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Benedict Arnold and the Rhode Island Quakers, Ranters and Heretics

Rhode Island Quakers had cause to esteem Benedict Arnold more than a century before his descendant brought disgrace to his name.

In September of 1658, the United Colonies of New England – Plymouth, Massachusetts Bay, New Haven and Connecticut – issued a joint proclamation. They would neither welcome nor tolerate Quakers.

And they urged their neighbor to join with them in pledging to banish any Rhode Island Quakers found in their midst.

Quakers Come to America

Quaker Mary Dyer brought before Gov. John Endecott (painting by Howard Pyle)

The Quakers first set foot in America in 1656 in Massachusetts Bay Colony. Massachusetts quickly made them unwelcome with imprisonment, fines, whippings and destruction of their books. They tried to establish a foothold in Sandwich, Mass., then part of Plymouth Colony. But that town proved equally inhospitable.

The Quakers and the Puritans both criticized the Church of England, but the similarities ended there. The Puritans practiced rites of baptism and communion and followed a minister. The Quakers believed God worked in man through the individual’s inner light.

The Puritans already had trouble with the Baptists, but their differences paled in comparison to their issues with Quakers. Massachusetts’ Puritan leaders could not see that the more they fought the Quakers, the more attention the Quakers got. And the more attention the Quakers got, the more members they got.

Rhode Island Quakers

The proclamation to ban all ‘Quakers, ranters and such notorious heretics’ did not get a positive reception in Rhode Island.

Benedict Arnold served as the colony’s president at the time its neighbors urged him to banish all Rhode Island Quakers. The letter carried the threat that if Rhode Island persisted in providing a haven for Quakers, all trade with its neighbors would cease.

Benedict Arnold, whose namesake would one day turn traitor to the American revolutionary cause, replied to the request in a letter:

“Concerning these Quakers (so-called), which are now among us, we have no law among us, whereby to punish any for only declaring by words etc. their minds and understandings concerning the things and days of God, as to salvation and an eternal condition,” he wrote.

‘Delight to be persecuted’

Arnold understood what his neighbors did not about the Quakers: They ‘delight to be persecuted by civil powers.’ When persecuted, they gained more followers who sympathized with ‘their patient sufferings’ than who agreed with ‘their pernicious sayings’.”

Arnold distanced himself, though, from the Rhode Island Quakers, saying their beliefs undermined civil authority and overturned relations among men.

The following year, Rhode Island leaders agreed that if they received any complaints about Quakers that they would send them to England. There, the English courts could handle the issue.

But the Rhode Islanders came up with the policy only to deflect Massachusetts’ ire. No complaints against Rhode Island Quakers ever resulted in their expulsion or trial.

Massachusetts would continue persecuting Quakers, even executing some such as Mary Dyer. Then in 1660, the monarchy returned to England and King Charles II ordered Massachusetts to stop.

Arnold and most other Baptists in Rhode Island had little in common with the Quakers. But Arnold did not believe they posed a threat.

Perhaps he would have taken a firmer stand against them if he knew how quickly the Quakers would multiply. In 1674, four years before Arnold’s death, Rhode Islanders elected as governor a Quaker named William Coddington.

This story was updated in 2022.

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Edward Gove and His One-Man Revolution of 1683

What if you started a revolution and nobody came? New Hampshire’s Edward Gove found out in 1683 – and the answer is you are sent to the Tower of London to await your gruesome execution.

Gove’s story is well-preserved in The Gove Book: History and Genealogy of the American Family of Gove, written by William Henry Gove.

Edward Gove

Gove was born in 1630 in London. His father brought him to America around 1647 when he was 17. He gradually moved north from Charlestown, Mass., to Salisbury, Mass., and finally into Hampton in what is now New Hampshire in 1665.

The assault on Mason and Barefoot

In 1679, King Charles II declared that New Hampshire no longer belonged to Massachusetts. Rather, it would be governed as an independent province. At that point, the English hadn’t settled much of New Hampshire, which consisted of four towns: Portsmouth, Exeter, Hampton and Dover.

