As the news spread, there was consternation amongst Edward’s friends. Roger Williams was still grieving for him twenty years later. For all his long absence, Edward was an irreparable loss to New England. As well as representing them in the councils of power in London, he had been a living link to the glorious past.
In London, however, Elizabeth and Susanna were discovering that a life lived on a heroic scale had its financial cost. Shell-shocked by his death, they found out that Edward still had huge unsuspected debts ‘to the value of £500 and upwards unsatisfied at his departure from England’. Edward’s ‘great disbursements’ buying provisions for himself and his servants for the voyage to Hispaniola had been very expensive, and most of the goods had been lost. The matriarch of a leading family in New England, Susanna was now stranded in London with little cash while she sorted out his affairs. In a petition to Cromwell and the Council of State, she said she was ‘in a low condition having little else to subsist on but the expectation of his salary’. She asked for the balance of £500 that he was owed for the Hispaniola expedition.
In the previous nine years Edward’s absence had thrust considerable responsibilities upon Josiah, who was approaching thirty years old. A soldierly man who, aged twenty, had become insignia-bearer and captain of the Marshfield militia, he had risen to the challenge. Now he had to rush to London, to ensure the English side of the family business continued.
Tradition has Josiah as a gentleman farmer who was devoted to Plymouth, serving the colony in many official capacities. But documents show he was also just as much a merchant involved with sugar plantations in the West Indies, as well as exporting iron and cloth on a large scale. His uncle John had paved the way, but being married to Governor Bellingham’s niece Penelope drew Josiah even more tightly into the heart of the Boston merchant elite, a financially innovative and daring community.
Bellingham had taken the opposite view from Josiah’s father and the orthodox party on most of the issues of the past. He saw nothing wrong with the Child petition, and no reason to discriminate against non-church members and members of the Church of England. Unlike John Winthrop, who believed in the discretion of the magistrate, Bellingham wanted a body of laws, which he helped draw up in 1648. Josiah seems to have discreetly come over to Governor Bellingham’s side. While many Plymouth farmers proudly farmed their own land and were dependent on no one, especially not the slick city folks of Boston, Josiah had a more outgoing and ambitious stance. The fact that he was amongst the earliest students at the new Harvard College was another sign of the Winslows growing apart from the rest of the Old Colony. Since Plymouth did not have a proper grammar school until the 1670s, let alone a university, it was only natural to seek out education elsewhere.
* * *
Susanna got her money. At the bottom of her petition was written in Cromwell’s now shaky handwriting: ‘Oliver P. We refer this paper to a Council April 18 1656’. What was described as ‘compensation’ to Edward’s wife and children was paid forthwith.
Cromwell had once stated he ‘had rather have a plain russet-coated captain that knows what he fights for, and loves what he knows, than that which you call a gentleman and is nothing else. I honour a gentleman that is so indeed.’ Edward had been such a man. However, Cromwell might have been less generous had he known about the Winslow connection to the Penruddock Uprising, the most important insurrection of the Republic. Josiah arrived to find his cousin William Wake in prison at Exeter, having been captured during the rebellion. Wake was part of the Royalist secret resistance movement, the Sealed Knot, and faced the possibility of execution for high treason.
In the past, having Royalists for cousins could be shrugged off – almost everyone in the Civil War had relatives on different sides. But the Penruddock insurrection had been such a challenge to the regime that having William’s brother, Edward Wake, as a major investor in the Winslow business was potentially very embarrassing. So dangerous was the situation that Cromwell had brought in the Major-Generals. For the first and only time, England was ruled by martial law. Josiah had at least two ships in which Edward Wake had investments. The Winslows – now just Josiah – had been importing clothing to New England on a large scale, getting several hundred pounds of kersey, cotton, penistone, serge and linens by one ship alone. It seems likely that some was manufactured by William Wake and his wife Amie’s clothing business in the West Country, in which she ‘was a great help to him; and brought him a considerable portion in money to enable him to carry it on’. Josiah needed to fill those ships regardless of the cloth’s provenance.
‘Cuz Ed Wake’, as Josiah called him, may have been the middleman dealing with Josiah. Probably Edward Wake, as well as Josiah, thought William Wake was a damned fool. Certainly, the imprisonment of William didn’t stop the cousins doing business. A year later Ed was expecting a £30 return – that is interest on ventures – which may have originally been several hundred pounds (tens of thousands today). Josiah, like his father, simply ignored the potential difficulties of being linked to Royalists.
