In October 1664 baby Elizabeth, who had been born that April, was christened alongside Mercy Baker at the Second Church of Scituate, the church established by Edward’s enemy William Vassall, where Josiah and Penelope worshipped regularly, though it was ten miles from their home.
Having children of a similar age is a good way of bonding. Penelope’s son Isaac was born around the same time her sister-in-law Elizabeth Curwen produced two girls to make more of a family for her son, John Brooks, now in his teens. Elizabeth named her daughters after her sister-in-law and her mother: Penelope was born in 1670 and Susanna in 1672. But Elizabeth did not forget her first husband, Robert Brooks. Amongst her prized possessions was a chest of linen which had belonged to him. It was ‘always reserved to myself and kept in my possession’.
Josiah became reliant on George Curwen as a friend and mentor, perhaps for his commercial wisdom. The sober, practical Curwen was in awe of what he perceived as Josiah’s noble, lordly character. Amongst the Curwen papers is an October 1672 IOU from Josiah asking his executors to pay Curwen the large sum of ‘fifty pounds stout in the current silver money of New England’ before the following October. Josiah most likely had ventured some money on one of Curwen’s ships.
* * *
As transatlantic trade took off and business boomed, the opinionated, proud nature of the Boston merchants grew more pronounced. The gold- and silversmith John Hull was typical of the new Boston establishment, of which Josiah was now part. Hull was sent to England by the Massachusetts government to negotiate with Charles II’s ministers to make sure that England did not interfere with the charter. Unsurprisingly, Charles II viewed New England as the home of regicides. Indeed two very well-known regicides – Edward Whalley, a cousin of Cromwell, and his son-in-law, the millenarian-minded General William Goffe – had fled there in July 1660, and had been openly welcomed.
Samuel Maverick, one of the earliest settlers in New England and a dedicated Anglican, hated the Congregrational churches. He had signed Child’s Remonstrance, for which he had been imprisoned by the Massachusetts government. At the Restoration he had his revenge. He told Charles II he should send over commissioners to pull the colonies into line, and was himself appointed as one of them. The New England colonies were not only independent-minded and largely Parliamentarian in sympathy, they were also literally a law unto themselves.*
The Massachusetts government refused to accept the Royal Commissioners’ jurisdiction, calling out trained bands onto the streets. They also hid the regicides. Edward Whalley lived in a cave outside New Haven, Goffe under a pseudonym in Hadley, Massachusetts.
Eventually the commissioners returned home, furious at the insulting way in which they had been received at Boston. Their only success was to seize New Netherland in what is known as the Second Dutch War, renaming the island of Manhattan New York, after the Duke of York, Charles II’s brother James. Penelope’s uncle, Governor Bellingham, was loudest in his defiance to Charles II. He had always been an outrageous character and had lost none of his fire in his old age. He refused to go to England to discuss New England’s behaviour. Instead he sent over a ship laden with pine trees for masts for the Royal Navy. The king, preoccupied by other matters, thereafter left New England alone.
Where the English commissioners were effective was with the Atherton Company. Helped by Samuel Gorton, who had hung on to the 1644 petition in which they submitted themselves to Charles I, the Narragansetts once more petitioned the Royal Commissioners for justice. They got it: the Atherton Purchase was declared illegal. The commissioners named the Narragansett country ‘the King’s Province’ and the tribe were considered to be taken under Charles II’s protection but this was one victory for the Indians in a series of defeats.
In acknowledgement of Charles II’s overlordship, the Narragansetts were to pay him two wolfskins a year on 29 May, his birthday. As a sign of their pleasure the chiefs sent extra gifts which included ‘a feather mantle and a porcupine bag for a present to the Queen’. (These curios never reached Whitehall. The ship in which they were travelling was seized by the Dutch.)