The colony elected a council to govern itself, which operated until 1683 with Edward Gove as a member. This brief period of self-governance abruptly ended shortly after a royal governor, Edward Cranfield, arrived late in 1682.

Cranfield had two unenviable tasks. First, he had to impose a tax on the colony. Second, he had to deal with Robert Mason. In 1622, Capt, John Mason had gained title to property north of the Merrimack River in Newburyport. But the Mason family had done little with the land.

John Mason had built mills for sawing lumber and milling grain, and he stocked his new colony with cannon and small arms. Upon his death, however, all his work decayed to ruin.

In 1652, a descendant tried to reestablish ownership of the colony. Though he successfully sued one of the settlers occupying part of the land, he could never extract any payment. He returned to England empty-handed.

Robert Mason

With the royal decision to detach New Hampshire from Massachusetts, the time seemed right to Robert Mason to try to enforce his family’s 60-year-old claim to the land. With visions of establishing himself a fiefdom, Mason named himself Lord Proprietor of New Hampshire. He then agreed to pay Governor Cranfield a salary of 150 pounds to go to New Hampshire. Mason also began demanding that the residents of the colony start paying him rent for their land. He agreed to send 20 percent of what he collected back to the king.

The elected government of New Hampshire was dissolved and replaced by an appointed king’s governing council. This council first tried to buy off Cranfield by topping Mason’s bribe. It voted him a payment of 250 pounds. Cranfield agreed to the payment, but continued working with Mason.

The governing council grew increasingly annoyed by Mason as he continued to assert that he owned all of New Hampshire. He also denied them trees for fuel and threatened to sell their property. The governing council outlawed his proceedings and almost everyone flat-out refused to pay him rents.

Cranfield, too, started getting frustrated at the colonists’ unwillingness to pay. In Hampton, Edward Gove – a large landowner – boiled over.

Seeming Lunatic

Edward Gove had a history of hotheadedness,. He appeared in court to answer complaints about his foul language and his accusation that his neighbor had stolen property. The time had come, Gove asserted, to defend the liberties of the colonists from Mason and Cranfield.

Gove assembled a group of 12 men who felt, as he did, that the time had come to revolt against Cranfield. The men armed themselves and rode horses from Exeter to Hampton, one man blowing a horn and the others calling for their neighbors to come out and join them in rising up against the tyranny. (Alcohol may have played a role in this endeavor.)

john-winthop-jr.-boston-post-road

Gove’s neighbors not only didn’t pick up arms to join him. They had him arrested. Those who knew him might have viewed the episode as Edward Gove popping off as usual.

To Cranfield, the incident amounted to treason. He had Gove and his fellow riders jailed and then tried. Gove’s neighbors tried to explain to the court that, for Edward Gove, this type of behavior wasn’t terribly unusual nor was he all that difficult to control.

“Edward Gove now of Hampton…was some years since in a strange distemper seemingly lunatic,” one neighbor testified according to the Gove genealogy.

The Tower of London

Another said:

“There be also many more than testify if need be . . . and some that can swear they were in company and did many times help to bind the said Edward Gove hand and foot (when he was out of his head) for fear he should do hurt to himself or others.”

Cranfield held off sentencing the majority of the revolutionaries, but not Gove. He sentenced Gove to death, and a gruesome death at that:

“You, Edward Gove, shall be drawn on a hedge to the place of execution and there you shall be hanged by the neck, and when yet living be cut down and cast on the ground, and your bowels shall be taken out of your belly, and your privy members cut off and burnt while you are yet alive, your head shall be cut off and your body divided in four parts, and your head and quarters shall be placed where our Sovereign Lord the King pleaseth to appoint. And the Lord have mercy on your soul.”

The Tower of L ondon today

With that, Edward Gove was dispatched on a ship, lest he be rescued from prison. The colonists sent him to the Tower of London since they did not believe they had authority to actually carry out an execution.

As Edward Gove languished in the tower for more than a year, Cranfield started pressing his case again for taxes and rents.

