The Manor
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bloodroot: Bloodroot might possibly be the “Indian” plant that a collector in England put on his “wish list”: “A small roote of a fingers bignes as red as blood wherewith they dye their mattes.” The size is right, and bloodroot’s root is a pale reddish color. Cited by Potter from Goodyer MS 11, fol. 21, and published in R. T. Gunther, Early British Botanists and Their Gardens (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1922), 70–71.
7. THE WORLD TURNS UPSIDE DOWN
The title of Christopher Hill’s book “The World Turns Upside Down”: The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (London: Temple Smith, 1972; reprinted London: Penguin, 1991)—the source for the chapter title—was taken from an old ballad.
The will of Grizzell: May 7, 1685, SMA, NYU, I/A/140/19.
first Grizzell: In 1630 a Grizzell and a Dorothy Wase received a £400 bequest from Auditor Richard Budd, Kennish, chart, Wase, Budd, Brinley, Hanbury, Wheeler, Chart, Griswold Papers, Fales Library, NYU.
fairy tale: William A. Wheeler, An Explanatory and Pronouncing Dictionary of the Noted Names of Fiction, etc. (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1872), 159; Clyde Furst, A Group of Old Authors (Philadelphia: George W. Jacobs, 1899), chapter 2, “A Medieval Love Story: Chaucer’s Tale of Griselda.”
The Irish: Ireland’s bloody reduction was the first exercise of imperial British power. Nicholas Canny, Making Ireland British (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
bouts of war: The English Civil War was waged in Scotland and Ireland as well as England, and it had three phases: the first, 1642–46; the second, 1648–49; the third, 1649–65.
two auditors: William Gwyn Jr. and Richard Kinsman joined the king at Oxford in 1643. Gray, “Land Revenue,” 59. Thomas Brinley II, Thomas Brinley’s great-grandson, wrote that Auditor Brinley went to Oxford and followed Charles II into exile, but no confirmation exists. Thomas Brinley II (Boston?) to William Bollan, London, June 23, 1755, partial transcription input in 2000 at Sylvester Manor as Serial #197, Sylvester Manor FileMakerPro Database, Fales Library, NYU.
Cavaliers and Roundheads: In the 1950s and ’60s, Laurence Stone and Christopher Hill, used the social sciences (and in Hill’s case, Marxist theory) to enrich and deepen the standard political “what happened” rendering of the Civil War, set forth by nineteenth-century “Whig” historians such as Thomas Macauley and G. M. Trevelyan. In the 1970s historian Conrad Russell and others took issue, viewing the unsuccessful settlement of Civil War issues as a complicated, unclear process resolved only in 1688. Conrad Russell, The Causes of the English Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).
out-and-out Parliamentarians: Parliamentarians had to be very convinced of their cause in 1642, when it was unclear that the “revolution” would succeed. Aylmer, The King’s Servants, Table 49, 405.
“Lady Bullock’s house”: Thornbury, Old and New London, 332.
English lives: Ann Hughes, “The Execution of Charles I,” http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/civil_war_revolution/charlesi_execution_01.shtml.
“man of blood”: A Remonstrance of His Excellency Thomas Lord Fairfax, Lord General of the Parliaments Forces and of the General Councell of Officers Held at St. Albans the 16. of November, 1648 (London: Partridge, 1648), http://oll.libertyfund.org/?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=2183&chapter=201180&layout=html&Itemid=27.
Charles I: Mark A. Kishlansky and John Morrill, “Charles I (1600–1649)” (ODNB, 2004), http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/5143?docPos=1.
Henry Ireton: Ian J. Gentles, “Ireton, Henry (bap. 1611, d. 1651)” (ODNB, 2004), http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/14452.
four thousand troops: Thomas signed a petition in nearby Eton to protest hardships caused by troops quartered in the area. Janet Kennish, Datchet Past (West Sussex: Phillimore, 1999), 41–43; “Petition from Parishes in Stoke Hundred to Parliament, Dec. 7, 1647,” Centre for Buckinghamshire Studies, D/X 1205.
surrounding landscape: “The Royal Village: 16th and 17th Centuries,” in Kennish, Datchet Past, 23–31 and figs. 20, 34; John Rocque, “County of Berkshire” (map), 1761, TNA: MPZ 1/1.
