An edition by Ethan T. Jordan for Early American Literature (Spring 2006). This is number 5 in the series. This post contains the full text of this edition, which is also available in a more elegant PDF format.
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Thomas Hutchinson and Ezra Stiles on the Regicides (1764, 1794)
Ethan T. Jordan, Early American Literature, Dr. Jon Miller, Spring 2006
Thomas Hutchinson, “The Regicides in New England," from The History of Massachusetts-Bay (1764)
and
Ezra Stiles, “Anecdotes of the Three Judges," from History of Three of the Judges of King Charles I (1794)
Introduction
King Charles I of England was executed in 1649, condemned to die at the hands of a group of 59 commissioners or judges. After Charles II returned to England at the start of the Restoration in May 1660, these judges became traitors, and of the 59 who signed the death warrant of Charles I, twenty-nine were sentenced to death. At least ten of these judges were hanged, drawn, and quartered while the rest received sentences of life imprisonment. Three men escaped their fate by fleeing to the New World: William Goffe, Edward Whalley, and John Dixwell, who later became known as “the regicides.” Goffe and Whalley left together for Boston on May 13, 1660, only one day before their arrests were ordered by the House of Commons. This call for the arrests of the regicides was due to the King’s Act of Indemnity and Oblivion (essentially, pardons for the King’s favorites and death sentences for his enemies). Whalley and Goffe fled to Boston, moving from place to place with the help of a network of friends in the New World. The legend of the regicides is shrouded in mystery, and Goffe in particular became a legendary figure after supposedly warning a village in Massachusetts about an impending Algonkian attack, dubbing him the “Angel of Hadley” (Sargent 431).[note 1]
The incident at Hadley, Massachusetts took place on September 1, 1675, and it is the most frequently related element of the regicide legend. While some historians have tried to disprove the Hadley incident (it was recorded as an anecdote from Governor Leverett almost ninety years after it took place), Douglas C. Wilson, in “Web of Secrecy: Goffe, Whalley, and the Legend of Hadley,” demonstrates how the complicated communication network between England and America served to keep the incident hazy; the regicides wanted to be seen as “angels” or “ghosts” in the historical record to avoid execution. The regicides were sheltered in Hadley for over ten years, even while the penalty for harboring them was “the same as that for treason itself: the guilty could be hanged, cut down while still alive and disemboweled, then beheaded and quartered” (Wilson 528). Goffe and Whalley’s network of friends in America included ministers, such as John Davenport, who preached on a biblical text regarding “outcasts” in order to prepare his congregation for the regicides who would be among them: “hide the outcasts, bewray not him that wandereth. Let mine outcasts dwell with thee” (anecdote 5 of the Stiles text).
The legend of Hadley comes to us from two works, Thomas Hutchinson’s The History of Massachusetts-Bay (1764) and Ezra Stiles’ History of Three of the Judges of King Charles I (1794), both of which include tales of the regicides and their adventures. Robert M. Calhoon’s entry in the American National Biography Online provides information about Thomas Hutchinson’s biography, noting that he was an admirer of Charles I, even as a child, when he began reading history. He became a member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives in 1737, and he eventually found himself an “ally of the Crown,” although he did so merely to defend the “interests” of Massachusetts as a colonial governor. Hutchinson later helped draft the Albany plan of union with Benjamin Franklin. He defended the Stamp Act, and his home was destroyed by colonists as a result. Hutchinson’s policies during the start of the Revolution were, according to Calhoon, established in order to “allow the British to reassert their authority, to stun the Massachusetts populace into ending its turbulent, self-destructive conduct, and to then usher in a period of healing, negotiation, and finally reconciliation” (ANB Online). After the uprisings and events from 1770-1776 (The Boston Massacre and the Boston Tea Party, for instance), Hutchinson was called to London and exiled from the colonies. He died in London. Calhoon describes Hutchinson’s resentment towards the colonies as akin to the “irritation of a proud and possessive father with a beloved but wayward child who fails to do him credit in high places” (ANB Online).
