“Oliver Newman” is a poem which I opened with trembling; for the last new poem that ever shall be read from such an one as Southey, is not a thing that can be looked upon lightly. Then it came to us from his grave, “like the gleaming grapes when the vintage is done;” and the last fruit of such a teeming mind must be relished, though far from being the best; as we are glad to eat apples out of season, which, in the time of them, we should hardly have gathered. But this is not to the purpose. I was surprised to find the new poem built on a history which novelists and story-tellers have been nibbling at these twenty years, and which seems to be a peculiarly relishable bit ofnewson an old subject, if we may judge by the way in which literary epicures have snatched it up piecemeal. In the first place, Sir Walter Scott, who read every thing, got hold of a “North American publication,”[20]from which he learned; with surprise, that Whalley the regicide, “who was never heard of after the Restoration,” fled to Massachusetts, and there lived concealed, and died, and was laid in an obscure grave, which had lately been ascertained. Giving Mr. Cooper due credit for a prior use of the story, he made it over, in his own inimitable way, and puts it into the mouth of Major Bridgenorth, relating his adventures in America. Southey seems next to have got wind of it, reviewing “Holmes’ American Annals,”[21]in theQuarterly, when he confesses he first thought of King Philip’s war as the subject for an epic—a thought which afterwards became a flame, and determined him to make Goffe (another regicide) the hero of his poem. A few details of the story got out of romance and gossip into genuine history, in a volume of “Murray’s Family Library;”[22]and the great “Elucidator” of Oliver Cromwell’s mystifications condenses them again into a single sentence, observing, with his usual buffoonery, that “two of Oliver’scousinryfled to New England, lived in caves there, and had a sore time of it.” And now comes the poem from Southey, full of allusions to the same story, and, after all, giving only part of it; for I do not see that any one has yet mentioned the fact, thatthreeregicides lived and died in America after the Restoration, and that their sepulchres are there to this day.
In truth, the new poem led me to think there might be some value in a certain MS. of my own,—mere notes of a traveller, indeed, but results of a tour which I made in New England in the summer of 18—, during which, besides visiting one of the haunts of the fugitives, I took the pains to investigate all that is extant of their story. I found there a queer little account of them, badly written, and worse arranged; the work of one Dr. Stiles, who seems to have been something of a pious Jacobin, and whose reverence for the murderers of King Charles amounts almost to idolatry. He was president of Yale College, at Newhaven, and thoroughly possessed of all the hate and cant about Malignants, which the first settlers of New England brought over with them as an heir-loom for their sons. A member of his college told me, that Stiles used to tell the undergraduates that silly story about the king’s being hanged by mistake for Oliver, after the Restoration; and that he only left it off when a dry fellow laughed out at the narration, and on being asked what there was to laugh at, replied, “hanging a man that had lost his neck.” After reading the doctor’s book on the Regicides, I cannot doubt the anecdote, for he carries his love of Oliver into rapture; talks of “entertaining angels” in the persons of Goffe andWhalley, and applies to them the beautiful language in which St. Paul commemorates the saints—“they wandered about, being destitute, afflicted, tormented; they wandered in deserts, and in mountains, and in dens and caves of the earth—of whom the world was not worthy.” The book itself is the most confused mass of repetition and contradiction I ever saw, and yet proved to me vastly entertaining. In connexion with it, I got hold of several others that helped to “elucidate” it; and thus, with much verbal information, I believe I came to a pretty clear view of the case. I can only give what I have gathered, in the off-hand way of a tourist, but perhaps I may serve some one with facts, which they will arrange much better, in performing the more serious task of a historian.
After spending several weeks in the vicinity of New York, I left that city in a steamer for a visit to the “Eastern States;” our passage lying through the East River and Long Island Sound, and requiring about five hours sail to complete the trip to Newhaven. I found the excursion by no means an agreeable one. The Sound itself is wide, and our way lay at equal distances between its shores, which, being quite low, are not easily descried by a passenger. Then there came up a squall, which occasioned a great swell in the sea, and sickness was the consequence among not a few of the company on board. Altogether, the steamer being greatly inferior to those on the Hudson, and crowded with a very uninteresting set of passengers, I was glad to retreat from the cabin, going forward, and looking out impatiently for the end of our voyage.
Here it was that I first caught sight of two bold headlands, looming up, a little retired from the shore, and giving a dignity to the coast at this particular spot, by which it is not generally distinguished. We soon entered the bay of Newhaven, and the town itself began to appear, embosomed very snugly between the two mountains, and deriving no little beauty from their prominent share in its surrounding scenery. I judged them not more than four or five hundred feet high, but they are marked with elegant peaks, and present a bold perpendicular front of trap-rock, which, with the bay and harbour in the foreground, and a fine outline of hills sloping away towards the horizon, conveys a most agreeable impression to the approaching stranger of the region he is about to visit. A person who stood looking out very near me, gave me the information that the twin mountains were called, from their geographical relations to the meridian of Newhaven, East and West Rocks, and added the remark, for which I was hardly prepared, that West Rock was celebrated as having afforded a refuge to the regicides Goffe and Whalley.
My fellow-passenger, observing my interest in this statement, went on to tell me, in substance, as follows. A cleft in its rugged rocks was once actually inhabited by those scape-goats, and still goes by the name of “The Regicides’ Cave.” Newhaven, moreover, contains the graves of these men, and regards them with such remarkable veneration, that even the railroad speed of progress and improvement has been checked to keep them inviolate;—a tribute which, in America, must be regarded as very marked, since no ordinary obstacle ever is allowed to interfere with their perpetual “go-ahead.” It seems the ancient grave-yard, where the regicides repose, was found very desirable for a public square; and as a mimic Père-la-Chaise had just been created in the outskirts of the town, away went coffins and bones, grave-stones and sepulchral effigies, and monumental urns, to plant the new city of the dead, and make way for living dogs, as better than defunct lions. Such a resurrection the towns-folk gave to their respectable grandfathers and grandmothers; but not to the relics of the regicides. At these shrines of murder and rebellion, the spade and the mattock stood still; and their once restless tenants, after shifting between so many disturbances while living, were suffered to sleep on, in a kind of sepulchral limbo, between the marble in Westminster Abbey, to which they once aspired, and the ditch at Tyburn, which they so narrowly escaped.
I was cautioned by my communicative friend not to speak too freely of ‘the Regicides.’ I must callthem “the Judges,” he said; for, in Newhaven, where Puritanism perpetuates some of its principles, and all of its prejudices, it appears that such is the prevailing euphuism which is employed, as more in harmony with their notions of Charles as a sinful Malignant, and of the Rebellion as a glorious foretaste of the kingdom of the saints. “The Judges’ Cave” is therefore the expression by which they speak of that den of thieves on West Rock; and they always use an equally guarded phrase when they mention those graves in the square,—graves, be it remembered, that enclose the ashes of men, who should have been left to the tender mercies of the public executioner, had they only received in retribution what they meted out to their betters.