manor house: Thomas Brinley, who may have moved to Datchet by 1647 when his son William was baptized there, still gave his address as Clerkenwell in 1646. Earlier, he apparently lived in Eton, where he wrote his will, but at his death in 1661 he was probably living in Datchet Manor House. William Brinley, baptism 1647, no month or day given, Datchet Parish Register; Testimony of Richard Budd, 1621, Eton College, Miscellaneous Estates 49/155, Case of College v. Helen Foster relict of John Foster, Vicar of Datchet; “Inventory of Thomas Brimley [sic], 26 Nov 1661,” Buckinghamshire Probate Inventories, 1661–1714, Michael A. Reed, ed. (Buckinghamshire Record Society, 1988), 11–12.
royal business: On March 1, 1640/1, “Mr. Auditor” TB certifies receipt of some £67 or so from fines levied on Henrietta Maria’s properties in co. York. W. D. Hamilton, ed., Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, of the Reign of Charles I, 1640–41 (London: Longmans, 1882), 528.
lose everything: Brinley salvaged lands and rents for his wife and sons, and portions for at least some of his daughters. Will of Thomas Brinley of Datchet, Buckinghamshire, filed December 11, 1661, Prerogative Court of Canterbury, PROB 11/306. Will of GBS.
£600 annually: Based on the income of Brinley’s successor in the office, Richard Aldworth, in 1661, see Westminster in the House of Commons, 1660–90, ed. Basil Duke Henning (London: History of Parliament Trust, 1983) 1:525, in Sacks, “Francis Brinley and His Books 1650–1719” (2006).
John Bland: An Atlantic World merchant based in London, Bland had a brother in Spain in the 1640s. Other family members in Jamestown, Virginia, owned a warehouse there and received a large shipment of goods in 1644, when NS was also there.
Anne was not the only wife: Alice Clark, Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1919, reprinted 1982), 20–24.
Boscobel: http://www.british-civil-wars.co.uk/timelines/1651.htm.
genealogical researcher: Charles A. Hoppin was hired by the Horsfords in 1904. Thomas Brinley II, Thomas Brinley’s great-grandson, wrote that Auditor Brinley went to Oxford and followed Charles II into exile, but no confirmation exists. Thomas Brinley II (Boston?) to William Bollan, London, June 23, 1755, partial transcription input in 2000 at Sylvester Manor as Serial #197, Sylvester Manor FileMakerPro Database, Fales Library, NYU; full paper copy, Griswold Papers, Fales Library, NYU.
Thomas’s grant holdings: The papers on compounding Thomas Brinley’s estate listed in 1880 at the PRO as First Series xxxi–651 were reclassified in 1895 as G91-959-1019-1 to 11. Circa 1904 these documents could not be found; a recent (2002) search confirms their absence. Legal efforts to reclaim property by generations of Brinley descendants were unsuccessful. Charles Hoppin, “Brinley,” 40; Rachel Judith Weil, “Thinking about Allegiance in the English Civil War,” History Workshop Journal 61 (Autumn 2006): 183–91.
Presbyterian: One whose church is governed by a synod of lay elders, not bishops. By the 1640s, “Presbyterian” was used as a political term, meaning a moderate Puritan opponent of the Crown. For distinctions between the Presbyterians of London and the “Independents” (more radical and more hostile to the king), see Valerie Pearl, “London’s Counter-Revolution,” in The Interregnum: The Quest for Settlement, 1646–60, ed. G. E. Aylmer (London: Archon Books, 1972), 29–56.
right kind: Laurence Brinley left a £30 bequest to the radical Presbyterian minister Edmund Calamy and another “for poor ministers put out of their places.” Will of Laurence Brinley, Haberdasher of London, December 3, 1662. TNA: PRO PROB 11/309; Hoppin, “Brinley,” 52–53.
forefront: During the war, Lawrence collected money, plate, and horses for the parliamentary financial machine. During the Interregnum, his ties to other intercolonial merchants may have helped shield Thomas. Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 430, TNA: PRO, State Papers 16/491/47; Sacks, “Francis Brinley and His Books,” 35–36.
assets: Thomas also invested funds (a total of £200) toward the purchase of lands in Ireland. John P. Prendergast, The Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland, 2nd ed. (London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1870), 431, 447, 448, https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=RmoBAAAAQAAJ&printsec=frontcover&output=reader&authuser=0&hl=en&pg=GBS.PR1.
helped Anne and Grizzell: See Sacks, “Francis Brinley and His Books,” 35, for an interpretation of how Laurence may have assisted Patience (1653) and Elizabeth (1655) and Mary with shelter in London, based on a reading of their marriage licenses and banns in 1653, 1655, and 1656.
