After Whalley died, Goffe left Hadley and went to Hartford. We do not know much about him there. We know that he was still an exile with a price on his head, and still hiding. In one of his letters he says to a friend, “Dear Sir, you know my trials are considerable, but I beseech you not to interpret any expression in my letters as if I complained of God’s dealing with me.” His family in England had moved and he did not know their address or how to reach them, and in April, 1679, he wrote to the same friend, “I am greatly longing to hear from my poor desolate relations, and whether my last summer’s letters got safe to them.” What answer he received, whether he ever heard from them again, we cannot tell, for his story ends with that last letter.

The third regicide judge who came to Connecticut; was Colonel John Dixwell. He spent some time with Whalley and Goffe at Hadley and afterward lived seventeen years in New Haven. No search was ever made for him because he was supposed to have died in Europe, and he was known to almost every one in the colony as Mr. James Davids. It was only when he was on his death-bed that he allowed his real name to be told. His house stood on the corner of Grove and College Streets; he married in New Haven and had several children. He was a great friend of Reverend James Pierpont, the minister, and the story goes that they had beaten a path walking across their lots to talk over the fence and that Madame Pierpont used to ask her husband who that old man was who was so fond of living “an obscure and unnoticed life” and why he liked so much to talk with him, and he replied that “if she knew the worth and value of that old man she would not wonder at it.”

Once, so it is said, Sir Edmund Andros came from Boston to New Haven and noticed on Sunday in church a dignified old gentleman with an erect and military air very different from the rest of the people, and asked who he was. He was told that it was Mr. Davids, a New Haven merchant. “Oh, no,” said Andros, “I have seen men and can judge them by their looks. He is no merchant; he has been a soldier and has figured somewhere in a more public station than this.” Some one warned Dixwell and he stayed away from church that afternoon.

When he died he was buried in the old burying-ground behind Center Church on the New Haven Green. In 1849, one of his descendants put up the monument to him which stands there to-day. The monument to Goffe and Whalley is the “Judges’ Cave” on the top of West Rock, and three streets in New Haven are also named for the three regicide judges who came to Connecticut.

References

  1. Hutchinson, Thomas. History of Massachusetts, Salem and Boston, 1795.
  2. The Mather Papers, in Massachusetts Historical Collections, 4th series, vol. 8.
  3. Dexter, F.B. Memoranda respecting Edward Whalley and William Goffe, in Papers of the New Haven Colony Historical Society, vol. 2.
  4. Stiles, Ezra. A History of Three of the Judges of King Charles First. Hartford, 1794 Reprinted in Library of American History, Samuel L. Knapp, editor. New York, 1839.
  5. Goffe’s Diary, in Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 1863-64.
  6. Judd, Sylvester. History of Hadley. Introduction to edition of 1905. H.R. Huntting & Co. Springfield, 1905.

[The Fort on the River]

A boy named Lion Gardiner was born in England in 1599, toward the end of the reign of Queen Elizabeth. He was strong, active, and energetic, and as he grew up he was trained to be an engineer. Like a good many other ambitious young Englishmen of his day, he took service in the Low Countries,—­that is, in what is now Holland and Belgium,—­where the people were fighting against Spain for their independence. He was employed as “an engineer and master of works of fortification in the legers [camps] of the Prince of Orange.”

While he was in Holland he received an offer from a group of English “Lords and Gentlemen” of the Puritan party, who were interested in colonization in America, to go to New England and construct works of fortification there. “I was to serve them,” he says, “in the drawing, ordering, and making of a city, towns, or forts of defence,” and “I was appointed to attend such orders as Mr. John Winthrop, Esq., should appoint, and that we should choose a place both for the convenience of a good harbour and also for capableness and fitness for fortification.”

Lion Gardiner signed an agreement with them for four years at one hundred pounds, or five hundred dollars, a year and expenses paid to America for himself and his family. He was married before he left Holland and he and his wife sailed for London, July 10, 1635, in a small North Sea bark named the Batcheler. A month later they left London in the same little ship bound for Boston. The Batcheler was very small; there were only twelve men and two women on board, and these two women were Gardiner’s wife, Mary Wilemson, and her maid, Eliza Coles. The voyage was rough and stormy and lasted nearly three months and a half. When they arrived in Boston on November 28, the snow was knee-deep, and the winter set in so cold and forbidding that there was some delay in carrying out the plans for the new colony. As Lieutenant Gardiner was an “expert engineer,” the people of Boston were glad to take advantage of his stay with them to employ him in finishing some fortifications for them on Fort Hill.