The Three Judges and the Rock

In sixteen forty-nine, the English Parliament tried King Charles the First and found him guilty of treason against his own people. He was beheaded on January thirtieth of that year, and among the judges who signed his death warrant were three men who would eventually make their way to New Haven.

Eleven years later, the monarchy was restored. Charles the Second came to the throne. Within months, warrants went out for the regicides, the men who had voted to kill his father. Most were caught. A few fled to New England, where Puritan sympathies still ran deep.

Edward Whalley and his son-in-law William Goffe arrived in New Haven in sixteen sixty-one, welcomed quietly by the colony's Puritan leadership. When royal agents came searching, the two men hid in a cave on the high ridge west of the city, a formation of exposed rock on what is now called West Rock. They slept in the cave and in nearby friendly houses, moving when the search parties came too close. They eventually escaped north to Hadley, Massachusetts, where Whalley died around sixteen seventy-five and Goffe lived out his remaining years in hiding.

A third regicide, John Dixwell, came to New Haven separately. He was more careful. He invented a name, James Davids, and posed as a retired merchant for nineteen years. He married twice. He had children. When he finally revealed his true name on his deathbed in sixteen eighty-nine, the authorities had long since assumed he was dead.

New Haven named streets for all three. You can still drive Whalley Avenue, Goffe Street, and Dixwell Avenue. The cave at West Rock is still there, marked and open to visitors.