The Manor

by Mac Griswold

  Unbeknownst to Dyer, they had granted this pardon some days before but kept the news secret in order to pull off the grisly charade. Perhaps the magistrates feared that hanging a woman would increase sympathy for the Quakers; perhaps they wished to look magnanimous. Dyer was banished again, set on a horse, and escorted to the Rhode Island border. Another return to Massachusetts, she was informed, would result in her execution. She made her way home, but she didn’t stay there for long. Shortly before the Quaker missionary John Taylor left Shelter Island in late 1659, Mary Dyer arrived. Taylor found Dyer, then in her late forties, to be still “a very Comely Woman,” as well as “a Grave Matron” who “ever shined in the Image of God,” and the two led several meetings together. By the end of the following April she decided to return to Boston, to burn as a candle for the Lord, traveling north through Providence to avoid visiting her husband and children.

  The six months or so that Dyer spent with the Sylvesters may have been the happiest, most dedicated, least fractured time of her life. Her actions embodied her faith; all the rest of life’s concerns had burned away. Perhaps Nathaniel and Grizzell helped her into a boat, prayed with her and waved goodbye, then watched her disappear over the rim of the bay. They could have had no doubt that she was voluntarily, knowingly, headed for death. By late May she was back in Boston’s jail. On June 1, 1660, Dyer mounted the scaffold under a big elm tree on Boston Common. As her body dangled from the noose, her skirt quivered in the breeze. What a bystander scoffingly said at that sight would eventually stand as Mary Dyer’s truth: “She did hang as a Flag for them to take example by.”

  The King’s Missive

  Ten months after Dyer’s death, in March 1661, William Leddra, a young Quaker from Barbados, was also hanged for his faith on the Boston Common, becoming the last of his sect executed in the colonies. English Friends had appealed to Charles II (recently restored to the throne, in May 1660), but their plea was answered too late to save Leddra from the gallows. Although the Horsfords stoutly held to the notion that Auditor Thomas Brinley’s access to the crown was what led to the cessation of the persecutions, it seems much more likely that Nathaniel’s brother, Giles, was responsible—if any Brinley or Sylvester could take credit, that is. Only a month before Leddra’s death, Giles, along with several other Quakers then in London, had signed a petition to the king that listed the sufferings of American Friends in graphic detail. The petition ground its way through the royal bureaucracy, at last reaching the Council for Foreign Plantations—on which sat the council member and Shelter Island partner Thomas Middleton! He may have sped the document along to help his partner on Shelter Island.

  It seems an improbable move for radical sectarians like the Friends: appealing to the son of a monarch beheaded by radical Protestants. Astonishingly, however, the petition got a royal hearing. The king responded promptly, perhaps because Massachusetts Colony had also sent a petition to him, to defend their actions regarding the Quakers, appended to which was a note written by a Massachusetts functionary who was aware of the Quakers’ appeal. The note scornfully dismissed the Quakers’ request: “You will go to England to complain this year, the next year they will send to see if it is true, and by the next year the government in England will be changed.” If anything was calculated to fire Charles up, it was just such a snide reminder of what changing government had brought to his father.

  In response to the Quakers’ plea, the king quickly drew up what is called a mandamus, a special royal writ—later commemorated in 1880 by the Horsfords’ friend, the Quaker poet James Greenleaf Whittier, in his dramatic poem “The King’s Missive.” The document specifically commanded Massachusetts governor John Endicott to send any Quakers condemned to death “or other corporal punishment” to England for judgment, thereby superseding the colonial law of 1658—a blow to the Puritans, who dreaded interfering monarchs even more than they did Quakers. This was a royal warning, clear and simple, that Massachusetts had overstepped its jurisdiction. The Quakers raised £300 for Captain Ralph Goldsmith, a Quaker of London (and later of Southold), to set sail in his ship, whether he had a load of goods to carry or not, and carry the writ to Boston without delay.

