ESCAPEES

IN 1624, the Reverend John Lyford arrived in Plymouth aboard the Charity. Traveling with a household that included his wife, children, and servants, Lyford arrived hoping that Plymouth offered an opportunity to escape his past. An educated man and an ordained minister, he expected the church to call him to serve. Having previously guided a Protestant church in Ireland, Lyford had the requisite experience to fill the post. At the very least, he sought employment as a teacher for the infant colony, and the Plymouth investors promised him, before he sailed, a salary for that work. Lyford came to join the small and rudimentary community, despite his educational attainments and lack of ties to the Leiden church, because he had seriously damaged his prospects at home. He fled Ireland and ultimately went to Plymouth to avoid the consequences of having raped a member of his congregation. Asked by a parishioner to examine the spiritual fitness of his prospective bride, Lyford took the opportunity of a private interview with the young woman to assault her. He then reported back to her intended husband that she was a fit companion. When the rape was revealed, Lyford lost his post. Returning first to England, he moved on to Plymouth ahead of the rumors about what he had done. Lyford was the first person known to have traveled to Plymouth to evade a sordid past, though the strategy would come in to play throughout English America.

Had Lyford made himself inconspicuous, he might have left the Irish incident behind. Instead, he quickly became embroiled in controversies with the Plymouth church and the town’s leaders. After joining Plymouth’s congregation, he quietly moved to gather other new arrivals into a rival church without the permission (or even at first the knowledge) of his fellow church members. He also tried to write, surreptitiously, to the investors to accuse the main body of settlers of various abuses. While his accusations were being mediated in London, Lyford’s history of sexual assault came to light. His wife, Sarah, confided in her friends at Plymouth, among them a church deacon. She claimed that he lied to her before their marriage, denying that he had fathered a “bastard.” Later, after their marriage rendered her powerless to object, he brought the little one into their home for her to raise. She also described how he repeatedly assaulted the serving maids, even “meddling with them” as these young women slept at the foot of the couple’s bed.

When Lyford and his family were forced to leave Plymouth, Sarah expressed her great fear that God would punish the family for her husband’s many sins. In particular she worried that she would fall into the hands of the Indians, “to be defiled by them as he had defiled other women.”¹ With this fearful fantasy, Mistress Lyford revealed a great deal about herself. She feared Native peoples—despite the lack of any evidence that indigenous men were inclined to rape English women; she believed that God punished sin with suffering; and she felt that her husband’s sin, for which she had already suffered, might be punished with torment meted out to his family members. Her comment exposed her fear and misunderstanding of the people among whom the Plymouth planters lived; her providentialism—the idea that God punished sin in this life with misfortune; and her society’s patriarchal household organization, in which a man’s dependents were thoroughly identified with him. While Mistress Lyford’s fears proved unfounded—since the Natives never defiled her or any other woman in Plymouth—“her grief and sorrow of mind” at being shackled to this hypocritical rapist came through with stark clarity. Although Lyford proved unable to reform his ways or fully to escape the consequences of his crimes, his wife did eventually gain her freedom through his death in 1634. At that time, she returned to New England, married a local man, and lived in apparent peace. She lapsed into the obscurity appropriate to the well-behaved seventeenth-century woman.

Lyford’s case was the most dramatic but not the only example of transatlantic travel being used to escape the consequences of misbehavior. Thomas Weston—an early supporter of Plymouth who had tried unsuccessfully to launch a rival trading outpost—visited the plantation in 1623. His recent attempt to establish a neighboring outpost at Wessagussett had collapsed, and his finances were in disarray. He traveled under an assumed name, fleeing his creditors in England. Despite complaining of the unexpected expenses they had incurred aiding Weston’s people at Wessagussett, the Plymouth leaders assisted his next attempt to trade along the New England coast. He never repaid them. Subsequently, he ran afoul of Sir Ferdinando Gorges, a member of the Council for New England, and left for Virginia.²