The Sealed Knot had ordered their followers to seize power at the beginning of March 1655 when Edward Winslow had been in Barbados. William Wake was part of the little group captured at South Moulton in Devon. Colonel John Penruddock had his head cut off inside Exeter Castle on 16 May, and his gentlemen associates were hanged in the market square, which could have been William’s fate. Very fortunately for William, his captor, Captain Unton Croke, had offered articles of surrender that included his not being executed. Wake and six others were pardoned by Parliament and eventually released. William had a very narrow escape.
But being married to a rebel took its toll on Amie. Her first son had been born when Wake was still in prison. Continuous anxieties through the Interregnum shortened her life, and ten years after the Restoration she was dead, aged just thirty-two. Captain Wake outlived her by thirty years.
Though Josiah had arrived back in England with cash and the expertise to deal with his father’s probate, the family still had a large hole to plug. The sums owed suggest that it was not only Edward’s lifestyle which was the problem – perhaps he had bought shares in other ships going out from London, and perhaps those investments had made losses. Whatever the reasons, Susanna had need of money. She also had the sudden expense of a wedding.
In the way of the world when an energetic unattached female is in the vicinity of a successful male, her attractive and strong-willed daughter Elizabeth had formed an attachment to the Winslows’ London business partner, a substantial merchant named Robert Brooks. On 9 March 1656 they married at the tiny fifteenth-century City church St Olave’s in Hart Street near Tower Hill.*
Brooks’ family was sufficiently eminent to have a coat of arms, and probably ran a cloth-manufacturing business. To be flourishing at this time they were most likely of Puritan sympathies. Brooks dealt in iron hardware and ammunition – he sent powder, shot, nails and scythes to New England – and he was also a considerable importer of sugar, arranged by Josiah’s contacts and paid for by Brooks, and of beaver fur, also sent by Josiah. Brooks was a tough-minded businessman who fought his corner to the last penny. There were the inevitable tensions between partners about charging interest and credits. In a memorandum to himself Josiah noted he must examine the accounts more closely to ‘find how my debt as by his account current the last year could be so much’.
But Susanna approved of the wedding. Elizabeth also found her husband’s painstaking counting of the pennies and pounds sensible and reassuring. Enmeshing these various in-laws in a tight family net was very helpful for their commercial activities.
Herbert Pelham sent the young married couple a silver candlestick to celebrate the birth of their child John Brooks. It was a handsome gift costing far more than pewter.† Elizabeth had a taste for material gifts, and lots of them, as a list of her special possessions shows. She had grown accustomed to sophisticated objects and the new luxuries of the period. She owned elegant furniture which would not be manufactured in Boston for another thirty years, including the wicker-backed chairs which were then fashionable. Her pomander baskets made with oranges and cloves kept away bad smells. Even in New England it was beginning to be the fashion to be more ostentatious. Before a wedding, bride gloves were often sent to new relations. Pieces of cake followed. Her wedding probably featured sugared almonds. Sack posset would have been served to jolly up spirits. Music played while the families got to know one another. Some New England weddings had psalms sung throughout the evening, but Elizabeth may have preferred a quartet. The Winslows did not want to be sneered at by Londoners for being uncouth. There were all kind of rumours about strange New England customs: in the Connecticut Valley, for example, young people whispered to one another in full view of the family through what were called courting sticks, and it was said that engaged couples were allowed to share beds divided by a bolster or a sheet, a custom known as ‘bundling’.
In godly London the Puritan leaders enjoyed display. A wedding was a time to show off. Cromwell at his daughter Frances’s wedding in 1657 wore ‘a rich suit of uncut velvet’ made up of a doublet and breeches ‘of the Spanish fashion’, as well as ‘lace trimmed fine linen, silk stockings, black Spanish leather shoes and gold buttons’.
Elizabeth’s ceremony was very different from what Susanna’s wedding on the shores of the Atlantic had been like, when a simple joining of her hand to Edward’s had sufficed. It fitted the Pilgrims’ mood in the wooden meeting house they had built with their own hands. But this was a different era. The couple received lavish gifts: Elizabeth describes a ‘large tankard’ made of silver ‘with our arms’. The tankard sounds as if it was a present celebrating the union of the two families, as does what she described as a ‘plate sugar box given me per Governor Winslow’. Sugar boxes held personal portions cut off the big sugar loaves, which is how sugar was sold in the seventeenth century. They were a recent novelty, and proliferated amidst the wealthy merchants of New England because of their close links to the new West Indian sugar plantations and the sugar trade. An excuse for craftsmen to show off their talents, these boxes were pioneered by the celebrated Boston gold- and silversmith John Hull, who made the first coins in Boston in the safety of the Interregnum (it was illegal to make coins anywhere other than England).*
* * *
Susanna and Elizabeth probably kept the lodgings on where Edward, Elizabeth and Magdalen had lived reasonably well for the past few years. Magdalen was now in the West Country helping soothe her daughter-in-law’s fears. Much in London was more pleasing to Susanna than when she was last there decades before, especially its godliness: since 1642 the last Wednesday of every month was meant to be a fast day.
