Six Women of Salem

by Marilynne K. Roach

  Matters improved in 1681. When ashore, Philip served on county juries, and Mary, having examined her soul, applied to the Salem Church for full membership and was accepted. She received the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper one spring Sabbath around the time the church was considering the problems at its feuding satellite congregation in Salem Village. “After some agitation,” the church record noted, “the church agreed” to having George Burroughs preach there. The disagreement in the village would escalate in unexpected directions, but for now Mary celebrated by composing an acrostic based on her own name, using the “Y” as an ampersand (&).

  May I with Mary choose the better part,

  And serve the Lord with all my heart,

  Rescue his word most joyfully

  Y live to him eternally.

  Everliving God I pray,

  Never leave me for to stray.

  Give me grace thee to obey

  Lord grant that I may happy be

  In Jesus Christ eternally.

  Save me dear Lord by thy rich grace

  Heaven then shall be my dwelling place.

  Philip attended with her and at this point did not object to the lack of Church of England services. He had even signed the 1680 petition to the selectmen desiring a new, larger meeting house for Salem (as did Francis Nurse and Mary’s brother William Hollingworth, among others).

  On March 4, 1682, Eleanor paid off the last of the £250 mortgage to Cromwell “in money and goods in hand,” and the Blue Anchor was wholly her own. In July Mary gave birth to daughter Susanna (who died young), and in the following year Philip was appointed a constable at the yearly town meeting. One of his duties was to collect taxes (Eleanor Hollingworth’s was three shillings). This caused problems when Philip and some of the other tax collectors neglected to collect from fellow Jerseymen away at sea even though their families resided in Salem. Some of the men, he said, had moved away. Part of the problem may have been based on the fact that a medieval charter had exempted Jersey “from all manner of Taxes, Imposts, and Customs in all Cities, Market-Towns, and Ports of England,” which a second ancient charter extended “to all Places within the King’s Dominion beyond the Seas.” Some Jerseymen, like Thomas Baker of Ipswich, were openly scornful of local law. When served with a warrant in 1679, he refused it, “saying he did not care for all the laws in the country.” When told that he would be brought before Major William Hathorne for his refusal, he scoffed that “he would not be tried by that white hat limping rogue.”

  The Salem selectmen sued for the delinquent taxes in 1684 and confiscated a plot of land from English in lieu of payment. He bought it back in 1685 when he also purchased William Dicer’s house-lot when William and the contentious Elizabeth moved to Maine.

  Philip’s tendency to sue others for overdue debts had already ruffled a few feathers. This practice was common enough in Jersey, where the laws made it more necessary, but in Massachusetts even when a debtor thought he had made arrangements to pay, Philip would sue and often had the debtor arrested—even other Jersey folk. In addition, the year before the selectmen’s lawsuit, he had purchased the house and land once belonging to Mary’s uncle Captain Robert Starr on the lot northwest of the Blue Anchor. Philip removed the old building and began constructing the largest mansion in town. During a time when most families lived in one room and a garret and the larger homes had two rooms on each of two floors, English’s Great House (as it would be called) must have been a topic of fascination and envy.

  Philip ordered an L-shaped house, with each of its upper levels projecting over the one below. House wrights raised an oak frame, filled the exterior walls with brick between the timbers, and then covered them with clapboards on the outside and plaster on the inside. Even the cellars were completely finished, from the stone floors to the plastered ceilings. Masons built many hearths leading to the great central chimney stack and constructed more than one oven in the kitchen. The ground floor contained pantries and parlors, a counting-house (Philip’s business office), and possibly a shop (though that may have been added later). This allowed space for several rooms above and even in the attic, which was fully finished and plastered as well. A stone wall separated the front yard from the road to the Neck.

  Over a century later the house still had the largest rooms in all of Salem. By then some of the facade gables had been removed, and the place was a bit worn, though still sound. Descendants would recall that there had been some sort of balcony with seats built outside the southern chamber over the shop, a sundial below this over the shop door, and tall roof ornaments at the peaks.

