The Warwick Women
A few weeks after the Marmaduke sailed from East Cowes, a much larger group of around one hundred settlers – men and women – left Gravesend for Virginia in the good ship Warwick under Captain Arthur Guy and Master Nicholas Norburne.1 Their instructions were to set sail from England ‘with the first oppertunity of wynd and weather’ after loading goods, provisions and passengers, taking the direct route to Jamestown ‘accordinge to their best skill and knowledge’. Piracy or attack by an enemy ‘man of warre’ was a distinct possibility, in which case their orders were to ‘hinder their proceedinges or doe them violence’ as far as they were able.
Among the passengers were another thirty-six ‘Maydes and Younge Woemen’ assembled by the Virginia Company as part of its money-making plan to supply brides for planters who could afford to pay for them.2 Like the Marmaduke maids before them, they came with guarantees of provenance and personal recommendations from city and parish worthies, and each travelled with a bride price on her head.
Lying some twenty-two miles due east of London, or twenty-six miles if you travelled by the snaking River Thames, Gravesend and its sister parish of Milton had been a hythe or landing place for river traffic since the Domesday survey at least.3 The heart of the City was only a flood tide away, allowing ships a quick passage upriver, while the Kent and Essex shores on either bank provided safe anchorage should they need it. The town’s nightingales were much praised and its air was reputedly healthy, unlike Tilbury Fort directly across the Thames, whose inhabitants suffered constant agues from the ‘effluvia’ of the surrounding marshes.
For many foreigners arriving on these shores, Gravesend afforded their first sight of England and they were not always overly impressed. Visiting at the end of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, Swiss medical student Thomas Platter noted that the town lacked walls, was not especially large and had ‘very little to be seen’, despite its many inns, where he stayed just one night before taking a small boat to London with the incoming tide.4 More than a decade later, the Roman Catholic priest Orazio Busino came to England in the train of Piero Contarini, Venetian ambassador to the court of King James. They too stopped at Gravesend after a tempestuous sea crossing from France, dropping anchor as soon as they reached the Thames estuary since both wind and tide were against them. They went to the Post Inn, which was apparently accustomed to receiving ambassadors and foreign grandees, but found its charges exorbitant, ‘namely 2 golden crowns per meal for each person’, and so like Thomas Platter before them, they quickly hurried away.5
But Gravesend was in business to service ships and travellers on their way to and from the capital, not to keep them entertained, and its watermen clung to their ancient privilege of transporting His Majesty’s subjects by the ‘long ferry’ that plied between Gravesend and London. They faced increasingly fierce competition from the owners of the smaller tilt boats, so-called because passengers sat on bales of straw under a ‘tilt’ or canvas that shielded them from the worst of the weather. The journey by public barge cost twopence per passenger, rowed by four men in fair tides and five in foul weather, plus a steersman at least. Fatal drownings were a fact of travel but thankfully rare. Tilt boats could carry up to thirty passengers for a maximum fare of fifteen shillings per boat, or sixpence per passenger, three times the cost of travelling by barge.6
The journey for the Warwick maids began at Billingsgate Quay, where they caught the long ferry to Gravesend.
The long ferry and much of the river traffic from London to Gravesend set out from Billingsgate Quay just to the east of London’s only bridge, which presented a hazard to smaller boats shooting between the piers, especially at low tide.7 Here at Billingsgate the Warwick women will have started their long journey to Jamestown, having first gathered at the house of Deputy Treasurer John Ferrar in St Sithes Lane close to the City’s pulsing heart. During the years when Sir Edwin Sandys effectively controlled the Virginia Company, its administration was centred here in the merchant household of the Ferrars.