Susanna now had the melancholy task of sorting through Edward’s things and taking what she could home to America. She left most of his household goods with Elizabeth to form the basis of her new married life. Edward’s will gave his linen, ‘which I carry with me to sea, to my daughter Elizabeth’. The heavy, expensive suits were sent back to New England, one to each brother. The rest of the goods went to Josiah.
It seems likely Josiah took Susanna to stay with his father-in-law, Herbert Pelham, before she began her long journey back to Marshfield. It would have been a relaxing sojourn at a time of grief. When the New England Winslows visited the manor house Ferriers, the peace of East Anglia formed a striking contrast to their own beautiful but dangerous countryside. The sixteenth-century Waldegrave memorial in St Mary’s in Bures was a marvellous sight: a kneeling Sir William Waldegrave with his six sons behind in descending order of size, and Dame Elizabeth with their four daughters. Susanna may have been shocked to see that the arms of all the figures had been sliced off during a visit from the Puritan soldier and iconoclast William Dowsing. He went to over 200 churches in East Anglia carrying out the Parliamentary army’s order that ‘all Monuments of Superstition and Idolatry should be removed and abolished’.
Herbert Pelham had slotted back into a society in which a number of the Puritan gentry had links with New England. Susanna knew many of them. She probably visited the Gurdons, cousins of the Waldegraves who lived at the magnificent Assington Hall nearby, where Cromwell had stayed during the siege of Colchester. It was now inhabited by the MP for Suffolk, John Gurdon, who knew Edward from the Council of State. The family had considerable interest in the Puritan experiment in New England. Gurdon’s half-sister Muriel had married a Saltonstall and lived in Ipswich, Massachusetts.
Funeral sermons did not become fashionable reading matter in New England until later in the century but they were beginning to have a vogue in Old England. Susanna’s hostess, Herbert Pelham’s wife Elizabeth, may have given the bereaved Susanna Ralph Josselin’s poignant sermon on the recent death of Mrs Smithea Harlakenden. William Harlakenden – who was a cousin of Elizabeth’s first husband, Roger Harlakenden, whom Susanna had known twenty years previously in Boston – had the sermon printed at his own expense in 1652. He and Josselin had thought the words might also be a comfort to other bereaved and ‘their damped, grieved spirits’. Such was its success it was published in a pamphlet containing John Donne’s great funeral sermon on the death of Lady Danvers, the mother of George Herbert. That had become a staple of mourning literature in England over the twenty-five years since it was printed.
Perhaps Susanna was comforted by Josselin’s idea that it was God’s Providence that allowed people to forget the dead, so that time digested ‘those bitternesses of Spirit that are like death itself’. The forgetfulness was not of the ‘graces and virtues of the dead’. In that respect saints lived, ‘but it is of their persons which in time pass from us, and we scarce retain their image in our mind; and indeed how should we, when we forget our own face even before the glass is set aside’. God allowed men to mourn, but He also put a limit to their mourning: it must be remembered ‘your friends shall return again, they are not buried in the dust for ever, believe it, dwell upon it’. The bereaved must ‘but consider they are but gone before on the same way, in the same journey thou art travelling, and all the Saints are following’.
It was indeed a very long time since Susanna had seen her own dear traveller. She would never see him again, on this earth at least. For Josselin the Resurrection made the dead ‘our comforts, so that when others go to the Tombs and Graves to mourn, Christians go to the graves to rejoice’. Alas, poor Susanna could not visit a tomb for Edward; she could only think of him lying offshore hundreds of feet below the surface of the sea.
But now it was back home for her. With her dead husband’s possessions in the ship’s hold, she made the long and uncomfortable journey back to America. She could have remained in England with her daughter but – despite all its dangers and difficulties – New England was her home. Her three sons lived there. Elizabeth, meanwhile, was so homesick for tastes of New England that Josiah sent her a barrel of cranberries which he called ‘a token to my sister’. As early as the 1650s, to the first generation born in America the sour taste of the unique New England fruit had become the taste of home.
* * *
Susanna was a woman who embraced the new. Like her daughter-in-law Penelope, she never became disenchanted with the colonial life. Even if she occasionally found fault with New England severity there was satisfaction in the orderly ways of the tiny God-fearing piece of civilisation that was seventeenth-century Marshfield. The marsh was full of creeks, channels of water. Edward and the rest of the community had deepened them into what they called Green Harbour Canal, thereby creating a continuous waterway from Plymouth to Marshfield. One of the creeks came up to the house and a boat was kept there. The branches and delicate leaves of silver birch trees today almost hide the spot, but the mighty view ahead remains spectacular.