Newhaven, in addition to these treasures, boasts another Puritan relic, of a different kind. The early settlers founded here a Calvinistic college, which has become a very popular sectarian university, and my visit at this time was partly occasioned by the recurrence of the annual commemoration of its foundation. I suspect the person who leaned over the bulwarks of the steamer, and gave me the facts—which I have related in a very different vein from that in which I received them—was a dissenting minister going up to be at his college at this important anniversary. There wasa tone in his voice, as was said of Prince Albert’s, when he visited thesavansat Southampton, which sufficiently indicated his sympathies.[23]The regicides were evidently the calendared saints of his religion, and their adventures hisActa Sanctorum. He was nevertheless very civil and entertaining, and I was glad, on arriving at the quay, to find no worse companion forced upon me in the carriage which I had engaged (as I supposed for myself alone) to take me into the city. There was so great a rush for cabs and coaches, however, that there was no going single; and I accordingly found myself again in close communication with my narrative fellow-traveller, who soon made room for two others; grave personages with rigid features and polemical address, which convinced me that I was in presence of the dons and doctors of a Puritan university.
“Go-ahead!” sung out somebody, as soon as our luggage was strapped behind; and away we drove, in full chase, with drays and cabs, towards the central parts of the city. The newer streets are built, I observed, with snug little cottages, and intersect at right angles. The suburban Gothic, so justly reprobated by the critics of Maga, is not quite as unusual as it ought to be; but a succession of neat little shrubbery-plots around the doors, and a trim air about things in general, suits very well the environs of such a miniature city as Newhaven. I never saw such a place for shade-trees. They are planted every where; little slender twigs, boxed carefully from wheels and schoolboys, and struggling apparently against the curse, “bastard slips shall not thrive;” and venerable overarching trees, in long avenues, so remarkable and so numerous that the town is familiarly called, by its poets, the “City of Elms.”
The Funereal Square, of which I had already learned the history, was soon reached, and we were set down at a hotel in its neighbourhood. Its “rugged elms” are not the only trace of the fact, that the rude forefathers of the city once reposed in their shadow; for, in the middle of the square, a church of tolerable Gothic still remains; in amiable proximity to which appear two meeting-houses, of a style ofarchitecturetruly original, and exhibiting as natural a development of Puritanism, as the cathedrals display of Catholic religion. Behind one of these meeting-houses protrudes, in profile, the classic pediment of a brick and plaster temple, of which the divinity is the Connecticut Themis, and in which the Solons of the commonwealth biennially enact legislative games in her honour. Still farther in the back-ground are seen spire and cupola, peering over a thickset grove, in the friendly shade of whose academic foliage a long line of barrack-looking buildings were pointed out to me as the colleges.
These shabby homes of the Museswere my only token that I had entered a university town. The streets, it is true, were alive with bearded and mustached youth, who gave some evidences of being yetin statu pupillari; but they wore hats, and flaunted not a rag of surplice or gown. In the old and truly respectable college at New York, such things are not altogether discarded; but, at Newhaven, where they are devoutly eschewed as savouring too much of Popery, not a member of its faculties, nor master, doctor, or scholar, appears with the time-honoured decency which, to my antiquated notion, is quite inseparable from the true regimen of a university. The only distinction which I remarked between Town and Gown, is one in lack of which Town makes the more respectableappearanceof the twain; for the college badges seem to be nothing more than odd-looking medals of gold, which are set in unmeaning display on the man’s shirt ruffles, or dangle with tawdry effect from their watch ribbons. I have no doubt that the smart shopmen who flourish canes and smoke cigars in the same walks with the collegians, very much envy them these poor decorations; but in my opinion, they have far less of the Titmouse in their appearance without them, and would sooner be taken for their betters by lacking them. My first impressions were, on the whole, far from favourable, therefore; as from such things in the young men, I was forced to judge of theiralma mater. And I must own, moreover, that my subsequent acquaintance with the university did little to diminish the disappointment which I unwillingly felt in this visit to one of the most popular seats of learning in America. I certainly came prepared to be pleased; for I had met in New York several persons of refined education, who had taken their degrees at this place; but, to dismiss this digression from my main purpose, I must say that the Commencement was any thing but a creditable affair. After carefully observing all that I could unobtrusively hear and see, I cannot speak flatteringly of the performances, whether the matter or the manner be considered. I can scarcely account for it that so many educated men as took part in the exercises should make no better exhibition of themselves. One oration delivered by a bachelor of arts, was vociferated with insolence so consummate, that I marvelled how the solemn-looking divines, whom it occasionally seemed to hit, were able to endure it. In all that I heard, with very few exceptions, there was a deficiency of good English style, of elevated sentiment, and even of sound morality. Many of the professors and fellows of the University are confessedly men of cultivated minds, and even of distinguished learning: yet this great celebration was no better than I say. I can account for it only by the sectarian influences which imbue every thing in Newhaven, and by the want of a thoroughly academic atmosphere, which sectarianism never can create. It was really farcical to see the good old president confer degrees with an attempt at ceremony, which seemed to have no rubric but extemporary convenience, and no purpose but the despatch of business. All this may seem to have nothing to do with my subject; yet I felt myself that the regicides had a good deal to do with it. In this college, one sees the best that Puritanism could produce; and I thought what Oxford and Cambridge might have become under the invading reforms of the usurpation, had the Protectorate been less impotent to reproduce itself, and carry out its natural results on those venerable foundations.
On the day following that of the Commencement, I took a drive to West Rock. I was so happy as to have the company of a very intelligent person from the Southern States, and of a young lady, his relative, who was very ambitious to make the excursion. It was a pleasant drive of about three miles to the foot of the mountain, where we alighted, the driver leaving the horses in charge of themselves, and undertaking the office of guide. It was somewhat tedious climbing for our fair friend; but up we went, over rough stones, creeping vines and brushwood, that showed no signs of being very frequently disturbed; our guide keeping the bright buttons of his coat-skirts before us, and in some other respects remindingme of Mephistopheles on the Hartz. It certainly was very accommodating in Nature, to provide the lofty chambers of the regicides with such a staircase; for in their day it must have defied any ordinary search, and when found must have presented as many barriers of brier and thicket, as grew up around the Sleeping Beauty in the fairy tale.
