Chapter 4

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 Saturday, 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 nobody 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 Saturday, 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 God 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 Massachusetts. 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 God must have sent an angel to help them. Long afterward they learned that it was General Goffe.

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 God,' 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 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.

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 Massachusetts 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 ship 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 finishing some fortifications for them on Fort Hill.

In the spring he sailed once more on the little Batcheler for the mouth of the Connecticut River, where it had been decided to build the new fort and plant the new colony. This place was selected partly because of its good harbor, and partly because a fort here would command the entrance to this "Long, Fresh, Rich River."

The "Lords and Gentlemen" who planned this undertaking included Lord Saye and Sele, Lord Brooke, John Pym, and other well-known men in the Puritan party. They were opposed to the Government in England both in politics and religion, and at one time, when matters went strongly against their party, some of them expected to come to America. It is said that Oliver Cromwell, afterward Lord Protector of England, and John Hampden, his cousin, were among this number. It is at least true that Lieutenant Gardiner was ordered to construct "within the fort" houses suitable for "men of quality" and to erect "some convenient buildings for the receipt of gentlemen." The place was named Saybrook for Lord Saye and Sele and for Lord Brooke. It was not a colony of merchants like the New Haven Colony, nor of farmers like the Connecticut Colony; it was a military post, and it was planned as a refuge in the New World for influential men in public life in England who might be forced to leave their own country.

John Winthrop, Jr., who was to be the governor of the settlement, had sent a ship in November with carpenters and other workmen to take possession of the place and to begin building, but when Lieutenant Gardiner arrived at the mouth of the Connecticut in March, he found that not much had been done--only a few trees cut down and a few huts put up. He set to work at once and built a fort "of a kind of timber called 'a read oack,'" and across the neck of land behind the fort he built a "palisade of whole trees set in the ground."

The fort was on a point of land running out into the river just above its mouth. There were salt marshes around it, and on three sides it was protected by water. Dutch sailors had first discovered this place and called it "Kievet's Hook" from the cry of the birds (pee-wees) whom they heard there. The Dutch themselves intended to establish a trading-post here, but they were driven away by the arrival of the English.

The "Lords and Gentlemen" in England had promised to send Lieutenant Gardiner "three hundred able men" that spring, to help him; "two hundred to attend fortification, fifty to till the ground, and fifty to build houses," but they did not come and he was greatly disappointed. George Fenwick, acting as agent of the company, however, arrived to see how matters were progressing at Saybrook. Fenwick was the only one of the Puritan "gentlemen" who ever came to New England; for conditions were rapidly changing in English politics, and their party was soon engaged in a struggle with the Government that kept all its prominent leaders at home. But although Lion Gardiner was left without enough workmen and with few supplies, he made the most of his resources, and his little fort, built under such difficulties, soon became an important place because of the protection it gave to the planters against the Indians.

He was scarcely established at Saybrook before trouble broke out with the Pequots, a large and powerful tribe of Indians. There were wrongs and misunderstandings on both sides, and at last the Pequots murdered Captain Stone, a Virginia trader, in his boat on the Connecticut River, and most of the party with him. Not long after this John Oldham, a Massachusetts trader, was killed on Block Island. These and other outrages led the Massachusetts Colony to demand satisfaction of the Pequots and the surrender of the murderers. Lieutenant Gardiner, in his exposed position, felt that a war just then would be a mistake, and he sent a protest to the magistrates of Massachusetts to "entreat them to rest awhile, till we get more strength here about," he said, "and provide for it; for I have but twenty-four in all, men, women, and boys and girls, and not food for them for two months unless we save our cornfield, which could not be if it came to war for it is two miles from our house. I know, if you make war with these Pequots, myself with these few you will leave at the stake to be roasted or for hunger to be starved; for Indian corn is now twelve shillings per bushel and we have but three acres planted. War is like a three-footed stool; want one foot and down comes all, and these three feet are men, victuals, and munition; therefore, seeing in peace we are like to be famished, what will be done in war? Wherefore I think it will be best only to fight against Captain Hunger."