  “With a prosperous gale,” Goldsmith’s vessel arrived in Boston toward the end of November. Boston’s authorities, seeing a ship entering the bay flying English colors, soon boarded, and they found that the ship’s passengers included Quakers who had been banished from Massachusetts. Did Captain Ralph Goldsmith have official letters? “Yes,” he said, but told them he would deliver them the following day. The next morning, Goldsmith and one of the banished Quakers, Samuel Shattuck, went ashore. As George Fox wrote in his autobiography, the two men, closely guarded, “went through the town to Governor John Endicott’s door, and knocked … They sent him word that their business was from the King of England, and that they would deliver their message to no one but the governor himself.”

  Inside Endicott’s house, a hastily summoned government meeting was weighing a politic response to the shipload of heretics. Shattuck and Goldsmith entered, hats firmly upon their heads. Endicott ordered the two to uncover, but they didn’t stir. A servant threw the offending headgear onto the floor. Shattuck handed the governor the letter ordering him to stop the persecutions. Aghast at seeing the king’s signature, Endicott took off his own hat and had Shattuck’s and Goldsmith’s returned to them. “We shall obey his majesty’s commands,” the governor said.

  One popular version of the Boston martyrs’ story concludes triumphantly that the royal order effectively protected the Quakers. Charles did, in fact, prevent further executions, although Massachusetts’s chief colonial court simply shifted responsibility for other corporal punishment of Quakers to lower jurisdictions. Visiting Friends were again tied to the backs of carts and whipped from town to town to the colony’s borders. But now an unsympathetic royal eye was trained on freedoms that the Puritan colony had enjoyed since the start of the English Civil War. Within another twenty years the colony’s charter would be revoked and Anglicans, Baptists, and Quakers would lawfully establish congregations. By 1680, the year of Nathaniel’s death, exclusively Puritan rule had ended.

  While Giles was in London, helping to shepherd the Quaker petition through the government in 1661, Nathaniel was contending with local repercussions from the Boston hangings. Two days before Mary Dyer’s death, the New Haven General Court had unsealed a “slanderous & blasphemous letter” from Nathaniel “written with his owne hand.” Branding him a self-professed Quaker, the court also accused Nathaniel of “sundry calumnious and opprobrious speeches uttered at Southold against yt courts & magistrates of New England, as well as o’selves in pticular.” (Nathaniel had apparently put himself on record as a Friend for the first time, as if the bloody events in Boston and his powerlessness to protect Friends once they left his island had impelled him to step forward.) Furthermore, he was a “frequent harbourer … to yt cursed sect, who fro his island have frequently taken opportunity to come amongst our people, soweing the seeds of their pernicious doctrines & sometimes by grosse affronts, publiquely to make disturbance at Southold.” Under New Haven law, seditious speech and harboring Quakers were punishable offenses. The magistrates ordered that £100 of Nathaniel’s estate be “attached & seised & not to be released untill this court … have received satisfaction from him for these & such like offences, if proved against him.” He was also summoned to appear in court that October to answer those charges, and, ominously, to respond to “what else shalbe charged against him.” Nathaniel failed to turn up in October, or in May 1661, the second court date set for him.

  New Haven retaliated by sending “divers persons under the Government of New Haven and by virtue of an order from the said Government” to raid Shelter Island. Yet again the invaluable Giles filed a petition with the Council for Foreign Plantations noting that none other than council member Middleton “by himself and partners did at their very great charges settle a plantation upon the said Island.” Furthermore
, the document claimed that the raiders broke open “your Petitioners’ houses laying violent Hands upon the said Inhabitants … seized and confiscated all the Estates they could find of your petitioners … and do still most wrongfully detain the [goods].” The petitioners concluded with a request that they “may be restored to their said Lands and goods … and in future be preserved from the like violences and outrages.” Whether restitution was made, whether Nathaniel himself was arrested or another attack occurred, isn’t known. Maybe the very act of submitting this petition fired a loud warning shot across New Haven’s bows. The Sylvesters would not have to fear New Haven much longer: by 1665 the colony had been absorbed into Connecticut, which was ruled by Governor John Winthrop Jr., Nathaniel’s patron, friend, and ally.