As we reached what seemed to be the top of the rock, we came suddenly into an open place, but so surrounded by trees and shrubs, as effectually to shut in the view. Here was the cave; and very different it was from what we had expected to find it! We had prepared ourselves to explore a small Antiparos, and were quite chagrined to find our grotto diminished to a mere den or covert, between two immense stones of a truly Stonehengian appearance and juxtaposition. I doubted for a moment whether their singular situation, on the top of this mountain, were matter for the geologist or the antiquary; and would like to refer the question to the learned Dean of Westminster, who hammers stones as eloquently as some of his predecessors have hammered pulpits. The stones are well-nigh equal in height, of about twenty feet perpendicular, one of them nearly conical, and the other almost a true parallelopiped. Betwixt them another large stone appears to have fallen, till it became wedged; and the very small aperture between this stone and the ground beneath, is all that justifies the name of a cave, though there are several fissures about the stones, in which possibly beasts might be sheltered, but hardly human beings. To render the cave itself large enough for the pair that once inhabited it, the earth must have been dug from under the stone, so as to make a covered pit; and even then, it was hardly so good a place as is said to have been made for “a refuge to the conies,” being much fitter for wild-cats or tigers. I could scarcely persuade myself, that English law could ever have driven a man three thousand miles over the sea, and then into such a burrow as this! But so it was; and it was retribution and justice too.
Bad as it was, it looked more agreeable Goffe and Whalley, than a cross-beam and two halters, or even than apartments in the Tower of London. They had it fitted up with a bed, and other “creature-comforts” of a truly Crusoe-like description. The mouth of the cave was screened by a thick growth of bushes, and the place was in several other respects well suited to their purposes. The parallelopiped, of which I have spoken, was easily climbed, being furnished with something like stairs, and its top commands a fine view of the town, the bay, and the country for miles around. It served them, therefore, as a watch-tower, and must have been very useful as a means of protection, and as an observatory for amusement. I mounted the stone myself, and tried to fancy how different was the scene two hundred years ago. There the exile would sit hour after hour, not as one may sit there now, to see sails and steamers entering and leaving the harbour, and post-coaches and railroad cars passing and re-passing continually; but to gaze in astonishment and fear, if one lone ship might be descried coming up the bay, or if a solitary horseman was to be seen or heard pursuing his journey in the valley below.
While the fugitives lived in this den, they were regularly supplied with daily bread and other necessaries of life, by a woodman, who lived at the foot of the rock. A child came up the mountain daily with a supply of provisions, which he left on a certain stone, and returned without seeing any body, or asking any questions of Echo. In this way he always brought a full basket and took back an empty one, without the least suspicion that he was becoming an accessory in high treason, and, as it is said, without ever knowing to whom, or for what, he was ministering. As a Brahmin sets rice before an idol, so the little one fed the stone, or left the basket to “the unseen spirit of the wood;” and well it was that the little Red-riding-hood escaped the usual fate of all lonely little foresters, for it seems there were mouths and maws in the mountain which cheesecakes would not have satisfied. The dwellers in the rock had a terrible fright one night from the visit of some indescribable beast—a panther, orsomething worse—that blazed its horrid eyes into their dark hole, and growled so frightfully, that if all the bailiffs of London had surrounded their den, they would have been less alarmed. It seemed some motherly tigress in search of her cubs, and when she discovered the intruders, she set up such an ululation of maternal grief as made every aisle of the forest ring again, and so scared the inmates of her den, that, as soon as they dared, they took to their heels down the mountain, ready to hear any hue and cry on their track, rather than hers. This story was told us by our guide, who gave it as the reason for their final desertion of the place.
On the stone which I climbed, I found engraven a great number of names and initials, with dates of different years. Apparently they had been left there by visiters from the university. In more than one place, some ardent youth, in his first love with democracy, had taken pains to renew the inscription, which tradition says Goffe and Whalley placed over their retreat. “Opposition to tyrants is obedience to God.” I suppose there will always be fresh men to do Old Mortality’s office for this inscription, for the maxim is one which has long been popular in America among patriotic declaimers. How long it will continue generally popular, may indeed be doubted, since the abolitionists have lately adopted it, and in their mouths it becomes an incendiary watchword, which the supporters of slavery have no little reason to dread. I myself saw this motto on an anti-slavery placard set up in the streets of New York.
I inferred from this inscription, and the names on the rock, that the spot is visited by some with very different feelings from those which it excited in me and my companions. Our valuable conductor, it is true, spoke of “the Judges” with as much reverence as so sturdy a republican would be likely to show to any dignity whatever; and really the honest fellow seemed to give us credit for more tenderness than we felt, and tried to express himself in such a manner, when telling of the misery of the exiles, as not to wound our sensibilities. But I fear his consideration was all lost; for, sad as it is to think of any fellow-man reduced to such extremity as to take up a lodging like this, we could only think how many of the noble and the lovely, and how many of the true and loyal poor, had been brought by Goffe and Whalley to greater miseries than theirs. I could not force myself, therefore, to the melting mood; it was enough that I thought of January 30, 1648, and said to myself, “Doubtless there is a God that judgeth in the earth.” The lady recalled some facts from Lord Clarendon’s History, and said that her interest in the spot was far from having anything to do with sympathy for the regicides. Her patronising protector expressed his surprise, and jokingly assured me that she regarded it as a Mecca, or he would not have given himself the trouble of waiting on her to a place he so little respected. She owned that she was hardly consistent with herself in feeling any interest at all in the memorial of regicides; but I reminded her that Lord Capel kissed the axe which completed the work of rebellion, and deprived his royal master of life;[24]and we agreed that even the intelligent instruments of that martyrdom acquired a sort of reliquary value from the blood with which they were crimsoned.
The troglodytes, then, were but two; but there was a third fugitive regicide who came to Newhaven, and now lies there in his grave. This was none other than John Dixwell, whose name, with those of Goffe and Whalley, may be found on that infamous death-warrant, which some have not scrupled to call the Major Charta. Dixwell’s is set among theοἱ πολλοι, who, in the day of reckoning, were judged hardly worth a hanging; but Whalley’s occupies the bad eminence of being fourth on the list, and next to the hard-fisted autograph of Oliver himself; while William Goffe’s is signed just before the signature of Pride, whose miserable penmanship that day, it will be remembered, cost his poor body an airing on the gibbet, in the year 1660. Scott, by the way,gives Whalley theprænomenRichard; but there it is on the parchment, too legible for his soul’s good—Edward Whalley. Shall I recur to the rest of their history in England before I come to my American narrative? Perhaps in these days of “elucidations,” when it is said that every thing about two hundred years since is, for the first time, undergoing a calm but earnest review, I may be indulged in recapitulating what, if every body knows, they know only in a great confusion with other events, which impair the individual interest.
Of Dixwell, comparatively little is known, save that his first act of patriotism seems to have consisted in leaving his country. Enough that he served in the parliamentary army; sat as judge, and stood up as regicide in that High Court of Treason in Westminster Hall; was one of Oliver’s colonels during the Protectorate; became sheriff of Kent, and no doubt hanged many a rogue that had a better right to live than himself; and finally sat in parliament for the same county in 1656.[25]His experiences after the Restoration are not known, till he emerged in America almost ten years after the last-mentioned date.
