Jon Miller photo
Pursuit of the Regicides mural at the Westville library.
March 18 was the anniversary of John Dixwell’s death. For more than three centuries, Whalley and Goffe have gotten almost all the attention. Time to give New Haven’s other regicide his due.
Jon Miller is a freelance writer living in Westville. He is currently working on a book about the Regicides, from which these articles are adapted. Click here and here to read the first two parts of this series.
Despite the presence of two aging men, the Russell House was far from sedate when John Dixwell showed up in Hadley, Massachusetts in 1665.
Reverend Russell and his wife had two young sons. Jonathan was 10 when Dixwell arrived, his brother Samuel was just five. With Edward Whalley aging into dementia and William Goffe, his son-in-law, caring for him, and all of them avoiding visitors, Dixwell no doubt welcomed the diversion two little boys could provide.
He himself had never married and had no children of his own. He later wrote that he had cared for his brother’s children as if they were his own. But since leaving England, the family had largely turned its back on him. He was especially bitter about the way Basil, Mark’s eldest son, treated him.
In a legal document he wrote in 1682, Dixwell described how he had cared for the family for 17 years. Not only had he managed the estate in trust for Basil, he said, but when rents from tenants dried up during the war and taxes claimed more of the estate than his brother ever imagined, Dixwell contributed a good deal of his own money to ensure the children’s inheritance.
And yet according to Dixwell, Basil, who inherited Broome Park and most of his father’s wealth, and later became a baronet, refused to reimburse his uncle for the money he had given the family, nor, wrote Dixwell, “show any respect for the care I had of him, by making some provision for me in my afflicted state.”
Dixwell’s niece Elizabeth, who remained devoted to him throughout his life, sent her uncle small sums when she could, along with books and clothing. But Dixwell confessed in the 1682 document that “if the Lord had not extraordinarily provided for me, I had perished for want“
Dixwell’s good fortune turned when he left his friends hiding out in Hadley and ventured into New Haven. He left, I think, to seek what he had never had, a family of his own.
As isolated as they were, Whalley and Goffe had loving wives and children back home to sustain them in their exile. Whalley even had grandchildren, including those Goffe and his daughter had given him. And Francis (Whalley) Goffe kept both her husband and father connected to their family back home through regular correspondence.
But Dixwell had little to comfort him in his last years, having been largely rejected by the only family he knew. So rather than remain in hiding with his famous friends, Dixwell, I believe, decided to take one last shot at becoming a father and husband. He was no longer young, but men his age — he was in his 60s —often married younger women.
There were two serious obstacles blocking his path to matrimony: his status as a regicide and his poverty. His low profile, at least compared to his well-known comrades, and his alias had proven effective against the first threat. As for the second, his trust in God proved well founded.
Dixwell Starts A Family
1641 map of New Haven.
Benjamin Ling was one of New Haven’s original settlers. He and his wife Joanna had a comfortable two-story house not far from the town’s central green, on the corner of what is now Grove and College streets, across from Yale’s Woolsey Hall.
By the time John Dixwell knocked on their door, they were getting on in years. But as Dixwell probably knew from Whalley and Goffe, the elderly couple had no children and plenty of room for a quiet, godly lodger.
It’s unclear how long Dixwell lived with the Lings, but by 1673, when Benjamin was nearing the end of his life, the couple had obviously grown close to their boarder. So close in fact that the dying man asked Dixwell to look after his wife.
Whether Benjamin and Joanna had already decided to make Dixwell their heir or she decided on her own I don’t know. But shortly after Benjamin was gone, Dixwell and Joanna married. The fact that she herself died a few weeks later suggests that the couple knew what was coming when they said their vows.
The marriage gave the Lings a legally binding way to leave their modest estate to a family member, a man they had come to care for, who needed the inheritance to start a family of his own. The Lord had not seen fit to give them children, but perhaps through Dixwell, they might still help bring little ones into the world.
Their generosity did not go to waste. As a man of property, Dixwell was now an eligible bachelor. Four years later he married Bathsheba Howe, whose father had been licensed to sell “strong water by pints or quarts or other small quantities.”
Within two years, Bathsheba gave birth to their first child, Mary. By the time she turned three, Mary had a brother, John, and a sister, Elizabeth, named no doubt for Dixwell’s loving niece.
The family lived quietly in New Haven. James Davids, as he was known to all but a select few, kept to himself. He attended church and enjoyed his uncommonly large collection of books, especially The History of the World, which Sir Walter Raleigh wrote during the 14 years he was imprisoned for treason — a situation Dixwell no doubt sympathized with.
Throughout the Davids’ first years together, New Haven had no regular minister. Then in 1685, John Pierpont joined the community. He had ridden down from Harvard with his friend Samuel Russell, who 20 years earlier, as a five-year-old, had so delighted Dixwell and his old friends in Hadley.
In Pierpont, Dixwell at last found a well-educated companion with whom he could discuss worldly and spiritual matters. The two became fast friends and met so frequently to chat over the fence separating their properties that they wore a path between their two houses.
When Mrs. Pierpont asked her husband why he enjoyed spending so much time with the old man next door, he told her that Mr. Davids knew more about religion and other matters than anyone else in town, and that if she knew him as he did, she wouldn’t wonder at their friendship.
Next time — Part Four: Dixwell faces a final challenge.
