In 1660, just after twenty-nine of those involved in the regicide had themselves been tried for treason, a printed account of their trials appeared: An Exact and Most Impartial Accompt of the Indictment, Trial, and Judgment (according to Law) of Nine and Twenty Regicides (1660). This publication included nearly 300 pages of exchanges between the court and the regicides. When the radical Puritan regicide Thomas Harrison was in the dock, Charles I’s death warrant was read out to prove that Harrison had been involved in ‘imagining and compassing’—thinking about and plotting—the king’s death. Yet when the death warrant was reprinted in the Exact and Most Impartial Accompt, one name was missing: that of John Dixwell.1
Dixwell had been a captain in the Kent militia in the civil war before being promoted to the rank of colonel of foot. In 1646 he was elected MP for Dover in the Long Parliament and kept his seat after Pride’s Purge two years later—a clear suggestion that he had supported putting Charles I on trial. He sat in the High Court of Justice that tried the king and he attended every session of the trial before becoming the thirty-eighth signatory of Charles’s death warrant. While he did not reach the same heights as Whalley and Goffe during the Interregnum, his career was not without notable achievements: he was appointed to the Council of State in 1651, sat in three Protectorate Parliaments, and became governor, later lieutenant, of Dover Castle. In short, he had done enough—most notably by signing the king’s death warrant—to ensure that he would not be forgiven at the Restoration.
The omission of Dixwell’s name from the list of regicides in the Accompt may have been an innocent mistake. The Accompt would have been a typesetter’s nightmare: it was long, dense, and produced quickly; errors were bound to creep in. Yet there might be another explanation for the omission: John Dixwell had run away and his location was unknown. Although the names of Whalley and Goffe appeared on the reproduced death warrant, it was probably known that they had fled to America when the Accompt went to press and this was confirmed definitively by Thomas Bredon on 11 March, a fortnight before the latest point at which the Accompt could have been printed.2 The Restoration authorities could acknowledge openly that Whalley and Goffe were at large but could claim that the regicides’ location was known and that moves were afoot to capture them. Dixwell’s location was a mystery which would cause embarrassment to the Restoration authorities: not only had Dixwell evaded justice, he had exposed their inability to bring him to justice. A possible solution might have been to omit his name from the reprinted death warrant and hope that no one noticed or asked too many questions.
The fact is that Dixwell proved to be one of the regicides most successful at hiding his whereabouts from contemporaries and modern historians. All we know is that Dixwell hid in Hanau for five years. His precise location would remain a mystery until 10 February 1665, when he met Whalley and Goffe at Russell’s house in Hadley. Whalley and Goffe may have suggested that Dixwell travel to New Haven where they had themselves received kind hospitality. Whatever his purpose or motivation, Dixwell did travel to New Haven and stayed there for over two decades under the pseudonym James Davids. He boarded initially with an elderly couple, Benjamin and Joanna Ling. Benjamin died on 27 April 1673, at which point Dixwell married Joanna in a marriage perhaps based on property rights rather than romantic love. Joanna would have wanted to ensure that Dixwell had somewhere to live in the event of her death. As it happened, Joanna died just a month after her second marriage but Dixwell continued to live in relative comfort. His ‘health and comfortable being’ was reported in November 1676, though he did suffer from swollen feet, the remedy for which, apparently, was to wash them in brandy. Dixwell was also provided with clothing, shoes, and books.3 On 23 October 1677, at the age of about seventy, Dixwell married Bathsheba How, a woman less than half his age.
Dixwell’s personal happiness contrasted sharply with the ordeals suffered by his co-religionists in England. On 12 January 1681, Dixwell received a letter informing him of clouds gathering ‘very thick’ in his mother country.4 This was not a meteorological observation but a reference to the fate of Nonconformist Protestants in the context of the Exclusion Crisis and the development of the first political parties in England. Charles II had not sired any legitimate children; his Catholic brother, James, duke of York, was therefore due to succeed to the throne on the king’s death. Since Restoration England was a virulently anti-Catholic country, the succession would prove difficult. Memories remained of the persecution of Protestants under Queen Mary in the 1550s, the threat posed by the Spanish Armada in 1588, and the Gunpowder Plot designed by Catholics to murder James I in Parliament. Allegations were made that there was a ‘Popish Plot’ to assassinate Charles II and put his Catholic brother on the throne, something about which Goffe had also been informed in Hartford.5 Moreover, for many Protestants it seemed that Louis XIV’s militantly Catholic France sat menacingly just across the English Channel.
Largely in response to the spectre of the duke of York returning his dominions to the Catholic faith once he became King James II, the ‘Whig’ political party was born. By campaigning ‘out-of-doors’, and attempting to pass a law ‘excluding’ James from the succession, it tried to ensure that James would never become king. The latter strategy was thwarted dramatically by Charles II’s abrupt dissolution of Parliament at Oxford in March 1681; he would not call a Parliament again for the remainder of his reign. Charles considered the Whig machinations to be an affront to his authority as hereditary monarch. He had witnessed what happened when Parliament meddled with the royal succession and was determined that it was not going to happen again. He also felt insulted by the disloyalty and ingratitude exhibited by many of his subjects: he had offered them widespread forgiveness in 1660 but now he thought that too many were exploiting his good nature and returning to the behaviour displayed by his father’s enemies in the run-up to the civil war. ‘Forty-one is come again’, the cry went up, to remind Charles II’s subjects to avoid the traumas of the 1640s and rally behind the king and his brother.
