and for nearly a year they lived unmolested, attending religious meetings, where they preached and prayed. When royalist warrants for their apprehension reached Boston they were conveyed away to the woods by their friends. For many years they lived in great secrecy. In 1664 they were joined at Hadley by Colonel Dixwell, another of the king's judges, who changed his name, married, and lived peaceably among the people of Newhaven, where he died at the age of eighty-two.

1

Hutchinson, who had read the papers left by Whalley and Goffe, tells us that they believed that the regicides put to death in London, whose bodies were not suffered to be put into graves, were the witnesses mentioned in the Apocalypse. They looked for the coming of Christ, and were much disappointed when the year 1666, which had been assigned for that event, passed away without the deliverance of the saints; but flattered themselves that the Christian era might be erroneous.

In 1675, when Hadley was surprised by the Indians during King Philip's war, the town was saved by Goffe, the old Puritan soldier, now bowed with years, who darted from his hiding-place, rallied the disheartened, and having achieved a safe defence sank back to his retirement to be seen no more.

Hesilrige and Whitelocke were included in the amnesty, the House of Commons being specially divided on their cases. Whitelocke paid an enormous fine to Charles, in order to secure himself from further

1 History of the Colony of Massachusetts Bay, pp. 215-219. Hutchinson gives in the appendix an affecting letter from Goffe's wife in England, who was Whalley's daughter.

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molestation; for a vote of the House of Commons was scarcely sufficient to save a man from the court. Harrington and Colonel Hutchinson were both imprisoned on groundless charges without ever being brought to trial. Harrington was set free after his health was permanently injured; but Hutchinson died at Sandown Castle in Kent, in 1664, after eleven months' imprisonment. The last of the great commonwealth men that appear in English history are Algernon Sidney and Edmund Ludlow.

Sidney found it intolerable to live in England after the return of the Stuarts. "I think," he wrote, "that being exiled from my country is a great evil, and would redeem myself from it with the loss of a great deal of my blood. But when that country of mine, which used to be esteemed a Paradise, is now like to be a stage of injury; the liberty we hoped to establish oppressed; luxury and lewdness set up in its height, instead of the piety, virtue, sobriety, and modesty which we hoped God by our hands would have introduced; the best of our nation made a prey to the worst; the parliament, court, and army corrupted; the people enslaved; all things vendible; no man safe but by such evil and infamous means as flattery and bribery-what joy can I have in my own country in this condition? A pleasure to see that all I love in the world is sold and destroyed? Shall I renounce my principles, learn the vile court arts, and make my peace by bribing some of them? Shall their corruption and vice be my safety?

"Ah, no. Better is a life among strangers than in my own country upon such conditions.

"When the innocence of my actions will not

protect me, I will stay till the storm be overpassed.

"In short, when Vane, Lambert, Hesilrige cannot live in safety, I cannot live at all. If I had been in England, I should have expected a lodging with them; or, though they may be the first as being more eminent, I must expect to follow their example in suffering as I have been their companion in acting." After spending many years in Italy and France, Sidney returned to England to fall a victim to an unjust trial, leaving his eloquent writings and his heroic example to his countrymen.

When Ludlow found that resistance to the restoration was hopeless, he took refuge in Switzerland along with John Lisle, the husband of Alice Lisle, the lady who was put to death for harbouring a fugitive after Monmouth's rebellion. Lisle was murdered by royalist assassins, and several attempts were made upon the life of Ludlow, but without success. Though repeatedly asked, he had refused to engage in the desperate plots of the Wildmans and Fergusons against the Stuarts; but when the news of the Revolution of 1688 reached the shores of the Lake of Geneva, Ludlow regarded it as the triumph of the cause to which he had been so honest and steady a friend.

He was invited by some powerful members of the Whig party to return to England; but it would appear that the horror with which the regicides were regarded had increased during the twenty-eight years, when no man dared say a word in their excuse. was brought to the notice of parliament by some Tory member that one of the regicides had appeared

It

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openly in London, and whatever the Whigs may have thought on the matter, they had not the courage to defend him. Some days elapsed before a warrant could be issued against him, and the Puritan soldier had time to escape from England and to return to the republican state which had sheltered him so long. He died in the seventy-third year of his age. We have seen his grave in the church of St Martin, overlooking the little town of Vevey, and the quiet blue waters of the Leman Lake, surrounded by the mountains on which he must often have gazed. On the church wall there is an inscription in which his widow records his courage in battle, his mercy to the vanquished, his love of liberty, and hatred of arbitrary power. Beside him lies Andrew Broughton, who read the sentence of death on Charles I.

CHAPTER XXIV

Vane's Theological Views and Writings

WHILE Oliver Cromwell took up the uneasy burden of the state, Henry Vane retired to Raby Castle and gave his mind to those theological reveries which so strikingly contrast with his firm grasp of administrative details and the clearness of his political insight. Yet, in the deeply religious tone of those days, it is no more surprising that a practical politician should have written an abstruse treatise on theology than that, in our days, a cabinet minister should write a book on the Homeric poems, or on the foundations of belief. In the spring of 1655 Vane published a quarto volume of 440 pages entitled, A Retired Man's Meditations or the Mysterie and Power of Godlinesse. One feature of Vane's writings is their entire subjectivity. One may turn over page after page without finding any trace of the personality of the author or political allusions which might mark when the book was written.

In the last chapter of the Meditations Vane proclaims his faith in the near coming of a real theocracy on earth. This belief, which was shared by many of his contemporaries,1 amongst others by John

1 Bishop Hacket in his Memoirs of the Life of Archbishop Williams, tells us of a very religious family in Huntingdonshire who kept a sentinel at all hours and seasons to expect the second coming of the Lord Jesus Christ.