Susanna had helped forge it. By the end of the century the town had two grist mills, one saltworks, by the North and South Rivers, and a herring fishery. Cordwood was being exported to Boston by the Winslow and Baker families. The North River became important for shipbuilding owing to the oak trees in the area.
Susanna was not lonely because Penelope and Josiah lived across the way. She and Penelope felt safe at Marshfield surrounded by the many Winslows and their multiplying offspring on neighbouring farms up amongst the green hills where the forests had been cleared. She was proud of Josiah, who from a young age had demonstrated a strong service ethic.
On the whole Plymouth Colony was a kinder place than Massachusetts. It lacked Boston’s harshness and what today we would think of as misogyny. Ever since the Anne Hutchinson episode, it was a given that sensible women in Boston guarded their tongues. But Anne Hibbens – the wife of William Hibbens, the Massachusetts ambassador to the Long Parliament – refused to do that. A dispute with lazy workmen who were defended by a church member resulted in her being called before her church for criticising Brother Davis. The case segued into criticism of her dominating her husband. She was expelled from her church for refusing to apologise for her remarks and for being a contentious woman.
Once her husband was dead, the sharp-tongued ill-tempered Mrs Hibbens was easy prey for the malicious. Old age made her angry and not quite in control of her emotions. Hibbens had lost a great deal of money through bad investments. Accused of witchcraft, she was executed against the will of the Court of Assistants around the time of Susanna’s return from London. Years later John Norton, the minister who succeeded John Cotton as teacher at the First Church of Boston, said privately that Mrs Hibbens was ‘hanged for a witch only for having more wit than her neighbours’. The horrible treatment of a respectable old woman was a terrible warning to young women like Penelope and Elizabeth about the dangers of being outspoken. It may have been a reason for Elizabeth to enjoy London. Despite the Interregnum it was a less rigid society.
Anne Hibbens’s punishment contrasted with attitudes to Susanna’s old friend, the assertive Elizabeth Warren. Force of personality, and the need for funds, meant that after her husband’s death she became a Purchaser of Plymouth Colony’s debts. A woman who brought her servant to court for profanity, she defeated her own son Nathaniel and his manipulative mother-in-law, who had tried to obtain land she had gifted to her two sons-in-law. Nathaniel was told to ‘forever cease all other or further claims’.
Yet Susanna was all too conscious that the older generation were passing, that the once boisterous male comrades of the Mayflower were fading away. Stephen Hopkins had been in his grave for thirteen years. Loara Standish, Myles’s daughter who made the first sampler at Plymouth, had grown up, but never married. She died in 1655, as did her new sister-in-law, soon after her wedding. A heartbroken Myles asked to be buried beside the both of them. A year later he was.
On 9 May 1657 William Bradford suddenly fell down dead in his garden. To the inhabitants of Plymouth he had been a revered, fragile old man for a number of years. But Susanna had known him in his passionate youth. He had played a fatherly role in Edward’s absence. Susanna was pleased that Josiah wrote a tender acrostic poem on Bradford’s death.
Generational change even affected the extraordinarily youthful Massasoit. Two of his children, Wamsutta and Metacom, who had been boys at Edward’s departure, were now strong young men. In the time-honoured way of aristocratic elites, by the mid-1650s Massasoit had married them to the daughters of the head of an important local family, the Pocasset chief, Corbitant. Corbitant had been hostile in the early days of Plymouth and his eldest daughter, Weetamoo, who married Massasoit’s eldest son, Wamsutta, was a strong independent personality. She was an Indian princess who was said to have too much character for her own good. She was not happy with the increasing land sales. A very formidable young woman who married five times, she was anxious to protect land opposite Rhode Island at Pocasset. She succeeded her father Corbitant as chief as there was no male heir.
* * *
The year after Edward died, his brother John moved to Boston with his wife Mary. While Susanna was away there had been a great scandal with their daughter and son-in-law, Susanna and Robert Latham. Marshfield was shocked when their fourteen-year-old servant John Walker died of serious mistreatment. A whipping had broken the skin. The Lathams were accused of felonious cruelty. Robert was taken to Plymouth prison and convicted of manslaughter. He was allowed to plead benefit of the clergy, a legal loophole which meant first-time offenders could be treated leniently.* Plymouth Colony records show he ‘desired the benefit of law, viz, a psalm of mercy, which was granted him’. Though he and Susanna had not shown much mercy to John Walker, Latham intoned: ‘Have mercy upon me, O God, according to thy loving kindness: according unto the multitude of thy tender mercies blot out my transgressions.’ Sentence was now pronounced: ‘that the said Robert Latham should be burned in the hand’. This was the branding on the thumb sometimes with an M for manslaughter or a T for thief which meant he could not plead mercy twice.
