Charles I’s Killers in America

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From The Wall Street Journal:

We Americans look to the Founding Fathers when we think about the American experiment in democracy. But to whom did the Founders turn for guidance? More than a few found inspiration in the England of the previous century, when the conflict between Parliament and King Charles I erupted into civil war. The victorious parliamentary leaders—mostly Puritans—abolished the monarchy, executed Charles for treason in 1649, and established England’s first and only republic, led by Oliver Cromwell as Lord Protector.

Cromwell’s death in 1658, however, left a power vacuum that, two years later, was filled by Charles’s eldest son and the restoration of the monarchy. Fortunately for him, and for Great Britain, Charles II was a shrewder, more tolerant and certainly less obdurate man than his father, who died for his belief in the divine right of kings. Charles II’s return from exile in 1660 was eased by a general policy of toleration and lenience. Only a handful of the surviving parliamentarians who had signed his father’s death warrant a dozen years earlier were ineligible for amnesty.

“Charles I’s Killers in America” tells the story of two regicides who sought refuge in the American colonies, Edward Whalley and his son-in-law William Goffe. Whalley and Goffe were figures of some importance in the civil war, and in Cromwell’s commonwealth, but they are more prominent in American annals than English ones. In the summer of 1660 they fled to the Puritan stronghold of Massachusetts Bay. In the colonies, they led an uncertain existence until Whalley died in 1674-75 and Goffe about 1679. No one is entirely certain where or when either died, or where they are buried.

. . . .

Whalley and Goffe were invoked in revolutionary pamphleteering, and they make appearances in novels and plays of the 19th and early 20th centuries, including some minor fiction of Sir Walter Scott, James Fenimore Cooper and Nathaniel Hawthorne. A cave in which they hid in New Haven, Conn., for several months features a plaque commemorating their presence. In 1794, Ezra Stiles, the president of Yale College, wrote a hagiography that included them titled “A History of Three of the Judges of Charles I.”

. . . .

In truth, what makes Whalley and Goffe interesting is not their influence on the young American nation—or, as Mr. Jenkinson puts it, “why their story was manipulated, twisted, and distorted to suit different political sympathies and cultural tastes”—but what their sojourn in the colonies tells us about the politics of a neglected chapter in American history. Massachusetts Bay was founded and governed by Puritans, who were naturally sympathetic to their Puritan brethren in the civil war and commonwealth. Accordingly, the restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660 was greeted with a certain ambivalence in Boston, and, initially, Whalley and Goffe were welcomed by the royal governor, John Endecott.

But the governments of the New England colonies were also dependent on London’s patronage and protection and, of course, on trade with England. Whalley and Goffe’s hero status soon grew ambiguous. The king issued warrants for their arrest, and agents were dispatched to hunt them down and return them to England. The royal governments of Massachusetts Bay and neighboring Connecticut, where the regicides soon took refuge, were obliged to do London’s bidding. But they did so in a decidedly half-hearted, sometimes comically deceptive, fashion, as Mr. Jenkinson shows—and Charles II, contrary to legend, seems not to have pressed the matter too hard.

For several years, Whalley and Goffe subsisted, first in New Haven and later in Hadley, Mass., in a kind of twilight status, protected by local Puritan clergy, living largely incognito, evading arrest but not too dangerously imperiled.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal (Sorry if you encounter a paywall)

PG has read some American history and has some ancestors which were hanging about Massachusetts and Connecticut during the relevant period, but was entirely unaware of the story of Whalley and Goffe.