Pardon

The news outraged the New Hampshire citizenry and further hardened them against Cranfield. In one case, an officer of the government attempted to collect a tax due from people exiting a church in Dover. A young girl knocked him to the ground by striking him in the head with her Bible.

“At other places, the women met the collector of taxes at their doors with scalding water, which proved a perfect barrier to their ingress, and the men with clubs defied their approach, the officers being not infrequently roughly handled.”

In England, newly crowned King James II and his government learned the details of Cranfield’s behavior in New Hampshire. Cranfield, himself, began to doubt whether his plans would ever succeed.

The King pardoned Edward Gove and allowed him to return home, ordering the return of his lands seized by Cranfield. Meanwhile, he recalled Cranfield from his post. When news of Cranfield’s demotion reached New Hampshire a spontaneous committee formed to remove the erstwhile governor. They stripped him of his sword, tied him to a horse and escorted him to the border of Massachusetts. From there he went on his way.

Walter Barefoot

Capt. Walter Barefoot temporarily replaced Cranfield and tried to implement Mason and Cranfield’s tax schemes. He had even less success than his predecessor.

An officer of the governor gets a thrashing with a Bible for trying to deliver a writ.

One oft-told story involved Thomas Wiggins and Anthony Nutter visiting Mason at Barefoot’s home, where Mason was staying. The disagreement over Mason’s claim quickly turned violent. Wiggins tossed Mason into the fireplace and knelt on him on the coals. Barefoot tried to intervene and Wiggins gave him the same treatment, breaking two of his ribs in the process.

Nutter, meanwhile, stood by laughing until Mason reached for his sword. That prompted Nutter to take the sword away. Finally the violence ended when neighbors began entering the house, drawn by the maid’s screams. The rents, needless to say, went uncollected.

This story about Edward Gove was updated in 2023.

Image: Tower of London By © Hilarmont (Kempten), CC BY-SA 3.0 de, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=38250655.

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Samuel Gorton Insults the Puritans, Goes to Jail, Founds Warwick, R.I.

By 1648, most New England leaders had it in for Samuel Gorton. In just a handful of years he had been kicked out of every town he moved to, infuriated even the famously tolerant Rhode Islanders and been attacked by government soldiers. He even got threatened with a death sentence in Massachusetts.

So after four years in exile in England when he decided to return to the colonies, where did he go? Yup, he sailed right into Boston Harbor, where officials promptly arrested him. But Gorton had one more card to play that would save his life yet again.

Depiction of Samuel Gorton on Trial in Portsmouth, R.I.

Gorton had brought with him an official letter ordering the colonists to grant him safe passage to his home in a sparsely populated section of land in Rhode Island. That allowed him to settle there.

Samuel Gorton

Gorton’s flaw, as the Puritans saw it, was that he didn’t believe in their world of saints and sinners. Rather, Gorton had his own unconventional beliefs. He believed in equality for women, and he eschewed the formal church leadership. He accepted that all people are imbued with the spirit of God. His beliefs mirrored those adopted by the Quakers.

Born in 1592 in Gorton, England, near Manchester, his family was financially well off. Private tutors educated him, and he became a scholar. He married Mary Mayplet, whose brother John served as surgeon to King Charles II.

Gorton embraced an unorthodox strain of Puritanism. He believed in the equality of all humans and in the presence of the Holy Spirit in everyone. And he opposed slavery.

He left England some time around early 1637. “I left my native country to enjoy liberty of conscience in respect to faith toward God and for no other end,” he wrote.

Arrival in the Colonies

When Gorton first arrived in the colonies in 1637 with his wife and children, he landed in Boston in the early stages of the Anne Hutchinson controversy. During that dispute, the religious leaders of the colony eventually banned Hutchinson from Massachusetts for her religious views.

