THE CAVE OF THE REGICIDES;
AND HOW THREE OF THEM FARED IN NEW ENGLAND.
“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 of news on 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 the Quarterly, 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’s cousinry fled 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, that three regicides 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 and Whalley, 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 call them “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.