Once Upon a Time in Connecticut Part 3

5. Mather, Reverend Cotton. Magnalia Christi Americana, i, 25. London, 1702.

THREE JUDGES

In the year 1661, when the city of New Haven was a small village not much more than twenty years old, a family of boys named Sperry lived out on a farm some two or three miles west of that settlement. There was only one house then besides theirs outside the town in that direction and the woods all about were thick and wild.

That summer something mysterious was going on near the Sperry farm. Every morning Richard Sperry himself, or one of his boys, carried food, in dishes covered with a cloth, into the woods on the steep side of West Rock about a mile from the house, and left it there on a stump. Every evening he, or one of his sons, went for the empty bowls and brought them home. The boys were curious to know who had eaten the food, for they never met any one coming or going, and never saw any one up on the Rock. In reply their father told them that there were men at work in the forest near by; yet they never heard voices nor the sound of an axe, and it was only long afterward that they learned the real reason for what they had done. If one of the boys had waited long enough some morning, lying still and hidden in the bushes, he might have seen a man come slowly and cautiously through the woods toward him, a dignified, grave-looking person with something foreign in his dress, something soldierly in his bearing, as if he were accustomed to commanding others; he might have watched this stranger--so different from the people he knew--take up the dishes of food and disappear again into the dark forest. And he would have wondered why a man like that, who was evidently not a hunter and not a new settler, should be hiding in the woods around New Haven.

Twelve years before, in England, this same man had taken part in a very different scene. There was a great trial held in the stately old Hall of Westminster and the prisoner at the bar was the King of England himself, and among the fifty-nine judges who condemned him to death was the man who was now hunted for his own life and was in hiding near the Sperry farm that summer, three thousand miles away from all he loved in England.

There were nearly one hundred men who had some part, large or small, in the trial and death of King Charles the First, and all of them were in great danger eleven years later when the Royalists returned to power and his son, Charles the Second, became king. A few who had very little to do with the king's sentence were pardoned; others were seized at once, tried, condemned, and executed in the barbarous way the English law then allowed, and still others tried to escape by leaving England.

Some got safely to the Continent and wandered about from one foreign city to another, trying to pa.s.s unnoticed in the crowd, and always in danger of being discovered and arrested by the messengers the English Government sent after them.

Three of them came to New England and spent some time in Connecticut. This is their story.

Early in May, 1660, a s.h.i.+p named the Prudent Mary lay at Gravesend near London, getting ready to sail under her master, Captain Pierce, for the colonies in the new world. Two of the regicides, General Edward Whalley and General William Goffe, had taken pa.s.sage in her, but they dared not sail under their own names and they came aboard as Edward Richardson and William Stephenson. While the s.h.i.+p was waiting in Gravesend the new king was proclaimed. That was on Sat.u.r.day, May 12. The next day General Goffe wrote in his diary,--"May 13. Wee kept Sabbath abord."

On Monday they sailed and were happy to get away from England before an order could be given for their arrest. The s.h.i.+ps of those days were very small and the little Prudent Mary took ten weeks to make her way across the ocean, but at last Goffe wrote in his journal: "July 27. We came to anchor between Boston and Charlestown; between 8 and 9 in the morning; all in good health through the good hand of G.o.d upon us."

When the judges landed they were among friends, for most of the people in New England were of their political party. They took their own names again, called on the Governor of Ma.s.sachusetts Bay Colony and went about freely. Goffe's diary says: "Aug. 9.

Went to Boston lecture and heard Mr. Norton. Went afterwards to his house where we were lovingly entertained with many ministers and found great respects from them." And on the 26th: "We visited Elder Frost, who received us with great kindness and love."

This diary and his letters show that Goffe was sincere and religious, but his life tells us that he was brave and energetic too. He had made his own way, and both he and Whalley, who was his father-in-law, had been important men in England; they were major-generals who had fought in great battles and had taken part in great events in history. There is an old story about their skill in fencing.

