“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 awful memories, 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 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 found
Where the scent lay. But, earth them as they will,
I shall unkennel them, and from their holes
Drag 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.”