The English began to foreclose on loans that the Plymouth Indians did not have the cash to pay for. Josiah saw nothing wrong with such practices. He kept adding to his own acres. In what was called the Major’s Purchase, in 1662 he and forty-four others bought a considerable area of Indian land. In 1671, in what looks like a cynical manoeuvre to benefit a syndicate of Boston businessmen, he sued one of Massasoit’s great-nephews – William, the son of Tispaquin the sachem of Namassaket – for £20 because he had not paid for a horse and other goods worth £10. To pay the fine, William’s father Tispaquin agreed to hand to Josiah over a hundred acres of land.* In August 1672, to settle an £83 debt Philip mortgaged four square miles of land near Taunton River.
Such questionable practices became the norm. The settlers’ desire for land, and the Indians’ desire for goods, meant that by 1675 the Wampanoag chief was completely surrounded by English settlers to whom he had sold thousands of acres. Hemmed in by the English colonists’ houses which obstructed his view, Philip no longer even had the right to fish off his ancestral peninsula of Mount Hope.
King Philip was proud and ambitious, temperamentally more fiery than Massasoit, and far less able to compromise. He felt betrayed by Josiah, who seemed to have completely forgotten the history of the two families. The clergyman William Hubbard, who interviewed many leaders of the colony to write his book, reported that Philip’s malice against the English ‘was mixed with a particular prejudice against Governor Winslow’.
Philip felt humiliated by his treatment and kept expecting things to improve. But they did not. As a result, over the next decade Indian dances (at which they plotted war) became increasingly frequent. Held at Mount Hope on a regular basis, they added to the threatening atmosphere.
And the festering issues continued. The Indians were not used to fencing their fields, so English livestock trampled their corn; and ‘the English made them drunk and then cheated them in bargains’. Philip was bitterly aware of growing powerlessness. By the 1670s as many as one-fifth of Indians of Massachusetts and Connecticut lived in Praying Towns such as Lowell, Grafton and Marlborough where their wigwams had once stood. They had English houses, meeting houses, clothing and schools where they read the Bible. The Indians wore English clothes, and had short hair. The Christian religion undermined the Indian leaders’ powwows and their own power. Philip’s great fear was that his Wampanoags would be forced to be Christians. The Indian culture, where rule and tribute were enforced by powwow magicians, was under threat.*
In a conversation with John Eliot, who became known as the Apostle to the Indians, Philip revealed his horror at praying Indians rejecting their sachems: ‘if I should pray to [the English] God, and all my people with me, I must become as a common man among them and so lose all my power and authority over them’. Despite his amiability Massasoit himself had been resistant to Christian instruction. Non-praying Indians were shocked by the way their kin had abandoned the hunting which had been the sign of a man’s status.
Tragically Philip was also interested in progress. He was one of the most anxious of all the sachems to learn from the Europeans. He experimented with keeping a herd of hogs and asked John Eliot to teach his people to read, not for religious reasons, but so they could get on in the modern world. John Eliot sent one of his best students, a high-achieving Indian named John Sassamon, to live with Philip and teach the Wampanoags to read. Sassamon was one of the few Indians who had studied at Harvard. He asked the Plymouth government to give him encouragement, by which he probably meant money.
Unfortunately Philip’s contemptuous behaviour towards John Eliot – during a meeting Philip plucked at a button on Eliot’s coat and said he cared as much for his Gospel as that button – did nothing to shore up his credentials.
* * *
In July 1669, just when the Winslows were bound up with the organisation of Elizabeth’s wedding to George Curw
en, news came that some of Philip’s senior men had been meeting with the chief of the Niantics, Ninigret. Although Philip said it was to teach his men a new dance the English became increasingly suspicious. The thought of the two most powerful tribes in New England plotting together ramped up tension.
Philip’s younger brother Takamunna had just reached adulthood and he seems to have been stirring up other braves for the war which was the traditional way of young men proving themselves. Contemporary commentators, including Philip’s chief commander Annawon, excused Philip, blaming the pressure of ‘others of the youngest sort of his followers, who coming with their several tales (which he likened to sticks laid on a heap) till by a multitude of them a great fire came to be kindled’.
By 1671 the die seems to have been cast. Philip, probably forced by the younger braves urging war on him, had secretly made up his mind. Hundreds of Indians were making their way to Mount Hope. Philip’s men were seen preparing for war, sharpening their tomahawks and cleaning their guns. Settlers were fleeing their territories in Rhode Island because they heard the Narragansetts were also in the plot and intended to ‘slay them like cattle’.