"At Boston," so the story runs, "there appeared a gallant person, some say a fencing-master, who, on a stage erected for the purpose, walked for several days challenging and defying any to play with him at swords. At length one of the judges disguised in a rustic dress, holding in one hand a cheese wrapped in a napkin for a s.h.i.+eld, with a broomstick, whose mop he had besmeared with dirty puddle water as he pa.s.sed along, mounted the stage. The fencing-master railed at him for his impudence, asked what business he had there, and bade him begone. The judge stood his ground, upon which the gladiator made a pa.s.s at him with his sword to drive him off. An encounter ensued. The judge received the sword into the cheese and held it till he drew the mop of the broom over the other's mouth, and gave the gentleman a pair of whiskers. The gentleman made another pa.s.s, and plunging his sword a second time, it was caught and held in the cheese till the broom was drawn over his eyes. At a third lunge, the sword was caught again, till the mop of the broom was rubbed gently all over his face. Upon this, the gentleman let fall, or laid aside, his small sword and took up the broadsword and came at him with that, upon which the judge said, 'Stop, sir! Hitherto, you see, I have only played with you and have not attempted to hurt you, but if you come at me now with the broadsword, know that I will certainly take your life.' The firmness and determination with which he spoke struck the gentleman, who, desisting, exclaimed, 'Who can you be? You are either Goffe, Whalley, or the devil, for there was no other man in England that could beat me.'"

For seven months the two judges lived in Cambridge at the house of Major Daniel Gookin, a member of the governor's council and a fellow pa.s.senger of theirs in the Prudent Mary. They went to church on Sundays, and no doubt on "training-days" they watched the train-bands practice, for they were famous fighters themselves. But meantime the news of their being in the colonies was carried to England by a royalist named Captain Breedon, and the governor debated with his council what to do about it. He wanted to protect them, but he feared the king's displeasure might bring trouble on the colony. Before he decided, the two judges, or "the two Colonels" as they were called, finding they were not safe in Boston, left for New Haven.

This was their first journey in the new wilderness; it was winter time, and probably there was snow on the ground and hanging heavy on the trees-more snow than they had ever seen in England. Most of the road between Boston and New Haven was a trail through forests where a guide was necessary. They stopped at Hartford, were kindly received there, and reached New Haven early in March.

For three weeks they were guests of the minister, Reverend John Davenport. He was their friend and is said to have preached a sermon from the text, "Hide the outcasts; betray not him that wandereth," to prepare people for their coming. Whalley's sister had once lived in New Haven and they had other friends there too.

But it was very dangerous for these friends to try to protect them, and when word came that a reward had been offered in England for their arrest, the hunted judges left New Haven as they had left Boston before, pretending, this time, to go to New York. However, they only went as far as Milford and turned back secretly in the night to New Haven where the minister received them again and hid them, in his own house and in the houses of other friends, until May, when a still greater danger threatened them.

The royal order for their arrest at last reached Boston and the governor there was obliged to forward it. He gave it to two young royalists, Thomas Kellond and Thomas Kirk, and on Sat.u.r.day, May 11, they arrived with it in Guilford at the house of William Leete, the Governor of the New Haven Colony. Governor Leete took the paper and began to read it aloud, hoping some one in the room would overhear it and send word to warn the judges. Kirk and Kellond interrupted him and said the paper was too important to read in public. Then they asked for horses and a search-warrant to carry with them to New Haven. It took a long time to get the horses; there was one delay after another, and the governor said he could not give them the warrant without consulting the other magistrates, but he would write a letter. It took a long time also to write the letter, and when both horses and letter were ready it was too late to start that night. The next day was Sunday and n.o.body was allowed to travel on Sunday in the New Haven Colony. So the messengers waited impatiently for Monday, and meantime they heard rumors that the judges had been seen in New Haven, and that Mr. Davenport must be protecting them still, because he had lately put ten pounds' worth of fresh provisions in his house; all of which made them still more impatient.

On Monday, at last, they got to New Haven, and some hours later Governor Leete followed them--very slowly--and called the magistrates together. It took the magistrates so long to decide what to do that Kellond and Kirk asked bluntly whether they meant to honor and obey the king or not. The governor answered, "We honor his Majesty, but we have tender consciences." At last a search was ordered to be made for the regicides, but Kirk and Kellond were convinced by this time that it would be useless, and they left in disgust for New York.