The townsfolk believed Susanna to have been equally culpable: the jury presented her for being ‘in a great measure aguilty … in exercising cruelty towards their late servant’. She had not given him proper food, clothing or lodging and ‘especially in her husband’s absence, in forcing him to bring a log beyond his strength’. The presentment remained live for three years but she was never brought to trial. It was then ordered to be struck from the record.
Some New England jurisdictions like Connecticut and Massachusetts exempted women from being tried for capital crimes such as perjury and idolatry. It may be that Susanna’s fellow citizens ultimately believed that a woman’s weaker nature meant she must have been overborne by her husband. Or it may be that no one wished to offend the powerful Winslows.
The Lathams spent the rest of their lives in East Bridgewater. It seems likely that they moved from Marshfield after their humiliation (although Susanna Latham remained in her mother’s will).
* * *
As well as doing business in Boston, Josiah spent time there because Penelope was close to family members: Governor Bellingham and his wife, her aunt Penelope, and her father’s other sister Elizabeth, who had brought her up. Governor Bellingham was an outrageous and thunderous character, an impulsive and rather fierce man moved to great acts of kindness and used to having his own way.†
Susanna visited Boston several times a year. There were always pots and pans which needed replacing by English manufactures. She was on visiting terms with Governor Winthrop’s children and families such as the Dudleys and the Bradstreets, elite families who had emigrated with the Winthrop Fleet.
Governor Bellingham was one of the last living people who were patentees of the Massachusetts charter. Most of the major figures in the founding of New England, such as Thomas Hooker and Thomas Dudley, were dead. In 1649 – the year when both John Winthrop and Cambridge’s inspired preacher Thomas Shepard died – it had looked like winter even in springtime because a plague of caterpillars ate all the leaves off the trees. The beginning of John Cotton’s terminal illness had been marked by a comet in the heavens. Appropriately its light slowly faded, getting dimmer and dimmer until it was quite extinct. People said God had removed a ‘bright star’ to glory above.
But Josiah and Penelope were young, and had their lives ahead of them. They also went to England on at least two occasions. Marriage and trade brought them renewed acquaintance with Penelope’s father and a number of siblings, step-siblings and English relations. Penelope might also have been seeking a professional opinion from the medical experts New England lacked about why she had problems having children. It was almost a decade after her wedding that Penelope gave birth to another Elizabeth Winslow, probably named after her sister-in-law.
The later 1650s were not especially happy for Penelope. Her elder sister Jemima died after only three years of marriage to the exciting soldier chaplain Samuel Kem. In Bristol, Kem was said to have preached in a scarlet cloak with pistols on the cushions beside him. But in peacetime there was too little to occupy his strenuous energies. He was good friends with the hermetic philosopher and alchemist Thomas Vaughan, who died in Kem’s house after one experiment too many. Jemima seems to have been estranged from Kem at the time of her death, as she was buried at Ferriers. Perhaps Kem did not have the strength of character to nurse her through a long and painful illness. Ralph Josselin came to comfort her at a time when she was afraid of dying. He noted on 7 May 1657: ‘preacht this day at Bures, the Lord touch hearts, I was with Mrs Kem who is under fears, and endeavoured to persuade her to roll her soul on God in Christ’.
More heart-rending for Penelope even than the deaths of Jemima and her stepmother – who died shortly after – was that of her cherished brother Nathaniel that November. He had been her companion and friend growing up in Boston after her family returned to England. Nathaniel was one of the ‘persons of great worth and virtue’ drowned when the magnificent 400-tonne ship of the highly reputable Mr Garrett sank with all hands on board. It was never recovered. The sinking was a national tragedy: a large number of New England’s most promising young people had been on board. They included the missionary Reverend Thomas Mayhew the younger, whose work among the Indians on Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket Edward had been at such pains to describe.
Josiah too knew Nathaniel well. By this time Josiah was a trusted agent for Herbert Pelham, looking after his hundreds of acres in New England.
To add to her low mood, what Penelope perceived as ill treatment by her father overshadowed these years. Herbert Pelham had gone out of his way in England to be courteous to Josiah’s family, and he was warm to Penelope and Josiah themselves. At first Penelope had looked forward to getting to know her father better. But at some point she learnt that she was owed a legacy from her grandfather, Thomas Waldegrave. Penelope may have accompanied Josiah to England when he went to discuss what should happen to Herbert’s land in New England now that Nathaniel was dead. She may have come to Ferriers when she knew her sister Jemima was dying, and stayed to nurse her sick stepmother.
