The Marmaduke Maids
Some time after Sunday 12 August 1621, thirteen young women gathered beside the burgeoning wharves and storehouses at East Cowes on the Isle of Wight, waiting for a lighterman to row them out to the Marmaduke anchored in the roads.1 Already a month into their journey, they had travelled by boat from London to Gravesend and after a short stay had continued overland to Portsmouth then by boat across the Solent to Cowes on the island’s northern coast.2 The Virginia Company had commissioned the Marmaduke’s master, John Dennis, to pick up passengers and goods from the Isle of Wight, and here the women had stayed until the boat was loaded and the winds and the tide turned in their favour.
The hand-picked women travelled without family, apparently of their own volition, in response to the company’s call for ‘maydes for Virginia’ – English women ‘young, handsome and honestlie educated’ willing to cross the Atlantic to marry planters in its colony of Virginia, then less than fifteen years old.3 Promised a free choice of husband, the women doubtless remained ignorant of the financial nature of the operation: that they formed part of a ‘magazine’ or trading enterprise designed to bring much needed cash from individual investors to replenish the company’s now empty coffers.
Among those whose fortunes we shall track is Catherine Finch from the small rural parish of Marden in Herefordshire, where she was baptized in the church of St Mary the Virgin, perched beside the sluggish River Lugg in a broad flood plain surrounded by gently undulating farmland. The long-distance footpath across the Welsh Marches runs through the straggling village, which remains deeply agricultural to this day, its old-world charm dislocated by shimmering rivers of polytunnels protecting the soft-fruit crops of the region’s thriving agribusinesses and refrigerated lorries thundering through its narrow country lanes.
As parish records for Marden survive only from 1616, it has not been possible to check the age that Catherine declared to the Virginia Company (twenty-three in 1621), but you can still touch the fourteenth-century sandstone font where she was baptized and admire the fine brass plate commemorating the ‘Pietie and Virtues’ of a gentlewoman from Catherine’s time: Dame Margaret Chute, who died on 9 June 1614 following complications in childbirth, the day after her infant daughter, Frances.4 Clearly a member of the upper gentry, Dame Margaret is dressed in the court fashions favoured by Queen Anne of Denmark, wife of the Stuart King James: low neckline, tight bodice winged at the shoulders and pointed at the waist, cuffs and raised collar in expensive needlepoint lace, necklace of pearls and one visible dangling earring. Her children appear beside her, a surviving daughter dressed like a scaled-down version of her mother and the dead baby wearing a lace collar and bib over her swaddling clothes. The young Catherine will have seen the Chute family at church, seated according to their station in life, which placed her own family somewhere between the middle and the back.
From Marden, the orphaned Catherine Finch travelled to Westminster to live in service with her quarrelsome brother Erasmus Finch, crossbow maker to King James and later to King Charles I. Erasmus then lived on the less favoured ‘landside’ of the Strand, a wide thoroughfare connecting the two cities of London and Westminster where poor and middling sorts of people lived in tenements squeezed between the grander houses of aristocrats, courtiers and gentlemen’s lodgings. Two other brothers lived close by: Edward, described variously as a goldsmith and a locksmith, a little way east along the Strand in the parish of St Clement Danes, and John, also a crossbow maker, in St Martin’s Lane off the Strand, a winding thoroughfare running northwards from Charing Cross to the church of St Giles-in-the-Fields flanked by land only recently turned over to housing. Brother John would rise to be one of ten assistants in the newly formed Company of Gunmakers under Master Henry Rowland, the king’s master gunmaker, outranking Erasmus Finch, who appears among the commonality of ‘Skilful Artists’.5
One of Catherine’s companions on the Marmaduke was Audry (Adria) Hoare, a shoemaker’s daughter from the lace-making town of Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire. Baptized on 25 August 1604 at the parish church of St Mary the Virgin, Audry was the youngest child of Thomas and Julyan Hoare, aged barely seventeen when she sailed, two years younger than the age she gave to the Virginia Company. She had at least four older siblings, three sisters (Joan, Agnes and Elizabeth) and brother Richard, apprenticed to a fustian dresser.6 Unlike many of her fellows, Audry Hoare had both parents still living when she was brought to the Virginia Company by her married eldest sister, Joane Childe, who was living in Blackfriars ‘down in the Lane neer the Catherne wheell’, which might refer to a tavern or to a tenement building.7 Stretching north from the Thames, this lively neighbourhood was popular with gentry and much favoured by players, musicians, composers and artists. Shakespeare was a shareholder in the small, indoor Blackfriars Theatre and even bought a substantial house here in 1613, which he bequeathed to his daughter Susannah on his death just a few years later.8
On the face of it, neither Catherine Finch nor Audry Hoare had an obvious reason to join the shipment of young women willing to risk their futures on finding a husband in the New World. Audry Hoare had close kin living in London and well connected relatives who might have helped her attract a husband: one of her first cousins was a merchant, Master Thomas Biling, and another an upholsterer in Cornwall. Catherine Finch enjoyed even more advantages. She lived with her brother, a craftsman with royal connections, in one of the capital’s most vibrant and fashionable neighbourhoods, within easy reach of the river and the open spaces of St Martin’s Field, and she had other family living nearby. Surely her chances of finding a husband were better than most? But all three brothers commended her to the Virginia Company, either because they wanted to rid themselves of responsibility for their unmarried sister, or because Catherine herself was more than willing to adventure her life overseas. Perhaps the truth lies somewhere in between: that through his royal connections or neighbourhood gossip Erasmus Finch caught wind of the company’s plan to ship marriageable women out to the colony and successfully convinced his sister to take up the challenge.