Whalley was among the more notorious of the rebels. He was cousin to Oliver, and one of the few for whom Oliver sometimes exhibited a savage sort of affection. He proved himself a good soldier in a bad cause, at Naseby; and a furious one at Banbury. When the rogues fell out among themselves, he was the officer that met Cornet Joyce as he was convoying the king’s majesty from Holmby,[26]and offered to relieve the royal prisoner of his protector; an offer which Charles with great dignity refused, preferring to let them have all the responsibility in the matter, and not caring a straw which of the two villains should be his jailor. At Hampton Court, however, fortune decided in favour of Whalley, and put the king, for a time, into his power; till like fortune put it into the king’s power to get rid of his brutality by flight, an accident for which our hero got a hint of displeasure from parliament. Just at this point Cromwell addressed a letter to his “dear cousin Whalley,”[27]begging himnot to letany thing happen to his majesty; in which his sincerity was doubtless as genuine as that of certain patriots in the Pickwick history, who, out of regard to certain voters coming down to the election, with money in their hands and tears in their eyes, besought the senior Wellernot to upsetthe whole cargo of them into the canal at Islington. After getting out of this scrape, and doing the damning deed that got him into a worse one, he fleshed his sword against the king’s Scottish kinsmen, at Dunbar, where he lost a horse under him, and received a cut in his wrist,[28]though not severe enough to prevent his writing a saucy letter to the governor of Edinburgh castle. He was the man that took away the mace, when Cromwell broke up his Barebones’ parliament. Then he rode through Lincoln, and five other counties, dealing with recusant Anabaptists,[29]as one of the “Major Generals;” demurred a little, at first, at the king-manufacturing conference, but finally came into the project; and, from a sense of duty, so far overcame his republican scruples as to allow himself to take a seat in the House of Lords, as one of the Oliverian peerage.[30]If titles were to be had with estates, like the Lordship of Linne, he was surely entitled to his peerage, for he was growing fat on the Duke of Newcastle’s patrimony, with part of the jointure of poor Henrietta Maria, when, God be praised, the day of reckoning arrived; and my Lord Whalley, surmising that, should any one come to the rope, he was likely to swing if he remained in England, made off beyond seas.
Goffe, too, was of the Cromwellian cousinry, having married a daughter of Whalley.[31]He was a soldier, but could do a little exposition besides, when there was any call for such an exercise; as, for instance, at that celebrated groaning and wrestling which was performed at Windsor, and ended in resolving on the murder ofthe king,[32]after extraordinary supplication and holding forth. When father Whalley removed the mace, son-in-law Goffe led in the musqueteers, and bolted out the Anabaptists, against whom he rode circuit through Sussex and Berks, growing rich, and indulging dreams of disjointing the nose of Richard, and thrusting himself into the old shoes of the Protector, as soon as they should be empty.[33]He, too, sacrificed his feelings so far as to become a lord; and, perhaps, thinking that royal shoes would fit him as well as republican ones, he at last consented to making Oliver a king.[34]Nor were his honours wholly of a civil character, for he was made an M.A. at Oxford, and so secured himself a notice in Anthony Wood’s biographies, where his story concludes with a set of mistakes, so relishably served up, that I must give it in the very words of theFasti, as follows:—“In 1660, a little before the restoration of King Charles II., he betook himself to his heels to save his neck, without any regard had to his majesty’s proclamation; wandered about fearing every one that he met should slay him; and was living at Lausanna in 1664, with Edmund Ludlow, Edward Whalley, and other regicides, when John l’Isle, another of that number, was there, by certain generous royalists, despatched. He afterwards lived several years in vagabondship; but when he died, or where his carcase was lodged, is as yet unknown to me.”[35]
On Christmas day, 1657, good John Evelyn went to London, in spite of many severe penalties incurred thereby, to receive the holy sacrament from a priest of the Church of England.[36]Mr. Gunning, afterwards Bishop of Ely, was the officiating clergyman, and preached a sermon appropriate to the festival. As he was proceeding with the Eucharist, the place where they were worshipping was beset by Oliver’s ruffians, who, pointing their muskets at the communicants, through the doors and windows, threatened to shoot them as they knelt before the altar. Evelyn surmises that they were not authorised to go so far as that, and consequently they did not put their threat into execution; but both priest and people were taken prisoners, and brought under guard before the magistrates to answer for the serious misdemeanour of which they had been guilty. Before whom should the gentle friend of Jeremy Taylor find himself standing as a culprit, but these worshipful Justices, Whalley and Goffe! It was, doubtless, by their orders that the solemnities of the day had been profaned.
Evelyn seems to have got off with only a severe catechizing; but many of his fellow-worshippers were imprisoned, and otherwise severely punished. The examination was probably conducted by the theologically exercised Goffe, for the specimen preserved by Evelyn is worthy of his genius in every way. The amiable confessor was asked how he dared to keep “the superstitious time of the Nativity;” and was admonished that in praying for kings, he had been praying for Charles Stuart, and even for the king of Spain, who was a Papist! Moreover, he was told that the Prayer-book was nothing but the Mass in English, and more to the like effect; “and so,” says Evelyn, “they dismissed me, pitying much my ignorance.”
This anecdote, accidentally preserved by Evelyn, shows what kind of characters they were. They seem to have been as sincere as any of their fanatical comrades, though it is always hard to say of the Puritan leaders which were the cunning hypocrites, and which the deluded zealots. Whatever they may have been, their time was short, so far as England is concerned with them; and in three years after this event, they suddenly disappeared. So perfectly did they bury themselves from the world, that from the year 1660, till the romance of Scott[37]again brought the name of Whalley before the world, it may be doubted whether any thing was known in England of lives, which in another hemisphere were protracted almostinto another generation. Nobody dreamed there was yet an American chapter in the history of the regicides.
Yet, considering the known disposition of the colonies, and their inaccessible fastnesses, it is remarkable that only three of the fugitives found their way across the Atlantic. Another, indeed, there was, a mysterious person, of whom it is only known, that though concerned in the regicide, he was not probably one of “the judges.” He lived in Rhode Island till he was more than a hundred years old, begetting sons and daughters, to whom he bequeathed the surname of Whale. Whoever he was, he seems to have been a sincere penitent, whose conscience would not let him rest. He slept on a deal board instead of a bed, and practised many austerities, accusing himself as a man of blood, and deprecating the justice of God. The particulars of his guilt he never disclosed; and as his name was probably an assumed one, it is difficult to surmise what share he had in the murder of his king. There was in Hacker’s regiment one Whalley, a lieutenant; and Stiles, the American writer, thinks this Whale may have been the same man. But then, what did this Whalley perpetrate to account for such horrible remorse? Considering Hacker’s active part in the bloodiest scene of the great tragedy, and the conflicting testimony in Hulet’s trial,[38]as to the man that struck the blow; and coupling this with the fact, that an effort was made to procure one of several lieutenants to do the work,[39]I confess I once thought there was some reason to suspect that this fellow’s accusing conscience was terribly earned, and that he at least had been one of the masks that figured on the scaffold. This surmise, though shaken by nothing that came out on the state trials, I have since discharged, in deference to the opinion of Miss Strickland,[40]who is satisfied that the greybeard was Hulet, and the actual regicide, Gregory Brandon.