  Nonetheless, Nathaniel’s safety and sovereignty had been breached for the first time. Throughout the 1660s and ’70s, he aided Friends more discreetly, buying shares in the 1665 Monmouth County Patent in New Jersey, where Quakers and Baptists from Rhode Island and Long Island settled to enjoy religious freedom. He also encouraged other Friends, such as Captain Ralph Goldsmith, to settle on the East End. Visiting Quakers continued to stream through Shelter Island, and regular meetings were established in Newport and Oyster Bay, Long Island. After Great Britain acquired New Netherland by treaty in 1664, Governor Richard Nicoll incorporated the islands in Long Island Sound into a royal province under James, Duke of York, with laws that provided for nominal religious freedom, built on the existing Dutch precedent of religious toleration. Quakers still endured occasional discrimination, but not fanatical persecution. While Shelter Island no longer sailed as far offshore in solitary splendor as Nathaniel had envisioned, the privileges of the 1666 manorial grant—the power to appoint his own magistrate and freedom from military levy and taxes—largely compensated for the loss.

  George Fox on Shelter Island

  It is six o’clock on an August evening, hurricane season. The tail of a big one is just beginning to lash the East End. Alice and I sit in the long living room, gazing out the bay window at Gardiners Creek. The South Ferry will shut down soon if the storm gets bad, so I must get going. But before I do, I fix each of us a good stiff drink. Alice’s preferred poison is two fingers of Mount Gay Barbadian rum—only Mount Gay will do—in a stemmed glass filled up with water, no ice. Andy died of cardiac complications several years ago and Alice is now even more the lady of the manor. (She has left all of Andy’s clothes and shoes in his closet, however, and when she gets lonely, she tells me, she opens the door and inhales.) She is now in her eighties: her hair is brilliantly white, cut in a thick, handsome helmet with visorlike bangs down to her eyebrows. The sky has turned livid, the color of the sky in El Greco’s Entrance to Toledo. That electric-shock hue flashes right into the room and dyes the pale green walls and wall-to-wall carpet. Big trees bend and toss to the breaking point; rain, branches, and unidentifiable objects begin to fly past the window, which suddenly seems very fragile. The wind, sweeping across the island from the south, shakes the walls. But we are safe: this house has seen so many storms in its two and a half centuries that we trust it.

  George Fox arrived on Shelter Island in August 1672 after beating his way across the Sound from Narragansett through a big late summer storm, maybe even the tail of a hurricane like this. He wrote in his journal: “After we had stayed two months in and about Rhode Island and thereabouts … we took sloop and passed by Point Juda, and by Block Island, and from thence to Fisher’s Island … The next day we went into the sound, and our sloop was not able to live in the water.” The Rhode Island Friends traveling with him wisely “turned in again, for we could not pass, and so came to anchor again at Fishers Island two nights, and there was exceeding much rain, whereby we were much wet being in an open boat; and we passed over the two Horse Races waters (so called) and by Garner’s [Gardiners] Island and the Gull’s Island, and so came to Shelter Island which was twenty-seven leagues from Rhode Island.” While Fox constantly had his eye on the heavenly kingdom, he seldom missed a grounding physical detail, from the head count of crowds who came to hear him to the ferocity of the Fishers Island mosquitoes, which kept him from camping onshore. When he preached in Providence on a simmering June day “in a great barn full of people,” he duly noted that the heat of his preaching made him “so hot with sweat as though I had been sodden.”

  The Sylvesters would have been aware of Fox’s whereabouts long before he attempted to reach them. It had taken a year for him and his disciples to make their way from Barbados up the North American coast, a journey during which “the eminent arm and power of the Lord … carried and preserved us through and over the fury of wild beasts and men, woods, storms, wildernesses, bogs, rivers, famine and frosts.” He debated opponents, welcomed converts, and performed medical miracles. When a companion fell from his horse and stopped breathing, “his head turned like a cloth it was so loose,” Fox recalled. “[I] took his head in both my hands … and I put my hand under his chin, and behind his head, and raised his head … with all my strength, and brought it in, and I did perceive his neck began to be stiff, and then he began to rattle, and after to breathe.”

