In recent years, a number of authors have taken an interest in the variously unhappy fates met by some of those responsible for the trial and execution of Charles I. With some outstanding exceptions, treatment of the subject has not really attained levels of scholarship elevating it beyond the interests of the general reader. Mathew Jenkinson's Charles I's Killers in America makes no bones about its intentions in that regard. But it is also highly suggestive of its subject's deeper potential.

The western exploits of Edward Whalley and William Goffe are reasonably well known—perhaps surprisingly so, for an old-world audience, certainly for this reader. It turns out that elements in the mythology surrounding them has been a long-standing and fairly well ingrained feature of the culture and political culture of the United States, brought to life on the page, stage, and canvas, as Jenkinson puts it, for the best part of three centuries, off and on. William Goffe apparently even made his first appearance on the small screen as recently as 2014.

This latest book-length treatment provides as engaging an account as one might expect to meet of the American lives of the regicides. Jenkinson does what he can within the severe limitations imposed by the available sources to piece together what we know—and what we almost certainly do not, and never will. However, Jenkinson is entirely unafraid of speculating confidently as to what may (or may not) lie between the lines—or indeed, out of sight, just around the next bend in the rutted highway down which his subjects ride—in order to fill out the account of the regicides’ flight, pursuit (such as it was), and concealment in various New England locations in the years after the Stuart Restoration.

The core of the first section's thesis is that, by contrast with various efforts expended in mainland Europe, there was an almost collusive indifference between metropolitan and colonial authorities to the tracking down of these two particular regicides (a third, John Dixwell, barely attains the status of after-thought—necessarily so, given how deep he is buried in historical oblivion). The argument will be familiar to readers of Jenkinson's contribution to the recent festschrift for Clive Holmes, offered in tribute to Dr. Holmes's own influential contribution toward the reevaluation of the “county community” school of civil war studies, forty years ago. There are some interesting speculations offered as to the significance of (non-)events in the evolving relationship between London and the colonial authorities in the Restoration period, if no real load-bearing contributions to an expansive scholarship on the wider topic.

Jenkinson's slight tendency to overcompensate for the limitations of his subject in the first half of the book is succeeded in the second by an economy that seems to me to come at the cost of slightly underselling its potential. This section offers an introductory overview of the regicides’ story as a feature of colonial, revolutionary, and republican American culture and identity. Here, where source material is much more plentiful, and where context could have been heaped upon context, regrettably Jenkinson only has time to make a whistle-stop tour of his subject, content to point out some of the conventional sights, such as depiction in several media of the well-known tale of “the Angel of Hadley.”

The bigger ideas of this section of the book are as frustratingly fugitive as are the two puritan judges themselves. The potential counterpoint to (or is it a consistency with?) Eric Nelson's stimulating thesis—about the retrieval, by leading American revolutionaries, of regal, law-bound prerogative powers, supposed to have been consigned to the ash-heap of Anglophone history in the Stuart age—is a route clearly signposted, if studiously avoided on this occasion. Jenkinson points out a seeming reluctance in the colonies to engage with the story of Whalley and Goffe for much of the eighteenth century, without pausing to wonder whether at some stage, in the eyes of some colonists—such as those at Marblehead, Massachusetts, who marked the 117th anniversary of the execution of Charles I by burning effigies of Westminster MPs (101)—the regicides may have become the bad guys.

If in the first half of his book Jenkinson led us confidently around his chosen domain more or less mapless, picking out for us its principal features as they loomed from the void of a darkening New England winter, in the second half he offers no more than a brisk sketch, surveying the coastline of a far greater land mass, as it were from aboard ship. Jenkinson's outlines are highly suggestive nevertheless—at least to somebody as unfamiliar as I am with the territory—of a number of potential directions for future travel and for deeper exploration of this fascinating and determinedly resilient theme.