To add to the strain for Josiah, there was a new baby in their house. Penelope had just given birth to their son Isaac. Susanna herself was really quite old. In the event of an Indian attack she would not be able to run.
Some authorities think Philip was playing for time as his preparations were not yet ready. He agreed to attend a peace conference at Taunton on 12 April 1671, where he was ordered to surrender his guns. He gave up some, though not all, and was released. But as the braves continued to assemble on Mount Hope, all the signs were he was still preparing to attack. Philip’s friend James Brown – the son of Massasoit’s confidant – went to Mount Hope to seek an audience but Philip was in the middle of a war dance with his braves, and knocked off Brown’s hat when he tried to speak to him, saying it was disrespectful not to take off one’s hat in the presence of a king.
Philip refused to go back to Plymouth and negotiate but he yielded to John Eliot’s entreaties to go to Boston. The Massachusetts government agreed to mediate between the Plymouth government and Philip. Horrified by the thought of war, which would destroy the hopes he still retained of converting the Wampanoags, Eliot hoped to calm the situation.
At the meeting in Boston things appeared to go Philip’s way. Echoing the Narragansetts, Philip said the governor of Plymouth ‘was but a subject and he … would not treat except his brother King Charles of England were there’. In response Massachusetts wrote to Plymouth querying their authority over Philip.
By energetic lobbying Plymouth, however, managed to convert Boston to its view that Philip was indeed Plymouth’s subject. Philip was charged with violating the Treaty of Taunton as well as having malicious and dangerous designs on Plymouth. A new treaty produced on 29 September achieved all Plymouth wanted: Philip was subject to Plymouth’s government and its laws. He could not make war or peace without the permission of the governor. Philip was to deliver up all his arms, and pay £100 for the trouble he had caused. He had no more free agency. Philip’s humiliation was complete – and so was his determination to wage war.
All the evidence suggests that over the next four years Philip was making secret preparations. The question was not whether war would come, but when.
* * *
Josiah and Penelope were also preoccupied with the woes of Penelope’s aunt, whose husband, Richard Bellingham, died on 7 December 1672 when he was still governor of Massachusetts. Bellingham’s capacity to enrage his acquaintances reached epic heights with his will. He left the bulk of his estate to his beloved wife, Penelope, a tiny legacy to his son and the rest to godly preachers. This was an offence against male primogeniture – while the godly preachers were the wrong kind of godly. The will was the subject of lawsuits for over a hundred years.
Aggressive questions about the governor’s state of mind in his last days were put to the widow Penelope Bellingham and her sister Elizabeth, in a manner they were quite unused to. Josiah came to the rescue. Lawyers for Bellingham’s son Samuel, who eventually overturned the will, suggested that the governor must have been mentally ill to leave next to nothing to his male heir. Court documents mention George Curwen as one of Penelope Bellingham’s friends present after the funeral to support her. Elizabeth Winslow had only been married to George Curwen for three years, but Curwen could be relied on in a tight corner. There was some bargaining with the trustees to make sure she got something out of her husband’s property. Josiah managed to swap the less profitable farm she was left for the more lucrative one he claimed had always been known as hers in the governor’s lifetime.
* * *
Meanwhile, affairs were moving to a climax out at Mount Hope. The Indians were both cowed and furious. In May 1675 it was reported that Philip’s former sister-in-law, Weetamoo, sachem of the Pocassets opposite Rhode Island, was fearful of her land boundaries being eroded. She wanted her bounds to have a river at each end – north and south because of her tribe’s dependence on fish.
