Once Upon a Time in ConnecticutNewton, Caroline Clifford
History
Once Upon a Time in Connecticut
Newton, Caroline Clifford
Connecticut -- History
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 God'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 Massachusetts_,
Salem and Boston, 1795.
2. The Mather Papers, in _Massachusetts 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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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