Stiles and Hutchinson knew of each other’s works in progress, but the two took very different paths in portraying the regicides, as Mark L. Sargent notes in “Thomas Hutchinson, Ezra Stiles, and the Legend of the Regicides”: “Determined to quell resistance to king, Parliament, and his own authority, Hutchinson fashioned a lesson in obedience out of the history of the fugitives and the strange tale of Goffe’s intervention at Hadley” (435). In his biography of Hutchinson, Bernard Bailyn even conjectured that Hutchinson wrote the History of Massachusetts-Bay in order to clear himself of charges that he was a traitor and caused the Revolution, as a form of apology for his administration (17). In terms of style, the book demonstrates how Hutchinson’s language can be difficult to read, leading Ezra Stiles to note that the History is written with the “cautiousness in character and motives” that characterizes Hutchinson himself (qtd. in Bailyn 17). He avoids descriptive, detailed language, uses few figures of speech, and writes in complicated sentence structures built to avoid forcefulness. His milieu was “understatement,” and he once described soberly that his temper “does not incline to enthusiasm” (qtd. in Bailyn 17). The emphasis in the History is on sobriety and neutrality. Hutchinson later suffered a nervous breakdown, which many have conjectured as being a result of this cautious nature. He is said to have made constant revisions to his letters, and as Hutchinson biographer William Pencak says, “by literally worrying himself sick over what to say, when, and to whom, he could increase his sense of suffering and alienation, and ensure that he would, in fact, be poorly understood” (16). In essence, Hutchinson wanted to appear as prudent as possible by showing diligence and care in his writing.
Hutchinson’s telling of the regicide legend is seen as a short historical piece, and his acquaintance Ezra Stiles is accused of merely dressing up Hutchinson’s tale for his own purposes. Sargent notes, however, that Stiles’s piece “should not be dismissed as a clumsy retelling of Hutchinson’s tale, for it is, in large measure, a rebuttal to Hutchinson’s indictment of the judges,” placing them instead as “martyrs of freedom” (433). Ezra Stiles was born in 1727 in North Haven, Connecticut. After receiving his master’s degree from Yale and becoming a minister, Stiles eventually became the president of Yale University, bringing what Stiles biographer Edmund S. Morgan describes in his ANB Online entry as “badly needed political, financial, and intellectual success.” He was a copious note taker, writing “in diaries and notebooks and on scraps of paper, which he preserved in extraordinary quantities” (ANB Online). Morgan also notes Stiles’ stance on the issue of independence and regicide, particularly as a result of the French Revolution, which “confirmed his confidence that old tyrannies could not stand before the freedom unleashed by American independence.” He also opposed Charles I. As Morgan writes, “he had identified himself with the seventeenth-century Puritans who had resisted the efforts of Charles I and Archbishop Laud to dictate their religion.” Stiles approved of the regicide during the French Revolution: “When the French did to their king what the English had done to Charles I, many Americans were shocked, but Stiles wrote passionately in defense of regicide and declared his conviction that the ‘common people will generally judge right, when duly informed. The general liberty is safe and secure in their hands’” (ANB Online). In The Gentle Puritan: A Life of Ezra Stiles, 1727-1795, Morgan notes that Stiles felt a degree of sympathy for the regicides: “They were, after all, the protagonists in the most daring action that the old Puritans undertook” (458). Stiles is said to have stopped frequently at the grave of John Dixwell. A proposal to erect a monument to the regicides was apparently taken seriously by Stiles, who “was enthusiastic at the proposal and at once began to prepare plans for the monument, which would proclaim at large the right of a people to judge their king” (Morgan, The Gentle Puritan 458).
The History of the Three Judges of King Charles I began as Stiles was attempting to write the inscription for this regicide monument. In The Gentle Puritan Morgan describes the work as “Stiles at his worst . . . a tedious hodgepodge of fact and fancy, compounded mainly out of dim recollections by old men and women of things their grandfathers had told them fifty years before” (458). The close of the History contains a lengthy polemic defending the execution of tyrannical monarchs, such as Louis XVI and Charles I, which is described by Morgan as “the finest thing that Stiles ever wrote” (The Gentle Puritan 459). The piece celebrates liberty and democracy, the importance of free assembly, and the responsibility of the people to overthrow governments that oppress them, but it was hidden “by publishing it at the close of his bewildering historical memoirs of the judges” (Morgan, The Gentle Puritan 460).