They were right, it was useless; for an Indian runner had come quickly from Guilford on Sat.u.r.day, and Goffe and Whalley had disappeared.

Several stories are told of their narrow escapes at this time.

One says they were on the Neck Bridge over Mill River on State Street when they heard the horses of their pursuers behind them and had only time to slip under the bridge and lie there hidden while the men rode over their heads. Another tells how a woman hid them in her house, in a closet whose door looked like a part of the wall with kitchen pots and pans hung on it. When they left the settlement they took refuge in the wild forest, and most of that summer they lived in a cave in a pile of boulders on the top of West Rock. The cave is there still, and is called "Judges'

Cave" to-day. Richard Sperry carried food to them or sent it by one of his boys, and sometimes on very stormy nights they crept secretly down to his house and stayed with him. Once, in June, they went back to New Haven and offered to give themselves up to save their friends, if necessary, and arranged that Governor Leete should always know where to find them. Most people thought they had left the colony altogther then, but they were back in their cave on the Rock, or in some other hiding-place in the deep woods. Rewards were still offered for them and they dared not venture out. They called West Rock "Providence Hill," because G.o.d had provided for them there. And now these two men, who had led such stirring, active lives in England, lived in a great loneliness and silence, with no friends near them, no sounds but the distant crash of a falling tree, or the wind sighing in the forest branches. There were prowling Indians and prowling wild beasts. Once, so the story says, a panther crept up stealthily to the cave at night as they lay in bed and put his head in at the opening, his eyes burning in the darkness like two fires.

In August, when the search for them was pretty much over, they went to Milford. They stayed there very secretly for three years, until, in 1664, there was danger of another search being made.

Then they went back to their cave on the Rock; but it was no longer a safe place for them, because "some Indians in their hunting discovered the cave with the bed," and their friends made a different plan for their concealment.

The exiles set out on another long journey. They traveled only at night, stopping and hiding in the daytime. The trail they followed led them up the valley of the Connecticut River, beyond Hartford and far into the north, until they came to what is now the town of Hadley in Ma.s.sachusetts. This was then one of the farthest settlements in the wilderness and very remote and lonely. Reverend John Russell, the minister there, gave them shelter and took care of them. There was a cellar under part of his house, and, by taking up some loose boards in the floor above it, they could drop down quickly into it if visitors came unexpectedly. In spite of the danger to himself, Mr. Russell kept them safe in Hadley for twelve or fifteen years. A few friends wrote to them and sent them money, but no one else in the world outside knew what had become of them or whether or not they were still alive.

There is a famous story about one of the regicides in Hadley.

Once, it says, in King Philip's War the Indians attacked the place. They burst out of the woods and rushed upon the settlement on a Sunday morning while every one was at church. Terror-stricken and thrown into wild confusion by the sight of the yelling savages the people of Hadley were helpless, when, all at once, an unknown man, with whitening hair and strange garments, appeared in the midst of them and took command. He rallied them and led them out against the Indians and drove them back into the forest. "As suddenly as he had come, the deliverer of Hadley disappeared."

No one ever saw him again, and the people said G.o.d must have sent an angel to help them. Long afterward they learned that it was General Goffe.

[Ill.u.s.tration: The Judges' Cave on West Rock]

There is not much more to tell about the judges after this.

Whalley was an an old man now, and Goffe wrote to his wife, who was Whalley's daughter, "Your old friend" (he dared not say her father, and he signed himself Walter Goldsmith instead of William Goffe) "is yet living, but continues in a very weak condition and seems not to take much notice of anything that is done or said, but patiently bears all things and never complains of anything. The common and very frequent question is to know how he doth and his answer for the most part is, 'Very well, I praise G.o.d,' which he utters with a very low and weak voice."

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 G.o.d'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 Ma.s.sachusetts, Salem and Boston, 1795.

2. The Mather Papers, in Ma.s.sachusetts 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 Ma.s.sachusetts 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 s.h.i.+p 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 finis.h.i.+ng some fortifications for them on Fort Hill.