The American history of the regicides begins with the 27th of July following the Restoration, when Whalley and Goffe landed at Boston, bringing the first news that the king had been proclaimed, of which it seems they had tidings before they were clear of the Channel. Proscribed as they were, they were heroes among the colonists, and even Endicott, the governor, ventured to give them a welcome. The inhabitants of Boston and its environs paid them many attentions, and they appeared at large with no attempt at concealing their names and character. The Bostonians were not all Republicans, however; and several zealously affected Royalists having been noticed among their visiters, they suddenly conceived the air of Cambridge more salubrious than that of Boston, and took up their abode in that village, now a mere suburb of the city. There they freely mingled with other men, and were admitted as communicants in the Calvinistic meetings of the place; and sometimes, it appears, they even ventured, like the celebrated party at the Peak, “to exhibit their gifts in extemporaneous prayer and exposition.” On visiting the city, they once received some insult, for which the assailant was bound over to keep the peace; though, if he had but known it, he was so far from having done any wrong in the eye of law, that he was entitled to a hundred pounds reward, for bringing before a magistrate either of the worthies who appeared against him. The authorities, however, had received no official notice of the Restoration, and chose to go on as if still living under the golden sway of the second Protector.
A story is told of one of the regicides, while living at Cambridge, which deserves preservation, as it not only illustrates the open manner in which thy went to and fro, but also shows how well exercised were the soldiers of Cromwell in military accomplishments. A fencing-master had appeared at Boston, challenging any man in the colonies to play at swords with him; and this bravado he repeated for several days, from a stage of Thespian simplicity, erected in apublic part of the town. One day, as the mountebank was proclaiming his defiance, to the terror and admiration of a crowd of bystanders, a country-bred fellow, as it seemed, made his appearance in the assembly, accepting the challenge, and pressing to the encounter with no other weaponry than a cheese done up in a napkin for a shield, and a broom-stick, well charged with puddle water, which he flourished with Quixotic effect as a sword. The shouts of the rabble, and the confusion of the challenger, may well be imagined; but the countryman, throwing himself into position, lustily defied the man of foils to come on. A sharp command to be gone with his nonsense, was all the notice which the other would vouchsafe; but the rustic insisted on having satisfaction, and so stubbornly did he persist in brandishing his broomstick, and opposing his cheese, that the gladiator, in a towering fury, at last drove at him desperately enough. The thrust was very coolly received in the soft and savoury shield of the countryman, who instantly repaid it by a dexterous daub with his broom, soaking the beard and whiskers of the swordsman with its odorous contents. A second and more furious pass at the rustic was parried with masterly skill and activity, and rewarded by another salute from the broomstick, which ludicrously besmeared the sword-player’s eyes; the crowd setting up a roar of merriment at his crest-fallen appearance. A third lunge was again spent upon the cheese, amid shouts of laughter; while the broomsman calmly mopped nose, eyes, and beard, of his antagonist’s puffing and blowing physiognomy. Entirely transported with rage and chagrin, the champion now dropped his rapier, and came at his ridiculous adversary with the broadsword. “Hold, hold, my good fellow,” cried Broomstick, “so far all’s fair play! but if that’s the game, have a care, for I shall certainly take your life.” At this, the confounded gladiator stood aghast, and staring at the absurd apparition before him, cried out, amid the jeers of the mob, “Who is it? there were but two in England that could match me! It must be Goffe, Whalley, or the Devil!” And so it proved, for it was Goffe.
In November, came out the Act of Indemnity, by which it appeared that Goffe and Whalley were not included in the amnesty which covered a multitude of sins. It was nevertheless far in February before the governor had entered upon even a formal inquiry of his council, as to what he should do with the fugitives; a formality which, empty as it was, must have occasioned their abrupt departure from Massachusetts. At Newhaven, a concentrated Puritanism seems to have offered them a much safer asylum;[41]and as a brother-in-law of Whalley’s had lately held a kind of pastoral dignity in that place, it is not improbable that they received pledges of protection, should they choose it for their city of refuge. One now goes from Boston to Newhaven, by railroad and steamer, in less than a day; but in those times it was very good travelling which brought them to their Alsatia in less than a fortnight. There they were received as saints and confessors; and Davenport, the strait-laced pastor of the colony, seems to have taken them under his especial patronage. He seems to have been a kind of provincial Hugh Peters, though he was not without his virtues: and there was far more fear of him before the eyes of the local authorities, than there was of King Charles and his Council. His Majesty was in fact completely browbeaten and discomfited, when his warrant was afterwards brought into collision with the will of this doughty little Pope: and to him the regicides owed it, that they finally died in America.
The government at home seems really to have been in earnest in the matter, and a royal command was not long in reaching Endicott, requiring him to do all his power for the arrest of the runaways. He seems to have been scared into something like obedience, and two zealous young royalists offering their services as pursuers, he was obliged to despatch them to Newhaven. So vigorouslydid these young men prosecute their errand, that but for the bustling fanaticism of Davenport, they would certainly have redeemed the honour of the colonies, and given their lordships at Westminster Hall the trouble of two more state trials. For its own sake, no one, indeed, can be sorry that such was not the result. But when one thinks how many curious details of history would have transpired on the trials of such prominent rebels, it seems a pity that they could not have been made serviceable in this way, and then set, with Prynne, to do penance among the old parchments in the Tower.
The governor of the Newhaven colony, one Leete, lived a few miles out of the town, but not far enough off to be out of the control of Davenport, whose spiritual drill had got him in good order for the expected encounter. That painstaking pastor had, moreover, felt it his duty to give no uncertain blast of preparation on his Sabbath-day trumpet, and had sounded forth his deep concern for the souls committed to his care, should they, by any temptation of the devil, be led to think it scriptural to obey the king and magistrate, instead of him, their conscience-keeper and dogmatist. With a skill in the application of holy writ, peculiar to the Hugh Peters’ school of divinity, he had laboriously pounded his cushion, in some thirty or forty illustrations of the following text from the prophet Isaiah: “Hide the outcasts, bewray not him that wandereth. Let mine outcasts dwell with thee, Moab! be thou a covert to them from the face of the spoiler.”[42]After this exposition, there was of course no dispute as to duty. The Pope is a deceiver, and Catholic Councils are lies; but when was a Puritan preacher ever doubted, by his followers, to be an oracle from heaven?
