The Great Escape of Edward Whalley and William Goffe: Smuggled Through Connecticut

When Puritans Edward Whalley and William Goffe joined the parliamentary army against King Charles I in the English civil wars, they seized an opportunity to overthrow a tyrant. Under their battlefield leadership, the army trounced the Royalist forces and then cut off the king’s head. Yet when his son, Charles II, regained the throne, Whalley and Goffe were force to flee to the New England colonies aboard the ship Prudent Mary–never to see their families or England again. Even with the help of New England’s Puritan elite, including Reverend John Davenport, they struggled to stay a step ahead of searches for their arrest in Boston, New Haven (where they hid out in Judges Cave) and the outpost of Hadley, Massachusetts. Forced to live as fugitives, these former major generals survived frontier adventures in seventeenth-century New England. Author Christopher Pagliuco reveals the all-but-forgotten stories of these Connecticut heroes.