The friendly welcome which had in fact been extended to the distinguished fugitives cannot be confidently interpreted as an indication of favorable judgment of the act by which their lives were now endangered.  No one of the New-England Colonies had formally expressed approval of the execution of King Charles the First, nor is there any other evidence of its having been generally regarded by them with favor.  It is likely that in New England, as in the parent country, the opinions of patriotic men were divided in respect to the character of that measure.  In New England, remote as it was from the scene of those crimes which had provoked so extreme a proceeding, it may be presumed that there was greater difficulty in admitting the force of the reasons, by which it was vindicated.  And the sympathy of New England would be more likely to be with Vane, who condemned it, than with Cromwell.  But the strangers, however one act of theirs might be regarded, had been eminent among those who had fought for the rights of Englishmen, and they brought introductions from men venerated and beloved by the people among whom a refuge was sought.

Edward Whalley, a younger son of a good family, first cousin of the Protector Oliver, and of John Hampden, distinguished himself at the Battle of Naseby as an officer of cavalry, and was presently promoted by Parliament to the command of a regiment.  He commanded at the storm of Banbury, and at the first capture of Worcester.  He was intrusted with the custody of the King’s person at Hampton Court; he sat in the High Court of Justice at the trial of Charles, and was one of the signers of the death-warrant.  After the Battle of Dunbar, at which he again won renown, Cromwell left him in Scotland in command of four regiments of horse.  He was one of the Major-Generals among whom the kingdom was parcelled out by one of the Protector’s last arrangements, and as such governed the Counties of Lincoln, Nottingham, Derby, Warwick, and Leicester.  He sat as a member for Nottinghamshire in Cromwell’s Second and Third Parliaments, and was called up to “the other House” when that body was constituted.

William Goffe, son of a Puritan clergyman in Sussex, was a member of Parliament, and a colonel of infantry soon after the breaking out of the Civil War.  He married a daughter of Whalley.  Like his father-in-law, he was a member of the High Court of Justice for the King’s trial, a signer of the warrant for his execution, a member of the Protector’s Third and Fourth Parliaments, and then a member of “the other House.”  He commanded Cromwell’s regiment at the Battle of Dunbar, and rendered service particularly acceptable to him in the second expurgation of Parliament.  As one of the ten Major-Generals, he held the government of Hampshire, Berkshire, and Sussex.