Bradford worried about the influence of those who chose to migrate to escape shame at home, but who “would necessarily follow their dissolute courses” after their arrival.³ In this case he seemed not to be thinking of Weston, who had racked up additional unpaid debts in Plymouth after fleeing creditors in England. Rather, he feared immorality, such as that involving Sir Christopher Gardiner. Gardiner came to New England in 1630, apparently aiming to leave two wives behind and possibly to enjoy a new liaison with a third woman. His ostensible reason for the journey was to work as the silent agent of Sir Ferdinando Gorges of the Council for New England, which had the king’s permission to colonize the region. Behind his role as Gorges’s agent—and his possible intention of spying on Plymouth and the colonists who were just then setting up Massachusetts Bay Colony—Gardiner also reputedly hoped to get away with bigamy. Bradford and others were suspicious about his companion, “a comely young woman whom he called his cousin; but it was suspected that she, after the Italian manner, was his concubine.”⁴ John Winthrop, governor of Massachusetts, received a complaint from Gardiner’s abandoned wives and moved to have him arrested. Once back in England, Gardiner did his best to create problems for New Englanders, working with another foe of Plymouth and Massachusetts, Thomas Morton. He seems to have escaped punishment in England for his bigamy (and the accusation that he stole from one of his wives), and his “cousin” went on to marry another and live in Maine.

Plymouth was established on the site of a Wampanoag village (Patuxet), amid the Wampanoag people. The Narragansetts to the west and Massachusetts to the north also interacted with the newly arrived English. Eventually the English established other enclaves of rival traders (Wessagusset and Mount Wollaston / Merrymount) or of towns (Scituate, Duxbury, Yarmouth) that grew out of Plymouth.

Gardiner was not alone in hoping that crossing the Atlantic Ocean might permit him to hide illegal activities like multiple marriages and theft. Another man, a Mr. Fells, came to the region aboard the Sparrowhawk in 1627, with a maidservant who was also suspected to be his “concubine.” When she proved to be pregnant, he attempted unsuccessfully to run away with her to avoid detection by the authorities and the punishment for unwed pregnancy. Upon his return, “they packed him away and those that belonged unto him by the first opportunity.”⁵ Bradford, ever anxious to protect the reputation of Plymouth, wanted nothing to do with the Gardiners and Fells.

The Plymouth authorities worried in one case that residents who had been accepted into the colony may have used transatlantic travel to flee responsibilities in England. As with Lyford, Gardiner, and Fells, this case involved sex. A married couple in Plymouth—Luce and Thomas Boardman—were found to have indulged in premarital sex while still in England, prior to their marriage and their migration. In the words of the court, they had been “living incontinently.” For this crime, committed far from Plymouth, the magistrate ordered Thomas whipped “severely” while Luce was to be censured with some as yet undetermined penalty once she gave birth to the child she was then carrying.⁶ Although a punishable offense, as the Boardmans learned, sex before marriage was not an unusual occurrence. The Plymouth court recorded numerous instances of couples caught and punished. These indiscretions came to light most often when a baby’s birth occurred too soon after the wedding date. Routinely, the midwife who attended the birth would be asked if the early baby seemed to have been premature. If not, the couple was presumed guilty and punished with whipping or time in the stocks. The first case of an early birth uncovered in the new town of Duxbury earned the errant couple, Francis West and his new wife Margery, an order to sit in the stocks. The magistrates further ordered Francis to build the stocks for the town first, as part of his punishment.⁷ Throughout New England and indeed colonial America more generally, marriages that started in this way, and couples who indulged in this transgression, faced no long-term consequences. The community accepted the Wests and other couples like them without pause, treating them—once they endured their punishment—just as they did others whose babies were born the requisite time after marriage.

The Boardmans faced possible censure because Thomas and Luce had left their first baby in London when they migrated to Plymouth. Someone, possibly one of the Boardmans, must have revealed the existence of the child. In a small community, the information circulated, and the magistrates learned that the pair had not only indulged in premarital sex but had left behind the resulting child. The authorities wanted assurances that the child “(so unlawfully begotten)” had not been abandoned but was receiving proper care. Besides punishing the couple—which involved the court handing down a sentence for a transgression committed before they resided in the colony and under its jurisdiction—the court ordered that Thomas post a bond for £80 until he was able to document their son’s well-being. The court sought to learn whether the infraction stretched to child abandonment as well as the more routine sex before marriage.⁸ What precisely had the couple sought to escape by migrating to Plymouth: just the stigma of Luce bearing a child out of wedlock or also the cost of the care of their first child?