Treasurer Sandys was the prime mover behind the plan to send brides to Virginia, determined to increase the colony’s population by tying down its rootless male settlers with the bonds of family and children. He even provided the link to one of the women who gathered at Billingsgate, twenty-five-year-old Cicely Bray from Gloucestershire, her parents described as ‘gentelfolke of good esteeme’ and herself as being ‘of kine [kin] to Sir Edwin Sandys’. Nicholas Ferrar inscribed her name first in his catalogue of thirty-six young women who sailed to Jamestown on the Warwick, giving her the prominence and flourish due to her rank, before handing the pen to his secretary Tristram Conyam to enumerate the other thirty-five.
Viewed as a group, the Warwick women were less illustrious than their Marmaduke sisters: just four out of thirty-six could claim gentry status. Immediately after Cicely Bray came Elizabeth Markham, one of only two sixteen-year-olds to sail on the Warwick. Tristram Conyam had corrected her father’s first name from ‘James’ to ‘Jervis’, surely the writer Gervase Markham, whose books on husbandry and housewifery had already reached the colony, bound together and sent on the Supply in September 1620.8 A younger son of a well connected but largely penurious branch of the Nottinghamshire Markhams, Gervase Markham was closely identified with Shakespeare’s patron the Earl of Southampton, having dedicated a rather florid sonnet to him and fought alongside him in military campaigns led by the Earl of Essex. They may even have studied together at Cambridge, since Markham would later claim to have ‘lived many yeares where I daily saw this Earle’.9
Both Markham and Southampton were lucky to escape the devastating consequences that followed the Earl of Essex’s fall from grace. On 23 February 1601, two days before Essex was executed for treason, Gervase Markham married Mary Gelsthorp at the church of the Holy Cross in her home parish of Epperstone, Nottinghamshire, and retreated to the country, where he lived quietly as a tenant farmer with his rapidly expanding family before returning to London a decade or so later, perhaps to the parish of St Giles Cripplegate, where he would eventually be buried. We are told that young Elizabeth was ‘by her father and mother presented’, so both her parents were still alive by the time she left for Virginia. The year after her departure Gervase Markham proposed a bizarre wager to walk from London to Berwick on the Scottish borders without crossing any bridges or travelling by any sort of boat, claiming that he had ‘groune pore’ because of his ‘many children and greate Charge of househoulde’.10 Was this a penance, perhaps, for having encouraged or allowed his young daughter to travel to Virginia?
A third gentry maid was the orphaned Lucy Remnant from Guildford in Surrey, who claimed Sir William Russell as her maternal uncle. Lucy’s father, Antony Remnant, had married Russell’s sister Mary as his second wife on 13 January 1595 at the church of St Mary the Virgin, Worplesdon, and the couple settled at Pirbright on the outskirts of Guildford. Their union was blessed with a son just nine months later, followed by Lucy (baptized 1 May 1598) and at least two more daughters, all baptized at the ancient church of St Michael and All Angels, Pirbright, where their father was buried when Lucy was just twelve years old.11
All we know of the fourth gentry maid to travel on the Warwick, nineteen-year-old Elizabeth Nevill, is that she was born in Westminster, the daughter of a ‘Gentleman of worth’, and that her mother’s name was Frauncis Travis, facts attested ‘by divers of the Company on their owne knowledge’, together with her ‘good Carriage’. Information about the parentage of her companions is equally sketchy. Their fathers or kinsmen included clothworkers, a cutler, a draper, a baker, a victualler, a tailor, a hat maker and a plasterer from Oxford, but the father’s occupation for twenty-three women was not recorded. Eleven of the Warwick maids were born in London, Middlesex or Westminster; seventeen came from elsewhere, while nothing is known about the birthplace of the other eight.