It is easy to see why a third Jamestown bride aboard the Marmaduke wished to travel to Virginia. Also considerably younger than the age she gave to the Virginia Company, Ann Jackson was bound for Martin’s Hundred, some ten miles downriver from Jamestown, to join her bricklayer brother John Jackson, who had represented the new settlement as one of its two burgesses in Virginia’s first general assembly held in 1619. Born within sight of Salisbury cathedral and baptized on 24 September 1604 in the parish church of Sarum St Martin, several years after two brothers, Ann Jackson came to the Virginia Company with the blessing of their father William, a man of ‘known honesty and conversaton’.
By the time Ann sailed, William Jackson had moved from Salisbury to Westminster and was living in one of the overcrowded tenements squeezed into dingy alleyways between the grand houses of Tuttle (Tothill) Street inhabited by the nobility.9 No mention is made of Ann’s mother so I can only assume she had died and that Ann was keeping house for her father, who was attracted like many others to the densely populated parish of St Margaret’s to serve the courtiers and bureaucrats of Westminster. Since his name does not appear in the various tax assessments for the parish, he was either subletting or judged too poor himself to contribute towards the upkeep of paupers, but as a gardener William Jackson will have found plenty of work tending the large gardens running north and south from Tuttle Street.10
The maids who sailed by the Marmaduke left England from East Cowes across the Medina estuary from Cowes Castle, sketched here by the Dutch artist Lambert Doomer.
While account books and ledgers can tell you the names of the passengers taken on board, they cannot tell you what those passengers were thinking, or how the women viewed their prospects as they waited for the flat-bottomed barge that would take them out to the Marmaduke.
Already one of their number had jumped ship: the widowed Joan Fletcher, at twenty-eight one of the oldest in the group and by all accounts the best connected, born into a prominent family in Cheshire and Staffordshire that included members of parliament, viscounts, a lord chancellor and even an earl. Her paternal uncle, Sir Ralph Egerton Knight, may be identified as one of two Ralph Egertons of Betley in Staffordshire, either ‘Radus [Ralph] Egerton de Betley, Armiger’, who married his relative Frances Egerton in January 1577, or their first-born son Radus, baptized at Betley three years later.11
Perhaps the widowed Joan Fletcher had taken fright at her companions or at the cramped conditions and undeniable hardships of travel in early seventeenth-century England. It can only have been a last-minute decision as the trunk containing her personal possessions was loaded onto the ship before she changed her mind, or had it changed for her.12 All we know is that she was ‘turned back’ at the Isle of Wight and her place taken by An[n] Buergen, who may have been of German or French origin since Buergen in all its variant spellings is not a local name.13
The ship’s master, John Dennis, carried with him a letter from the Virginia Company to the governor and council in Virginia, clearly written before Joan Fletcher’s hurried departure, as it includes among the ship’s passengers ‘one Widdow and eleven Maides for Wives for the people in Virginia, there hath beene especiall care had in the choise of them; for there hath not any one of them beene received but uppon good Comendacons, as by a noat herewth sent youe may perceive’.14 In fact thirteen women sailed on the Marmaduke as part of the bridal shipment, according to a second note written by Nicholas Ferrar, merchant and younger brother to John Ferrar, who was then deputy to the Virginia Company – in effect its chief administrator – and the Ferrars’ clerk, Tristram Conyam. The thirteen included eleven maids from the original dozen, Joan Fletcher’s replacement Ann Buergen, and Ursula Lawson, who was travelling with her kinsman Richard Pace and his wife, on their return to the colony.15 Just two of the Marmaduke women were Londoners born and bred: twenty-year-old Susan Binx, raised outside the City walls in St Sepulchre’s parish, and fifteen-year-old waterman’s daughter Jane Dier, the baby of the group, brought by her mother, who lived among the drunken Flemish refugees, seamen, madmen and pestering tenements of the riverside precinct of St Katharine’s by the Tower. The others were all born elsewhere.
