English civil war. As early as 1692, Gershom Bulkeley noted that the rebellion against Charles I had excited ‘an anti-monarchical spirit’ in America, which had become so ‘strongly rooted . . . as not to be easily or speedily, if ever, totally eradicated’. That spirit had led to the ‘admiration’ and ‘entertainment’ of some of the king’s ‘murderers here and there in the country’.32
Second, the post-civil war political philosophy of the seventeenth-century English philosopher John Locke further provided an ideological basis for resistance. Locke argued that there was a contract between ruler and ruled: a contract into which subjects entered to grant them security and protection from harm, to save them from the violence and instability that were inherent in the state of nature. But subjects did not give away all their rights to a central authority, and that authority had to respond to subjects’ wishes and necessities. If the authority failed in its responsibility to protect its subjects, or if it overreached its power, then the contract was broken and subjects had a right to rebel, instituting a new authority that would guarantee civil order and provide subjects with the protection necessary to pursue their individual goals. Locke had begun writing in the reign of Charles II, a reign preoccupied with the sinister shadow of the English civil war: Charles was determined that the miseries of the 1640s would not be experienced again but he also recognized that the nature of government fundamentally had changed. Kings could lose their crowns and their heads by the judicial will of their subjects.
John Locke’s views on civil liberty were adopted by American revolutionaries and then attacked by the English minister Jonathan Boucher as ‘new-dressed principles’ that had been ‘industriously revived and brought forward with great zeal’ in the reign of Charles I. ‘There is hardly a principle or project or any moment in Mr Locke’s Treatise’, Boucher argued, ‘of which the rudiments may not be traced in some of the many political pieces which were then produced’.33 Boucher’s views of the causes and effects of the American Revolution were delivered in ‘thirteen discourses’ in America between 1763 and 1775, then published after the Revolution once he had returned to England. Boucher was ‘avowedly hostile’ to the Revolution and noted a number of parallels between England in the 1640s and America in the 1760s–70s. Benjamin Franklin’s admirers defended him, Boucher commented, in just the same way that the regicides had been defended.34 More fundamentally, Boucher observed that ‘the history of the last century, and what then passed among ourselves, is a perpetual lesson, at least to British subjects, to leave off contention before it be meddled with’. The English civil war had begun, as the American Revolution had, ‘about matters which, comparatively speaking, were but of little moment’; it had erupted due to the interference of ‘persons unknown to the laws, who began their reformation by overturning the established church’. That is, once Puritans had meddled with the church in England, it was not long before they meddled with the state. The implication was that the same thing had happened in America.35
Third, some commentators viewed the American Revolution as another English civil war, but one transplanted to the colonies. They may have been 3,000 miles away from England, but the rebellious colonists were arguably still English: ‘of the same language, the same religion, the same manners and customs, sprung from the same nation, intermixed by relation and consanguinity’, with ‘the manners, habits, and ideas of Britons . . . the same laws, the same religion, the same constitution, the same feelings, sentiments and habits’. For some, the American colonists were actually purer Englishmen than their corrupted cousins across the Atlantic; their quest for a constitution undefiled by Hanoverians (or the Stuarts and other monarchs before them) made them ‘undegenerated descendants of their British ancestors . . . desir[ing] a constitution perfectly English’.36 Others, most famously Thomas Paine, pointed out the flaw in the ‘second civil war’ line of reasoning: by the 1770s, he argued, not a third of the colonists were of English descent, so they did not have a mother country in England, but a mother continent in Europe more widely.37
Fourth, for those writing in the post-revolutionary period, it was not just the English civil war, Commonwealth, and Protectorate that provided seventeenth-century inspiration for resistance to George III, but also the politics of the reign of Charles II. And to some observers one case study was unavoidable: that of the regicides on the run in the American colonies. In celebrating the principles espoused by seventeenth-century New Englanders that underlay the events of the 1770s, they hailed especially the story of Kellond and Kirke’s fruitless pursuit of the fugitives in 1661 and the royal commission sent to New England and New Netherland by Charles II in 1664.
In 1799 Hannah Adams’s Summary History of New-England, From the First Settlement at Plymouth was ‘published according to Act of Congress’. It included the story of Whalley and Goffe and described them in terms very similar to Trumbull’s: ‘gentlemen of distinguished abilities’ who had ‘moved in an exalted sphere’.38 Adams, a distant cousin of President John Adams, retold the story of the regicides’ arrival in Boston, their time in the cave outside New Haven, their journey to Milford, their return to New Haven, and their later residence in Hadley. Fundamentally, she linked their time in hiding to the colonists’ fear that Charles II would remove their liberty and privileges. Adams was convinced that Charles was determined to rule like his father. The colonists’ enemies in England, she argued, ‘gave exaggerated accounts of every interesting occurrence, and the king was prejudiced by their representations’.39 One such ‘interesting occurrence’, presumably, would have been the case study of Whalley and Goffe and their protection, through a variety of means, by colonial authorities.
