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.