Wherever their birthplace, most of the young women were living in London by the time they fell into the Virginia Company’s net, working in service with family members or respectable citizens who could vouch for their honesty and industry. As was usual for the times, a good many had lost either or both parents, but socially these women were far from society’s cast-offs. If we include Joan Fletcher among their number, as many as five of the original dozen were the daughters of gentlemen or counted gentlefolk among their relatives. The father of twenty-one-year-old Ann Harmer from Baldock in Hertfordshire was ‘a gentleman of good means now lyvinge’. Londoner Susan Binx had a widowed maternal aunt, Mistress Gardiner, a gentlewoman living near the Finches in the Strand. Margaret Bourdman’s maternal uncle was Sir John Gibson, knighted by King James in 1607 and holder of the patent to exploit alum in the North Riding of Yorkshire, a county he would later serve as sheriff.16 Lettice King could even lay claim to two gentry relatives. One was an uncle dwelling in London’s Charterhouse, then an almshouse for indigent gentlemen, soldiers or merchants, although he was later expelled for ‘misprision of treason’, a lesser form of treason or concealing the treachery of others.17 The second was her cousin once removed, Sir William Udall, in all likelihood the popular courtier Sir William Uvedale or Udall, who had recently been nominated by the Earl of Southampton as member of parliament for the Isle of Wight.18 Given Southampton’s involvement in Virginia Company affairs – he was soon to take over as treasurer – he may have been the conduit for Lettice King’s recruitment to the Jamestown brides.
While not of such elevated stock, the other Marmaduke maids had fathers, brothers, uncles or cousins who worked in respectable trades as saddlers, husbandmen, soldiers, wire drawers, grocers, printers, in addition to the merchants, gardeners, shoemakers, upholsterers, crossbow makers and fustian dressers already encountered. Even Jane Dier’s dead father could claim his place among Sir Thomas Overbury’s Characters, which painted the watermen as tellers of ‘strange newes, most commonly lyes… When he is upon the water, he is Fare-company: when he comes ashore, he mutinies; and contrarie to all other trades, is most surly to Gentlemen, when they tender payment.’19 Here was a microcosm of middling England under King James, independent tradesmen who worked for their living, trading with the products of their hands or with the skills in business or the professions for which they had trained.20
In putting together its prospectus for potential husbands, the Virginia Company took pains to enumerate the women’s accomplishments. Provenance alone was sufficient guarantee of worth for most of the gentry daughters among them, while skills listed for the lower-status women were generally of two sorts: robust, practical skills in housewifery on the one hand, and more refined needlework or knitting skills on the other. Despite her more advanced age (not in itself a handicap), husbandman’s daughter Allice Burges would have made a splendid planter’s wife: ‘She is skillfull in manie country works, she can brew, bake and make Malte etc.’ The same was said of another husbandman’s daughter, Ann Tanner from Chelmsford, who could ‘brew, and bake, make butter and cheese, and doe huswifery’, in addition to her ability to ‘Spinn and sewe in Blackworke’.
Another four Marmaduke maids had rarefied needlework skills: Cambridge-born Mary Ghibbs could make intricate bone lace, which involved weaving linen thread around bobbins of bone. Brought up in the household of a seamstress, gentleman’s daughter Ann Harmer ‘can doe all manner of workes [in] gold and silks’, while Audry Hoare could ‘doe plaine works and blackworks’ and make all manner of buttons. As well as working in ‘divers good services’, Susan Binx was able to knit and embroider in white- and blackwork, a skill she may have acquired from her wire-drawer father, since blackwork embroidery was sometimes embellished with gold or silver-gilt thread. But the fashion for blackwork was almost over, and it is hard to imagine that its delicate ornamentation would prove a selling point for a planter’s wife in Virginia.21
By the time the women reached the Isle of Wight, they will surely have got the measure of each other and begun to form natural alliances that would help them weather the long journey ahead. The man charged with seeing them safely aboard their ship was local merchant Robert Newland from nearby Newport, who had been largely responsible for bringing the Virginian trade to the island. It was Newland who had replaced Joan Fletcher with Ann Buergen, and given the delicate nature of his cargo, he will undoubtedly have wished to attend on them personally as they waited for the boat that would take them out to their ship, anchored in the choppy waters of the Solent.