These twin concerns—the commitment to punishing the sex itself and the need to see that any resulting child received the proper care—meant that the authorities deemed sex not followed by marriage a more serious problem. When two people who were not married and had no intention of marrying nevertheless produced a child, they introduced to the community a baby who had no male household head to assume financial responsibility for it. The magistrates’ desire to learn whether Thomas Boardman had indeed arranged care for the baby left in London motivated their insistence that he post a bond until he could prove he had done so. Within Plymouth itself, when extramarital sex produced a child, the court forced the father to pay for the child’s upbringing. When Stephen Hopkins’s serving maid Dorothy Temple proved to be pregnant and the father was revealed to be the recently executed murderer Arthur Peach, the court faced a more difficult question: with Peach dead, who would pay for the baby’s upkeep? The court decided that Hopkins, as Temple’s master, had failed in his duty when a woman under his authority entered into an unlawful sexual relationship. Hopkins was outraged and at first refused to pay. The court held him in contempt, and he eventually raised the money by selling Temple’s indenture to another master. In the case of the child of Temple and Peach, the court demonstrated a typical concern that the costs of a fatherless child be covered by a responsible party. Their concerns were predominantly financial, although the concern to ascertain whether Boardman had escaped his responsibility by abandoning his son suggested that they were also intent on having parents behave conscientiously.

Adultery brought out a different set of concerns. In the case of a married woman having sex with a man other than her husband, the resulting baby would be born into a marriage—which was generally considered ideal—but the couple’s illicit union passed the financial responsibility unfairly on to the unrelated husband. In such a case, circumventing the financial problem appeared less significant than the need to punish the sinning pair and protect the cuckolded husband from being saddled with the expense of another man’s child. Outrage over the act of adultery—an act explicitly forbidden in the sixth commandment—also dictated a harsher punishment. Initially the Plymouth court agreed that adultery would be punished by death, but that extreme penalty was never carried out. The colony faced few cases of adultery. In one instance that would seem particularly ripe for a harsh response, Mary Mendame, the wife of Robert, allegedly enticed the Native man Tinsin into having sex with her. The court did not order either partner executed. Still, her punishment did stand as one of the more unusual in the record book. The court ordered her whipped at the cart’s tail—meaning she would be tied to the back of a cart that processed down the street as a constable followed behind laying on the whip—and it consigned her to wear a badge on her sleeve for as long as she lived in Plymouth. If she was caught without the badge, she was to be branded with a hot iron in the face. Tinsin, in contrast, was only whipped and made to stand “with a halter about his neck at the post.” The magistrates gave him a lesser punishment because they believed that the sex resulted from “the allurement & enticement of the said Mary.”⁹ The badge—despite its association with New England history through The Scarlet Letter of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s later imagining—was an uncommon and rather odd form of punishment. It certainly had no earlier precedent in Plymouth. Notably, the court record revealed no particular concern for the fact that the sex occurred between an Indian man and an English woman: the issue was her status as a woman married to another. Adultery, not cross-cultural sexual encounter, earned the ire of the court.

Given the dedication of its leaders when it came to ferreting out transgressions, Plymouth seems an unlikely place to go for those trying to hide from the consequences of their actions. Regardless of the vigilance of the authorities, New England did offer the advantage of a remote location. Distance removed people from the places where they and their crimes were well known. John Smith, writing to recruit prospective settlers to move to New England, assured his readers that “My purpose is not to persuade children from their parents; men from their wives; nor servants from their masters: only such as with free consent may be spared.”¹⁰ He anticipated the worry about escapees, although he envisioned those fleeing responsibilities rather than crimes. Weston, evading debt, fit Smith’s pattern more than others. Lyford tried to leave behind the ignominy of rape, and Gardiner abandoned two wives and allegedly absconded with stolen jewelry. Even the Boardman couple attempted to slip into Plymouth without revealing that they had a son born before marriage. As many others in Plymouth could tell them, the magistrates were alert to the need to find and punish sins of a sexual nature, whether they violated marriage vows—as in the case of Mary and Tinsin; left a child behind—as did the Boardmans; or simply resulted in a birth too soon after the wedding. In the end, we may never know how many sexual transgressions went undetected and therefore unpunished in Plymouth.

Escape to Plymouth offered a refuge of a different sort for those who skirted the law or challenged social conventions. Escape could mean a blank slate, with a new start and a chance to live by society’s rules, or it might mean simply avoiding punishment or debtors’ prison with no aim of reform. Whether escapees came to make a fresh start in a law-abiding way or to continue their objectionable activities, crossing the Atlantic did not always protect them from their pasts.