Parish records nonetheless survive for some of the non-gentry women who gathered at Billingsgate at the start of their long voyage to Jamestown. One whose footsteps we shall track is Bridgett Crofte, born in the Wiltshire parish of Britford (old name Burford) and a little older than the age she gave to the Virginia Company, turning twenty as she crossed the Atlantic.12 The church where she was baptized still stands, fragments dating back to Saxon times, surrounded by ancient water meadows with fine views towards Salisbury cathedral. ‘The City of Salisbury is made pleasant with waters running through the streetes,’ wrote the Jacobean gentleman traveller Fynes Moryson, ‘and is beautified with a stately Cathedrall Church, and the Colledge [of] the Deane and Prebends, having rich Inhabitants in so pleasant a seate’.13
From further north came Jennet Rimmer, aged twenty, ‘borne at NorthMills [North Meols] in Lanckisher’, a parish near present-day Southport, which was virtually waterlogged until its meres and marshlands were drained in the nineteenth century.14 In the decade or so between November 1595 and February 1605 at least eleven male Rimmers in North Meols produced a host of children, despite a five-year gap in the records.15
Among the London-born maids, birth records survive for Sara Crose,16 daughter of baker Peter Crose; a Peter Crosse was still living in the parish of St Margaret Lothbury in 1638.17 And the records throw up two possible infant girls for nineteen-year-old Elizabeth Dag, born in Limehouse on the Thames between Ratcliff and Poplar: either Elizabeth Dage, daughter of Robert, baptized at the church of St Dunstan and All Saints in Stepney on 15 May 1603, or her namesake baptized at the same church on 26 September 1604, the daughter of John Dagg, ‘mariner of Lymehouse’.18 While the maiden name of Ann is unknown, her husband was surely the John Richards buried at St James Clerkenwell in the county of Middlesex on 20 June 1619, the very church whose parishioners gave Ann a glowing testimonial to send her on her way to Virginia.19 The birthplace of the other two widows, Marie Daucks and Elizabeth Grinley, is unknown.
Information about the Warwick women’s skills is also patchier than for those who sailed on the Marmaduke, although Tristram Conyam noted that Parnell Tenton ‘cann worke all kinds of ordinary workes’, that Ellen Borne was ‘skilfull in many workes’ and that Martha Baker was ‘skillfull in weavinge and makinge of silke poynts’. Interest in the women’s suitability as brides had shifted from practical skills to moral worth. Stock phrases recurred like a refrain; to be called ‘honest’ was the highest accolade. Ellen Davy was praised for her ‘honest and Good Carriadge’ and Alse Dollinges as a ‘Mayde of honest Conversation’. Ann Parker, in service with a scrivener, was labelled an ‘honest and faythfull servant’. Two maids – Ann Westcote and Mary Morrice – were described as ‘honeste and sober’, and three more praised for the honesty of their immediate family, echoing the advice of the pamphleteer Joseph Swetnam that ‘in choyse of a wife, a man should note the honesty of the parents, for it is a likelyhood that those children which are vertuously brought up will follow the steps of their parents’.20 Both parents of Londoner Frauncis Broadbottom were described as ‘very honest people’. Alse Dauson was brought up by her mother, ‘whom Mrs Ferrar reportes to be a verrie honest woman’, and Mary Thomas by her grandfather Roger Tudor, clothworker, ‘known for a verrie honest Man by divers of the Company’.
And here lies a clue to how the Virginia Company recruited many of its women: by word of mouth and personal acquaintance. Company personnel from the top downwards had clearly trawled among their relatives and friends for suitable brides, such as Treasurer Sandys’ Gloucestershire kinswoman Cicely Bray and Alse Dauson, the daughter of old Mistress Ferrar’s acquaintance. Their words of commendation reflect the chatter of the times, as those connected to the company spread the word about the kind of upright young women it was seeking, doubtless emphasizing the venture’s opportunities for advancement. The Earl of Southampton’s wide circle of patronage may have netted Gervase Markham’s sixteen-year-old daughter Elizabeth as well as Lettice King, who travelled out in the Marmaduke.