Stiles’s treatment of the regicide legend provided much of the groundwork for later Romantic works that involved regicide judges. While Hutchinson‘s account viewed the judges with great contempt, Stiles gives Goffe the heroic label of “angel.” These pieces have endured due to their importance to later American Romantic literature. The stories of the regicides appeared in a number of Romantic works, as the regicides became symbols of the American spirit: shoving off the monarchy in favor of independence and freedom. Hawthorne scholar G. Harrison Orians mentions in “The Angel of Hadley in Fiction: A Study of the Sources of Hawthorne’s ‘The Gray Champion’” that one of the largest sources for romantic writing in America was early colonial history, and that the history of the regicides in New England, especially the “Angel of Hadley” tale, was particularly poignant for romantic writers. The legend did not come into American fiction until British writer Sir Walter Scott used the tale in Peveril of the Peak in 1823. The prominence of the episode in American romances is demonstrated in a fact related by Douglas C. Wilson: “Between 1820 and 1850 a regicide judge appeared in eight—a full third—of the two dozen romances that were written in America about the American Puritans” (516). After Hutchinson and Stiles, the Hadley episode was recounted in a number of historical works, such as Timothy Dwight’s Travels in New England and New York and Increase Mather’s The History of Philip’s War. It did not take long for fiction writers to catch up, as Orians relates: “subsequent to its first use by Scott, in 1822, it became a minor feature in fiction for over thirty years. With the exception of H.W. Herbert’s Ruth Whalley, however, and short tales by Bacon and Stone, attention in such fictional enlargements was focused on the picturesque episode of the Angel of Hadley” (260). Scott’s tale also seems to have provided some of the language for Hawthorne’s title, “The Gray Champion,” as Peveril of the Peak often describes the stranger as “an inspired champion” and that he had a gray beard and gray eyes (Orians 263). James Fenimore Cooper also dealt with the regicide theme, changing it to suit his more epic and romantic concerns. As Orians notes, “Cooper really linked the attack of Hadley (called Wish-ton-Wish) with the events of King Philip’s War, thus transforming it from a minor episode to an event of major importance, and joined the regicide and the Narragansett chieftain in sympathetic understanding” (266).
Another Hawthorne scholar, Michael Davitt Bell, describes in Hawthorne and the Historical Romance of New England how the regicide became “something of a staple legendary figure” in the fiction of New England during the period, as it appeared in works by James McHenry, Delia Bacon, William Henry Herbert, William Lee Stone, and James Kirk Paulding, among others (27, 28). The “regicide tradition” involves their signing of the death warrant, the subsequent flight to Massachusetts, their pursuit by royal agents Thomas Kirk and Thomas Kellond, their hiding in the “Judges’ Cave” in Connecticut, and the attack on Hadley by Native Americans during King Philip’s War (Bell 28). In Sir Walter Scott’s work, the character Major Bridgenorth “disapproves of the execution of King Charles, but he admires the stern nobility of the regicide, a nobility apparently lacking in present-day Restoration England” (29); the regicide is thus set in contrast to British decadence and frivolity. In a work by James Kirk Paulding, entitled The Puritan and His Daughter, the regicide is once again seen as wise and sage, “another form of the conventional founding father . . . representative of a fiercer, nobler, and manlier age” (Bell 30). However, Michael Davitt Bell notes that this apparent and seemingly inherent nobility was not the central reason for the use of the regicide figure in fiction of the time. The figure was used as a symbol of revolution primarily because the regicide deposed the King, the ultimate act of revolution. In The Witch of New England (1824) and The Regicides (1831), the government is in a state of turmoil under tyrannical rule. Bell also makes an important distinction in showing that the regicides are distinctly old, usually the fathers or grandfathers of the protagonists in the stories, and therefore demonstrate a fusing of the old world with the new: “The prophetic voice of the regicide speaks not from the approaching future but from the vanishing past” (33). Cooper and Hawthorne are the most famous figures to develop the regicide in fiction, and the qualities that impelled Romantics to use it were, as Douglas C. Wilson describes, “antiquity, national spirit, and individualism; and Stiles’s embellishment of the story added another attractive element, the supernatural” (517). Thus, while Hutchinson’s The History of Massachusetts-Bay and Stiles’ History of Three of the Judges of King Charles I are not considered great literary works (or historical ones), they are nonetheless important for their impact on the Romantics and their fiction. The symbolic figure of the regicide judge perhaps had even greater impact than Whalley, Goffe, or Dixwell could have imagined.
A Note on the Texts
The texts in this edition are reproduced from A Library of American Literature: From the Earliest Settlement to the Present Time. Comp. and Ed. Edmund Clarence Stedman and Ellen Mackay Hutchinson. Vol. III. New York: Webster, 1891. Hutchinson’s text is taken from the 3rd edition (1795) of The History of Massachusetts-Bay, and is found on pages 50-54 of the volume. Stiles’ text is taken from the original 1794 edition of History of Three of the Judges of King Charles I and can be found on pages 118-121 of the same work. The texts have been edited as noted.
Works Cited
Bailyn, Bernard. The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press, 1974.
Bell, Michael Davitt. Hawthorne and the Historical Romance of New England. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton UP, 1971.
Calhoon, Robert M. “Hutchinson, Thomas.” American National Biography Online Feb. 2000. 3 January 2006. <http://www.anb.org/articles/01/01-00438.html>.
Morgan, Edmund S. “Stiles, Ezra.” American National Biography Online Feb. 2000. 3 January 2006 <http://www.anb.org/articles/01/01-00857.html>.
Morgan, Edmund S. The Gentle Puritan: A Life of Ezra Stiles, 1727-1795. New York: Norton, 1962.
