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

Author Christopher Pagliuco reveals the all-but-forgotten stories of these Connecticut heroes.

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. Yet when his son, Charles II, regained the throne, Whalley and Goffe were forced 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 ahead of the authorities in Boston, New Haven, and the outpost of Hadley, Massachusetts. Though forced to live out the rest of their lives fugitives, these former major generals survived frontier adventures in seventeenth-century New England, and became embedded in early United States history.