Other company personnel who personally recommended potential brides include company secretary Edward Collingwood (Ann Westcote) and merchant William Webb,21 whose post as the Virginia Company’s ‘husband’ was created to increase investor confidence in the organization’s affairs (Mary Morrice). ‘Robert the porter’ who introduced the orphaned Bridgett Crofte from Wiltshire was surely Robert Peasly, confirmed in his post only in May 1622 but already well known to senior officials. His appointment to the company’s warehouse followed the sacking of the previous incumbent, James Hooper, who was caught with tobacco thrust up his hose. Robert’s appointment went as high as the company’s court, which discussed a motion to employ ‘one Robert Peasly who was well knowne to divers of the Companie to be sufficient for the place and one that proffered good security for his truth upon wch good report and promise of Security the Companie have entertayned the said Robert Peasly for their Porter’.22
The two men charged with running the now defunct Virginia lotteries, Lott Peere and Gabriel Barbor, both had links to twenty-year-old Mary Ghibbs from Cambridgeshire, who had sailed on the Marmaduke: Peere was her maternal uncle, with whom she lived, and she was also known to Barbor. Barbor, who lived in East Smithfield, had similarly recommended eighteen-year-old Fortune Taylor, and he had a personal stake in the venture, having advanced twenty-four pounds to the subscription for the maids, three times the minimum investment allowed. Another investor was Christopher Marten, who recommended Elizabeth Dag and sank eight pounds of his own money into the enterprise. Mistress Cuffe, wife to company bookkeeper John Cuffe, could vouch for Mistress Gilbert of Holborn, who in turn commended the young daughter of a hat maker, Jeane Joanes. And so the gossip spread about the Virginia Company’s intention to ship brides to its struggling colony.
As for those who were not personally known to the company, several came with the explicit commendation of City worthies – officials of London’s great livery companies, such as Mr Hobson, an official of the Drapers’ Company, who vouched for the ‘honest Carridge’ of Parnell Tenton and praised Ellen Borne as ‘a sober and industrious Mayd’. Mr Spark, clerk of Blackfriars, recommended Jennet Rimmer, while the wife to the clerk of the Minories could vouch for Martha Baker, and the wife of the recorder of London’s coachman recommended Margaret Bourdman, who travelled on the Marmaduke.23 Jean Grundye and Barbara Burchens came with the backing of yeomen from the sovereign’s bodyguard, or of their wives. So while the majority of these women lacked the social cachet of the best of the Marmaduke maids, they nonetheless came of honest stock and surely travelled with the good wishes of many in the City.
To anyone who witnessed the women’s departure for Gravesend, they will have made an impressive sight as they gathered on Billingsgate Quay amid the cacophony of ships and boats unloading passengers and goods from many parts of the world: ‘fish, both fresh and salt, shell fishes, salt, Orenges, Onions, and other fruits and rootes, wheate, Rie, and graine of divers sorts for service of the Citie, and the parts of this Realme adjoyning’.24 I like to think they may have lingered in people’s imaginations, re-emerging as a folk memory to inspire early street ballads such as ‘The Maydens of London’s brave adventures’, which invited the brave and merry maidens of London to sail across the seas to start a new life in a land of plenty where the sun was hot and everything could be bought cheaply.25
Published some two or three decades after the women’s departure, the ballad promises fun and adventure to those ‘brave Lasses’ and ‘Loving Rogues’ who are ready and willing to join the sisterhood of twenty named young women who have already dared to make the crossing, among them ‘Fair Winifright, and Bridget bright,/ sweet Rose and pretty Nany,/ With Ursely neat and Alice compleat/ that had the love of many’. Unashamedly upbeat in tone, it offers a stark contrast to the reality of life for Virginia’s early immigrants. Even the food on board ship is praised as good strong fare: ‘Bisket salt-Beef, and English Beer, and Pork well boyld with Peason’. The women who sailed on the Warwick would experience no such plenty, nor would they share in the supposed surfeit of victuals that awaited them at their journey’s end: ‘Pigs, Turkies, Geese, Cocks, Hens, and Ducks,/ and other fare most dainty/… A good fat Capon for a groat and eighteen eggs a penny.’
