Killers of the King

by Charles Spencer

  There was nowhere in the castle for the Hutchinson family to stay: they lodged in Deal, making daily visits to and from the colonel on foot. Hutchinson’s wife and daughter would often scour the beach for seashells, which the colonel enjoyed sorting and tracing. His chief pastime though was studying the Bible: it became his exclusive reading during the remainder of his imprisonment. Buoyed by what he read, the colonel told his wife of his confidence that the cause he believed in so passionately would rise again one day, because ‘the interest of God was so much involved in it’. Mrs Hutchinson agreed, but said she feared that, given his poor health, he would die in prison before this could come about. ‘I think I shall not,’ he replied, ‘but, if I do, my blood will be so innocent, I shall advance the cause more by my death, hasting the vengeance of God upon my unjust memories, than I could by all the actions of my life.’26

  George Hutchinson, the colonel’s brother, arrived at Sandown Castle with good news: Lord Arlington had signed an order allowing the prisoner to walk along the beach, provided he was accompanied by guards. The colonel spent his shoreline strolls discussing the likely future of England with his family.

  During his time in captivity on the south coast, Hutchinson’s heart remained hundreds of miles further north, at Owthorpe Hall. When his wife planned to visit the family home, he gave her plans for new plantings in the garden, and for modifications to the structure of the house. ‘You give me these orders, as if you were to see that place again,’ she said. ‘If I do not,’ he replied, ‘I thank God I can cheerfully forgo it, but I will not distrust that God will bring me back again, and therefore I will take care to keep it while I have it.’

  Lucy Hutchinson set off for home, worried that she had seen her husband for the last time: she suspected the government was keeping him on the south coast before sailing him away to final imprisonment in Tangier.

  While she was gone, in early September, Hutchinson fell into a violent fever after a walk on the beach. His grave illness was punctuated by moments of lucidity, during which he turned to his Bible. Dr Jachin, a famous physician, was summoned from Canterbury to tend the distinguished prisoner. He knew the castle, and asked his companion two questions: what sort of man was the colonel? And in what room was he being kept? When told Hutchinson was frail, and that he was being detained in his passageway cell, the doctor said this would prove to be a wasted journey, ‘for that chamber had killed’. He gave Hutchinson a potion to help him sleep, and placed poultices on his temples. Seeing no improvement in his patient, Jachin warned the colonel’s brother that he would ‘soon fall into ravings and die’. When informed of this Colonel Hutchinson replied, ‘The will of the Lord be done: I am ready for it.’

  He became ever weaker, his pulse flickering. When someone mentioned his wife’s name, he summoned his final energy and said, lucidly, ‘Alas, how will she be surprised!’

  Those were his last words. Eleven months after his arrest on a fabricated charge, he died.

  When doctors cut him open to inspect his innards, they noted two or three purple spots on his lungs, as well as that he had an enlarged gall bladder. His body was taken back to the family vault at Owthorpe for burial.

  Lucy Hutchinson was overcome by the tragic trajectory of the colonel’s life: ‘I have often admired, when I have considered the abounding of God’s favour in the want of all things, that he who had had a comfortable house of his own, attendants, and all things that any gentleman of his quality could require from his infancy till his imprisonment, should come to die in a vile chamber, untrimmed and unhung, in a poor wretched bed without his wife, children, servants and relations about him, and all his former employments taken from him.’27 The Royalists had let Hutchinson go prematurely during the first, heady, days of the Restoration – but they got their man, in the end.

  Chapter 13

  An Ocean Away

  It is as hard a thing to maintain a sound understanding, a tender conscience, a lively, gracious, heavenly spirit, and an upright life in the midst of contention, as to keep your candle lighted in the greatest storms.

