The Mayflower

by Rebecca Fraser

  * * *

  Penelope did not marry again. In this she was uncharacteristic. For reasons of protection in a harsh physical environment, most colonists lived as married couples. If a spouse died the survivor tended to marry again fairly swiftly. Even in seventeenth-century Europe men and women might marry several times because of high mortality rates, and the need for women to run households.

  Penelope had been, in the Puritan phrase, Josiah’s ‘faithful yokefellow’. Like a swan she could only have one mate. She was to live almost another quarter of a century alone. She wore a mourning ring she had commissioned from the Boston silversmith John Coney, in which she kept a lock of Josiah’s long dark hair.

  Josiah had asked Kenelm’s son, his first cousin Nathaniel, to be one of the overseers to help Penelope administer the estate. Penelope stayed in Marshfield to bring up Isaac and his sixteen-year-old sister, Elizabeth. Marshfield was a quiet New England town, a place cattle were driven to graze on the salt marsh where hundreds of wildfowl made their home within the sound of the sea. People were no longer afraid to go out of doors, but it could be a cold and solitary spot. Isaac was a scholarly boy. He seems to have avoided comparisons with his heroic father. Perhaps because of a rather lonely existence he did well at his studies. Josiah is said to have impatiently left Harvard after his first year, but Isaac grew up to be a distinguished lawyer who became judge of the Probate Court at Plymouth, and Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas. After Plymouth was absorbed into the new political entity demanded by the English government, he was briefly president of the Council of the Province of Massachusetts Bay.

  Josiah had been especially close to his nephew, Elizabeth Curwen’s son, the fatherless John Brooks. He left him a great deal of land at Middleborough which Brooks seems to have been farming for Josiah, and another hundred acres on the north side of the River Taunton.

  Penelope was fortunate that, unlike most widowed women in Marshfield, she could escape from time to time to the busier world of Salem, where she was welcomed within the assured social circle of George and Elizabeth Curwen. Nevertheless anxiety about money afflicted Penelope as the very alarming picture of her father’s affairs emerged. Voluminous records show that witnesses gave statements before commissioners of the High Court at inns in Sudbury and Bures St Mary about Hebert Pelham’s last days. He had not been in his right mind, and he was also burdened with debts and mortgages to neighbours; £600 was owed on Ferriers itself. It was a grim picture. Waldegrave claimed that his father’s debts of £1,120 were so excessive that he could not pay out any of the legacies owed until those debts were settled, and he himself pleaded poverty.

  * * *

  Although some of the Pelham siblings saw Waldegrave as the villain of the piece, Penelope thought it was her father. To her, he had been a high-living crook.

  The New England Penelope had grown up in was antagonistic to female assertiveness, but she had her brother-in-law and overseer, the litigious George Curwen, to support her. He was used to business deals. He may have told her she had every right to claim her own money. In February 1683 Penelope suddenly made an extraordinary public denunciation. She sued her brother and her father’s estate in the Royal Courts of Justice in London for her legacy. In a vitriolic statement she accused them of fraud and criminal conspiracy to deprive her of her grandfather’s money.

  Being fended off by Herbert had been an embittering and alienating experience. Now Josiah was dead and she was facing life alone, her anger came tumbling out of her as she related how her grandfather had created a generous trust for all his grandchildren and she had never received her share. She said Waldegrave was now in possession of the said lands but now also refused to pay.

  Penelope accused Herbert of denying that Thomas Waldegrave had the sort of estate that could stand such a legacy, ‘that there were no such deeds made by the said Thomas Waldgrave though the will of the said Thomas doth mention the same’. Sometimes Herbert had claimed that the land had already been sold by the trustees and the money paid. Penelope believed Waldegrave knew the truth, and knew the whereabouts of the deeds. She demanded that he and his confederates, ‘when discovered’, produce them and also tell the truth about what had happened to the land. She believed it was being used and profited from – though it was meant to be sold ‘for the benefit of your said orator and the other younger children’.