One essential difference distinguished the ‘maydens’ of the ballad from the real-life Warwick women and those who had travelled before them. The ballad maids mostly had sweethearts already, who hoped to join them later in the great plantation adventure, undeterred by jeering ‘Jack Spaniard’ and firm in their resolve to band together as Christians to subdue the infidels – a tub-thumping end to a stirring call to adventure that dangled a life of ease and plenty for those young women brave enough to take up the challenge. The Warwick women had no sweethearts or, if they did, they were leaving them behind to find husbands overseas. In this they more closely resembled the young women who appear in another set of ballads published later in the century, ballads ostensibly written for young men wishing to buy themselves brides. These read like bawdy versions of the Ferrar lists in their description of the women’s charms. Choose, if you will, between ‘Sweet Madam Mosella, who came from afar,/ With her white snowy Breast, most gallantly drest’26 or another ‘young Beauty’, described as
… fit for Game,
before you buy her,
Young Nancy is her Name,
take her and try her.27
‘I love a ballet [ballad] in print, a-life, for then we are sure they are true,’ declared Mopsa, the easily fooled country wench in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale.
Regardless of whether they see themselves as brave lasses and loving rogues, or as young maids and ‘graz’d Widows’ to be sold at reasonable rates, the Warwick women are finally on their way, travelling downriver with the ebb tide, past the Customs House and adjacent Wool Quay, where wool entering the port of London was traditionally weighed, then a cluster of ships unloading their wares at Galley Quay against a backdrop of ‘many fayre houses’ built by merchants for storage, and on to the Tower of London, ‘a most strong Palatine Tower, whose turrets and walles doe rise from a deepe foundation, the morter therof being tempered with the bloud of beasts’.28 In Visscher’s famous Thames panorama of 1616 it rises from the river like a tiered wedding cake, culminating in the turreted White Tower with which the Norman King William had asserted his royal power over his newly conquered kingdom. On they row, past the blackened mouth of Traitors’ Gate – ‘a draw bridge, seldome letten downe, but for the receipt of some great persons, prisoners’.29 After the Tower come the tenements of seafaring St Katharine’s, home to waterman’s daughter Jane Dier who had sailed on the Marmaduke, and on to Wapping, where pirates and sea rovers were traditionally hanged on a short rope at the low-water mark, their bodies remaining until three tides had washed over them. On this stretch of the river, says the antiquarian John Stow, ‘was never a house standing within these 40 yeares: but since the gallowes being after remooved father off, a continuall streete, or filthy straight passage, with Alleyes of small tenements or cottages builded, inhabited by saylors victualers, along by the river of Thames, almost to Radcliff, a good mile from the Tower’,30 and from Radcliffe to Limehouse a mile to the east, once home to the great Elizabethan explorer Sir Humphrey Gilbert and graced with fine elms – all gone now.
At Limehouse the congested tenements give way to open country as the Thames loops down towards the royal naval dockyard at Deptford and the palace at Greenwich then up again through Blackwall Reach towards Bow Creek and the East India Company’s shipyard.31 Swiss student Thomas Platter visited Greenwich palace towards the end of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, admiring its delightful fountain in an outer court and climbing the steep slope behind the palace. He even bragged about stealing a memento from Sir Francis Drake’s Golden Hind, which had been pulled onto the shore, a theft he excused ‘since it was rotten with age and now decaying’.32
And so the women continue their journey to Gravesend, observing perhaps how the Thames widens and flattens as it flows into the estuary, its banks ‘wooded and gay with pleasant hamlets and homesteads’,33 past the settlements of Woolwich, Erith and Greenhithe, then up through Fiddler’s Reach, so called because sailing ships must here tack backwards and forwards against south-westerly headwinds, and down again through Northfleet Hope. Two years later the waterman-poet John Taylor would pass the same way, taking every opportunity to stop off at the taverns of Deptford and Greenwich; and after Erith,
we rows’d our selves and cast off sleepe
Before the day-light did begin to peepe.