Anne Hutchinson on trial

So he kept his own thoughts on religion to himself for a very brief time until he arrived in Plymouth, Mass. There he began making enemies in earnest. He quickly got into a religious argument with his landlord. He also defended his wife’s servant against gossip that she had smiled in church. When summoned to court to explain himself, he acted so obnoxious to the magistrates they gave him 14 days to clear out of Plymouth.

From Plymouth he travelled to Portsmouth, R.I. Rhode Islanders had split from Massachusetts when the colony banished Roger Williams for his religious beliefs. The colony had more tolerance for people with alternate religious views than the Puritans.

Gorton, however, was so offensive he soon found himself in trouble. In 1640 he went to court in a dispute that started over a trespassing cow. It ended with Gorton calling the magistrates “asses.” He labeled other men of the town “jack-an-apes” and “saucy boys”. He was sentenced to a whipping.

Bemadding Providence

Short of support, Gorton then tried Providence. But here he again got embroiled in disputes. Roger Williams wrote to John Winthrop: “Master Gorton having abused high and low at Aquidneck, is now bewitching and bemadding poor Providence…”

Roger Williams Statue, Roger Williams Park, Providence, Rhode Island. Photo: Detroit Publishing Co., Library of Congress

Throughout his travails, Gorton gradually gathered a group of supporters who shared his religious views. They also admired his outspoken disdain for the church authorities and disliked the prevailing leadership in Rhode Island. This band of people – perhaps as large as 40 or more – became known as Gortonites or Gortonists.

Other local colonists were outraged by Gorton’s shenanigans. So they asked Massachusetts for help in ridding them of the pest who had arrived via Boston. Massachusetts declined, however, citing a lack of jurisdiction. But then Winthrop — who Gorton called “the great and honored Idol General” — warned Gorton to quit agitating in Providence.

In 1643, Gorton and 11 others bought a piece of land from the Indians in what was known as Shawomet, south of Providence. But then two Indian sachems complained to Massachusetts that he’d swindled them of their land.

They then asked for help in ousting Gorton. This time Winthrop complied, sending 40 armed men after Gorton and his supporters. The Gortonites held out for a week and finally agreed to travel to Boston to answer charges. But they would only go as free men. As soon as they exited the house, however, they were barricaded in. The armed men then clapped the Gortonites in irons and marched them back to Boston.

Attack on Shawomet by Massachusetts soldiers

Warwick Gets a Name

The Puritan magistrates charged the Gortonites with heresy — not for the land deal — and sentenced them to death. A majority of the magistrates, however, would not affirm the death sentence. Instead, they ordered the Gortonites held at the Charlestown prison for a year at hard labor.

They got an early release, however, in 1644. Gorton and two of his followers thought it wise to return to England to look for help. There Gorton actively spread his beliefs while he petitioned the government for assistance. Here he also published several books detailing his mistreatment in New England.

By 1648 Gorton had received what he sought. A letter from Robert Rich, 2nd Earl of Warwick, ordering that he be allowed to return to his land at Shawomet. With letter in hand he sailed for Boston.

Robert Rich (1587-1658), 2nd Earl of Warwick

The order to arrest Gorton was rescinded when he produced the letter from the Earl of Warwick – who was the colonial administrator for the Crown – and Gorton was allowed safe passage to Shawomet (though he remained banished from Massachusetts). His fellow townsmen – now outnumbering his adversaries – immediately elected Gorton as one of their leaders.

He would remain a leader in the town – renamed Warwick in honor of the Earl – for the remainder of his life.

In 1667 Gorton passed away while the Crown considered his request to lift his banishment from Massachusetts. He finally won an order reestablishing his freedom to enter Massachusetts in 1668. He died in 1677.

By 1771, all but one Gortonite had died or drifted away, and Gorton’s sect disappeared altogether.

Gravesite of Samuel Gorton in Samuel Gorton Cemetery, Warwick, R.I.

Samuel Gorton, Reconsidered

Though dismissed as an eccentric troublemaker, later scholars and historians rehabilitated Gorton’s reputation. Despite his sarcastic outbursts, he had a gentle and sympathetic nature and often showed generosity to others.