News of the legacy came as a complete surprise. Penelope had only found out by chance, probably at a wedding or a funeral with a large gathering of relatives. Someone – a cousin, perhaps, or one of her sisters or half-sisters – may have asked her if she had received the £450 ‘in trust for them payable as they respectively came of age or at day of marriage’. As Penelope put it in her own witness statement some years later, ‘Your said orator, having lived at the time of the making of the said deed [1640] and ever since in New England was for a long time wholly ignorant of what her said grandfather did in the premises’. Penelope had never received the money. Taken aback, she asked her father what had happened to her legacy. At first he said that her grandfather Waldegrave had not been in a financial position to make such a disposal.
When Penelope was tipped off – perhaps by the same relation – that her father was farming the land which was meant to fund the legacy, Herbert Pelham said the deeds did not exist. A bitter row took place. Herbert continued to make what Penelope regarded as feeble and ultimately criminal excuses. Suggesting a series of furious face-to-face discussions as well as demands by letters over the years, Penelope described how her brother Waldegrave ‘did often persuade and advise the said Herbert to pay the same as what was in equity due … by virtue of the said deeds’. Waldegrave himself had seen the deeds and knew ‘in whose custody they are or hath formerly been’. To Penelope the idea that the estates of her grandfather were in no condition to support such inheritances was a lie. Her father lived in great style in a magnificent manor house.
At first glance the delicate little face of Penelope in her portrait, with huge soulful eyes, makes her appear fragile. Her actions, however, show she was a forceful character. It was brave of the young Penelope to challenge her father. Speaking out in New England could be positively dangerous, especially criticising a man and even more importantly a father, but Penelope refused to button her tongue. And she had her husband’s support.
Herbert Pelham was a formidable figure who had held office in Boston and England. He had held a raft of county offices in Suffolk and Essex in the Interregnum, including being commissioner for expelling scandalous ministers, as well as joint treasurer for the charity for maimed soldiers. Penelope was proud of her family’s past and pleased by a sense of family history. She reproduced her Pelham coat of arms on many of her possessions. Her son had it etched on the tombstone over the family vault. But her keen sense of injustice overrode awe of her father.
Staying in Suffolk, the young Winslows found out that Herbert Pelham had a reputation for being a little sharp when it came to property. Penelope’s aunt – the joint heiress with her mother to Thomas Waldegrave’s property – and her husband, Isaac Wincoll, had taken a case against Herbert about other Waldegrave inheritances. The issue there also concerned Thomas Waldegrave’s will. Had he intended Penelope’s branch of the family, the Herbert Pelhams, or the Wincolls, to inherit Ferriers and two other Waldegrave houses, Ravensfield and Payton Hall?
During Herbert’s absence in New England all these properties had fallen into the hands of his brother-in-law, Isaac Wincoll. Brampton Gurdon, the father of the present inhabitant of Assington Hall, was chosen to arbitrate. An award was made which gave Herbert Ferriers, the largest Waldegrave manor house. The Wincolls refused to accept the ruling and moved into Ferriers. They also seized Herbert’s extensive inheritance in Lincolnshire. Sir Matthew Hale, the author of the Hale Commission, had been brought in to see whether it could be dealt with amicably. Isaac Wincoll died before the case was wound up, probably of stress. Although the outcome is not recorded directly, a later deposition and other sources indicate that the Essex lands were partitioned between the two families. The legal issues and payments of fines, to enter into binding agreements with one another, had only recently been resolved at the south porch of St Mary’s Church in Bures, as was customary. The whole subject was so painful that the Wincolls were not on speaking terms with their Pelham first cousins for the rest of the century.
All this gave the young Winslows a sense that Herbert was not quite straight. Although Penelope did not go so far as to sue her father for the money, years later she did sue her brother.
For the present there was nothing Penelope and Josiah could do about the situation. They did not want to alienate Herbert and he did not want to alienate them. Common sense and family feeling prevailed, and there was no permanent estrangement. It was important for the wily Herbert to remain on good terms with the conscientious Josiah, so Josiah could supervise Herbert’s land in America until Herbert’s son Edward was old enough to do so himself. Herbert kept a close eye on his New England property. In 1648 he successfully petitioned the Massachusetts General Court for 800 acres. His own investments and marriage to Elizabeth Harlakenden had made him what one nineteenth-century authority called ‘one of the largest landed proprietors in Cambridge’.