  Penelope was used to being treated as an equal partner by Josiah. Out at Marshfield if a cow was calving and Josiah or his men were absent, there was no time for feminine sensibilities in an emergency. She just had to find a solution. Josiah had had a great deal of faith in Penelope’s character and judgement. His will stated that she could choose her own overseers to run his estate if any of the friends he named were not available. He insisted his family and community treat her with deference. Were his two precious children to die, Penelope could distribute £50 ‘to some other of my near relations who by their love and respect to her and hers she shall see best deserving’. When Isaac came of age the house and estate were to be divided between Isaac and Penelope once Elizabeth had her portion, but it was not up to Isaac to decide anything: ‘In all divisions’ it was ‘my wife to have her choice’.

  Penelope’s devastating portrait of Herbert suggests a burning sense of personal indignation, but trashing her father seems to have come at considerable emotional cost. The court case coincided with Penelope’s second spiritual crisis. She was overwhelmed by a sense of her own sinfulness, terrified she was not one of the elect. She was being assaulted by Satan and believed she was to be separated from Josiah for all eternity. What we might today call her nervous breakdown was so serious it necessitated another intervention by the community. An eight-page letter from Nathaniel Morton exhorted her to bear up during her current affliction.

  Was that sense of sin related to her attack on her father? She lived at a time when all formal authorities, whether legal principles or etiquette books, reinforced patriarchal precepts, where a father and husband wielded what one historian has called ‘absolute authority’. To charge her father with conspiracy had been an act of extraordinary daring which was almost sacrilegious, and perhaps created subconscious feelings of overwhelming wickedness.

  Yet, for all her neuroses, Penelope did not withdraw from the litigation. Whatever her sense of sinfulness and unworthiness or the trauma of rebellion, her strong sense of what was owed to her in pecuniary terms was not invalidated. Penelope believed in her legal rights and was not afraid to enforce them.*

  * * *

  The lack of indexing of many seventeenth-century Chancery cases at the National Archives, and the fact that outcomes were not filed with cases, mean it has been impossible to find out how Penelope’s case was resolved. All that survives of Penelope’s is the writ to the sergeant and her 1683 deposition. It seems likely that Waldegrave either convinced his sisters that he had no money or that he gave them something out of court, though not the whole sum Penelope was owed. It was probably part of the proof for both sisters that on 2 July 1683, five months after Penelope’s suit began, Waldegrave exhibited the probate inventory of Herbert Pelham and his executor’s account in the Prerogative Court.

  Waldegrave’s mortgages increased dramatically from the late 1680s, so perhaps he borrowed more money in order to pay his sisters. In fact he was in far deeper financial water than anyone realised, but it would take another decade before that became clear.

  CHAPTER XIX

  Penelope’s Final Actions

  For half a century Massachusetts had fought against the threat to cancel its charter. External events had always intervened to save rebellious New England from interference when its bold characters – including Penelope’s uncle, Governor Bellingham – became too provocative. The colonies had grown used to their independence. But with peace restored, England had the means to enforce a more streamlined imperial system.

  Edward Randolph’s information – which accused Massachusetts of being an illegal commonwealth, having an ill
egal mint, practising religious persecution, protecting regicides and avoiding the laws of England – made it easier to begin proceedings. In June 1684 not only was the Massachusetts Bay Charter revoked so were the charters of all the New England colonies, including Plymouth’s. To uproar, it was announced they were to be directly ruled by a royal governor. Their proud representative assemblies were abolished.

  * * *

  Six months before the charter was declared void, in January 1684, Penelope’s brother-in-law George Curwen dropped dead. A world only just restored to its old self started to totter again. George had been Penelope’s protector and perhaps a bit of a father figure. He was only ten years younger than her own father, Herbert Pelham, with whom relations had become so troubled.

  George Curwen had been a hectic leading citizen, but he never got round to making a will. Professional activities had used up all his attention. The ferocious scrutiny of detail which made him so successful in business stopped him tidying up his personal life. His wife Elizabeth had begged him for years to settle his affairs – ‘which he always promised and really intended to do, for my Comfortable Subsistence and maintenance as his Widow’.