But the Massachusetts people did not take his advice. Instead, they sent out an expedition under Captain Endecott, to punish the Pequots. This expedition burnt the Indian wigwams and cornfields on Block Island, and also in the Pequot country near the mouth of the Pequot, or Thames, River; and Captain Endecott and his soldiers came to Saybrook Port and made that place their headquarters, "to my great grief," said Gardiner, "for you come hither to raise these wasps about my ears and then you will take wing and flee away."

His prophecy came true, for the expedition returned to Boston without having accomplished anything except to enrage the Indians still further and to make the position of the little garrison at the fort more difficult than ever.

Even before this they had found it dangerous to trade with the Indians. About the time that Gardiner sent his protest to Massachusetts, a Saybrook man, Thomas Hurlburt, had a narrow escape from death in the Pequot country, where he had gone with a trading party, and he was only saved by the kindness and compassion of an Indian woman. He stepped into the sachem's wigwam to inquire about some stolen horses. While he was there, the Indians having for some reason left him alone for a moment, the sachem's wife, Wincumbone, came back and made signs to him secretly that the men were planning to kill him. "He drew his sword," ran to his companions, and barely got aboard the boat in time.

"This caused me," says Lieutenant Gardiner, "to keep watch and ward, for I saw that they plotted our destruction."

From this time on the fort was almost besieged by Indians who lay in ambush around it, watching and waiting for a chance to attack any of the garrison who might venture out.

One day two men were "beating samp at the Garden Pales," not far from the fort, when the sentinels called to them to run in quickly because a number of Pequots were creeping up to catch them. "I, hearing it," says Gardiner, "went up to the redoubt and put two cross-bar shot into the two guns that lay above, and levelled them at the trees in the middle of the limbs and boughs. The Indians began a long shout, and then the two great guns went off and divers of them were hurt."

These "two great guns" were two pieces, of three inches each, by which the fort was defended.

"After this," writes Gardiner, "I immediately took men and went to our cornfield to gather our corn, appointing others to come with the shallop [the boat] and fetch it, and I left five lusty men in the strong house I had built for the defense of the corn. Now, these men, not regarding the charge I had given them, three of them went a mile from the house, a-fowling; and having loaded themselves with fowl, they returned. The Pequots let them pass first, till they had loaded themselves, but at their return they arose out of their ambush and shot all three; one of them escaped through the corn, shot through the leg, the other two they tormented."

An equally cruel fate befell a trader named Tilly, who was taken alive by the Indians and tortured. Tilly came from Massachusetts Bay and was going up the river to Hartford. When he landed at Saybrook, as all travelers were obliged to do, he saw a paper nailed up over the fort gate with orders that no boat going up the river should stop anywhere between Saybrook and Wethersfield. These orders were put up by Lieutenant Gardiner because a boat with three men well armed in it had lately been captured by the river Indians. Tilly, however, refused to obey, and quarreled with Gardiner. "I wish you, and also charge you," said Gardiner to him in reply, "to observe that which you have read at the gate; 'tis my duty to God and my masters which is the ground of this, had you but eyes to see it; but you will not till you feel it." Tilly went up the river safely, obeying orders; but coming down, when he was about three miles above Saybrook, he went ashore with only one man and carelessly fired off his gun. The Indians, hearing it, came up, captured him, and carried him away. Gardiner called the spot where this happened "Tilly's Folly."

It was a winter of great responsibility and danger for Lieutenant Lion Gardiner, and all his courage and good sense were needed to carry him safely through it. Once he was himself wounded by Indian arrows and nearly lost his life. On the 22d of February, he "went out with ten men and three dogs, half a mile from the house, to burn the weeds, leaves, and reeds upon the neck of land" behind the fort, when, suddenly, four Indians "started up out of the fiery reeds," and the sentinels he had set to watch called to him that a great many more were coming from "the other side of the marsh." The Indians attacked his party, killed three or four men, and tried to get between the rest and the fort and cut off their return. "They kept us in a half-moon," says Gardiner, "we retreating and exchanging many a shot... defending ourselves with our naked swords, or else they had taken us all alive.... I was shot with many arrows, but my buff coat preserved me, only one hurt me." The English soldiers of those days wore back and breast pieces of steel over their buff coats. A few days later, the Indians, believing Gardiner dead, came again and surrounded the fort, and, as the old record says, "made many proud challenges and dared the English out to fight," but Gardiner ordered the "two great guns" set off once more, and the Indians disappeared.