Many individuals associated with the allegedly ungrateful and traitorous Whigs were Nonconformist Protestants who would not subject themselves to the king’s Church of England or to the true Stuart succession. It was no wonder, then, that Dixwell was informed of ‘thick’ clouds gathering: the Whigs were in the final throes of their attempts to exclude James from the succession, while the king’s dissolution of Parliament foreshadowed a period of intense persecution of his enemies, including a renewed assault on Protestant Nonconformists. Their meetings were disrupted; they were fined and imprisoned. They were spied on and harassed in a time known as the ‘Tory Reaction’—those years towards the end of Charles II’s reign when the ‘ingratitude’ of his enemies was punished in harsh measure.6 The persecution and the punishment increased in 1683 when the Rye House Plot was discovered, the aim of which was to assassinate the royal brothers as they returned to London from the horseracing at Newmarket.
Charles II’s enemies had not forgotten about the regicides in America. John Breman served as an MP between 1679 and 1681, campaigned against the duke of York, and later supported the king’s illegitimate son, the duke of Monmouth, as a Protestant alternative for the throne. During the Exclusion Crisis, he asked after Dixwell ‘most kindly’. Moreover, Breman was associated with the republican John Wildman, who likewise remembered Dixwell ‘with a great deal of kindness’.7 Their enquiries after the regicide raise the interesting question of whether they were told of his whereabouts. At the very least, Breman’s enquiry suggests that he thought the regicide was still alive. We will never know whether Elizabeth Dixwell, who spoke to Breman and Wildman, revealed his precise location. It is likely, though, that Dixwell’s presence in New Haven was known or suspected by his new neighbours: the residents of such a small community would have noticed the arrival of a stranger of unusual bearing, especially as he attended public worship. Well educated and dressed differently, his adoption of a pseudonym with initials exactly the same as his real name might have raised a few eyebrows amongst those already familiar with the tale of regicides on the run in their colony.
Whether they had their suspicions or not, many colonists were willing to accept the story that ‘James Davids’ was indeed James Davids and not the fugitive John Dixwell. Dixwell himself left a list of his closest associates in New Haven who probably knew his true identity. These men included William Jones and James Bishop, whom Dixwell described as his ‘honoured friends’, as well as his ‘Reverend friends’ James Pierpont and Samuel Hooker of nearby Farmington.8 Furthermore, Nicholas Street, Davenport’s successor as minister of New Haven, may well have known this mysterious figure’s true identity.9
James did indeed become King James II on Charles II’s death in 1685, but three years later he fled from England. James was forced to abdicate, in effect, by his subjects who could not tolerate the plans the new king was making to return their nation to the Catholic faith. James believed that his subjects would choose to return to Catholicism if they were given convincing arguments and reasons as to why the so-called ‘Roman faith’ was the true form of Christianity. However, James’s attempts to promote a faith in which he believed devoutly were politically suicidal. The nation, which had been split in the late 1670s and early 1680s over the prospect of James’s succession to the throne, now united in its desire to remove him. James alienated those Tories who previously had supported his hereditary claim to the crown: though James was going to be a Catholic king, they had argued that he would have to abide by English laws and that his accession was preferable to the potential chaos caused by subjects’ meddling in monarchical succession. In any case, so long as James II had no male heir, his reign would have been a brief Catholic hiatus before the nation reverted to a Protestant monarch upon his death. This changed when James’s wife, Mary of Modena, gave birth to a son in June 1688 and the prospect of a Catholic dynasty in perpetuity loomed large.10
William of Orange, James’s own son-in-law, and Mary, James’s daughter, were invited to become joint sovereigns. Now Protestants felt that their religion would be safe and that a new era would dawn when an old regicide like John Dixwell might be able to return to England. Dixwell indeed was sent a letter in September 1689 informing him that William was ‘bent to the honest part’ and that his friends were trying to secure him an official pardon. Moreover, they were confident that they would be able to obtain such a pardon with an Act of Parliament to support it. Dixwell was urged to make his way with his family to Amsterdam where he could stay until everything was ready for him to return to England. Yet Dixwell was warned to travel in the ‘greatest privacy’ because threats had been made against the regicide and there were individuals who would do him ‘a mischief’.11 As Wildman had given the advice that Dixwell should stop off in Amsterdam before returning to England, it seems probable that he did know of the fugitive’s residence in America: it would have been odd if Wildman did not know the direction from which the regicide would be returning. Dixwell, however, never made it home and his friends’ plans were fruitless: he had died on 18 March 1689.