Josiah and Penelope had no wish to get on the wrong side of a respected New England figure who had so many influential friends.
* * *
Penelope chose to make her life in New England. The rows with her father and brother may have convinced her to focus on her Massachusetts and Plymouth family. The links with England were something from which she deliberately distanced herself. Anne Bradstreet’s poem ‘A Dialogue between Old England and New’ on the eve of the English Civil War reflects a sense of difference between the two societies. For Bradstreet New England was the more vibrant. ‘You are my mother, nurse,’ she wrote. Perhaps that expressed Penelope’s own feelings. She and Josiah, who were very close, were different from their kin in England. Life was harsh, but it was what they were used to. Penelope’s reality was the Winslow family home at Marshfield where her mother-in-law Susanna lived and farmed, and a neighbourly way of life, in which each villager had to do their bit to protect the community from the two main dangers: Indians and wolves.
Josiah’s life was physically daring and adventurous. There were days at a time when he went up the Kennebec River looking for fish and furs, which he sold at the port of Boston amongst the other merchants. Since 1657 he had been a deputy to the General Court. He was military leader of the colony by 1659 and remained so until he became governor in 1673.
Josiah’s disciplined dutifulness made him a popular local figure. As well as being a trader and a magistrate, he was also a surveyor, and sometimes rode for days looking for fast water for sawmills, marking bounds, or working out who could be relied on to oversee the plans for a house of correction attached to the prison. Colonists trusted Josiah’s considerable administrative abilities.
At a time when all colonies were jockeying for precedence and territory, Josiah’s standing as a wealthy man and son of Governor Edward Winslow made Plymouth feel it was still an important colony that could punch above its weight.
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In 1660 Charles II was restored to the throne. The Puritan experiment in England came to an end, with ruinous effects for many – especially those who had speculated in land confiscated from Royalists or the Church of England, which had to be returned. Governor Bellingham had four unfortunate nieces, the Misses Goodricke. During the Interregnum when all the royal palaces were sold off, their father, Colonel William Goodricke, bought the royal palace of Richmond as part of a syndicate. It seemed a marvellous bargain at the time.
But Goodricke had backed the wrong horse. At the Restoration Richmond Palace was confiscated with immediate effect. The family was left in terrible straits. In May 1662 his daughters wrote Governor Bellingham a piteous letter. Their father had asked them ‘to let you know by these that he and [his wife] are yet alive, though much troubled both in body and spirit through old age and many infirmities and trials arising from the present times’. They hoped he would continue to pray for them and that one day they would meet in heaven. In 1668 the most enterprising Miss Goodricke decided Boston was easier to achieve than heaven. She tried unsuccessfully to emigrate to live near the Bellinghams as her circumstances and security began to crumble. Her husband, a gentleman’s son who had once had an estate in Yorkshire, was reduced to keeping a ‘Scrivener [printer’s] shop near the Pump in Chancery Lane’. She was grateful that when every house round them was visited by the plague they were spared, but it was a depressing situation. She felt surrounded by signs of God’s displeasure. By 1672 Governor Bellingham felt so worried about his nieces that he left them the rents of two of his farms in New England.
Elizabeth’s Royalist aunt Magdalen briefly returned to the gracious, light-filled rooms of her rectory in Wareham when her husband was released from prison. But he was so unwell he died the next year. His health had been permanently damaged by his ordeals. Magdalen returned to live with her sons. She lived at Shapwick House in Dorset, the home of Captain William Wake, until her death just short of her ninetieth birthday.
Elizabeth and Robert Brooks were much better off than the penniless Goodrickes. But Restoration London was an uncomfortable atmosphere to live in. By the Act of Oblivion the past was forgotten for most who had served on the side of Parliament in the Civil War. But anyone who could be linked to the execution of Charles I was not allowed oblivion. What were later called regicide trials began six months after Charles II’s return. Many escaped death for political reasons or because they had friends in high places, but several people who were part of the Pelhams’ and Winslows’ circle were executed in grisly ways. Hugh Peter was amongst them.
There were attempts to crack down on the administration of the English colonies in America, especially New England. Even in faraway Boston there were rumours of future changes, that the free and friendly intercourse between New England and the motherland would be a great deal less favourable. It was regime change with a vengeance, and vengeance was the operative word for returning Royalists.
Elizabeth had bad luck with raising children. Three sons were buried in the graveyard of St Olave’s in Hart Street, where she had married; none of them lived to be older than two and a half. The only survivor was John, which may be the reason that his fond family showered him with gifts – he was the recipient of much christening booty, including twelve silver spoons. One of them came from Lord Mayor Andrewes, who perhaps sentimentally wanted to send a little something to the son of his deceased friend’s daughter. Josiah and Penelope sent a porringer.
