Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 377, March 1847

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 fugue away 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, 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 awful memories, and perchance with occasional misgivings of judgment to come, pondered them in their hearts.

“Some slain in war,

Some haunted by the ghosts they had deposed;”

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 this world, 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 think he 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, alias James 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 ye 18th, in ye 82d year 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 their own 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, judicem calcas!

A judge, before whose unblenching face the sacred majesty of England once stood upon deliverance, and awaited the stern issues of life and death; an unjust 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.

LATEST FROM THE PENINSULA. 46

We have lately been surfeited with the affairs of that portion of Europe south of the Pyrenees, and did intend not again to refer, at least for some time, to any thing connected with it. We are sick of Spanish revolutions, disgusted with causeless pronunciamentos, and corrupt intrigues, weary of Madame Muñoz and “the innocent Isabel,” of palace plots and mock elections, base ministers and imbecile Infantas. We care not the value of a flake of bacallao, if Das Antas the Bearded, Schwalbach the German, Saldanha the Duke, or any other leader of Lusitania’s hosts, wins a fight or takes to his heels. Profoundly indifferent is it to us whether her corpulent majesty of Portugal, (eighteen stone by the scale, so she is certified,) holds on at the Necessidades, or is necessitated to cut and run on board a British frigate. Portugal we leave to the care of Colonel Wylde, homœopathic physician-in-ordinary to all trans-Pyrennean insurrections and civil wars; and Spain we consign to the tender mercies of Camarillas, propped by bayonets and inspired by the genial influences of the Tuileries. We have been pestered with these two countries, and with their annual revolutions, reminding us of a whirlwind in a wash-tub, until, in impatience of their restless, turbulent population, we have come to dislike their very names. Nevertheless, here are a brace of books about the Peninsula, concerning which we have a word to say, although we shall not avail ourselves of the opportunity they offer to discuss Portuguese rebellions and Spanish politics.

Writers on Spain, long resident in the country, acquire a borracha twang, a smack of the pig-skin, a propensity to quaint and proverb-like phrases, characteristic of the land they write about. The peculiarity is perceptible in the books before us; in both of them the racy Castilian flavour reeks through the pages. And first – to begin with the most worthy – as regards Mr. Ford’s “Gatherings.” There be cooks so cunning in their craft, that out of the mangled remains of yesterday’s feast, they concoct a second banquet, less in volume, but more savoury, than its predecessor. This to do, needs both skill and judgment. Spice must be added, sauces devised, heavy and cumbrous portions rejected, great ingenuity exercised, fitly to furnish forth to-day’s delicate collation from the fragments of yesterday’s baked meats. Mr. Ford has shown himself an adept in the art of literary rechauffage. His masterly and learned “Handbook of Spain,” having been found by some, who love to run and read, too small in type, too grave in substance, he has skimmed its cream, thrown in many well-flavoured and agreeable condiments, and presented the result in one compact and delightful volume. He has at once lightened and condensed his work. Mr. Hughes, the Lisbon pilgrim, has gone quite upon another tack. He makes no pretensions to brevity or close-packing, but starts with a renunciation of method, and an avowed determination to be loquacious. Dashing off in fine desultory style, with a fluent pen, and a flux of words, he proclaims that his sole ambition is to amuse, and with that view he proposes to be discursive and parlous. Amusing he certainly is; his irrepressible tendency to exaggeration is exceedingly diverting, whilst the excellent terms he is upon with himself, frequently compel a smile. His prolixity we can overlook, but we have difficulty in pardoning the questionable taste of certain portions of his book. In commenting on its defects, however, allowances must be made for the bad health of the writer. Doubtless he intends that they should be, for he repeatedly informs us that he is troubled with a pulmonary complaint of many years’ standing, to which he anticipates a fatal termination. “I strive,” he says, “to escape, by observation of the outer world, and of mankind, from the natural tendency to brood over misfortune, and seek to discover in occupation that cheerfulness which would be inevitably lost in an unemployed existence, and in dwelling on the phases of my illness.” What can we say after such an appeal to our feelings? how criticise with severity a book written under these circumstances? If we hint incredulity as to the gravity of the author’s malady, we shall be classed with those unfeeling persons, “whose levity and heartlessness not only refuse to sympathise, but often even doubt if my sickness be real.” Truly, when we learn that between the months of September and December last, the sick man travelled fifteen hundred miles – the latter portion of the distance through districts where he was compelled to rough it – exposed to frequent vicissitudes of temperature, and to the unhealthy climate of Madrid – sudden death to consumptive patients – eating, according to his own record, with the appetite of a muleteer, “rushing into ventas, and roaring lustily for dinner,” (vide vol. i. p. 206.) – holding furious discussions in coffee-houses, and winding them up, after utterly extinguishing his opponents, with Propagandist harangues eight pages long, (ibid. p. 334,) – and, finally, writing – in the intervals of his journey, we presume, – the two bulky and closely printed volumes now upon our table, we must say that many persons in perfect health would rejoice to vie with so sturdy an invalid. We do hope, therefore, and incline to believe, that the yellow flag thus despondingly hung out is a false signal; that Mr. Hughes, if not to be ranked altogether under the head of imaginary valetudinarians, is at any rate in a far less desperate state than he imagines; and that he will live long, long enough to amend his style, refine his tone, and write a book as commendable in all respects as this one often is for its fun and originality.