  Elizabeth’s domineering stepson Jonathan, George’s executor, now claimed that much of his father’s fortune had been made relying on his own mother’s money and thus should not be shared with his stepmother. He attempted to stop Elizabeth having the sort of money she had been accustomed to spending.

  Perhaps suffering from fear and depression as well as influenza, Elizabeth was in no condition to grapple with her stepchildren. Jonathan seized the moment to take over sole administration of the estate. ‘What in Right belongs to me’, Elizabeth said in her court deposition, ‘but by reason of sickness I was unable then to manage so great a trust, and Mr. Curwen wholly refusing to join with me in it, but was very urgent that I should resign it solely to him.’

  Living in Salem, Elizabeth was far from the people with whom she had grown up, at least a day’s journey from her girlhood friends in Marshfield. But the years in London had toughened her up. She rallied to petition the county court to make sure she was not done out of what she continued to see as her fair share of a fortune valued at £6,000, the largest in the annals of New England at that date.

  Elizabeth’s magnificent affidavit won her case hands down. Savvy from living at the side of a master merchant, interested in money, she obtained almost half of her husband’s estate. By a court decision of 1685 she got around £1,000 for herself and the same sum for each of her daughters. The intimidating Jonathan wanted to replace her as chief supervisor of the education of her younger daughter, Susanna. Elizabeth insisted she herself be appointed guardian. Court records show her battling furiously to get money to support herself in the luxurious style to which she had become accustomed, as well as portions for her girls.

  Elizabeth’s elder daughter Penelope married a well-connected young merchant named Josiah Wolcott. The date had been arranged long before. Without male support, suffering from distress in the middle of the rituals of the mourning period, Elizabeth still had to put on a wedding and make a fist at being joyful. But immediately after George’s sudden death she had been very short of cash. Jonathan did not volunteer to pay for the wedding dress so she had to find the money out of her own funds. Penelope Curwen’s wedding outfit was ‘much short of what her father would have allowed’.

  Elizabeth desperately needed the support of Penelope Winslow. Even for someone so masterful, a seventeenth-century widow’s horizons shrank rapidly. It was an immediate loss of status, and in the Curwen family itself she was treated brusquely. Elizabeth seems to have been locked out of parts of what had been the marital home. She made a list of her personal possessions: ‘that the several things given me some of them before and others after marriage (of which I have enclosed) may be restored to me’. Some were from her life with Robert Brooks. Others were probably imported by George Curwen from merchant connections round the world: the two calico quilts and her ‘japanned box’; the two Turkish carpets which had been in the hall; and a fire screen. Elizabeth claimed a pair of tobacco tongs, used to pick up embers to light a pipe, suggesting she may have smoked. The flamboyant and independent Elizabeth also possessed an amazing set of ‘chairs and screetoire [writing desk] of gilded leather’ in what she called the Red Chamber, ‘with the produce of some adventures the Captain had given me’, i.e. the return of some ship in which he had given her shares.

  At least Elizabeth now controlled her own funds absolutely. She made a handy income from interest on money lent to local merchants. She casually lists £8 worth of gold her husband got for selling an Indian boy. Since he was ‘sent me from Plymouth per the Governor and council’ the money belonged to her.

  Penelope Winslow had been fortunate that her son Isaac was only nine when she was widowed so her house remained controlled by her. Elizabeth was entitled to use only one-third of the splendid mansion she had furnished. She could only walk in a third of the garden which she had planted. Though it had been her home for fifteen years, because George Curwen had failed to make a will, she received only the widow’s thirds.

  Even Elizabeth’s spirited character could not help being ground down over the next decade. Her three children predeceased her. John Brooks died aged thirty-one in 1687. Three years later her daughter, Penelope, caught the highly contagious puerperal fever that was the premier hazard of childbirth. The girl whose wedding dress had not been good enough for her mother died aged twenty. Only a week earlier she had given birth to her second child, Elizabeth’s first grandson, Josiah, named after Josiah Winslow. Seven days later on 4 January 1691 the baby was buried. Susanna, Elizabeth’s younger daughter whom she had fought to bring up herself, died in October 1696 aged twenty-four, predeceasing her mother by two years.