Atlantic community: Through Lawrence, Brinleys and Sylvesters could have met, via business, family and religious linkages, both Craddock and Vassall, leaders in the trades with New England, Virginia, the West Indies, and Africa. Troy O. Bickham, “Cradock, Mathew (c.1590–1641)” (ODNB, 2004), http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/6562; Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 138; John C. Appleby, “Vassall, Samuel (bap. 1586, d. 1667)” (ODNB, 2004), http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/28120.
William Coddington: Virginia DeJohn Anderson, “Coddington, William (1601?–78)” (ODNB, 2004), http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/5794.
fourth-richest citizen: Bridenbaugh, Fat Mutton, 15.
Stephen Winthrop: Returning to Rhode Island, Coddington wrote to JWJr describing the jubilation he found in Commonwealth London. William Coddington, Rhode Island, to JWJr, Pequit, February 19, 1652, Freiberg, WP 6:173–76.
January 1650: “Coddington, William, esq. of the Isle of Rhodes, beyond seas, widower, about 40 and Anne Brindley, about 24, daughter of Thomas Brindley, of Eaton, co. Bucks., esq. alleged by John Mayer, of St. Bennet, Paul’s Wharf, London, Gent—at Datchett, co Bucks 12 Jan 1649/50 F.” Faculty Office of the Archbishop of Canterbury.
“my loving Brother in Law”: Will of GBS.
back to England: Coldham, Complete Book of Emigrants, 20.
Church of England: Thomas leaves nothing to any church or minister, commends his soul to God in conventional language appropriate to a member of the Church of England, and is buried in St. Mary’s, the Church of England parish church of Datchet. See Sacks, “Francis Brinley and His Books,” presented in “Recovering the Record: Sylvester Manor in the Atlantic World, ca. 1650–1750,” Session 20, American Historical Society Association Annual Meeting, January 7, 2005, Seattle, WA, note 45.
brood of twelve: Kennish, chart: “Wase, Budd, Brinley, Hanbury, Wheeler,” Griswold Papers, Fales Library, NYU.
“I have but them two”: Anne Brinley, London, to Francis Brinley, Newport, RI, April 20, 1665, holograph copy, original unknown, East Hampton Library. Anne Brinley’s literacy does not mean her daughters were literate as well. Grizzell was “signature literate,” meaning she could sign her name; her ability to read is evidenced by her ownership of a Bible. Anne Coddington wrote a remarkable letter in 1660 to Governor Endicott of Massachusetts shortly after the hanging of Mary Dyer, printed in Joseph Besse, Collection of the Sufferings of the People Called Quakers: for the testimony of a good conscience, etc. (London: Luke Hinde, 1753), 2:207–8, http://dqc.esr.earlham.edu:8080/xmlmm/docButton?XMLMMWhat=builtPage&XMLMMWhere=E6875814B.P00000204-207&XMLMMBeanName=toc1&XMLMMNextPage=/printBuiltPage.jsp.
8. “TIME OF LONGING”
“the garden of New England”: “An Account Taken from Mr. Harris of New England,” Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series America and West Indies (CSP), eds. W. Noël Sainsbury et al. (London: Public Record Office, 1860–1994), 9:222, quoted in Antoinette F. Downing and Vincent Scully Jr., The Architectural Heritage of Newport, Rhode Island, 1640–1915 (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1967), 472 n9.
left Barbados: After 1647, no records have been found of the Sylvesters’ De Seerobbe.
decommissioned by the Dutch: The Swallow’s last Dutch-owned trip ended in New Amsterdam. The Company’s directive instructed: “On arriving in New Netherland, the ship, Swol, being old, ought to be sold.” O’Callaghan and Fernow, Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York, 1:165–67.
such cabinets: Huon Mallalieu, ed., The Illustrated History of Antiques (Philadelphia: Running Press, 1995), 40–41; Joseph Aronson, ed. The Encyclopedia of Furniture, 3rd ed. (London: B. T. Batsford, 1965), 65–67; Jonathan L. Fairbanks and Robert F. Trent, New England Begins: The Seventeenth Century (Boston: Boston Museum of Fine Arts, 1982), 293–94, 527–28.
“perceiving his cabbinet”: “Deposition of Stephen Daniel,” April 28, 1653, WP 6 (1650–54): 284–85.
“the Swallow”: “Deposition of Bernerd Collins before Lion Gardiner and Thomas Baker, February 25, 1655/56,” EHTR, 1:91–93.
“Captain Nathiell Silvister”: Collins, EHTR, 1:91–93.
in the morning: It appears the Swallow first ran aground in late afternoon or at night: Collins said it was “the next Morning yt [that] the afor sd Greenfeild Larrabies ship was cast away.” EHTR, 1:91–93.