  Richard Baxter, theologian, and chaplain to Colonel Whalley’s Regiment of Horse

  William Goffe opened his journal for 16621 with a list of sixty-nine names associated with the killing of the King, written in his own hand. There was no mention of the ten regicides executed by this point. The rest were divided into groups: seventeen men, including Bourchier and Deane, who he marked as ‘all deceased’; next were the four whose bodies had been marked for posthumous revenge: Cromwell, Ireton, Bradshaw and Pride; the seven names following were of men who Goffe noted had been ‘degraded’ through harsh punishment, but not condemned to death; there were three men together, whose fate he was perhaps unsure about – Lisle, Say and Walton; and then there were two lists, each of nineteen names, the first of which detailed those in prison in the Tower of London, while the other was a roll call of those he had marked simply as ‘Fled’. In this column were the three men recently captured by Downing in Delft, as well as Ludlow, but also two referred to only by their initials: ‘E. W.’ and ‘W. G.’ – Edward Whalley, and himself. The journal was written in hiding, in America, its author employing shorthand, pseudonyms and codes.

  Goffe and Whalley were among that inner core of Cromwell’s confidants drawn tight together by family connections: Whalley’s mother, Frances, was Oliver’s aunt; while Whalley’s daughter, another Frances, had married Goffe. The father-in-law and son-in-law were both first-rate soldiers. Whalley had served as a major in his cousin Cromwell’s cavalry regiment and was one of the men of humble birth and strict piety to be promoted through merit. This process had attracted criticism from the snobbish on his own side: ‘Colonel Cromwell [in the] raising of his regiment makes choice of his officers, not such as were soldiers or men of estate, but such as were common men, poor and of mean parentage, only he would give them the title of godly precious men . . . If you look upon his own regiment of horse, see what a swarm there is of those that call themselves the godly; some of them profess they have seen visions and had revelations.’2 Whalley had no pretentions to nobility, but he was a natural leader of men, Cromwell reporting to Parliament in the aftermath of the battle of Gainsborough, in 1643, ‘The honour of this retreat is due to God, as also the rest: Major Whalley did in this carry himself with all gallantry becoming a gentleman and a Christian.’3

  At Naseby, Whalley’s ferocious charge dispersed two divisions of the Royalist cavalry. As a reward, in January 1646, when Cromwell’s regiment divided into two, Parliament made Whalley colonel of one of the resulting units. He led it with distinction at the storming of Bristol and Banbury, where his bravery was recognised by a gift of £100 from Parliament, which he used to buy two warhorses. He was lionised by his cause as a symbol of unbounded courage, John Milton writing, ‘You, Whalley, whenever I heard or read of the fiercest battles of this war, I always expected, and found, among the thickest of the enemy.’4 Only the most fanatical Puritans treated him with distrust, claiming he was a Presbyterian. When Whalley heard Hugh Peters was behind this attack on his sincerity, he threatened to hunt down the preacher and give him a thrashing.

  Whalley had been entrusted with overseeing the defeated Charles I’s detention in 1647, which he did with charm and efficiency until his flight to the Isle of Wight. Before that escape, he had been open in wishing to preserve the King’s life. It is possible that Whalley was, as the historian Mark Noble wrote in the 1780s, ‘the abject tool of Cromwell’s ambition, perhaps without his own knowledge’, because Cromwell ‘employed him in carrying all the petitions of the army to the Parliament, to prepare for the tragic death of the King’.5 Certainly Whalley attended all but one of the King’s trial sessions, and signed his death warrant.

  William Goffe was the radical son of a Puritan divine from a village near Brighton, Sussex. Religion remained the backbone of his life, leading contemporaries to call him ‘Praying William’. As a young man he had served as an apprentice to a London dry-sal
ter, curing hides and meat, before joining Parliament’s army. He served in the Civil Wars with distinction, being promoted first to quartermaster, before becoming an infantry colonel.

  Goffe’s had been an earnest voice at the Putney debates, persistently warning that to stray from God’s way was to invite his wrath against the Parliamentary cause: ‘There are two ways that God doth take upon those that walk obstinately against him: if they be obstinate and continue obstinate, he breaks them in pieces with a rod of iron; if they be his people and wander from him, he takes that glory from them and takes it to himself.’6 He worried that negotiations with the King were breathing new life into the Royalist cause. Like Whalley, he was open to drastic measures to bring about peace in the kingdom. Convinced long before the trial that the path to a settled nation involved the trial and death of the King, he was a fully persuaded signatory of the death warrant.