Orians, G. Harrison. “The Angel of Hadley in Fiction: A Study of the Sources of Hawthorne’s ‘The Gray Champion.’” American Literature 4.3 (1932): 257-269.
Pencak, William. America’s Burke: The Mind of Thomas Hutchinson. Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, 1982.
Rowse, A. L. The Regicides and the Puritan Revolution. London: Duckworth, 1994.
Sargent, Mark L. “Thomas Hutchinson, Ezra Stiles, and the Legend of the Regicides.” William & Mary Quarterly 49.3 (1992): 431-448.
Welles, Lemuel Aiken. The regicides in Connecticut. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale UP, 1935.
Wilson, Douglas C. “Web of Secrecy: Goffe, Whalley, and the Legend of Hadley.” New England Quarterly LX (1987): 515-548.
Thomas Hutchinson, “The Regicides in New England” (1764)
In the ship which arrived from London the 27th of July, there came passengers, Col. Whalley [note 2] and Col. Goffe, two of the late King’s judges. Col. Goffe brought testimonials from Mr. John Rowe and Mr. Seth Wood, two ministers of a church in Westminster. Col. Whalley had been a member of Mr. Thomas Goodwin’s church. Goffe kept a journal or diary from the day he left Westminster, May 4, until the year 1667, which, together with several other papers belonging to him, I have in my possession. Almost the whole is in characters or shorthand, not very difficult to decipher. The story of these persons has never yet been published in the world. It has never been known in New England. Their papers after their death were collected, and have remained near an hundred years in a library in Boston. It must give some entertainment to the curious. They left London before the King was proclaimed. It does not appear that they were among the most obnoxious of the judges; but as it was expected vengeance would be taken of some of them, and a great many had fled, they did not think it safe to remain. They did not attempt to conceal their persons or characters when they arrived at Boston, but immediately went to the governor, Mr. Endicott, who received them very courteously. They were visited by the principal persons of the town, and among others they take notice of Col. Crown’s coming to see them. He was a noted royalist. Although they did not disguise themselves, yet they chose to reside at Cambridge, a village about four miles distant from the town, where they went the first day they arrived. They went publicly to meetings on the Lord’s days, and to occasional lectures, fasts and thanksgivings, and were admitted to the sacrament, and attended private meetings for devotion, visited many of the principal towns, and were frequently at Boston, and once when insulted there the person insulting them was bound to his good behavior. They appeared grave, serious and devout, and the rank they had sustained commanded respect. Whalley had been one of Cromwell’s lieutenant-generals, and Goffe a major-general. It is not strange that they should meet with this favorable reception, nor was this reception any contempt of the authority in England. They were known to have been two of the King’s judges; but King Charles the Second was not proclaimed when the ship that brought them left London; they had the news of it in the channel. The reports afterward by way of Barbados were that all the judges would be pardoned but seven. The act of indemnity was not brought over until the last of November. When it appeared that they were not excepted, some of the principal persons in the government were alarmed; pity and compassion prevailed with others. They had assurances from some that belonged to the general court that they would stand by them, but were advised by others to think of removing.
The 22d of February the governor summoned a court of assistants to consult about securing them, but the court did not agree to it. Finding it unsafe to remain any longer, they left Cambridge the 26th following, and arrived at New Haven the 7th of March. One Capt. Breedan, who had seen them at Boston, gave information thereof upon his arrival in England. A few days after their removal, an hue-and-cry, as they term it in their diary, was brought by the way of Barbados; and thereupon a warrant to secure [note 3] them issued, the 8th of March, from the governor and assistants, which was sent to Springfield and the other towns in the western parts of the colony; but they were beyond the reach of it.
They were well treated at New Haven by the ministers and some of the magistrates, and for some days seemed to apprehend themselves out of danger. But the news of the King’s proclamation being brought to New Haven, they were obliged to abscond. The 27th of March they removed to Milford, and appeared there in the daytime, and made themselves known; but at night returned privately to New Haven, and lay concealed in Mr. Davenport the minister’s house, until the 30th of April. About that time news came to Boston that ten of the judges were executed; and the governor received a royal mandate, dated March 5, 1660, to cause Whalley and Goffe to be secured. This greatly alarmed the country, and there is no doubt that the court were now in earnest in their endeavors to apprehend them; and, to avoid all suspicion, they gave commission and instructions to two young merchants from England, Thomas Kellond and Thomas Kirk, zealous royalists, to go through the colonies as far as Manhadoes [note 4] in search of them. They had friends who informed them what was doing, and they removed from Mr. Davenport’s to the house of one Jones, where they lay hid until the 11th of May and then removed to a mill, and from thence on the 13th into the woods, where they met Jones and two of his companions, Sperry and Burrill, who first conducted them to a place called Hatchet harbor where they lay two nights until a cave or hole in the side of a hill was prepared to conceal them. This hill they called Providence hill, and there they continued from the 15th of May to the 11th of June, sometimes in the cave, and in very tempestuous weather in a house near to it.