  In September 1684, while Philip was at odds with the selectmen, Mary gave birth to Philip Jr. Meanwhile debt collectors plagued her brother William, who was back in Salem after sojourns as far away as Spain. For instance, Thomas Mudget, a co-owner of a ship William had hired, claimed the latter was responsible for part of the crew’s pay and provisions. William disagreed and had evaded those creditors in both Virginia and Bilbao, Spain.

  Then Deputy Marshal Philip Fowler appeared at the Blue Anchor, ostensibly to sell malt to Eleanor but in fact bearing an arrest warrant for William. Witnesses saw Fowler chase William across the yard toward the brew house, but the pursued got over the fence first and grabbed an ax to ward off his pursuer. Eleanor followed, shouting at Fowler that she would “stave out his brains,” as she clouted him four blows and then seized him from behind, keeping him from following William, who bolted into the house to hide. Fowler entered a complaint before Magistrate John Hathorne but had to admit he had not yet taken his oath as deputy. (Philip English and others present testified to this.) The March 1685 Quarterly Court believed Eleanor’s claim that she had not known Fowler was a constable, but she still had to pay costs of £1:7:4.

  Perhaps Eleanor feared that her son’s creditors would try to attach her hard-earned property, on the grounds that William was the only Hollingworth son and, therefore, heir. She had already taken the precaution in February of conveying “for divers good causes and considerations” and “my natural love and affection unto my daughter Mary English” the ownership of her house, outer housing and land, with the wharf and landing place. Eleanor apparently continued running the tavern.

  Family tradition recalled that Mary had a good business head and was left in charge of Philip’s business during his absences at sea. Given the example of her mother, this was very likely true.

  Descendants also recalled the marriage of Philip and Mary in glowing terms—he certainly trusted her business acumen—but other descendants told a darker tale. In 1851 Philip’s great-great grandson Ebenezer Hathorne told his cousin, the writer Nathaniel Hawthorne (who had added a “w” to his surname to distinguish and distance himself from his ancestor, the witch-trial judge, John Hathorne), that “This Philip left some bastards; but only legitimate daughters, one of whom married, I believe, the son of the persecuting John [Hathorne]; and thus all the legitimate blood of English is in our family.”

  But family lore can be more often dubious than undeniable. Although it is certainly possible that Mary’s husband sired illegitimate offspring, court records credit all of the known children to Mary, with the dates of their births consistent with her being the mother of them all. Philip Jr. inherited the Blue Anchor, implying Hollingsworth blood. The births of the two Williams correspond to the deaths of Mary’s own father and brother (also named William). Granted, however, some men had sired children with servant women. For example, Samuel Braybrook in Ipswich was ordered to bring up his child by the maidservant, and this must have been a strain, one imagines, on his childless wife. The English household had many servants, mostly indentured women from Jersey, but no mention of irregularities with them reached the court records. Ebenezer’s anecdote may well have been baseless, though unsupported family stories usually tend to praise the ancestors.

  Brother William’s fortunes declined along with his health until he died, only thirty-three years old, on November 7, 1688. Eleanor saw to it that he h
ad a proper funeral—£7 worth of wine and beer, £3:7:0 for three and a half-dozen pairs of gloves (as the usual favors to mourners), and fifteen shillings for the coffin and grave on Burying Point. Eleanor itemized these expenses along with others, all of which she billed to her son’s estate: £1:10:0 to the doctor, ten shillings to the nurse, and £2:4:0 for providing meals to his apprentice for two months and three weeks. Most of the outlay went toward the funeral, and the whole claim amounted to £21:15:00.

  No land or houses or ships appeared in William’s meager inventory—“One small sea bed” with bedding, “two half worn hammocks,” some chests and trunks, tankards and earthenware, but also silver buckles, a rapier, his clothing, fifty pounds of loaf sugar, and four remaining years worth of service from his apprentice. All this amounted to only £34:02:04.

  Mary gave birth to another son that winter and named him William. On behalf of his mother-in-law, Philip took her son’s inventory to the March Quarterly Court sitting at Ipswich, but he refused to administer the estate—or tried to refuse. Thomas Mudget, still trying to collect the old debt, soon sued Philip as executor of William’s estate.