His biographer, Adelos Gorton, argued in 1907 that no one other than Roger Williams did more to establish the foundation of civil rights and liberty in Rhode Island.

Samuel G. Arnold, 19th century historian and U.S. senator from Rhode Island, called him, “one of the most remarkable men that ever lived.” He wrote,

His astuteness of mind and his Biblical learning made him a formidable opponent of the Puritan hierarchy, while his ardent love of liberty, when it was once guaranteed, caused him to embrace with fervor the principles that gave origin to Rhode Island.

Earlier, Samuel Eddy, historian and Rhode Island congressman, wrote that none of the first settlers received more unmerited approach or suffered so much injustice as Samuel Gorton.

His opinions on religious subjects were probably somewhat singular …But that was his business; his opinions were his own and he had a right to them.

This story last updated in 2022.

With thanks to Philip F. Gura, The Radical Ideology of Samuel Gorton: New Light on the Relation of English to American Puritanism, The William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 36, No. 1 (Jan., 1979), pp. 78-100.

Images: Gorton’s gravesite By Sarnold17, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=34487253. Attack on Shawomet By Scribner's Popular History of the United State, 1898, by William Cullen Bryant, Sydney Howard Gay, Noah Brooks – https://books.google.com/books?id=TJBYAAAAMAAJ&q=samuel+gorton#v=onepage&q=Gorton%20and%20his%20men%2C%20whatever%20else%20they%20were%2C&f=false, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=37114025. Gorton on Trial By Unknown author – NYPL Digital Collection: http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/id?834240, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16541517.

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Shattuck and The Devil Try To Stop Quaker Persecution in New England

Quaker persecution began in Massachusetts in July 1656 as soon as the first two Quakers sailed into Boston Harbor. Mary Fisher and Ann Austin arrived on the Swallow, a ship from Barbados, with a trunk full of Quaker writings.

Puritan magistrates had them strip searched in public for signs of witchcraft, jailed them, deprived them of food, confiscated their belongings and put them back on the Swallow when it sailed away eight weeks later.

To the Puritans’ horror, eight more Quakers arrived in Boston shortly after Fisher and Austin. The General Court passed an edict that imposed a heavy fine on any ship’s captain who brought Quakers into Boston. The eight Quakers were beaten and jailed, and the captain who brought them had to take them back to England.

The Massachusetts Bay Colony then banned Quakers — in 1656, 1657, 1658, 1659 and 1660 — and sent letters to the other New England colonies suggesting they do the same. Connecticut followed suit in 1656; Rhode Island refused.

The colonies got away with Quaker persecution until the restoration of the English monarchy. Then, Charles II tried to stop the Puritans from persecuting Quakers – or other heretics such as Catholics or Lutherans. And at that point Quaker persecution was more than an exercise in religious intolerance; it was about maintaining political independence from the Crown.

New England Way

Samuel Sewall

The Puritans had endured much to establish the New England Way, a system based on the power and independence of the congregation. The church was sovereign; the state subordinate to the church.

To create their moral community – their ‘city on a hill’ – the Puritans had left their homes, sailed across the Atlantic and confronted the terrors of the wilderness.

The Quakers who continued to arrive in the mid-1600s were anything but gentle peaceniks. They deliberately disrupted the Puritan community. When the self-righteous Quakers came to town they yelled in the streets, banged pots and pans, shouted during church services and stripped off their clothes.

Samuel Sewall in his diary recorded one such disturbance:

In Sermon time there came in a female Quaker, in a Canvas Frock, her face as black as ink, led by two other Quakers, and two others followed. It occasioned the greatest and most amazing uproar that I ever saw.

Burning Quakers

The Puritans responded by cruelly punishing Quakers. They whipped them, branded them, cut off their ears, bored holes through their tongues and hanged them.

Rev. John Norton, a leading Boston minister, cried, “I would carry fire in one hand and faggots in the other, to burn all the Quakers in the world.”

That didn’t stop the Quakers.

