King of England Charles I - Charles Is killers in America: the lives & afterlives of Edward Whalley & William Goffe

Figure 1. Photograph of the Judges Cave, New Haven, featuring twenty-first-century graffiti

This is not what one would imagine at a site that was for a long time revered as a symbol of Americas liberty and the fight against British tyranny. The cave was so symbolic of revolution, in fact, that the French revolutionary Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Prigord, who contributed to the writing of The Declaration of the Rights of Man (1789), visited it in 1794 and made a very animated and impassioned address in French in relation to [Whalley and Goffe], their amor patriae, and their love of freedom. Goffe went from being apprenticed to a London grocer in 1634 to being one of the most familiar characters in nineteenth-century American literature: a proto-American revolutionary. The regicides became the subject of fascination in many cultural forms, thousands of miles away from, and centuries after, their births. Now comparatively little attention is paid to the regicides in America or to the inscription on the cave in New Haven.

This book plots the rise and decline of the regicides in Americahow and why they were celebrated (or, sometimes, criticized), and how and why their story was manipulated, twisted, and distorted to suit different political sympathies and cultural tastes, across three and a half centuries. Charles Is Killers in America is not simply the story of the regicides on the run, as exciting as their flight may have seemed. Their story carries with it intriguing historical and ideological baggage that continued to be unpacked and repackaged in various cultural forms on both sides of the Atlantic, but especially in America, into the twenty-first century. So this book plots the lives and afterlives of Edward Whalley and William Goffeand, to a lesser extent, John Dixwell, a third regicide in Americafrom their role in the English civil wars to the point at which the Judges Cave turned from historical monument to make-out point. By investigating these microhistorical figures over a long period of cataclysmic change it is possible to inform a number of wider issues: the relationship between crown and colonies in the late seventeenth century; the presence of the English regicide in debates surrounding the American Revolution; and the persistence of the regicides in Americas founding narratives and the forging of a distinct American national identity. We can see how one of the most dramatic moments in British historythe execution of Charles Iwas remembered and represented across the Atlantic over subsequent centuries.