During this time the messengers went through New Haven to the Dutch settlement, from whence they returned to Boston by water. They made diligent search, and had full proof that the regicides had been seen at Mr. Davenport’s, and offered great rewards to English and Indians who should give information that they might be taken; but by the fidelity of their three friends, they remained undiscovered. Mr. Davenport was threatened with being called to an account for concealing and comforting traitors, and might well be alarmed. They had engaged to surrender, rather than the country or any particular persons should suffer upon their account; and upon intimation of Mr. Davenport’s danger, they generously resolved to go to New Haven, and deliver themselves up to the authority there. The miseries they had suffered and were still exposed to, and the little chance they had of finally escaping, in a country where every stranger is immediately known to be such, would not have been sufficient to have induced them. They let the deputy governor, Mr. Leete, know where they were, but he took no measures to secure them, and the next day some persons came to them to advise them not to surrender. Having publicly shown themselves at New Haven, they had cleared Mr. Davenport from the suspicion of still concealing them, and the 24th of June went into the woods again to their cave, until the 19th of August, when the search for them being pretty well over, they ventured to the house of one Tomkins near Milford, where they remained two years, without so much as going into the orchard.
After that, they took a little more liberty, and made themselves known to several persons in whom they could confide; and each of them frequently prayed and also exercised, as they term it, or preached, at private meetings in their chamber. In 1664 the commissioners from King Charles arrived at Boston. Upon the news of it, they retired to their cave, where they tarried eight or ten days. Soon after, some Indians in their hunting discovered the cave with the bed, etc., and the report being spread abroad, it was not safe to remain near it. On the 13th of October, 1664, they removed to Hadley, near an hundred miles distant, travelling only by night, where Mr. Russell, the minister of the place, had previously agreed to receive them. Here they remained concealed fifteen or sixteen years, very few persons in the colony being privy to it. The last account of Goffe is from a letter, dated Ebenezer (the name they gave their several places of abode), April 2d, 1679. Whalley had been dead some time before. The tradition at Hadley is, that two persons unknown were buried in the minister’s cellar. The minister was no sufferer by his boarders. They received more or less remittances every year, for many years together, from their wives in England. Those few persons who knew where they were made them frequent presents. Richard Saltonstall, Esq., who was in the secret, when he left the country and went to England in 1672, made them a present of fifty pounds at his departure; and they take notice of donations from several other friends.
They were in constant terror, though they had reason to hope, after some years, that the inquiry for them was over. They read with pleasure the news of their being killed with other judges in Switzerland. Their diary for six or seven years contains every little occurrence in the town, church and particular families in the neighborhood. These were small affairs. They had indeed for a few years of their lives been among the principal actors in the great affairs of the nation, Goffe especially, who turned the members of the little parliament out of the house, and who was attached to Oliver and to Richard to the last; but they were both of low birth and education. They had very constant and exact intelligence of everything which passed in England, and were unwilling to give up all hopes of deliverance. Their greatest expectations were from the fulfillment of the prophecies. They had no doubt that the execution of the judges was the slaying of the witnesses. They were much disappointed when the year 1666 had passed without any remarkable event, but flattered themselves that the Christian era might be erroneous. Their lives were miserable and constant burdens. They complain of being banished from all human society. A letter from Goffe’s wife, who was Whalley’s daughter, I think worth preserving. After the second year, Goffe writes by the name of Walter Goldsmith, and she of Frances Goldsmith, and the correspondence is carried on as between a mother and son. There is too much religion in their letters for the taste of the present day; but the distresses of two persons under these peculiar circumstances, who appear to have lived very happily together, are very strongly described.
Whilst they were at Hadley (February 10th, 1664) Dixwell, another of the judges, came to them; but from whence, or in what part of America he first landed, is not known [note 5]. The first mention of him in their journal is by the name of Col. Dixwell, but ever after they call him Mr. Davids. He continued some years at Hadley, and then removed to New Haven. He was generally supposed to have been one of those who were obnoxious in England, but he never discovered who he was until he was on his death-bed. I have one of his letters, signed James Davids, dated March 23d, 1683. He married at New Haven, and left several children. After his death, his son, who before had been called Davids, took the name of Dixwell, came to Boston, and lived in good repute; was a ruling elder of one of the churches there, and died in 1721 of the small-pox by inoculation. Some of his grandchildren are now living. Col. Dixwell was buried at New Haven. His gravestone still remains, with this inscription: “J.D. Esq., deceased March 18th, in the 82d year of his age, 1688.”
