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 , here and here to read the first three parts of this series.
John Dixwell had every reason to believe the worst was behind him.
He had outfoxed the king and escaped to Germany, eluded Downing’s trap in Delft, and made his way safely to the new world. He had been welcomed into a godly community and been blessed with a loving wife and three children of his own.
The only serious disappointment was no doubt the ascent of a Catholic king to the throne of England. The coronation of Charles’s brother James must have come as a blow to Dixwell and his fellow Puritans.
Still, Dixwell had faith that Protestant purity would eventually triumph over such “popery,’ writing at one point that he was “confident the Lord will appear for people and the good old cause for which I suffer, and that there will be those in power again that will relieve the injured and oppressed.”
At 80, he knew he might not live to see that day, but he could rest easy knowing he had done all he could to provide for his family.
Dixwell was far from wealthy but the inheritance he detailed in his will would give Bathsheba the resources to care for the children until they were old enough to look after themselves.
And if anything should happen to her before then, his good friends William Jones and his wife, Whalley and Goffe’s fellow passengers all those years ago, had agreed to take Mary, John, and Elizabeth into their own family.
Dixwell also left several household items, along with his gun and sword, to his son John. And in a note he added to the will after it had already been signed and witnessed, he remembered to leave his daughter all of the books she had put her name in.
To his good friend Reverend Pierpont he left his treasured volume of Sir Walter Raleigh’s History of the World.
A Close Call
Sir Edmund Andros.
One sabbath day in 1687, Dixwell sat with his friends and neighbors in the meeting house on the green, waiting for the morning service to begin.
As sober-minded Puritans, everyone was dressed modestly in plain, unadorned clothes. All of which made the elaborately dressed visitor seated among them stand out like a peacock among a flock of ducks.
As he prepared to begin the service, Reverend Pierpont must have been acutely aware of the visitor.
Sir Edmund Andros had been sent by the new king — James II had succeeded his brother Charles — to bring the crown’s six unruly colonies together into a more manageable Dominion of New England.
Andros was universally despised not just for his mission but for his arrogant disregard of the colonists.
In the king’s name, he had imposed new taxes and enforced the hated Navigation Acts, which severely limited the colonists’ ability to conduct trade.
He had revoked all land titles, forcing owners to pay the king to get their property back. And in defiance of everything Dixwell and his neighbors believed, Andros had established the Church of England as the official religion, abolished local Puritan-friendly legislatures, and reinstituted maypole celebrations, Christmas services, and other rituals Puritans considered pagan. He even allowed gambling and dancing, and the reopening of theaters.
Most recently, rumor had it, Andros had been humiliated in Hartford when he tried to force the governor to surrender the colony’s charter.
In what many no doubt believed an act of divine intervention, a gust of wind was said to have extinguished all the candles in the room where the document was lying on a table. According to one version of events, someone quickly grabbed up the charter and dashed outside into the night.
Andros left without discovering the charter’s hiding place in an ancient oak just outside.
Many of those in the meeting house that day remembered a similarly tense moment.
Years before, when Whalley and Goffe were expected, the colony’s founder, Reverend John Davenport had preached a defiant sermon urging his congregation to “withhold not countenance, entertainment, and protection from such, if they come to us from other countries.” Now, everyone waited to see if their new spiritual leader would rise to the occasion.
As Reverend Pierpont’s good friend, Dixwell may have known what was coming.
Pierpont began by reciting the words of a hymn he had chosen with his visitor in mind. Andros must have turned as red as the cape he likely wore as he listened.
Why dost thou, tyrant, boast abroad,
Thy wicked works to praise?
Dost thou not know there is a God
Whose mercies last always?
Why dost thy mind yet still devise
Such wicked wiles to warp?
Thy tongue untrue, in forging lies
Is like a razor sharp.
Thou dost delight in fraud and guile,
In mischief, blood and wrong;
Thy lips have learned the flattering style,
O false deceitful tongue
After the service ended, Pierpont managed to mollify the angry governor. But he must have been alarmed by what happened next.
Andros, it turned out, was not the only one who stood out among the worshipers that day. Andros had been watching Dixwell as well and now asked who the distinguished looking gentleman was.
Told he was a local merchant by the name of Davids, Andros scoffed. Whoever he was, his manner and educated speech made it abundantly clear that “Mr. Davids” did not belong among the common rabble.
Andros left the service saying he would make inquiries and return with the answer in short order. Someone must have told Dixwell about the unwanted interest he had attracted, because he did not return for the afternoon service that day.
Andros never did identify Dixwell. A year later, King James II was driven from power and replaced by his Protestant daughter Mary and her Dutch husband William of Orange.
Not a shot was fired during what came to be known as the Glorious, or Bloodless, Revolution. With James gone, the colonists rebelled against Andros. The peacock was caught, imprisoned, and eventually shipped back to England.
Excited by what the Glorious Revolution could mean for Dixwell, his niece’s son, Thomas Westrowe, wrote to tell his great uncle that he might soon be able to return to England and reclaim his property. In the meantime, he urged him to head for Amsterdam while he worked to secure a royal pardon from the new king and queen. The letter arrived shortly after Dixwell was laid to rest in the modest plot behind the meeting house.
Fearing that supporters of the old regime would desecrate his grave if his true identity were known, Dixwell asked that his resting place be marked by nothing more than a simple headstone inscribed with his initials, JD for John Dixwell and James Davids, his age and the date of his death, March 18, 1689.
For 85 years, Dixwell lay undisturbed. Then as New England colonists prepared to battle another tyrannical monarch, the king’s men discovered the grave and according to a 1927 history, treated it “with marks of indignity too indecent to be mentioned.”
But history had the last laugh. In 1774, on his way down from Boston to Philadelphia, John Adams stopped in New Haven to pay his respects at the simple stone memorial on the green. He was on his way to the First Continental Congress and thought it only fitting to stop and honor those who not so long ago had sacrificed so much to defy a tyrannical king.
Dixwell was the only one of the New Haven regicides whose grave was marked, but I suspect Adams had in mind all three of the men who met together that day in Hadley.
A final note: In 1849 Dixwell’s remains were exhumed and reburied beneath a much grander memorial, which still stands where it was placed behind the Center Church on the New Haven Green.
While the skeleton was above ground, someone thought to measure it, which is how we know that the stranger who visited the Russell house that day in 1665 was about five feet, seven inches tall.