  By the end of the year the indomitable Eleanor, “Old Mistress Hollingworth” (as Constable Philip Fowler had called her) died on November 22, 1689, at age fifty nine.

  Unlike her husband and son, Eleanor left no debts.

  In fact, her estate amounted to a surprising £467:18:00, mostly obtained through her own labor and perseverance. She had already transferred the tavern and the rental house to Mary but still owned part of another house and part of a warehouse on Winter Island. Her inventory listed more than the usual cooking implements and bedding: a copper furnace and other brewing equipment; quantities of wine and cider; several leather upholstered chairs; six chairs covered in Turkey-work needlepoint; cupboards, chests, and tables; dozens of yards of a variety of textiles; her own woolen and linen clothing and two pairs of silk stockings; two hammocks (her son’s presumably); a dictionary; a flock of sheep and four swine; plus various sums of cash—£138:00:06 and £16. She also owned “one Indian servant” worth £25. All of this presumably went to Mary—debt free.

  Mary must have been the one who commissioned the double gravestone to mark the graves of her mother and brother. It was a thick slate placed near the edge of Burial Point above the hush and wash of the tides. Carved with an inscription for each, it was decorated with garlands, stars, and the silhouette of an ornate classical urn as well as the more usual winged death’s head.

  Earlier that year Massachusetts had overthrown Royal Governor Andros, the action being a New England counterpart to the Glorious Revolution that ousted the openly Catholic King James II from England. James fled to the protection of his cousin, the king of France, who had designs of his own on the English colonies. While offering refuge to James, he ordered his governor in Canada, Count Louis de Buade Frontenac, to attack the English settlements. Thus, bands of Abenaki allies and couriers du bois (Frenchmen who ranged the forests, lived among the native tribes, and adopted their ways of wilderness warfare) made bloody surprise attacks over the snow. They struck ­Schenectady, New York, in February 1690, killing about sixty colonists and kidnapping thirty, and then they hit Salmon Falls, New Hampshire, in March, this time killing thirty and marching more than fifty hostages off to Canada.

  These sudden attacks spawned rumors of a Jersey plot to help Canadian French and local “negro and Indian servants” (i.e., slaves) to attack Massachusetts. (What Mrs. Hollingworth’s “Indian servant” thought of this development is not recorded.) Jerseyman Isaac Morrell, the supposed ringleader, stood trial for treason, but fortunately for him, that rumor proved false. (The Huguenots of Frenchtown, Rhode Island, were not so lucky; their settlement was burned under suspicious circumstances in 1689 even before the frontier raids.)

  It had been a disastrous year all around, though at least Massachusetts reacted by capturing Port Royal in Acadia (Nova Scotia) in April 1690. But a combined force of New Englanders and New Yorkers fell afoul of weather and smallpox when they were en route to attacking Quebec that fall. They succeeded only in ransoming a few captives from earlier raids, earning the contempt of the French, and losing many of their vessels in a storm on the return voyage. On the personal front, Mary’s cousin Christian Trask of Beverly, after certain neighbors drove her to distraction, committed suicide by cutting her windpipe and jugular with a small, short-bladed pair of scissors.

  Frontier attacks continued.

  By December 1691 Massachusetts’s General Court prohibited any French from living in the frontier towns or in the seaports—an order greatly resented and generally ignored. This, however, did not prevent Philip English from becoming a selectman in Salem in 1692.

  Despite the constant threat of frontier attack and local resentment against the French, Philip and Mary English greeted the new year as secure and as well provided for as anyone could expect to be, and in fact, they were better than most—for the time being.

  Ann Putnam Sr.

  Ann jolts awake again—the baby is crying, a weak mewling that nevertheless slices into her sleep. She elbows herself up against the pillow and reaches down to the cradle beside the bed.

  “Hush now, hush,” she whispers.

  Her husband does not wake but does stir slightly; the children in the trundle bed remain still. She drags a shawl around her shoulders, swings her legs out of the warm bedcovers, and picks up the child.

  The mewling continues.