For Hannah Adams, when Charles II sent the 1664 commission with its four officials—Nichols, Carr, Cartwright, and Maverick—the king’s primary intention was not to advance English claims over Dutch colonies but to reduce the English colonies to ‘the plan of twelve royal provinces, according to the ideas adopted by his father in 1635, and to have a viceroy over the whole’.40 As we have seen, the reality was a little subtler than this. Although the question of jurisdiction was present, neither king nor colonial authority was prepared to concede sovereignty, and each side initially was careful to ensure it did not significantly rile the other. The warships and soldiers that arrived in the summer of 1664 were targeted ostensibly at New Netherland. Although New Englanders might fear that Charles would use this military force against them, the king could always argue that this was a deluded and wilful misinterpretation. After all, his pursuit of the regicides at the time—if we can call it a real pursuit—was careful and measured. The commissioners were to discover who had protected the regicides but not to arrest them. The ‘protectors’ were simply to be encouraged to ‘take the more care for their future behaviour’. This was potentially a sinister threat but it was not an overtly aggressive and intrusive one.
But Hannah Adams allowed no such subtlety in 1799. The 1664 commission was just another example, she suggested, of the British government threatening the independent sovereignty and jurisdiction of New England. The colonies ‘disrelished’ this threat because of their ‘strong aversion to arbitrary power’. Moreover, Adams argued, ‘the inhabitants of New England may emphatically be said to be born free. They were settled originally upon the principle . . . that “all men are born free, equal and independent” ’. The 1664 commission, she argued, ‘excited the irritability natural to a people jealous for their liberty’.41 There can have been few more overt claims to a direct connection between the seventeenth-century European settlement of New England and the American Revolution.
So, in addition to Stiles’s History of Whalley, Goffe, and Dixwell, the decades following the American Revolution clearly witnessed a resurgence of interest in the regicides in America. Once independence from Great Britain ensured there would be no retribution for sheltering fugitives who had committed treason on British soil, the story of the regicides appeared in all manner of different places—not just traditional histories or collections of historical documents. Jedidiah Morse’s American Universal Geography in 1796, for example, featured Whalley and Goffe alongside a discussion of turnpike roads. Morse not only noted the cave north-west of New Haven in which the regicides lived when they were hiding from Charles II’s agents; he also conveyed the wider story.42 Yet, as we have seen, the implications of the regicides’ story, and of its wider political and historical context, were far greater in this post-revolutionary period than Morse’s geographical digressions might suggest.
The ‘rediscovery’ of the story of Whalley and Goffe provided a ready interpretative framework for the events of the 1770s. The regicides may not yet have been given the architectural monument that Aedenus Burke desired but, as the eighteenth century progressed, they were increasingly remembered in print. Authors looked back to the seventeenth century to find historical evidence of the British government infringing the rights of America’s independent colonies. In the context of the American Revolution, there seemed to be some striking parallels to the history of the regicides in the 1660s. Indeed, whenever the regicides in America were invoked—before, during, and after the Revolutionary years—interest focused on two key episodes: first, the period in 1661 when it became clear that Whalley and Goffe would not be exempt from prosecution, the colonial authorities had to decide whether to protect them, and Kellond and Kirke were sent to look for them; and, second, the 1664 commission from England, which was concerned ostensibly with advancing claims over New Netherland but might be interpreted as a renewed attempt to capture the regicides.
Both the 1661 and 1664 episodes went beyond the immediate issues and implications of capturing men who had been protected by significant individuals in the New England colonies. Both arguably involved an attempt by the British government to interfere directly in colonial affairs. The events of 1661 invoked the sinister spectre of a ‘governor of New England’, which reinforced the propensity of the New Haven authorities to give Charles II’s government the run-around; the 1664 commission was concerned not only with the capture of Whalley and Goffe but also with control of jurisdiction and territorial disputes in New England. Both episodes were seen to culminate in colonists resisting this interference either subtly or overtly. It was not such a surprise, therefore, even if it was rather unsubtle, for these episodes later to be seen as precursors to the struggle between ‘liberty’ and ‘arbitrary power’ during the American Revolutionary years. Yet such interference was exaggerated to provide ‘evidence’ of America’s deep-seated love of liberty and independence in the face of British tyranny. So it was in the eighteenth century that the seeds of the prevalent, if misleading, interpretation of the regicides in America were sown.