Charles I's Killers in America: The Lives and Afterlives of Edward Whalley and William Goffe

Abstract

In 1660, with Charles II posed to return to England to take his late father's position as king of England, Scotland, and Ireland, the two men who signed Charles I's death warrant, William Goffe and Edward Whalley, sailed for Massachusetts Bay Colony. In New England, these regicides were feted, housed, and—once the newly restored monarchy sought to track them down—hidden from Crown officers. They lived out their lives in hiding in New Haven, Connecticut, and especially in the remote Massachusetts town of Hadley. Whalley probably died in 1675, and Goffe in 1679 or 1680. The two are remembered in connection with the cave in which they once hid, but especially for the reappearance of Goffe—as the “angel of Hadley”—who purportedly rallied the Hadley townsfolk during King Philip's War (1675–1676) (p. 70). The legend of Goffe's providential appearance would be memorialized in visual images, novels, and plays. Matthew Jenkinson's book contributes to our understanding of the remembrances of these regicides. The work opens with a brief preface recounting a twenty-first-century visit to the graffiti-filled Judge's Cave, so called to honored Whalley and Goffe's role in what could be perceived as a legitimate trial, rather than the commission of regicide, denoting the murder of a king. Jenkinson reviews events in England, from the monarch's execution in 1649 through the Restoration in 1660, that sent the two men fleeing. Two chapters then cover the men on the run, including efforts to track them down and the various stratagems to hide them and deny culpability for their escape. The remainder of the book (four substantive chapters and a brief conclusion) assesses their “afterlives”: accounts of them during the American Revolution, media coverage in the early nineteenth century, and the “revival, rise and decline” of attention to them after the Civil War (p. 152).