The mysterious figure organized and directed the settlers in fending off the Indian attack. Then, Hutchinson reports, "the deliverer of Hadley disappeared," leaving the settlers "in consternation, utterly unable to account for this phenomenon."
In A History of Three of the Judges of King Charles I (1794), Ezra Stiles, president of Yale, reported that the inhabitants could "not account for the phenomenon, but by considering that person as an Angel sent of God" to deliver them. Fortunately, Stiles said, "It was the usage of the frontier towns in those Indian Wars, for a select number of the congregation to go armed to public worship."
This incident has become popularly known as the legend of the Angel of Hadley. Reflection suggests, however, that the peculiar figure was no unearthly manifestation. Indeed, it is likely that if Reverend Russell was astonished at the appearance, it was not because he did not recognize the mysterious stranger. Indeed, he knew that King Charles II considered the stranger to be significantly lower than the angels and had issued a warrant for the stranger's arrest because the "angel" had been among those who had condemned Charles' father, King Charles I, to death.
The "angel" was Maj. Gen. William Goffe, one of the fifty-nine judges who signed Charles I's death warrant on January 29, 1649. With his father-in-law, Lieut. Gen. Edward Whaley, anoth...
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...in Indian New England, Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, 1997.
John Demos, The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America, Knopf, New York, 1994.
Evan Haefeli and Kevin Sweeney, Captors and Captives: The 1704 French and Indian Raid on Deerfield, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 2003.
John Williams, The Redeemed Captive Returning to Zion, 1707, Hessinger, Montana, 2003.
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