It was in vain that the loyal pursuers came to Newhaven, after the little general had thus got his forces prepared for the contest. Wellington, with the forest of Soignies behind him, at Waterloo, was not half so confident of wearing out Napoleon, as Davenport was of beating back King Charles the Second, in his presumptuous attempt to govern his Puritan colonies. Accordingly, when the pursuers waited on Governor Leete, they found his conscience peculiarly tender to the fact, that they were not provided with the original of his Majesty’s command, which he felt it his duty to see, before he could move in the business. He finally yielded so far, however, as to direct a warrant to certain catchpoles, requiring them to take the runaways, accompanying it, as it would seem, with assurances of affectionate condolence, should they happen to let the criminals, when captured, effect a violent escape. A preconcerted farce was enacted, to satisfy the forms of law, the bailiffs seizing the regicides, a mile or two from town, as they were making for East Rock; and they very sturdily defending themselves, till the officers had received bruises enough, to excuse their return without them. But after this pleasant little exercise, the regicides had an escape of a more really fortunate character, and quite in the style of King Charles Second’s Boscobel adventures. For while cooling themselves under a bridge, they discovered the young Bostonians galloping that way, and had only time to lie close, when a smart quadrupedal hexameter was thundered over their heads, as they lay peering up through the chinks of the bridge at their furious pursuers. No doubt the classic ear of Goffe, the Oxford Master of Arts, was singularly refreshed with the delightful prosody, which the retiring horse-hoofs still drummed on the dusty plain; but they seem to have been so seriously alarmed by their escape, that if they ever smiled again, they certainly had little cause for their good-humour; for that very day they took to the woods, and entered upon a long and wretched life of perpetual apprehension, from which death, in any shape, would have been, to better men, a comfortable relief. They immediately directed their course towards West Rock, where, with an old hatchet which they found in the forest, they built themselves a boothin a spot which is still called, from the circumstance, “Hatchet-Harbour.” Here they became acquainted with one Sperry, the woodman who finally fitted up the cave, and introduced them to their life in the rock.
It seems that on stormy days, and sometimes for mere change of air, the poor Troglodytes would come down the mountain, and stay a while with the woodman at his house. They had lived about a month in their cave, when such an excursion to the woodman’s had nearly cost them their liberty. The pursuers, meantime, had accomplished a wild-goose chase to New York, and had returned, after more perils and troubles than the regicides were worth. Somehow or other, they got scent of their game this time, and actually came upon them at Sperry’s before they had any notice of their approach. Fortune favouring them, however, they escaped by a back-door, and got up to their nest, without giving a glimpse of themselves to the pursuers, or even leaving any trace of their visit to favour a suspicion that they had recently been in Sperry’s protection. But Leete, who had received at last the original warrant, and thus was relieved of his scruples, seems to have been so alarmed about this time, that he sent word to the fugitives that they must hold themselves ready to surrender, if it should prove requisite for his own safety and that of the town. To the credit of the poor men, on receiving this notice, they came out of their cave like brave fellows, and went over to their cowardly protector, offering to give themselves up immediately.
Here the redoubtable Davenport again interfered, and though all the colony began to be of another opinion, he fairly drubbed the prudent Leete into a postponement of the time of surrender; and Goffe and Whalley were accordingly respited for a week, during which they lived in painful suspense, in the cellar of a neighbouring warehouse, supplied with food from the governor’s table, but never admitted to his presence. Meantime, the bustling pastor preached and exhorted, and stirred up all the important settlers to take his part against the timorous counsels of the governor, and finally succeeded in preventing the surrender altogether; and the fugitives went back to their cave, never again to show themselves openly before men, though their days were prolonged through half another lifetime.
It seems incredible that there was any real call for such singular caution, under the loose reign of Charles the Second: yet it is remarkable how timid they had become, and how long they supported their patient mousing in the dark. Nothing seems to have inspired them with confidence after this. The pursuers returned to Boston, and made an indignant report of the contempt with which his Majesty’s authority had been treated at Newhaven; all which had no other effect than to give colour to a formal declaration of the united colonies of New England, that an ineffectual though thorough search had been made. On this the hue-and-cry was suffered to stop; but the regicides still kept close, and shunned the light of day. Who would have believed that the lusty Goffe and Whalley, whose fierce files of musqueteers seemed once their very shadow, could have subsided into such decorous subjects, as to live for three lustres in the heart of a village, so quietly, that, save their feeder, not a soul ever saw or heard of them. Yet so it proved; for so much do circumstances make the difference between the anchorite and the revolutionist, and so possible is it for the same character to be very noisy and very still.
After two months more in the cave, they probably found it time to go into winter quarters, and accordingly shifted to a village a little westward of Newhaven, where one Tompkins received them into his cellar. There they managed to survive two years, during which their only recreation seems to have been, the sorry one of hearing a maid abuse them, as she sung an old royalist ballad over their heads. Even this was some relief to the monotony of their life in the cellar, and they would often get their attendant to set it agoing. The girl, delighted to find her voice in request, and little dreaming what an audience she had in the pit, would accordingly strike up with great effect, and fugueaway on the names of Goffe and Whalley, and their fellow Roundheads, another Wildrake. Perhaps the worthies in the cellar consoled themselves with recalling the palmy days, when the same song, trolled out on the night air from some royalist pothouse, had been their excuse for displaying their vigilant police, and putting under arrest any number of drunken malignants.
If they had any additional consolation, it seems to have been derived from an enthusiastic interpretation of Holy Writ, in which, after the manner of their religion, they saw their own peculiar history very minutely foreshadowed. They had heard of the sad end of Hugh Peters, and his confederates, which they were persuaded was the slaying of the two witnesses, predicted in the Apocalypse;[43]and they now looked in sure and certain hope for the year 1666, which they presumed would be marked by some great revolution, probably on account of its containing “the number of the Beast.”[44]But after two years in this cellar, there arrived in Boston certain royal commissioners, in fear of whom they again retreated to their cave, and stayed there two months, till the wild beast drove them away. About the same time, an Indian getting sight of their tracks, and finding their cave, with a bed in it, made such an ado about his discovery, that they were obliged to abandon Newhaven for ever. It is probable that Davenport now counselled their removal, and provided their retreat; for one Russell, the pastor of Hadley, a backwood settlement in Massachusetts, engaged to receive and lodge them; and thither they went by star-light marches, a distance of an hundred miles, through forests, where, if “there is a pleasure in the pathless woods,” they probably found it the only one in their journey. Rogues as they were, who can help pitying them, thus skulking along by night through an American wilderness, in terror of a king, three thousand miles away, who all the while was revelling with his harlots, and showing as little regard for the memory of his father as any regicide could desire.
