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Indeed on Jan 29,1660 Oliver Cromwell's corpse was exhumed from Westminster Abby and taken to the Red Lion Inn at Holburn,(which his ghost was said to thereafter haunt)and the next day dragged through the streets of London to Tyburn where it was hanged, then beheaded and the body dumped into a deep pit beneath the gallows. His head was impaled on a pike and taken to Westminster Hall where it remained until 1684 when the skull was sold to a dissolute drunken actor, Samuel Russell, and finally ended up at Sydney Sussex College and given proper burial in 1960.
As for Maj-Gen William Goffe The contention that William Gough and Major General William Goffe are the same person is totally contradicted by the facts.
Joseph Gough states that his ancestor William Gough was born in England in 1605, that he arrived in Maryland in 1664, subsequently married Hester Larken and was Roman Catholic.
But Major General William Goffe was born in Haverford West Wales in 1614. By 1650 he had married Frances Whalley, daughter of Major General Edward Whalley, and they had three daughters: Elizabeth, Frances, & Judeth, and one son Richard. Maj Gen Goffe was rigorously protestant and violently anti-catholic. He had spent 18 years fighting to establish Cromwell’s brand of Protestantism in England, and as a high officer, elected MP, and member of the House of Lords he was widely known and easily recognized. The notion that by simply changing the spelling of his name and pretending to be a Catholic in Maryland he could escape detection is totally absurd.
At the Restoration of the Stuart monarchy the regicides Goffe and Whalley fled England together and arrived in Boston July 1660 leaving their families behind in England. For the next fifteen years they lived together in hiding night and day, most of it in the home of Rev. John Russell in Hadley MA. until Whalley’s death in 1675 when Goffe left Hadley for New Haven where he was eventually recognized and nearly captured in 1679.
During these years Goffe continually corresponded with his wife Frances in England. Their letters are in the collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society and reveal how devoted he was to his wife and family throughout his entire exile. The proposition implied by Joseph Gough in his book that William Goffe would have somehow deceived Frances and his father-in-law with whom he was living night and day, and married Hester Larken and fathered Joseph Gough’s ancestors is not only impossible and absurd it would have made Goffe a bigamist and such children illegitimate.
Joseph Gough states that William Gough died in 1679 the year Maj Gen William Goffe disappeared after nearly being captured in New Haven. It was absolutely essential that Goffe disappear because the conspiracy to hide him had gone to the highest levels of government in Massachusetts and Connecticut. If he had been captured the colonies’ charters would have been revoked and all private property reverted to the Crown. Thus after 1679 William Goffe simply disappears and rumors were floated that he had conveniently died.
But over time it was reported that after 1679 he had been seen in Pennsylvania and Virginia; that he had gone into hiding near New York and having been discovered there retired secretly to Rhode Island and lived in hiding there with Whalley’s nephew Theophilus.
Thus the incontestable facts prove that Maj-Gen William Goffe and William Gough of Maryland are two totally separate individuals.
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