It cannot be denied that many of the principal persons in the colony greatly esteemed these persons, for their professions of piety and their grave deportment, who did not approve of their political conduct. Mr. Mitchell, the minister of Cambridge, who showed them great friendship upon their first arrival, says, in a manuscript which he wrote in his own vindication, “Since I have had opportunity by reading and discourse to look a little into that action for which these men suffer, I could never see that it was justifiable.” After they were declared traitors, they certainly would have been sent to England if they could have been taken. It was generally thought they had left the country; and even the consequence of their escape was dreaded, lest when they were taken those who had harbored them should suffer for it. Mr. Endicott, the governor, writes to the Earl of Manchester, that he supposes they went toward the Dutch at Manhadoes, and took shipping for Holland; and Mr. Bradstreet, the then governor, in December, 1684, writes to Edward Randolph, “that after their being at New Haven he could never hear what became of them.” Randolph, who was sent to search into the secrets of the government, could obtain no more knowledge of them than that they had been in the country, and respect had been shown them by some of the magistrates. I am loath to omit an anecdote handed down through Governor Leveret’s family. I find Goffe takes notice in his journal of Leveret’s being at Hadley. The town of Hadley was alarmed by the Indians in 1675, in the time of public worship, and the people were in the utmost confusion. Suddenly a grave, elderly person appeared in the midst of them. In his mien and dress he differed from the rest of the people. He not only encouraged them to defend themselves, but put himself at their head, rallied, instructed and led them on to encounter the enemy, who by this means were repulsed. As suddenly the deliverer of Hadley disappeared. The people were left in consternation, utterly unable to account for this strange phenomenon. It is not probable that they were ever able to explain it. If Goffe had been then discovered, it must have come to the knowledge of those persons, who declare by their letters that they never knew what became of him. [note 6]
Ezra Stiles, “Anecdotes of the Three Judges” (1794)
Among the traditionary anecdotes and stories concerning events which took place at and about the time the pursuers were at New Haven, are the following:
1. The day they were expected, the Judges walked out toward the neck-bridge, the road the pursuers must enter the town. At some distance, the Sheriff or Marshal, who then was Mr. Kimberly, overtook them with a warrant to apprehend them, and endeavored to take them. But the Judges stood upon their defence, and placing themselves behind a tree, and being expert at fencing, defended themselves with their cudgels, and repelled the officer; who went back to town to command help, and returned with aid, but found the Judges had escaped, having absconded into the woods with which the town was then surrounded.
2. That immediately after this, on the same day, the Judges hid themselves under the bridge, one mile from town, and lay there concealed under the bridge while the pursuivants [note 7] rode over it and passed into town; and that the Judges returned that night into town, and lodged at Mr. Jones’s. All this, tradition says, was a reconverted and contrived business, to show that the magistrates at New Haven had used their endeavors to apprehend them before the arrival of the pursuers.
3. That on a time when the pursuers were searching the town, the Judges, when shifting their situations, happened, by accident or design, at the house of a Mrs. Eyers, a respectable and comely lady; she, seeing the pursuivants coming, ushered her guests out at the back door, who, walking out a little ways, instantly returned to the house, and were hid and concealed by her in the apartments. The pursuers coming in, inquired whether the regicides were at her house? She answered, they had been there, but were just gone away, and pointed out the way they went into the fields and woods, and by her artful and polite address she diverted them, put them upon a false scent, and secured her friends. It is rather probable that this happened the next day after their coming to town; and that they then left the town, having shown themselves not to be concealed in Mr. Davenport’s, and went into the woods to the mill, two miles off, whither they had retired on the 11th of May. . . . .
5. About the time the pursuers came to New Haven, and perhaps a little before, and to prepare the minds of the people for their reception, the Reverend Mr. Davenport preached publicly from this text (Isa. xvi. 3, 4,): “Take counsel, execute judgment, make thy shadow as the night in the midst of the noonday; 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.”
This doubtless had its effect, and put the whole town upon their guard, and united them in caution and concealment. . . . .
