Nowadays when Englishmen do not flee to America because of religious persecution and do not fight their king because of tyranny, the politics of the time of the regicides seem singularly remote. The principles of government for which they fought have become established as a matter of course in the civilized world, and the doctrine of the ‘divine right’ of kings has gone forever. Yet we have only to remind ourselves that today Italy has a dictator as strong as Cromwell, and, like him, stimulating his people to intense earnestness and industry, to realize that times have not changed altogether.
Lemuel A. Welles, The History of the Regicides in New England (1927), 121–2
To investigate the lives and afterlives of Whalley and Goffe is to investigate some of the key moments in American history. While we may start with the English civil wars of the 1640s and the execution of Charles I in London in 1649, we end up travelling through the colonies, then states, of north-east America, glancing at King Philip’s War, Bacon’s Rebellion, the American Revolution, the American civil war, Lincoln’s assassination, and the Colonial Revival, before ending up with a play published in San Francisco. The view taken of the regicides depended on the political loyalty of those reading, writing, painting, or learning about their time on the run. Interest in the regicides’ fate may have waxed and waned according to contemporary political and cultural anxieties, or individuals’ interest in reviving Whalley and Goffe in their own time. But, with the exception of Thomas Hutchinson and a handful of his followers, most observers saw the regicides in America as heroes outwitting tyrants, presaging the Revolution of 1776. The regicides were ripe for distortion in the ideological battleground of the American Revolutionary years, and in the hands of nineteenth-century authors trying to forge an American identity that was both independent and yet somehow in thrall to its European forebears. As Jill Lepore has put it, ‘All nations are places, but they are also acts of imagination’, and America’s national imagination for a long time had English regicides as some of its key characters.1
The regicides and their protectors did foreshadow American independence, but not necessarily in the breathlessly heroic way suggested by Stiles and those nineteenth-century novelists who followed him. Instead, their anticipation of independence was a quiet and patient one—a recognition of the limitations of colonial control. In the early 1660s Charles II’s government did not have the logistical resources to descend on the New England colonies in an overbearing and tyrannical manner, or the means forcibly to extract demands and pluck individuals out of the wilderness. The colonists who protected the regicides were brave, but they had the limitations of imperial control in their favour. If Charles II wished to bring the regicides to justice, then he had to rely on colonial administrators. But the regicides survived because there were too few individuals in the colonies who wanted to give them up and too many who found various ways to protect them. The Restoration government conceded that it was powerless in such a situation. This realization dawned very early in Charles’s reign, and the many domestic problems he faced only served to increase the difficulty of capturing Whalley, Goffe, and Dixwell in America and of returning them to England.
In fact, while the regicides were in America there was little danger of pursuit for much of the time. Even the most notorious figure, Edward Randolph, who has become a pantomime villain for novelists, dramatists, and historians, was reduced to moaning about the Massachusetts Bay administration, instead of taking any real action to capture the regicides. The many observers since the eighteenth century who have tried to find something more dramatic and entertaining in the regicides’ story have disguised this historical reality. But we learn a lot more about the regicides themselves, the realities of colonial governance, and the relationship between English regicide and American Revolution if we remove that cartoon veneer.
Reading the literary afterlives of the regicides after the American Revolution provides further explanation as to how the real story of the regicides in America became refashioned to interest readers and to provide a neat road from English regicide to American Revolution. In each of these cultural artefacts, the regicides’ story had to be filtered to suit the agenda of the author and temperament of the audience. It is not sufficient to say that the regicides were either totally vilified or celebrated wholeheartedly as heroes. The majority of authors settled for the latter, especially in the second half of the nineteenth century when, prompted by celebrations of the centenary of the American Revolution, some observers considered what they perceived to be the cyclical nature of American history, which brought seventeenth-century regicides into the orbit of eighteenth-century revolutionaries. Novels followed histories; histories followed novels; paintings, plays, and poems followed both.