  Goffe’s military support of Cromwell in his Scottish campaign of 1650 was heroic, the lord general recording that, during the battle of Dunbar, Goffe ‘at the push of pike, did repel the stoutest regiment the enemy had there’.7 (At the same action Whalley was one of the infantry commanders, acting with his customary bravery, and receiving a wound in the wrist.) Goffe was present a year later, at Worcester, when he accepted the surrender of the Royalist Sir Henry Washington, a cousin of George Washington’s grandfather. After Lambert’s fall from grace Goffe was promoted Major General of Foot.

  Goffe approved of Cromwell’s political ruthlessness, supporting his and Harrison’s expulsion of the Rump Parliament as well as his loss of patience with the well-intentioned but unproductive Barebone’s Parliament. During the Commonwealth, Cromwell’s dependence on Whalley and Goffe was demonstrated when, in the 1650s, he appointed them as two of his administering major generals. Goffe believed his duties to mean that he was ‘called of God to serve him and his people in the country’.8

  Even after the failure of the major-generalships the pair remained uncompromising champions of the regime’s religious and political beliefs. John Evelyn remembered being hauled before Goffe and Whalley in 1657 for breaking Cromwell’s ban on celebrating Christmas: ‘When I came before them they took my name and abode, examined me, why contrary to an Ordinance made that none should any longer observe the superstitious time of the Nativity (so esteemed by them) I durst offend, and particularly be at common prayers, which they told me was but the Mass in English, and particularly pray for Charles Steward [Stuart], for which we had no Scripture.’9

  They had both been created peers in the House of Lords formed by Oliver Cromwell earlier that year. This chamber was greeted with contempt by the republican element that had rushed to abolish the original House of Lords, Lucy Hutchinson seeing its appearance as evidence of Cromwell’s lamentable self-glorification. ‘At last he took upon himself to make lords and knights,’ she wrote, ‘and wanted not many fools, both of the army and gentry, to accept of, and strut in, his mock titles.’10 Whalley was among those who, it was noted, took to his new status with a particular swagger.

  Goffe was one of the seven authors responsible for the Instrument of Government, which was written as a template for the Protectorship in 1657. He grew rich, buying up confiscated Crown lands, as well as 7,000 square miles of Newfoundland.

  Goffe and Whalley were among those at Oliver Cromwell’s deathbed, when he proclaimed his son Richard as his heir. They (along with the pardoned regicide, Richard Ingoldsby) were known as the most loyal supporters of the new Lord Protector. This allegiance proved isolating when Richard’s regime quickly folded: in November 1659, Goffe and Whalley were sent by the army to talk with the enigmatic Monck, but Monck – knowing their hatred for the royal family – was not interested in what they had to say.

  Goffe had two brothers in the enemy camp: John, an Anglican clergyman, and Stephen, who worked in Europe as an agent for Charles II, before becoming a Catholic priest and a chaplain to Charles I’s widow, Henrietta Maria. However, he had little confidence that they could help him survive the changes being ushered in by the Restoration: nervous at what was implied by the mistier subclauses of the Declaration of Breda, he decided, with Whalley, to cross to New England. They were confident that they could find a home in this outpost of orthodox Puritanism. They would also have the option, from there, of slipping south to New Amsterdam (soon to be taken by the British, and renamed ‘New York’), where the King, as yet, had no authority.

  The two exiles also had a fair knowledge of, and some close ties to, the American colonies: Whalley’s sister Jane had married William Hooke, who had lived in Taunton, Massachusetts, and moved to New Haven, before returning to England in the 1650s. The Hookes were close friends of Connecticut’s governor, John Winthrop. The two major generals had also met Richard Saltonstall while they were accompanying Cromwell in Scotland, nine years earlier. Saltonstall was an inhabitant of Ipswich, Massachusetts, and would prove useful to the two men in the future.