Facing north towards the English coast, Cowes is a town in two parts – East and West Cowes – straddling the mouth of the River Medina. In Tudor times, ships had traded from Newport at the head of the estuary, but by 1575 a new customs house had brought maritime trade downriver to East Cowes, and now Newland was devoting his considerable energy to establishing a working port with storehouses and a quayside.22
He had come to the Virginia Company’s attention two years before the women left for Jamestown, recommended by Gabriel Barbor in a letter to Sir Edwin Sandys, who had just wrested control of the company from wealthy City merchant Sir Thomas Smythe.23 One of the overseers of the Virginia Lotteries, Barbor was personally connected to two of the women: Marmaduke maid Mary Ghibbs, and Fortune Taylor who sailed shortly afterwards on the Warwick.
Newland was, said Barbor, ‘an honest sufficient & a moste indevoring man for Virginia’, who could further the colony’s development by victualling the ships or providing manpower. Already he was ‘so well reported of ’ by the Virginia Company of London’s sister Plymouth Company, among others, and had helped Captain Christopher Lawne establish a Virginian plantation along the James River in what would later become Isle of Wight County. Indeed, Newland was one of nine associates who had invested in Lawne’s plantation, earning praise as a ‘ventrous charitable marchant’.24 Newland would not only help prevent deserters from the company’s ships, promised Barbor, but would ‘victuall cheaper th[a]n Londoneres’, surely his chief attraction for a commercial company perennially short of funds.
Sandys and his deputy, John Ferrar, had clearly taken Barbor’s recommendation to heart and commissioned Newland to ship some 230 people and supplies by the Abigail from his base at East Cowes ‘for the more comodiousnes and for procuringe of people the better’.25 The operation was so successful that Newland was given five shares in the Virginia Company on condition that he did not sell them, recognizing the ‘extraordinary paines taken in their service in taking care of Shipping their people in the Abigaile at the Ile of Wight’.26
That was in early May 1621, just three months before the Marmaduke set sail from East Cowes and right at the start of the port’s brief decade of prosperity, when Robert Newland had a hand in much of the island’s trading activity. ‘All things were exported and imported at your heart’s desire,’ wrote the islander Sir John Oglander, recording the port’s rapid development from just three or four houses at Cowes to the magnificent sight of 300 ships riding at anchor in the roads, before European wars brought ‘poverty and complaint’ back to ‘our poor Island’ by the end of the decade.27
Although Newland drops out of the Virginia Company’s story from late 1622, when he received a commission to transport people to Virginia on the Plantacon and to proceed on a fishing voyage,28 he continued to play a leading role in island affairs as one of Newport’s chief burgesses, rising to mayor in 1629 and again for three months in 1636. Just one month after the Marmaduke sailed for Virginia, he was entrusted with the town’s ‘Comon Box to receave and accompt for all the towne rents revenues and proffitts’.29 But he was not considered a gentleman by the standards of the day, appearing simply as ‘Newland’ at the bottom of Sir John Oglander’s list of new year’s gifts received in 1622, the only donor denied a polite ‘Mr’, a ‘Goodman’ or even a Christian name.
Whatever talents he possessed for provisioning the Virginia Company’s ships, Newland was not especially well lettered, judging from the only correspondence of his to survive among the company’s records. The letter reveals his poor grasp of composition and punctuation and his erratic spelling, but if you read it aloud, his strong Hampshire voice rings through.30 Its first paragraph concerns shirts, packed away in a chest in the ship’s hold and therefore out of reach of the poor passengers, many of whom had endured a full month without changing their shirts. Newland’s tone is defensive, as if he is responding to a complaint about his charges:
Sr. Youers of the 18 of this instant I Recavd and you say that Capten Barwik had order to opene the Chest vher the shirtes is but thoues Chist ar stod in the ship and ar not to be Com by Some of youer pepell hath gon a month in a shirt so that of nesitie they most have Chaing I do for you as for my sell nothing but what Nesistie is done the fordrence paseger hath ben 2 times at the Coues to goe abord but the wind is Come to the wastward a gaine so now that be hear at Nuport and Capten Barwike will not leat his pepell Remane a bord befor the wind is faier.