At Hadley, pastor Russell received them into his kitchen, and then into a closet, from which, by a trap-door, they were let down into the cellar—there to live long years, and there to die, and there—one of them—to be buried, for a time. While dwelling in this cellar, poor Goffe kept a record of his daily life; and it is much to be regretted that this curious journal perished, at Boston, in the succeeding century, during the riots about the Stamp Act, in which several houses were burned. Scraps of it still exist, however, in copies; and enough is known of it, to prove that the exiles were kept in constant information of the progress of events in England; that Goffe corresponded with his wife, addressing her as his mother, and signing himself Walter Goldsmith; and that pastor Russell was supplied with remittances for their support. One leaf of the diary which, fortunately, was copied, is a mournful catalogue of the regicides, and their accomplices, all classed according to their fate, with some touching evidences of the melancholy humour in which the records had been set down. It is a table of sixty-nine as great rogues, or as deluded fanatics, as have left their names on the page of English history; but there they stand on Goffe’s list, a doleful registry indeed,
“Some slain in war,Some haunted by the ghosts they had deposed;”
but all noted by the wanderer as his friends, “faithful and just to him.” Twenty-six are marked as certainly dead; others, as condemned and in the Tower; some as fugitives, and some, as quietly surviving their ruin and disgrace. How dark must have been the past and the future alike, to men whose histories were told in such chronicles; but thus timorously from their “loop-hole of retreat,” did they look out on the Great Babel; and saw their cherished year of the Beast go by, and still no change; and then consoled themselves with hoping there was some slight error in the vulgar computation; and so hoped on against hope, and kept in secret their awfulmemories, and perchance with occasional misgivings of judgment to come, pondered them in their hearts.
At Hadley they had one remarkable visiter, from whom they probably learned much gloomy gossip about things at home. In 1665, John Dixwell joined them, having made his escape to the colonies with astonishing secrecy. He seems to have been a venturous fellow, who was far from willing to spend his days in a cellar, and accordingly he soon left them to their own company, and went, nobody knows where; but it is certain that in 1672 he appeared in Newhaven as Mr. James Davids, took a wife, and settled down with every sign of a determination to die in his bed. The first Mrs. Davids dying without issue, we find him, a few years after, married again, begetting children, and supporting the reputation of a grave citizen, who kept rather shy of his neighbours, and was fond of long prosy talks with his minister—the successor of Davenport, who seems to have rested from his labours. I wonder if those talks were so prosy! The good wife of the house, no doubt, supposed Mr. Davids and her husband engaged in edifying conclave upon the five points of Calvinism: but who does not envy that drowsy New England pastor the stories he heard of the great events of the Rebellion, from the lips of one who had himself been an actor therein! How often he filled his pipe, and puffed his pleasure, or laid it down at a more earnest moment, to hear the stirring anecdotes of Oliver; how he looked; how he spoke and commanded! What unwritten histories the pastor must have learned of Strafford,—of Laud,—of Pym pouncing on his quarry,—of how the narrator felt, when he sat as a regicide judge,—and of that right royal face which he had confronted without relenting, with all its combined expressions, of resignation and resolution, of kingly dignity and Christian submission.
Time went on, and the Hadley regicides wasted away in their cellar, while Dixwell thus flourished like a bay-tree in green old age. A letter from Goffe, to his “mother Goldsmith,” written in August, 1674, of which a copy is preserved, shows that years had been doing their work on the once bold and stalwart Whalley. “Your old friend Mr. R.,” he says, using the feigned initial, “is yet living, but continues in that weak condition. He is scarce capable of any rational discourse (his understanding, memory, and speech, doth so much fail him,) and seems not to take much notice of any thing ... and it’s a great mercy to him, that he hath a friend that takes pleasure in being helpful to him ... for though my help be but poor and weak, yet that ancient servant of Christ could not well subsist without it. The Lord help us to profit by all, and to wait with patience upon him, till we shall see what end he will make with us.”
Boys grew to be men, and little girls marriageable women, while they thus dwelt in the cellar; and the people of Hadley passed in and out of their pastor’s door, and doubled and trebled in number around his house, and not a soul dreamed that such inhabitants lived amongst them. This remarkable privacy accounts for the historical fact, given as a story in “Peveril of the Peak.”[45]It occurred during the war of King Philip, in 1675, the year following the date of Goffe’s letter, and when Whalley must have been far gone in his decline, so that he could not have been the hero, as is so dramatically asserted by Bridgenorth to Julian Peveril. It was a fast day among the settlers, who were imploring God for deliverance from an expected attack of the savages; and they were all assembled in their rude little meeting-house, around which sentinels were kept on patrol. The house of the pastor was only a few rods distant; and probably, through the miserable panes that let in all the sun-light of their cellar, Goffe watched the invasion of the Indians, and all the horrors of the fight, till the fires of Dunbar began to burn again in his old veins, and, overcoming his usual caution, sent him forth to his last achievement in thisworld, and perhaps his best. On a sudden, as the settlers were giving up all for lost, and about to submit to a general massacre, a strange apparition was seen among them exhorting them to rally in the name of God. An old man, with long white locks, and of unusual attire, led the last assault with the most daring bravery. Not doubting that it was an angel of God, they followed up his blows, and in a short time repulsed the savages; but their deliverer was gone. No clue or trace could be found of his coming or going. He was to them as Melchisedek, “without beginning of life, or end of days;” and their confirmed superstition that the Lord had sent his angel in answer to their prayers, though quite in accordance with their enthusiasm, was doubtless not a little encouraged by the wily pastor himself, as an innocent means of preventing troublesome inquiries. In many parts of New England it was long regarded as a miracle, and the final disclosure of the secret has spoiled the mystery of a genuine old wives’ tale.
About three years after this, Whalley gave his soul to God, and was temporarily buried in the cellar, where he had lived a death-in-life of fourteen years. Russell was now in a great fright, and with good reason, for a new crown officer was at work in New England, with a zealous determination to bring all offenders to justice, and if not the offenders themselves, then somebody instead of them. Edward Randolph, who has left a judge Jeffreys’ reputation in America to this day, was a Jehu for the government, and his feelings towards the regicides are well touched off by Southey, in the words put into his mouth in “Oliver Newman:”—
“Fifteen years,They have hid among them the two regicides,Shifting from den to cover, as we foundWhere the scent lay. But, earth them as they will,I shall unkennel them, and from their holesDrag them to light and justice.”
Alarmed by the energetic measures of such a man, Goffe, who was now released from his personal attentions to his friend, appears to have departed from Hadley for a time; while Russell gave currency to a report, that when last seen, he was on his way towards Virginia. It was soon added, that he had been actually recognised in New York, in a farmer’s attire, selling cabbages; but he probably went no further than Newhaven, where he would naturally visit Dixwell, and so returned to Hadley, whence his last letter bears date, 1679, and where he undoubtedly died the following year.