  They secretly set sail from Gravesend on 13 May – the day before the House of Commons ordered their arrest – aboard the Prudent Mary, a seventy-six-foot ship that had seen action in the First Anglo-Dutch War. She was under the command of a Captain Pierce. They used aliases, Goffe calling himself ‘Stephenson’, Whalley, ‘Richardson’: their fathers had been baptised, respectively, Stephen and Richard. On the same vessel was William Jones, son of the regicide Colonel John Jones. The colonel was at that time released on bail and enjoying the weeks before his sudden and disastrous re-arrest. William Jones was accompanied by his new wife, Hannah, a daughter of Theophilus Eaton, the first governor of the New Haven Colony: Governor Eaton had died two years previously, and Hannah and her husband were coming to claim his estate, and live in his house. Also aboard was Captain Daniel Gookin, a member of the General Court that governed the Massachusetts Bay Company. Gookin invited the two men to stay with him in his house in Cambridge, four miles from Boston, when they reached New England.

  ‘July 27,’ Goffe wrote in his journal, after the ten-week voyage, ‘we landed between Boston and Charlestown, between eight and nine in the morning. All in good health through the hand of God [being] upon us.’11 They dropped their aliases and reported as their true selves to the seventy-two-year-old governor of the Massachusetts Bay Company, John Endecott, a strict Puritan famed for defacing the English flag (the cross of St George) because he thought he detected symbols of the papacy in it. He embraced both men, and declared his hope that more like them would cross the Atlantic to New England. Endecott’s enthusiastic welcome led other leading figures in the colony to greet the two new arrivals with great respect. John Crowne noted how Goffe and Whalley were met with ‘universal applause and admiration’, and ‘were looked upon as men dropped down from Heaven’.12

  There was a ready appreciation of the danger the two men faced, on the other side of the Atlantic. Two weeks after their arrival in Boston the Reverend John Davenport, the leading Puritan minister in New Haven Colony, wrote a letter to Governor Winthrop in which he secreted a secondary message: ‘Sir, I mistook in my letter, when I said Col. Whalley was one of the gentlemen, etc. It is Commissary-General Whalley, sister Hooke’s brother, and his son-in-law who is with him is Col. Goffe; both godly men, and escaped pursuit in England narrowly.’13 The two fugitives were far from discreet about their past, Crowne reporting that he heard Whalley say on several occasions that, if presented with the question again, he would still approve of Charles I’s execution.

  The pair lived in Cambridge for seven months, honoured with the ‘liberty of the House’ of the General Court, mixing with the lawgivers and preachers of Massachusetts, their piety and integrity acclaimed by the colony’s leaders. When, during a visit to Boston, a Royalist shouted insults at them, he was arrested and bound over to his good behaviour.

  Stories relating to the venerable guests soon circulated. One told how a brash showman arrived in Boston, his special skill fencing. He set himself up upon a stage, sword in hand, loudly challenging all comers to try the
ir luck against him. Goffe was unable to resist the lure of showing off the skills honed by the Civil Wars. Holding a shield that was nothing more than a large cheese in a sack, Goffe got onto the stage with a dripping broom in his sword hand. The fencing master told his challenger – whose identity he did not know – to be gone, so proper fighters could take him on. When Goffe refused to stand down he went at him with his small sword, assuming this would be enough to send his disrespectful opponent scurrying back onto the street.

  Instead, Goffe caught the blade in his cheese, then counter-thrusted with his dirty broom, smearing a muddy moustache along the assailant’s top lip. Enraged, the showman now attacked Goffe with purpose, the major general lithely side-stepping, then rubbing the broom above his eyes. A third bout ended similarly, Goffe covering his opponent’s face in sludge. Humiliated by the laughter of the crowd, the man now reached for his broadsword. ‘Stop, sir!’ warned Goffe. ‘Hitherto you see I have only played with you, and not attempted to hurt you; but if you come at me now with the broadsword, know, that I will certainly take your life!’

  The fencer, clearly frightened, shouted, ‘Who can you be? You are either Goffe, Whalley, or the Devil, for there was no other man in England that could beat me.’14 Goffe got down from the stage and melted away into the crowd.

  When news arrived from the English colony of Barbados that only seven of the late King’s judges would be executed, it seemed unlikely that the two major generals would be among the condemned.