The tyde by Gravesend swiftly did us bring
Before the mounting larke began to sing.34
As they are rowed towards Gravesend the women cannot fail to notice the merchant ships on their way to and from the port of London, and the men-of-war headed for the naval yards at Deptford in what was fast becoming one of the busiest waterways in the world. Although England was nominally at peace with her traditional enemies of Spain and France, much of Europe was convulsed with religious conflict, and both piracy and privateering were rife. Only that spring King James’ daughter Elizabeth and her husband Frederick had begun their lifelong exile in The Hague, having been ousted from the throne of Bohemia after reigning for less than a year.
Like many travellers to Virginia, the Warwick maids boarded their ship at Gravesend. The spire close to the waterfront marks St George’s Church where Pocahontas was buried four years previously.
Just like Cowes, the landing stage at Gravesend lies within sight of forts or blockhouses built by Henry VIII to ward off the threat of invasion from the sea, one fort at Gravesend, of which only a footing remains, and another at Tilbury across the river, close to the spot where Queen Elizabeth famously rallied her troops before beating off the Spanish Armada, aided by luck and bad weather. England must have felt well protected in contrast to the women’s new lives, which are just beginning.
The Ferrars recorded the names of eight more young women who travelled to Virginia by other ships. Nicholas Ferrar himself added the few details that are known about them at the bottom of Tristram Conyam’s Warwick catalogue. First to leave, in the Charles, was Joane Haynes, described as ‘sister to Minturne the Joyner’, presumably another company employee. Her ship sailed in July, a little before the Marmaduke.35 Next came four maids who sailed in the Tiger, which departed Gravesend in September 162136 and after a tumultuous voyage, described in Chapter 8, limped into Jamestown in late 1621 or early 1622. Only three of the four Tiger maids were actually eligible as brides: twenty-eight-year-old Allice Goughe, the daughter of ‘Gentlefolke’; twenty-one-year-old Anne Gibbson, brought to the company by her guarantor, a Master or Mistress Switzer dwelling in the Blackfriars; and sixteen-year-old Elizabeth Browne, also from Blackfriars, whose parents were both still living. The fourth was described as ‘Daughter to Mrs Palmer whoe w[i]th her husband went along in the Tiger’. Ferrar clearly knew very little about her, leaving blanks for her age and her Christian name. In fact she was called Priscilla and was probably aged no more than seven or eight when she left England, demonstrably too young to marry.37
Three more young women sailed in November aboard the 200-ton Bona Nova, a frequent carrier in the transatlantic trade. Nothing is known about Priscilla Flint, and all we learn of Allice Grove is her age (twenty-six). The third is more intriguing: Elizabeth Bluett, ‘Daughter to Captayne Benjamin Bluett’. This was surely the Captain Benjamin Bluett who travelled to Virginia in 1619 with some eighty men to establish an ironworks for the Virginia Company.38 Some reports suggest that he died at sea during the crossing, but a ‘Mr Bluett’ was appointed to Virginia’s council in early 1620, and he is more likely to have survived the Atlantic crossing but to have died soon after his arrival.39 By the time Elizabeth sailed for Jamestown, Bluett was definitely dead, since responsibility for establishing an ironworks in Virginia had passed to John Berkeley, who agreed to go ‘upon the same condicons, as mr Blewett lately deceased’,40 concentrating his efforts at Falling Creek on the James River, now on the margins of the Virginia state capital at Richmond.
Elizabeth Bluett’s decision to travel to Virginia becomes even more troubling if she can be linked to the Elizabeth Blewett, daughter of Benjamyne Blewett, who was baptized on 1 April 1605 at St Giles Cripplegate in London, the same parish where Gervase Markham would later be buried and one with strong seafaring connections.41 If this is the same girl, she was just sixteen years old at the time of her departure – the same age as Elizabeth Markham, whom she may conceivably have known.
Was Elizabeth Bluett travelling to Jamestown to secure her father’s legacy and make a new life for herself overseas? Did she succumb to company propaganda or the blandishments of those who put God, king and company before the welfare of unprotected young women? Or was she travelling because she had no other options left?