The punishment for a Quaker to set foot in Massachusetts in 1660 was death by hanging. Quaker Mary Dyer chose to die to expose the cruelty of the Puritan theocracy

The Quakers even exasperated Roger Williams, that paragon of tolerance. Though the other colonies threatened Providence Plantation with a trade embargo because it tolerated Quakers, the Quakers treated Williams disrespectfully. Wrote one historian,

Williams was taken aback by his Quaker opponents’ boisterous behavior and abandonment of common courtesy during the debates. He vehemently objected to their habit of interrupting his arguments, shouting him down, attempting to humiliate him personally with name-calling and ridicule, misrepresenting his convictions, and displaying a noted lack of truthfulness in their own arguments.

Stopping the Quaker Persecution

Charles II ordered an end to Quaker persecution.

In 1660, the English monarchy was restored. Quakers went for help to King Charles II, a Catholic sympathizer. He had no liking for the Puritans, who had executed his father and taken refuge in New England.

A Quaker named Burroughs was said to have told the monarch, “There is a vein of blood opened in your dominions which, if not stopped, will overcome all.

”I will stop that vein,” Charles supposedly replied.

Then in 1662, the king sent a letter to Massachusetts ordering him to stop the Quaker persecution.

According to the king’s missive, the colony should send Quakers accused of crimes – unharmed – to England for trial. A Quaker named Shattuck, who the Puritans had sent back to England, then brought the letter to Gov. John Endicott. Word spread that “Shattuck and the devil had come.”

Endicott said he would obey the king’s command. But only gradually did Massachusetts Puritans lessen their persecution of Quakers.

This story about Quaker persecution was updated in 2022.

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How New Haven Became Part of Connecticut: It Was the Regicides

Had three regicides fled somewhere other than New Haven Plantation, Connecticut might look a lot different today.

regicides Charles_II_of_England_in_Coronation_robes

King Charles II

The three Puritan ‘king-killers’ who opposed King Charles I were among the 59 commissioners who sat in judgment of him and signed his death warrant. Charles was beheaded on Jan. 30, 1649, but the governments that succeeded him only lasted 11 years. His son Charles II became king on his 30^th birthday, May 29, 1660, and sought revenge for his father’s killers.

About 20 regicides were executed. Some were drawn and quartered. Some fled to the Continent, but three fled to the Puritan colony of New Haven in 1661, where they expected to find refuge. They did.

After the Restoration, Edward Whalley and William Goffe fled together to North America, landing in Boston. John Dixwell went to New Haven. He made the better choice.

John Dixwell, Regicide

William Goffe

John Dixwell was a colonel in the Parliamentary army and a member of four parliaments. When he arrived in New Haven Colony, it had been a staunch Puritan plantation since 1637. Over time it included Milford, Guilford, Stamford and Branford.

Dixwell immediately went undercover, assuming the name John Davids. Royalists in England believed he died, and never searched for him. He settled in a house near his friend the Rev. James Pierpont, an ancestor of Aaron Burr and J.P. Morgan. In 1673 he married widow Joanna Ling, and four years later he married Bathsheba How. They had a son and two daughters.

Regicides on the Lam

Edward Whalley fought under Oliver Cromwell, his cousin, during the English Civil War as a lieutenant general.

William Goffe married Whalley’s daughter Frances and became a major general in Cromwell’s army. Politically radical and deeply religious, he was known as ‘Praying William.’ After the Restoration, he and Whalley fled together to North America.

John Dixwell

On July 27, 1660, they arrived in Boston, where they knew Increase Mather and Daniel Gookin. Gov. John Endecott received them warmly. They thought themselves safe and lived openly in Cambridge, believing rumors that all but seven of the regicides would receive pardons. Those turned out to be false.

As the new Parliament debated what to do with people who committed crimes (including king killing) during the Interregnum, Endecott began to wonder whether he should have greeted the regicides with open arms. On Feb. 22, 1661, he gathered a court of assistants to discuss whether to arrest the two men. Whalley and Goffe decided to head south. They left on February 26, and orders for their arrest arrived from Barbados on March 8.