  “Oh Sarah, will you never stop crying?” she murmurs over the tiny fretful head. Ann is so tired. Giving birth to this child did not ease her weariness, and six weeks of wakeful nights since then has drained her. Slipping her feet into cold shoes, Ann jounces the baby in her arms and stands in the drafty room so as not to jar the bed as well. But Sarah is not comforted.

  Sighing, the mother pads to the door and makes her way to the other room, where the fire is banked low on the hearth but still giving off some half-hearted heat. The hired girl stirs in her pallet on the floor and grunts a groggy query but does not really rouse to offer help. She was of little use anyway.

  “Stay there,” says Ann to the hired girl, sitting in the great chair at hearthside. She opens her shift just enough in the chill December air to offer the child her breast, but Sarah nuzzles only briefly and then turns away, still making that thin constant fussing her mother feels powerless to stop and fills her with inarticulate exasperation. She knows that this is no fit emotion for a Christian woman, that it is an affront to God to resent this innocent child.

  “Sarah, for pity’s sake,” she says, still rocking the infant in her arms and noting that Sarah’s clouts are not soiled. So that is not the problem. She had already tried home remedies. Maybe tomorrow Tom would fetch a different doctor. She holds the child close in her aching arms and feels how warm the baby is—too warm. A fever now as well? So small and so fragile a bundle and so demanding! A child should not be coddled—her mother certainly never had coddled her—but they must be protected.

  The whining trails off, less frequent now, and Ann begins to doze, nearly quiet, at last nearly asleep. Would returning the infant to her cradle only wake her again? The mother slumps against the chair back, waiting until the child is truly, thankfully, still. Abruptly, the little body twists in her arms, slipping from her grasp, slipping away as if being pulled from her.

  Ann is fully awake now, chilled from a drench of fear deeper than the winter cold pervading the house. Sarah jerks and arches, her crying now a weak, gasping wail. Ann grips the baby, desperate not to drop her, but Sarah bucks and writhes as if trying to escape from her mother, as if trying to evade something her mother cannot see.

  Not again!

  Even the hired girl rouses, looking aghast at the two of them. Sarah works her arms free of the blanket and flails them, fighting off . . .what?

  “Sarah, no!” Ann cries, then calls, “Thomas!”

  The baby twists like a snake and is as difficult to hold. But An
n does not drop her. She clings to the moving child and tries to hold her close. The spasms lessen, though they still ripple through the little body head to foot.

  Thomas throws open the door from the other room. Holding a walking stick like a weapon as if expecting housebreakers, he stands there barefoot in his nightshirt.

  Sarah quivers a few more times and then makes an odd little cry and stills at last. Thank goodness, Ann thinks, cautiously resting the child in her lap to see her better. Sarah wears a look of surprise but makes no sound. Ann hears a sudden piercing scream like a distant fox in the night. She dimly recognizes it is her own voice at the same instant she realizes that Sarah is dead—another blessing snatched away.

  ____________________

  Born in Salisbury on June 15, 1661, the year before the marriage of her eldest sibling, ANN was the youngest of George and Elizabeth Carr’s ten children. She grew up on Carr’s Island near the mouth of the Merrimack River, named by the Algonquians for the great sturgeon that swam in abundance up its salty tides (a fish the settlers pickled and exported abroad). A timber bridge connected the north shore of the island to Salisbury, as her father’s ferry service crossed the deeper water on the south side to Newbury.

  Her father had immigrated to Massachusetts with his brother Richard around 1634 (about the same time the Townes settled in Salem), first to Ipswich, where they received land grants, then to Salisbury, a town with New Hampshire on the north and the Merrimack along its south shore. Besides being a shipwright, George owned a wharf in Boston and kept trading contacts there, owned part of a vessel in 1638 in partnership with colony leaders Simon Bradstreet and Richard Saltonstall (whose son Nathaniel would be the only magistrate to resign from the witch trial court of 1692), and, in 1649, traded a quarter share in another vessel to William Hilton for an Indian named James to be his “servant forever.” Around 1641 he married a Boston woman named Elizabeth (possibly Elizabeth Dexter), who brought a not insignificant marriage portion of £200.