“the rest of Capt: Nathaniell Silvesters servants”: This may be a rare mention of Sylvester “servants,” meaning indentured whites, as opposed to “servants” who were enslaved blacks. However, since the Swallow was en route from Barbados, Africans may also have been aboard.
first law of salvage: Dr. Kathy Abbass, Director, Rhode Island Marine Archaeology Project, 2003, pers. comm. Despite Larrabie’s wrongful application of the law of salvage, the case was apparently decided as a personal property issue (NS’s cabinet) in court.
“Consented unto the opening”: Collins, EHTR, 1:91–93.
“Now Mr. Giles Silvister”: Collins, EHTR, 1:91–93.
found guilty: For the judgment, May 11, 1653, see Records of the Particular Court of Connecticut, 1639–63 (Hartford: Connecticut Historical Society and Society of Colonial Wars in the State of Connecticut, 1928), 116–17.
thriving plantation: William Coddington, Rhode Island, to JWJr, Pequit (New London), April 20, 1647, quoted by Bridenbaugh, Fat Mutton, 50–51.
“Nanhygonsett [Narragansett] Bay”: “An Account taken from Mr. Harris,” in Downing and Scully, Jr., Architectural Heritage of Newport, 16.
the Coddington house: Coddington, builder of the only brick house in Boston before he left for Rhode Island in 1637, designed his Newport house as a stone-ender, a construction that draws on stone building traditions from the West and North of England with which Coddington, born in Lincolnshire, would have been familiar. Myron O. Stachiw, The Early Architecture and Landscapes of the Narragansett Basin (Newport: Vernacular Architecture Forum, 2001), 1:23; Downing and Scully, Architectural Heritage of Newport, 27.
After her arrival: Coddington returned to Newport with Anne, infant Nathaniel, and Grizzell before early August, when Roger Williams wrote to JWJr of Coddington’s arrival. Freiberg, WP, 6:131–32.
multilingual slaves: Like the Puritans of Providence Island, pan-Atlantic merchants in New England by the late 1630s saw little objection to buying Africans as cheap, lasting labor. Lindholdt, John Josselyn, 24; Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Providence Island, 172.
“charter generation” of slaves: Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in America (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998), 104.
fala de Guiné: “Guinea speech,” “negro speech,” in Berlin, Many Thousands Gone, 20. Also Thornton, Africa and Africans, 214–15.
ways to influence it: Berlin, Many Thousands Gone, 26–27, 34–36.
“time of longing”: Thomas Weld, quoted in Edmund S. Morgan, The Puritan Family: Religion and Domestic Relations in Seventeenth-Century New England (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), 59.
could never love: Saxton, Being Good, 48–49.
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“in and for the Lord”: Hugh Peter, A Dying Father’s Last Legacy to an Onely Child (London, 1660), 34, quoted in Saxton, Being Good, 49.
“the official ‘prudishness’”: Berkin, First Generations, 36.
“Food, drink, sleep, sex, safety”: Morgan, Puritan Family, 16.
“could not restrain”: Morgan, Puritan Family, 33.
Young women: Saxton, Being Good, 36–44.
“impudent whores”: Brereton, Travels in Holland, 55, quoted by Schama, Embarrassment of Riches, 471–73. For minority women in New England and forced sex, see Saxton, Being Good, 40–44.
sex with female slaves: Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624–1713 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973), 228, 252–55.
“The man whose heart”: Thomas Hooker, The Soules Humiliation (London, 1638), quoted in Morgan, Puritan Family, 62.
higher ratio: In New England between 1621 and 1651 there were four single men for each single woman. David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 26–27; Berkin, First Generations, 25.
four or five years younger: Fischer, Albion’s Seed, 75–76; Ulrich, Good Wives, 6.
a date of 1620: Hoff, “Sylvester Family,” 16.
a handful of portrait artists: See Jonathan L. Fairbanks, “Portrait Painting in Seventeenth-Century Boston: Its History, Methods and Materials,” in Fairbanks and Trent, New England Begins, 3:413–55; Abbott Lowell Cummings, “Seventeenth-Century Boston Portraiture: Profile of the Establishment,” in Painting and Portrait Making in the American Northeast, Annual Proceedings of the Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife 1994 (Boston: Boston University for the Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife, 1995), 17–29; and Lillian B. Miller, “The Puritan Portrait: Its Function in Old and New England,” in Seventeenth-Century New England, A Conference Held by the Colonial Society of Massachusetts (Boston: Proceedings of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, #63, 1984), ed. David D. Hall and David Grayson Allen, 153–84.