The Regicides in New Haven

Whalley and Goffe arrived in New Haven two days after Boston magistrates received the royal order for their arrest. They hid out with a sympathetic minister, the Rev. John Davenport. When the news of their arrest orders arrived, they made a show of leaving for Milford, but returned secretly to New Haven that night. For two months they stayed with Davenport and other sympathizers as royal agents swept the countryside in search of them.

New Haven Gov. William Leete received the orders for their arrest in Guilford, but Leete sympathized with the regicides and delayed the king’s agents. That gave Whalley and Goffe enough time to escape and hide out in Judges Cave, where they lived most of the summer.

Judges Cave

In August they moved to a house in Milford, where they lived for two years until their hideout was discovered. They moved back to the cave until Indians found them. On Oct. 13, 1663, they set out for western Massachusetts, traveling only by night. They arrived in Hadley, Mass., where the Rev. John Russell sheltered them. Goffe managed to exchange letters with his wife, still in England. She sent him money.

In 1665, King Charles II punished New Haven for protecting the regicides. He merged the colony with Connecticut.

Angel of Hadley

During King Philip’s War, Indians attacked Hadley. According to legend, all seemed lost until a powerful-looking old man with a white beard and a sword appeared. He rallied the militia in a successful defense against the Indians and then disappeared. There is reason to believe the Angel of Hadley was William Goffe.

The Angel of Hadley

Edward Whalley is believed to have died in 1675 in Hadley. Goffe is believed to have died in Hartford some years later.

John Dixon died on March 18, 1689, in New Haven.

A seven-mile hiking trail in Connecticut’s West Rock Ridge State Park is called The Regicides Trail. Judges Cave, where they hid, is near the south end of the trail, which is within New Haven, Hamden, Woodbridge and Bethany. For more information, click here.

Lake Watrous, viewed from an overlook on the Regicides Trail.

New Haven named three intersecting streets after the regicides: Dixwell Avenue, Whalley Avenue and Goffe Street.

This story about the regicides was updated in 2022.

Images: View from Regicides Trail By Tebersold – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17592991.

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Maine Timbers kept the British Navy afloat in the second Anglo-Dutch war in 1666.

Maine Timbers Shore Up the British Navy in 1666

Maine Timbers kept the British Navy afloat in the second Anglo-Dutch war in 1666.

There was nothing like a shipment of white pine Maine timbers from the New England colonies to cheer up a British Royal Navy undersecretary in 1666.

England’s prosperity depended on the navy to control the seas and trade routes. From March 1665 through July 1667, England was at war for a second time with the Dutch Republic, trying to end its domination of world trade. But the Royal Navy faced a chronic problem: there were few trees big enough in Britain for spars and masts to outfit its warships.

The immense stands of tall white pines in northern New England offered a solution. They grew to a height of over 200 feet and were sometimes 10 feet in diameter. Some were a thousand years old. The British Admiralty was quick to grasp the potential of New England’s great white pines for ship construction.

Eventually laws were passed to reserve for the Crown. The king’s surveyors traveled the woods, scoring the king’s trees with three slashes shaped like an arrow – the King’s Broad Arrow. The laws were honored more in the breach than in the observance.

During most of the 17th and 18th centuries, Falmouth, Maine (now Portland), and Portsmouth, N.H., were the center of the mast trade.

Samuel Pepys was an undersecretary of the British Admiralty in 1666. He kept a detailed diary from 1660-69.

On Dec. 3, 1666, Pepys had a bad day at work, ‘with everybody prophesying destruction to the nation.’ One event comforted him: “There is also the very good news come of four New England ships come home safe to Falmouth with masts for the King; which is a blessing mighty unexpected, and without which, if for nothing else, we must have failed next year. But God be praised for this good fortune, and send us a continuance of his favor in other things.”

It would not be enough, however, as Britain was unable to put its entire navy into fighting shape and England was beaten soundly in the war that ended in 1667.

This story was updated from the 2014 version.

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