  In Newport, Fox led a ten-day general meeting at William and Anne Coddington’s house. He preached to crowds each day, “and yet by the continued coming in of people in sloops from diverse other colonies and jurisdictions it continued longer.” Narragansett Bay must have been bright with sails, bringing believers, the curious, the bored, and even scoffers from as far away as Plymouth and Cape Cod. Streaming across the water in long canoes, Narragansetts, Mohegans, and Pokanokets joined them.

  A few days later, Fox arrived on Shelter Island. This was a time of triumph, peace, and rejoicing for Nathaniel and Grizzell after witnessing their fellow Friends endure so much sacrifice, pain, and bloodshed. When Fox climbed out of the sloop onto their soil and Nathaniel, more than fifty years old, came to greet him, it was a moment of reward and glory. Grizzell, thirty-six years old, held year-old Constant, his uncle’s namesake. Eight other Sylvester children would have stood around, ranging in age from five to eighteen, the “tender Plants” who “would stand and wait in the Simplicity” of a moment their parents hoped they would always remember.

  Indians came too. Fox wrote, “I had a meeting at Shelter Island among the Indians, and the king and his council, with about one hundred Indians with him.” This was by far the largest of the many gatherings with Native Americans that Fox recorded: every soul was another to exult over. (The multitude of local tribesmen surely speaks to the Sylvesters’ easy relations with them, at least momentarily: a few halcyon days when so many worlds came together.) “They sat about two hours and I spoke to them by an interpreter, that was an Indian that could speak English very well and they appeared very loving, and they said all was truth, and did make a confession after the meeting of it.” Their apparent readiness encouraged him to “set up a meeting among them once a fortnight and a friend Joseph Silvester [actually Joshua, Nathaniel’s brother—Fox got the name wrong] is to read the Scriptures to them.” Although Fox does not mention Africans being present, what he had already written about the importance of bringing slaves to meeting on Barbados strongly suggests that they, too, were included in the crowd.

  The next day, “many of the world and priests’ people [Puritans] … that had never heard friends before” came from the congregations of Southold, East Hampton, and Southampton, and probably from much farther away. Fox, the religious rock star of his day, wrote that “they was very much satisfied, and could not go away until they had seen me and spoke to me after the meeting, and I went down to them, and they was taken with the truth, and great desires there is, and a great love and satisfaction there among the people.”

  The preacher departed as he had come, wreathed in the Inner Light and violent weather, headed first for Oyster Bay, and then for John Bowne’s refuge in Flushing, closer to New York City. Setting his course first for Plum Island, Fox got stuck in the fearsome rip at Plum Gut, “
where there was a very great fog, and the tide did run so strong for several hours, I have not seen the like, though we had a gale we could hardly get forwards … We were driven a great way back again, near Fisher’s Island … and a great storm arose.” After a big meeting, a farewell brigade of Quakers often accompanied Fox toward his next stop. Perhaps Nathaniel, Joshua, and Grizzell went part of the way in their sloop before turning back to the reality of their lives, and other storms.

  Three years after Fox’s visit, in King Philip’s War, a confederacy of New England’s Algonquians united under Metacom, the Wampanoag leader known to the colonists as King Philip, burned ninety English communities in Maine, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island to ashes. Fewer than a thousand colonists had perished, as against at least two thousand Indians killed in battle or executed, another two thousand exiled, and three thousand casualties from disease, hunger, and other wartime hardships. Again, as after the Pequot War four decades earlier, the English sent vanquished Indians as slaves to the Caribbean, a thousand of them, this time to Bermuda. It took years for colonists to rebuild the towns; some only began to grow again after a generation. For the Algonquians of New England, Miantonomi’s plea in 1641 for unity—“Say brothr to one another. So must we be one as they are”—had resulted in final defeat, and a breakdown in culture and ownership of what lands still remained to them.