The parish registers of St Olave’s show that by April 1663 the Brookses had moved to a less prosperous area, Gravel Street in St Botolph without Aldgate. Life was now not quite so easy for Elizabeth. The Restoration made doing business more difficult. For Puritans associated with the old regime, much of their comfortable way of life fell away.
The New England Corporation was reconstituted with different personnel. It continued to support John Eliot’s missionary work, but the republican merchant element was allowed to retire. As the clergyman Richard Baxter put it, ‘we all agreed that such as had incurred the King’s Displeasure, by being members of any Courts of Justice, in Cromwell’s days should quietly recede’.
Elizabeth’s husband Robert Brooks died, probably of the last major outbreak of the plague which ravaged London, during the very hot summer of 1665. It is unsurprising that she then decided to return home to New England.
In July 1669 she married the richest entrepreneur in New England, George Curwen of Salem. Curwen was one of the most dynamic and extraordinary of Salem’s merchants. It was an amazing coup for a widow in her thirties with a young son who had travelled from London to New England in not very good financial shape.
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Herbert Pelham remained not only financially interested but emotionally attached to the colony he had played such a role in establishing. Massachusetts was still the place where God’s kingdom was earnestly being created on earth. He made himself a first port of call for cash-strapped delegations from the colony of Massachusetts.
In the mid-1660s Penelope’s teenaged half-brother Edward, Herbert Pelham’s third son, came to live in New England and was supervised by the Winslows. It was sensible for at least one member of the Pelham family to escape what was not a favourable period for any family identified with the Interrregnum.
Young Edward went to John Eliot’s Latin School and attended Harvard University, matriculating in 1673. He probably lived with Josiah and Penelope in the holidays. He would eventually inherit the land he was being trained up to look after. Josiah in his responsible way took Edward under his wing just as he had looked after Edward’s elder brother Nathaniel. Herbert’s will shows that he expected Josiah to handle financial affairs for Edward. (It also states grudgingly that Josiah was to be paid back money ‘in satisfaction of a debt which (he says) my son Nathaniel Pelham owes him’.)
The cattle brand with the initials HP on it found by archaeologists in the ruins of Josiah and Penelope’s house suggests Herbert Pelham had a herd which Josiah managed. But despite Penelope and Josiah’s kindness to Edward, of whom Josiah was clearly fond (he would leave his brother-in-law ‘a young horse for his own riding’), over the next twenty years relations between Herbert Pelham and the Winslows became increasingly distant. Josiah no longer had a reason to travel to England and he had other preoccupations, such as the rising disquiet about the Indians.
The Puritan impulse had been faltering for a while. In 1657 the Half-Way Covenant was drawn up by a ministerial convention. It slackened the rules for membership of the churches. Previously, members of the congregational churches who were baptised but had not given an account of their own conversion, as was the custom, were not allowed to baptise their children. Now they were. The children could proceed to full membership and not lose their political rights. It was hoped that falling membership might be halted.
In 1669 Half-Way Covenanters in the First Church of Boston broke away to form the Third Church, now known as the Old South Church. John and Mary Winslow became members.* But Governor Bellingham became upset that the covenant was being diluted, and tried to have the seceders arrested.
The Quakers refused to compromise. Their insistence on listening to their inner voices, their refusal to swear oaths, their pacificism and their individualism made them alarming. In Boston, the reaction was explosive. The hanging of four Quakers known as the Boston Martyrs – one of whom, Mary Dyer, was a supporter of Anne Hutchinson – reinforced Massachusetts’ reputation for severity. Charles II himself was shocked by their execution. He intervened in 1661 and banned the death penalty being applied to Quakers; he allowed William Penn, son of Admiral Penn, to found Pennsylvania as a refuge for Quakers. Nevertheless thousands of them were imprisoned and several hundred transported.
The Quakers’ sincerity made these new fugitives from England the subject of curiosity amongst leading families of the Pilgrims who had their own history of religious individualism and separatism. Plymouth’s official policy was to ban Quakers. The death penalty was passed against them, but unlike in Massachusetts it was never used. Plymouth Colony inhabitants were interested in hearing what the Quakers had to say. Governor Prence imprisoned Arthur Howland for holding a conventicle, but seven years later his own daughter married Howland.
There were some overzealous characters in Plymouth but nevertheless it was the one New England colony where Quakers were allowed to preach. They were not allowed to vote but, as Josiah himself reported, the Quakers ‘are not disturbed except they disturb the peace’. Peace was what Josiah was determined to safeguard, wherever the threats came from.