  * * *

  Penelope Winslow’s daughter Elizabeth married an apparently successful businessman, Stephen Burton. A widower, he was one of the four merchants appointed to purchase the 7,000 acres of Mount Hope lands. Having been exposed to her grand English relations, Penelope may have wanted to reproduce aspects of more elaborate English wedding traditions. But the bride and groom most likely wrote their own homespun vows which they said in the solemn heartfelt congregationalist fashion of Plymouth. Behind them stood Stephen’s small children – aged seven, six and four – to whom Elizabeth was to be a young stepmother. Stephen’s first wife had died earlier that year.

  The Burtons built a house at Bristol, Rhode Island, which became Burton Street, named after Stephen. It was one of the 120 or so lots made out of King Philip’s own land into small farms. The wild countryside was slowly transformed into fenced allotments. The Burtons lived there impervious to memories of Philip’s death nearby. If they thought of him at all it was with a shudder.

  To fulfil Josiah’s wish that his land outside Marshfield should make up part of their daughter’s portion, Penelope gave around a hundred acres on Mount Hope to Elizabeth in 1688, probably because Stephen Burton’s business was not going well.

  * * *

  Sir Edmund Andros was a tough imperial administrator who had restructured the former Dutch colony New Netherland into the English colony New York, rebuilding the city and its trade. Appointed by the new Stuart king, James II, he looked forward to organising all the northern colonies – including Plymouth, Massachusetts Bay, New Hampshire, Maine, Connecticut, Rhode Island and New York – into one political entity called the Dominion of New England. Ruled by himself with the help of a council, it would be better defended against the French and Indian threats.

  But the Dominion of New England rode roughshod over hallowed traditions, and trampled on colonists’ rights. The town meetings which had been an integral part of New England life since its beginnings were suspended. New Englanders had hacked their towns out of the wilderness, yet they were no longer allowed to rule themselves. The congregational churches were forced to take second place to the (entirely absent) Church of England. All land grants were to
be re-examined. It seemed to be the end of self-government and the beginning of direct rule from London.

  Andros had been a successful governor of New York. His accomplished relations with the Iroquois Indians – especially the Mohawks – stood New England in good stead for decades. But his rule of Boston was blindly imperious and he imposed new taxes without consent. Imported English royal officials imprisoned those who protested. Careless of the sacred nature of the Old South Meeting House, Andros requisitioned it for Anglican services. Edward Randolph took a major role as inspector of customs to make sure the Navigation Acts were at last enforced.

  John Winslow, Josiah’s first cousin, arrived in Boston from Nevis with news of the Glorious Revolution in England which had thrown out James II, the author of the Dominion. John was a merchant and sailor, not the natural person to start a revolution. But all his life it had been dinned into him that New England had its own ‘laws, liberties and customs’. When Andros imprisoned John for publishing William of Orange’s Declaration of Reasons for Appearing in Arms in England, all hell broke loose.

  With the approval of the most eminent Boston families, the militia seized Governor Andros and imprisoned him in Boston jail. He remained there for the next nine months until he was sent back to England. The venerable former governor Simon Bradstreet became president, and the Council of Safety administered the colony until a new charter was created. It was negotiated with the help of Increase Mather in London. The new king, William III, was in no position to resist the colonists’ demands.

  It was not until May 1692 that a new royal governor, Sir William Phips, arrived in Boston to rule what had become the Province of Massachusetts Bay. Massachusetts had become a Crown colony – but this time with its colonists’ consent. Their representative assemblies were to continue. Phips had a massive task to restore order: the abolition of the Dominion had created an alarming vacuum of authority. Not only was there no legitimate government, the Indians in Maine were rumoured to be about to attack Boston.