6. To show the dexterity of the Judges at fencing, this story is told: That while at Boston, there appeared a gallant person there, some say a fencing-master, who, on a stage erected for the purpose, walked it for several days, challenging and defying any to play with him at swords. At length one of the Judges, disguised in a rustic dress, holding in one hand a cheese wrapped in a napkin, for a shield, with a broomstick whose mop he had besmeared with dirty puddle water as he passed along: thus equipped, he mounted the stage. The fencing-master railed at him for his impudence, asked what business he had there, and bid him be gone. The Judge stood his ground—upon which the gladiator made a pass at him with his sword, to drive him off—a rencounter ensued—the Judge received the sword into the cheese, and held it till he drew the mop of the broom over his mouth, and gave the gentleman a pair of whiskers.—The gentleman made another pass, and plunging his sword a second time, it was caught and held in the cheese till the broom was drawn over his eyes.—At a third lunge, the sword was caught again, till the mop of the broom was rubbed gently all over his face.—Upon this, the gentleman let fall, or laid aside his small sword, and took up the broad-sword, and came at him with that.—Upon which the Judge said, Stop, sir, hitherto you see I have only played with you, and not attempted to hurt you; but if you come at me now with the broad-sword, know that I will certainly take your life. The firmness and determinateness with which he spake struck the gentleman, who desisting, exclaimed, Who can you be? You are either Goffe, Whalley, or the Devil, for there was no other man in England that could beat me. And so the disguised Judge retired into obscurity, leaving the spectators to enjoy the diversion of the scene and the vanquishment of the boasting champion. Hence it is proverbial in some parts of New England, in speaking of a champion at athletic and other exercises, to say that none can beat him but Goffe, Whalley, or the Devil.
I say nothing on a few variations in narrating this story—as that some say that the scene was at New York, where the fencer staked and offered a hat-crown full of silver to the man that should beat him. The place certainly was Boston, if anywhere, for they never were out of New England; and that the fencer discerned and recognized his master in the art of fencing, and desisted instantly, saying, You are my master, Colonel Goffe, who taught me fencing.—You, sir, and no other man can beat me. . . . .
To return: after lodging two nights at Hatchet Harbor, they went to the Cave. From Sperry’s they ascended the west side of Providence Hill to this Cave. But why this Cave should be spoken of as being in “the side of the hill,” I cannot conceive, unless it might so appear to the Judges [note 8], for the Cave is high up the hill, even on the very summit; although, being enveloped in woods, they might not, especially at first, consider it as on the summit; it is, however, on the very top of the West Rock, and about half or three-quarters of a mile from the southern extremity. This Cave, then, I shall consider as their first station or harbor, as they called all their residences Lodges, Harbors, or Ebenezers, without accounting their short lodgments of two nights each at the Mill and at Hatchet Harbor. In 1785 I visited aged Mr. Joseph Sperry, then living, aged seventy-six, a grandson of the first Richard, a son of Daniel Sperry, who died 1751, aged eighty-six, from whom Joseph received the whole family tradition. Daniel was the sixth son of Richard, and built a house at the south end of Sperry’s farm, in which Joseph now lives, not half a mile west from the cave, which Joseph showed me. There is a notch in the mountain against Joseph’s house, through which I ascended along a very steep acclivity up to the Cave. From the south end of the mountain, for three or four miles northward, there is no possible ascent or descent on the west side, but at this notch, so steep is the precipice of the rock. I found the Cave to be formed on a base of perhaps forty feet square, by an irregular clump or pile of rocks, or huge, broad pillars of stone, fifteen and twenty feet high, standing erect and elevated above the surrounding superficies of the mountain, and enveloped with trees and forest. These rocks coalescing or contiguous at top, furnished hollows or vacuities below, big enough to contain bedding and two or three persons. The apertures being closed with boughs of trees or otherwise, there might be found a well-covered and convenient lodgment. Here, Mr. Sperry told me, was the first lodgment of the Judges, and it has ever since gone and been known by the name of the Judge’s Cave to this day. Goffe’s Journal says, they entered this Cave the 15th of May, and continued in it till the 11th of June following.—Richard Sperry daily supplied them with victuals from his house, about a mile off, sometimes carrying it himself, at other times sending it by one of his boys, tied up in a cloth, ordering him to lay it on a certain stump and leave it; and when the boy went for it at night he always found the basins emptied of the provisions, and brought them home. The boy wondered at it, and used to ask his father the design of it, and he saw nobody. His father only told him there was somebody at work in the woods that wanted it. The sons always remembered it, and often told it to persons now living,—and to Mr. Joseph Sperry particularly. They continued here till 11th of June. Mr. Joseph Sperry told me that the incident which broke them up from this cave was this, that this mountain being a haunt for wild animals, one night as the Judges lay in bed, a panther or catamount, putting his head into the door or aperture of the Cave, blazed his eyeballs in such a hideous manner upon them as greatly frightened them. One of them was so terrified by this grim and ferocious monster, her eyes and her squawling, that he took to his heels and fled down the mountain to Sperry’s house for safety. They thereupon considered this situation too dangerous, and quitted it. All the Sperry families have this tradition.