Ironically, it is possible that the seeds of the regicides’ demise were sown in the decades of their notable popularity. In the hands of nineteenth-century authors, the regicides had become one- or two-dimensional post-revolutionary constructs lacking any subtlety, complexity, or, sometimes, accuracy. One nineteenth-century author’s casual attitude to historical veracity was betrayed by her dismissive note that, in her account of the regicides, ‘some slight liberties have been taken with the dates’.2 For all of these reasons the regicides were not figures who could sustain interest beyond an elementary school standard of sophistication and, at this level, there were plenty of other American heroes who were more recognizable, had performed more notable deeds, and looked better on gift shop memorabilia: Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, and Benjamin Franklin, among others. So in the sophomoric surge of interest in the regicides lay the beginnings of their decline: there was no longer anything sufficiently challenging for serious historians to investigate and research. The regicides became further and further removed from the realities of their seventeenth-century existence and more and more cartoon figures fit for little more than local histories, tobacco adverts,3 genealogical studies, and movie-stories about angels.
Once the regicides had become the preserve of broad-brush educators and entertainers (or both), their personalities, views, and experiences had to become wholesome, straightforward, and uncomplicated. They had to become representatives of the growth of an American liberty that could be traced across the Atlantic, back over a century, to the English civil war. Heroic myths needed to be created if the regicides were going to fit the image later given to them as intrepid proto-revolutionaries, especially as much of their genuine experience in America was not quite so heroic as we have been led to believe. In the hands of some nineteenth-century Romantic authors, historical truth was subordinated to the demands of a good story. And the requirements of a good story also demanded elements of fiction that had little or no basis in reality, but were required to keep the reading public interested in what was already a fascinating story. Devout, spiritual Puritans do not sell many books. Puritans in the midst of a breathless chase do—even if we have to suspend disbelief while we read about their exploits.
With the exception of the Angel of Hadley, if we accept its veracity, there was little in the behaviour of the regicides in America that reflected their military heroism from the English civil wars. From existing diary entries and letters we get the impression of individuals who were in a state of spiritual and temporal anxiety. Their physical hardiness was undermined during the Judges Cave episode by their retreating in times of bad weather to unexciting domesticity. And so the regicides appeared to become much frailer as their exile progressed. This might explain the need among the early myth-makers to invent stories involving nimble fencing and tense, dramatic pursuits. If the regicides were going to be early American heroes, then they had to be doing deeds that were more heroic than hiding in basements or prevaricating over psalms.
Over time, then, the story of the regicides belonged more and more to the hagiographical tradition of American writers who wasted no critical energy in placing Whalley and Goffe at the forefront of proto-1776ers who fought for liberty against a tyrannical British monarchy. Thereafter, they would receive scant attention from more recent historians who preferred to devote their critical faculties to topics that were more in tune with the ethical and cultural concerns of twentieth- and twenty-first-century America. It was not until 2012 that Whalley and Goffe returned to the history bookshelves, first in Christopher Pagliuco’s, The Great Escape of Edward Whalley and William Goffe, then in Don Jordan and Michael Walsh’s The King’s Revenge. In 2014, the publication of Charles Spencer’s Killers of the King coincided with William Goffe’s first appearance on a television screen, played by James Cosmo in Maxine Brant and Peter Flannery’s New Worlds—a programme which attracted over 660,000 viewers, but was described by one critic as ‘possibly the worst-directed historic drama ever’.4
New generations of readers were also introduced to the regicides through historical fiction: Jack Dunn’s The Diary of General William Goffe (first published in 1982 and reprinted in 2007) has Goffe’s diary being discovered by a Hadley lawyer, Jonathan Whiting. Ric Hooban’s Off With His Head: The Story of the Fighting Whalley (2009) presents one of Whalley’s descendants trying to discover the history of the ‘The Whalley pen with the King’s Blood on it’. Kathleen Kent’s historical romance The Wolves of Andover (2010) includes a labourer, Thomas Carrier, with a mysterious past: involved in the battles of the English civil war and the regicide, he flees from England to Massachusetts where, much like Whalley and Goffe, he is pursued by assassins resembling Kellond and Kirke.5
Up to this point, Whalley, Goffe, and Dixwell had been tarred with the ‘antiquarian’ brush. They had become a subject fit only for genealogy hunters determined to associate their family with revolutionary lineage. Others would have been deterred by the simplistic portraits of the regicides and their pursuers found in nineteenth-century romances. Some would have baulked at the ‘local history’ association of the regicides: a nice story that might appeal to the denizens of New Haven without conveying much about American or British history to a wider audience. Such critics would have been wrong to take this view. The New Haven Journal Courier from June 1934 carried the story of Whalley and Goffe, and rightly recognized that the lives and afterlives of the regicides ‘are not only the history of New Haven, but of our country’6—or, indeed, any country concerned with questions of monarchies and republics, tyranny and liberty.