In January John Eliot’s missionary John Sassamon had made a perilous journey through ice and snow to Marshfield. Sassamon had been a teacher in the school at the Praying Town of Natick. Probably orphaned during the 1633 smallpox epidemic and brought up by an English family named Callicut, he had been an interpreter for the English since the Pequot War. Although he had worked as King Philip’s teacher, secretary and translator, he had fallen out with him. Nevertheless the activities he had noticed in his travels round the countryside – the hostile faces, the secret gatherings – had convinced him something was up, and he had investigated. Philip seems to have guessed he was a spy and was watching his movements. Sassamon took his life in his hands to visit Josiah. He told Josiah he believed Philip was planning an uprising, but Josiah did not believe him. Perhaps he did not want to think that he would have to act against Philip. Perhaps he did not want to face the future.
When Sassamon left Marshfield, assassins were waiting for him and in the dark on his way home he was murdered. His body was found under the ice of Assawompset Pond with his gun and hat nearby. Philip appeared at Plymouth of his own free will to deny the murder, but Patuckson, another Indian, courageously came forward to say he had seen three of Philip’s men drown Sassamon. In June they were tried for murder with a jury consisting of twelve English jurors and six Christian Indians who were meant to assist. On 11 June – three days after they were hanged – news came from Rehoboth that the Wampanoags were preparing for war.
One of the signs of an Indian war was that women and children were sent away to be looked after by tribes who were out of danger. Philip’s squaws with their papooses on their backs were seen leaving Mount Hope for the Narragansett country.
* * *
Most historians today believe that the execution of Sassamon’s killers triggered a war that Philip had actually wanted – though not at a date of his planning. Once the murderers had been hanged, Philip believed that he would be hauled into Plymouth, accused of ordering the killing, and executed.
The war was Philip’s pre-emptive strike. A week before it began the deputy governor of Rhode Island, John Easton, called an emergency meeting on the Mount Hope peninsula with Philip and his councillors. He was a Quaker so he had a good sense of what it meant to be the underdog. Several Rhode Island magistrates came with Easton across the narrow channel to meet Philip at the ferry. Philip arrived unarmed himself, but with forty of his men who were bristling with weaponry. Easton made one final attempt to stop the war, suggesting that a mediation system could be put in place. But Philip in his last recorded words burst forth that he did not believe in English justice: the Indians had done nothing wrong, the English had wronged them. There could be no hope of justice when ‘if 20 of their honest Indians testified that an Englishman had done them wrong, it was as nothing; and if but one of their worst Indians testified against any Indian or their king when it pleased the English, that was suff
icient’.
Arbitration would not work because by arbitration the Indians had already had ‘many miles square of land so taken from them’. They thought the English would insist on English arbitrators, that they would confiscate their arms as had happened at Taunton, and then make them pay £100 to retrieve them: ‘And now they had not so much land or money, that they were as good to be killed as to leave all their livelihood.’ Philip said the English always cheated: ‘Whomever the English had once owned for king or queen, they would later disinherit, and make another king that would give or sell them their land.’ As a result ‘now they had no hopes left to keep any land’. Most poignantly of all, Philip revealed his sense of personal betrayal. When the Pilgrims had first arrived his father had been ‘a great man’ and the English like little children whom Massasoit had protected from other Indians. His father had let the English have ‘a hundred times more land now than the king had for his own people’.
John Easton believed that if independent arbitrators could have been arranged – such as the governor of New York and an Indian king – the war would not have taken place. But Plymouth never suggested this.
After the meeting Easton asked the Wampanoags to disarm. He said the English would be too strong for them. The Wampanoags responded they would be too strong for the English. They marched away.
* * *
Four days before war broke out Colonel Benjamin Church had an encounter demonstrating there was still room for manoeuvre. He had just started settling in at his new farm at Little Compton opposite Mount Hope and had become very friendly with his neighbour, Awashonks, the Squaw Sachem of the Sakonnets. Out of the blue she was visited by six braves of Philip’s to persuade her to join his side. Instead of agreeing, Awashonks sent a messenger to Church summoning him to the conference as well. Philip’s Wampanoag braves were in the state which Church knew ‘among that nation is the posture and figure of preparedness for war’. Their faces were painted, their hair ‘trimmed up in comb-fashion’, with powder horns and shot bags on their backs. As Church remembered, ‘Awashonks herself, in a foaming sweat was leading the dance’ of hundreds of Indians from her territories.
The Mayflower Page 32