Today’s yawning polarisation between leavers and remainers serves as a reminder that it was only from the 18th century that England became known as a land of political stability. No era was quite so topsy-turvy as that between 1640 and 1660. Charles I – an unacknowledged forerunner of Dominic Raab – had tried to rule without parliament, but the rebellion of his Presbyterian subjects in Scotland forced him to resort to parliament for funding. In reaction against parliament’s assertiveness, he fought a civil war against it, which he lost. Indefatigable, the king conspired, this time with his former enemies the Scots, to fight a second civil war, in which, again, he was defeated. Some parliamentarians realised that there was only one way to deal decisively with this unscrupulous “man of blood”.

Charles I was tried for high treason by a court whose authority he refused to recognise, and executed on 30 January 1649. There were 59 signatories of the king’s death warrant; they included Oliver Cromwell, as well as Cromwell’s cousin Edward Whalley and Whalley’s son-in-law William Goffe.

During the 1650s, the English employed a series of makeshift forms of government, including – amid a variety of experiments – republicanism, a protectorate and rule by a decentralised junta of major-generals (Whalley and Goffe among them). None took root. Eventually, after Cromwell’s death in 1658, England’s flirtation with non-monarchical government fizzled out. The restoration of Charles II in 1660 filled the vacuum of legitimacy.

The restoration itself was smooth and initially bloodless: although there was no truth and reconciliation process, an Act of Indemnity and Oblivion specified certain individuals whose former political transgressions it was convenient to overlook. The new king had no intention of sacrificing prudence to vindictiveness. But the regicides who had signed his father’s warrant of execution – 40 of whom were still alive – lay beyond the pale. Soon the trials and executions of the living regicides began, and the corpses of Cromwell and other deceased regicides were dug up, beheaded and put on display.

Several regicides had found refuge in the hospitable environments of republican Switzerland and the Netherlands. But Charles II’s continental regicide-hunter, Sir George Downing – a former parliamentarian – was implacable in pursuit of his quarry. Three were arrested in Delft, then rapidly smuggled out of jail and the Netherlands to the gallows in England, while another was tracked down in Lausanne, his assassin shooting him in the back with a blunderbuss in a churchyard.

An ocean away, the story of Whalley and Goffe, who escaped to New England, where they were later joined at one point by another regicide, John Dixwell, is for the most part a lighter affair. Although the Puritan colonies of New England were strongly inclined towards the good old cause of parliament and godly reformation, and paid heed to the requests of London for the capture of Whalley and Goffe, their unobtrusive sympathies were with their fellow Puritans. Indeed Matthew Jenkinson presents a delightful comedy of recalcitrance – of delayed, incompetent or misdirected pursuit of the regicides on the part of the authorities in New England.

Whalley and Goffe, sailing under assumed names, had left England from Gravesend on 14 May 1660, just 11 days before the arrival of Charles II at Dover, and four days before the House of Lords had decreed the seizure of the regicides. They arrived in the Boston area in late July, and were soon feted by the residents of Puritan Cambridge, the location of Harvard College. But at the end of November news reached the colony of Massachusetts that the men were excluded from the Act of Indemnity. It would certainly improve the colony’s awkward relations with the crown were the men to be turned in. The fugitives decided to move south to another Puritan colony at New Haven, in what would become Connecticut. In the spring of 1661 the Masachusetts authorities received a royal mandate for the arrest of Whalley and Goffe, but it was not until May, after some judicious dithering, that Governor Endecott appointed two Boston-based royalists, Thomas Kellond and Thomas Kirke, to track them down.

Prevarication and sly protectiveness were the order of the day in New Haven too, and the regicide hunters eventually returned to Boston duped, frustrated and led a merry dance by Deputy Governor William Leete, Whalley and Goffe having been at times no more than two miles away from their pursuers.

In 1664 the crown sent commissioners to New England, part of whose subtly worded remit was to investigate the affair of the missing regicides. Charles II himself was now part of the charade of shadow-boxing. Weary of too much bloodshed, he was happy enough to have regicides languish in prison and to ‘coax’ the loyalty of his subjects in New England, but reluctant to see more executions. Still Whalley and Goffe thought it prudent to move on again, spending the rest of their days around the settlement of Hadley in the back country of Massachusetts, where they were visited by Dixwell, their fellow regicide on the run.

In due course, as Jenkinson notes, Whalley and Goffe entered into the folklore of New England, not as regicides, but less pejoratively as “the Judges”. Yet the deeds of the Roundheads amounted to much more than a colourful ancestral heritage for the peoples of 18th-century New England. English civil war precedents played a significant part in framing debates over the authority of the motherland in the decades leading up to the American revolution. Indeed, in 1765 during the frenzied atmosphere that accompanied the imposition of the Stamp Act on the colonies, the house of Thomas Hutchinson, the loyalist lieutenant-governor of Massachusetts, was ransacked by a patriot mob. Hutchinson, it transpires, had owned the diary of William Goffe. By chance, some entries had been transcribed and were kept elsewhere. The destruction of the diary nonetheless leaves the reader all the more impressed at Jenkinson’s detective work in reconstructing the stories of men on the run.

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