Mr. Joseph Sperry also told me another anecdote.—That one day, the judges being at Mr. Richard Sperry’s house, some persons appeared riding up toward the house through a causey over the meadows, so that they could be seen fifty or sixty rods off; who, by their apparel, and particularly their red coats, were by the family immediately taken to be, not our own people, but enemies. They were the English pursuivants, unexpectedly returned from New York, or Manhadoes. Upon which the guests absconded into the woods of the adjoining hill, and concealed themselves behind Savin Rock, twenty rods west of Sperry’s house. When the pursuivants came to the house and inquired of the family for the two regicides, they said they knew not where they were; they had transiently been there, but had gone into the woods.
Notes
[note 1]. The historical facts surrounding the death of Charles I and the regicide judges are documented in a number of works. The following sources were used in preparing the Restoration background for this edition: Rowse’s The Regicides and the Puritan Revolution, Sargent’s “Thomas Hutchinson, Ezra Stiles, and the Legend of the Regicides,” Welles’s The regicides in Connectict, and Wilson’s “Web of Secrecy: Goffe, Whalley, and the Legend of Hadley.” See the list of works cited following the introduction for full bibliographical information.
[note 2]. Hutchinson refers to the regicide Edward Whalley as “Whaley” throughout the text. It has been changed in this text to reflect the more widely accepted spelling.
[note 3]. The Stedman and Hutchinson edition of the text reads “secured.”
[note 4]. Manhadoes, or Manhattan, was a Dutch settlement in New York, around the area of present-day New York City.
[note 5]. Less is known about regicide judge John Dixwell before his arrival in the colonies. Lemuel Aiken Welles, in The regicides in Connecticut, offers the following information:
The day the ship [the Prudent Mary, carrying Goffe and Whalley] got under way the house of commons ordered the arrest of all who sat in judgment on the late king. A relative of Colonel Dixwell petitioned the house of commons that the latter was ill and unable to surrender himself within the time fixed. This petition was granted, but instead of surrendering Colonel Dixwell fled to Germany, and nothing is known of him until he disappeared in Massachusetts nearly five years later. (2)
[note 6]. Stiles renders the tale of Hadley more romantically:
That pious congregation were observing a fast at Hadley, on the occasion of the war; and being at public worship in the meeting-house there, on a fast day, September 1, 1675, were suddenly surrounded and surprised by a body of Indians. It was the usage in the frontier towns, and even at New Haven, in those Indian wars, for a select number of the congregation to go armed to public worship. It was so in Hadley at this time. The people immediately took to their arms, but were thrown into great consternation and confusion. Had Hadley been taken, the discovery of the Judges had been inevitable. Suddenly, and in the midst of the people there appeared a man of very venerable aspect, and different from the inhabitants in his apparel, who took the command, arranged and ordered them in the best military manner, and under his direction they repelled and routed the Indians, and the town was saved. He immediately vanished, and the inhabitants could not account for the phenomenon, but by considering that person as an Angel sent of God upon that special occasion for their deliverance; and for some time after said and believed that they had been delivered and saved by an Angel. . . . The Angel was certainly General Goffe. . . (qtd. in Orians 258)
[note 7]. The Oxford English Dictionary Online defines a pursuivant as the following: “1. Formerly, A junior heraldic officer attendant on the heralds; also one attached to a particular nobleman. Now, an officer of the College of Arms, ranking below a Herald. . . . 2. A royal or state messenger with power to execute warrants; a warrant-officer. Obs. In Scotland, the heraldic pursuivants usually served summonses of treason, thus connecting senses 1 and 2.”
[note 8]. Compare with Hutchinson: “Sperry and Burrill, who first conducted them to a place called Hatchet harbor where they lay two nights until a cave or hole in the side of a hill was prepared to conceal them. This hill they called Providence hill” (third paragraph of this text).
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“Thomas Hutchinson and Ezra Stiles on the Regicides (1764, 1794).” Copyright 2006 Ethan T. Jordan. This text was prepared to fulfill a critical edition assignment offered in “Early American Literature,” a graduate-level seminar taught by Jon Miller at The University of Akron in the Spring of 2006. Please note, this is not peer-reviewed work. License: You are free and encouraged to copy and distribute this work under the following conditions: 1. You may not use this work for commercial purposes. 2. Any reuse or distribution must preserve this copyright, license, version, and citation information. 3. Any of these conditions can be waived if you get permission from the copyright holder. Version: First edition (May 2006). This document is, was created with, or contains the full text of a PDF file published by a website, The Akron Heron: Materials of American Literature. Please visit akronheron.com for possible corrections or improvements, which may appear in later editions of this file. Suggested citation: Ethan T. Jordan, ed. “Thomas Hutchinson and Ezra Stiles on the Regicides (1764, 1795).” The Akron Heron: Materials of American Literature from Jon Miller at The University of Akron no. 5 (May 2006): 8p. [Add date accessed and URL accessed].