How the two bodies ever got to Newhaven has long been the puzzle. It seems that Russell buried Goffe at first in a grave, dug partly on his own premises, and partly on those adjoining, intending by this stratagem to justify himself, should he ever be forced to deny that the bones were in his garden. But, in the years 1680 and 1684, Randolph’s fury being at its height, he probably dug up the remains of both the regicides, and sent them to Newhaven, where they were interred secretly by Dixwell and the common gravedigger of the place. Some suppose, indeed, that they were not removed till the sad results of the Duke of Monmouth’s rebellion had put the colonists in terror of the inexorable Jeffreys. The fate of Lady Alicia Lisle,—herself the widow of a regicide,—who had suffered for concealing two of the Duke’s followers, may very naturally have alarmed the prudent Russell, and led him to remove all traces of his share in harbouring Goffe and Whalley. His friendship for two “unjust judges” seems to have led him to dread the acquaintance of a third. As for Dixwell, he lived on in Newhaven, maintaining the character of Mr. James Davids with great respectability, and so quietly, that Randolph seems never to have suspected that a third regicide was hiding in America. He had one narrow escape, nevertheless, from another zealous partisan of the crown, quite as lynx-eyed, and even more notorious in American history. In 1686, Sir Edmund Andross paid a visit to Newhaven, and was present at the public worship of the inhabitants, when James Davids did not fail to be in his usual place, nor by his dignity of person and demeanour to attract the special notice of Sir Edmund, who probably began to thinkhe had got scent of Goffe himself. After the solemnities were over, he made very particular inquiries as to the remarkable-looking worshipper, but suffered himself to be diverted from more searching measures, by the natural and unstudied description which he received of Mr. Davids and his interesting family. It was well that they could answer so unaffectedly, for Andross was ready to pick a quarrel with them, conceiving himself to have received a great affront at the religious exercise which he had honoured with his presence. It seems the clerk had felt it his duty to select a psalm not incapable of a double application, and which accordingly had hit Sir Edmund in a tender part, by singing “to the praise and glory of God” the somewhat insinuating stave—
“Why dost thou, tyrant, boast abroad,Thy wicked works to praise.”
After this, though for forty years the righteous blood of a murdered king had been crying against him, Dixwell’s hoar hairs were suffered to come to the grave in a peace he had denied to others, in 1688. Meantime, that king had lain in his cerements at Windsor, “taken away from the evil to come,” and undisturbed alike by the malice that pursued his name, and the far more grievous contempt that fell on his martyr-memory from the conduct of his two sons, false as they were to his honour, recreant to his pure example, and apostate to the holy faith for which he died. Such sons had at last accomplished for the house of Stuart that ruin which other enemies had, in vain, endeavoured; and two weeks after James Davids was laid in his grave, came news which was almost enough to wake him from the dead. “The glorious Revolution,” as it is called, was a “crowning mercy” to the colonies; and the friends of the late regicide now boldly produced his will, and submitted it to Probate. It devised to his heirs a considerable estate in England, and described his own style and title as “John Dixwell,aliasJames Davids, of the Priory of Folkestone, in the county of Kent, Esquire.”
After my visit to West Rock, I went in the early twilight to the graves of the three regicides. I found them in the rear of one of the meeting-houses, in the square, very near together, and scarcely noticeable in the grass. They are each marked by rough blocks of stone, having one face a little smoothed, and rudely lettered. Dixwell’s tomb-stone is far better than the others, and bears the fullest and most legible inscription. It is possibly a little more than two feet high, of a red sand-stone, quite thick and heavy, and reads thus:—“I. D. Esq., deceased March ye18th, in ye82dyear of his age, 1688-9.” To make any thing of Whalley’s memorial, I was obliged to stoop down to it, and examine it very closely. I copied it, head and foot, into my tablets, nor did I notice, at the time, any peculiarity, but took down the inscription, as I supposed correctly, “1658, E. W.” While I was busy about this, there came along one of the students, escorting a young lady, who bending down to the headstone of Goffe’s grave, examined it a few minutes attentively, and then started up, and went away with her happy protector, exclaiming, “I must leave it to Old Mortality, for I can see nothing at all.” I found it as she had said, and left it without any better satisfaction; but, during the evening, happening to mention these facts, I was shown a drawing of both Goffe’s and Whalley’s memorials; by help of which, on repeating my visit early next morning, I observed the very curious marks which give them additional interest. Looking more carefully at Whalley’s headstone, one observes a 7 strongly blended with the 5, in the date which I had copied; so that it may be read as I had taken it, or it may be read 1678, the true date of Whalley’s demise. This same cipher is repeated on the footstone, and is evidently intentional. Nor is the grave of Goffe less curious. The stone is at first read, “M. G. 80;” but, looking closer, you discover a superfluous line cut under the M, to hint that it must not be taken for what it seems. It is in fact a W reversed, and the whole means, “W. G. 1680;” the true initials, and date of death of William Goffe. If Dixwell was not himself the engraver of these rude devices, he doubtless contrived them; and they have well accomplished their purpose, of avoiding detection in theirown day, and attracting notice in ours.
There was something that touched me, in spite of myself, in thus standing by these rude graves, and surveying the last relicts of men born far away in happy English homes, who once made a figure among the great men, and were numbered with the lawful senators of a free and prosperous state! I own that, for a moment, I checked my impulses of pity, and thought whether it would not be virtuous to imitate the Jews in Palestine, who, to this day, throw a pebble at Absalom’s pillar, as they pass it in the King’s Dale, to show their horror of the rebel’s unnatural crime. But I finally concluded that it was better to be a Christian in my hate, as well as in my love, and to take no worse revenge than to recite, over the ashes of the regicides, that sweet prayer for the 30th of January, which magnifies God, for the grace given to the royal martyr, “by which he was enabled, in a constant meek suffering of all barbarous indignities, to resist unto blood, and then, according to the Saviour’s pattern, to pray for his murderers.”
Two hundred years have gone, well-nigh, and those mean graves continue in their dishonour, while the monarchy which their occupants once supposed they had destroyed, is as unshaken as ever. Nor must it be unnoticed, that the church which they thought to pluck up, root and branch, has borne a healthful daughter, that chaunts her venerable service in another hemisphere, and so near these very graves that the bones of Goffe and Whalley must fairly shake at Christmas, when the organ swells, hard-by, with the voices of thronging worshippers, who still keep “the superstitious time of the Nativity,” even in the Puritans’ own land and city. What a conclusion to so much crime and bloodshed! Such a sepulture—thought I,—instead of a green little barrow, in some quiet churchyard of England, “fast by their fathers’ graves!” Had these poor men been contented with peace and loyalty, such graves they might have found, under the eaves of the same parish church that registered their christening; the very bells tolling for their funeral, that pealed when they took their brides. How much better the “village Hampden,” than the wide-world’s Whalley; and how enviable the uncouth rhyme, and the yeoman’s honest name, on the stone that loving hands have set, compared with these coward initials, and memorials that skulk in the grass!
Sta, viator,judicemcalcas!
A judge, before whose unblenching face the sacred majesty of England once stood upon deliverance, and awaited the stern issues of life and death; anunjust judge, who, for daring to sit in judgment, must yet come forth from this obscure grave, and give answer unto Him who is judge of quick and dead.