Newland will have needed all his mercantile skills to provision the company’s ships with sufficient food, fuel and general stores for the long sea crossing, and to sustain the new settlers during their first year in the colony. The Marmaduke maids were dispatched at such speed that they travelled empty-handed, without the usual provisions aside from clothes provided by the company and bedding: two trusses ‘for use at sea’ containing six bed cases and bolsters, six rugs, two psalters and twelve catechism books, the last two items to be delivered to the master’s mate, Mr Andrews, for the maids’ use.31 A further half-barrel contained six pairs of sheets, six bed cases and six bolsters, intended perhaps for six of the maids when they arrived in Virginia.32
The thirteen maids were not the only settlers travelling to Virginia that summer. Also on board the Marmaduke were ‘twelve lustie youths’ and stores bound for Martin’s Hundred,33 where gardener’s daughter Ann Jackson was joining her brother; forty more settlers for the plantation would follow in the Warwick. The Virginia Company’s ‘husband’ or chief accountant dutifully recorded the goods loaded onto the Marmaduke destined for this plantation: four barrels of peas; two herring barrels of oatmeal; eight more barrels of meal; a ten-gallon cask of spirits (‘aquavite’); a four-gallon cask of oil; six shovels and spades; a cask of tools containing eight axes, four hatchets, six broad and six narrow hoes; a dozen each of shirts, pairs of sheets, frieze suits and Irish stockings; two dozen falling bands (flat collars falling on the shoulders); and two dozen pairs of shoes.34 Also travelling – three to a bed – were twelve boys, kitted out with canvas suits, shoes, stockings, garters, headbands, knives, points or fasteners for their clothes, plus two shirts apiece. Such a full load of passengers and cargo left little room for the passengers’ personal belongings. Mary Ghibbs’s ‘small packe of cloaths’ was confused with one belonging to a Mr Atkinson and left behind, to be sent on later in the Tiger.35
Keeping discrete accounts for separate ventures was another challenge that Newland did not always get right. Expenses incurred by the maids should have been charged to the magazine of named investors who had adventured the money for their passage and expected to share in the profits from their sale to prospective husbands, but Newland mistakenly charged them to the general company.36 The £9 3s. he claimed to have laid out for the Marmaduke maids during their stay on the Isle of Wight suggests that they remained on the island for at least four weeks, since Newland himself would later receive 3s. 6d. per week for each Scottish soldier billeted on him in late 1627.37
They must have been relieved to be finally on their way – the thirteen maids no less than Robert Newland, his responsibility for their welfare finally acquitted. One imagines that hopes and fears conflicted as they set off from the shoreline towards their ostensible goal: finding a husband in a distant land, a goal that united and divided them at the same time. Now sisters-in-arms but soon they would be rivals, if not in love then at least in the marriage stakes.
Their situation set them apart from most women sailing to Virginia, who usually travelled as wives or as indentured servants. Ann Jackson’s brother had in all likelihood married his wife in England before setting out for Virginia,38 like five young men who married in the parish church of Sts Thomas at Newport, Isle of Wight, on 11 February 1621. ‘Last fyve cupple were for Virginia,’ reads a note in the parish register after their names: Henry Bushell and Alice Crocker, Christopher Cradock and Alice Cook, Edward Marshall and Marye Mitchel, Walter Beare and Anne Green, Robert Gullafer and Joan Pie.39 They sailed to Jamestown on the Abigail so successfully provisioned by Robert Newland, who may even have persuaded them to go and will certainly have talked of their example to the Marmaduke maids, who followed just a few months later. However, such was mortality in Virginia that four years on, not one of the couples survived intact, although two of the men were living as servants, and one or other of the women may have been widowed and married again.40 The rest were almost certainly dead.
The Marmaduke maids’ haunting last view of England can be imagined from this map of the Isle of Wight engraved by Jodocus Hondius and published by John Speed in 1611.
The thirteen young women now taking ship have no husbands as yet. Instead, they have agreed to sail across a treacherous ocean to marry men as yet unseen in a place of conflicting histories, part Eden, part savage wilderness.
Stay with them as they reach the Marmaduke out in the Solent and clamber as tidily as they can aboard the merchantman, stopping to take one long last look at the island, a gentle, very English landscape of trees, pastures and meadows, the wooded promontories on either side of the River Medina enclosing the natural harbour at Cowes like mittened hands.41 Leaving home is hard at the best of times, and these women will have known they had little hope of ever returning. Would you have been brave enough – or foolish enough – to follow in their wake?
