Venice Beach

Sometime before 1920, Emory Straker had had quite enough of the Northeast in general and Vermont in particular. He boarded a train to California, took an amazed look around, and sent word for his family to follow him out to the Coast.

Stories of blue skies and golden sunshine with nary a snowdrift in sight, thrilled his parents Daniel and Maloney Maria, so they pulled up stakes and went west themselves. Daniel died in Venice, CA 0n 16 December 1923, and Maloney breathed her last on 18 December 1927.

Perhaps because she was now living in a land of fresh starts, Edith, Emory's wife, resolved to have her umbilical hernia repaired. The surgery was unsuccessful, and she died on 23 February 1922. She was 52 years old.

When her daughter Frances went to the funeral home, she backed out of the viewing room in consternation. She was certain she was in the wrong place; the attractive, beautifully groomed woman displayed in the coffin couldn’t be her mother. But in fact it was Edith, and the funeral director had given her the care her husband, and her own innate simplicity, had always denied her.  

Emory seemed to enjoy life in Venice, California as a single man. Frances sniffed that her father lived near the beach so he could ogle all the floozies in bathing costumes. Hubba hubba!

Security Pacific National Bank Collection - LA Public Library

Before 1930 Emory married a slender, savvy businesswoman named Iola. She was either widowed or divorced, because she had four grown daughters in tow. On the 1930 census form, they claimed their last names were Woodley and Emory as their father, but he could not have been. When they were conceived in Indiana, he was shoveling snow in Mooers, NY. 

Edith - Used Like a Plow

          Emory and Edith Straker started their married life on a farm in Mooers, NY. 

The farmhouse and barn, which may still stand, although shakily.

          There is a touching but troubling story connected to this house. Edith’s first child was a little boy named George (1893) whom she simply adored. Evidently Emory didn’t share her infatuation with parenthood, and regarded his firstborn as an unanticipated burden. (This is puzzling, because surely Maloney Maria and Daniel gave him the Birds and Bees talk.) Anyway, Edith seemed to fear that her husband might harm her son. One day when she was down on her knees painting the farmhouse’s floor, little George trailed after her, leaving his tiny footprints in the wet paint. In later years, when she repainted the floor, she carefully skirted around the footprints so she could preserve some aspect of her child, no matter what happened to him.
          Emory was a hard-working one, as all farmers are, but he was careful to enforce his marital privileges. Every Sunday he would order his children to stay downstairs and leave him alone while he locked himself in his bedroom with Edith. I suppose he was indignant each time another baby mysteriously appeared, which happened in 1894, 1899, 1902, 1903, and 1907.

          This last birth in 1907 constituted my Grandmother Frances’ earliest memory.  The sight of Edith standing at the stove with two-hour-old Ernest balanced on her hip, cooking dinner for a gaggle of farmhands, haunted her to her final breath. The unspoken message “A woman’s first duty is to care for the menfolk” is one she vehemently rejected.

           By 1910 the family had relocated to a dairy farm in Woodstock, Vermont. Edith toiled on dutifully throughout these years, albeit in increasing discomfort. She had developed an umbilical hernia, which is usually caused by obesity, heavy lifting, or multiple pregnancies. In her case, all three factors converged.

          One of Edith’s great-granddaughters describes her in a short poem as: “Used like a plow/ Browbeaten, worn out/ Disposed of unmourned.” This is a little melodramatic, but contains more than one kernel of truth.

Canadians and Americans

Samuel Woodley junior was born in Grand Isle, Vermont in 1801. He married an Irish-born colleen named Margaret Lamberton (1810). They raised nine children, and Samuel died in Sciota in 1884 of apoplexy at the age of 83. All his descendants I know of over the age of 40 pop high blood pressure pills like they were Tic-Tacs to avoid succumbing to the dreaded apoplexy. Margaret followed him to the grave ten days later.

Their son Daniel (1842) married Malony (her spelling; her descendants tend to spell it “Maloney”) Maria Stockwell, the child of Joseph and Anna Maria Stockwell. They started their life together in Mooers, NY, where their older son Emory Carol was born on 14 August 1869. By 1920 Daniel and Maloney were living in Clinton, NY, a nearby farming community.

Evidently Emory was a stern young man, and Edith Frances Straker, born just over the Canadian border in Hemmingford, was meek, hardworking, and eager to please; she was a good choice for him. Perhaps he wasn’t such a good choice for her, but I’m basing my hunches on conversations with her granddaughter Orella Colburn. Not to mention comments made by her daughter Frances, who considered Emory to be something of an ogre.

Edith’s grandfather Robert Straker was born about 1791 in the East Riding of Yorkshire, England. East Riding sounds like an area reserved for nobility in brocade riding habits to chase foxes around. Actually, it comes from the old Viking administrative term Threthingr. Robert was a farmer with Episcopal leanings, and he lived near the North Sea coast. I’ve looked at fully a hundred photos of the area, and although the landscape’s quite striking, the sky’s always stormy. It reminds me of Victoria Beckham.

Fighting Napoleon left England in a post-war depression. Because she was the victor (and in no mood to let France forget that fact) in 1820 she proclaimed Lower Canada “open for settlement”. Farmers from Yorkshire began pouring into East Hemmingford and LaColle; Robert Straker was one of the first. According to a Web site called The English Settlers of Lacolle, Quebec, “the English settlers…and their families broke into the wilderness…[they] established settlements throughout Lacolle with churches, schools, and stores. Along with their lifestyles, customs and religious beliefs, they brought with them new and better methods of farming and husbandry.”

In other words, they taught their ignorant French neighbors a thing or two.

LaColle Mills Blockhouse. Source: Wikipedia.com

Robert married an American woman, Rachael Palmer (1817) and they raised their six offspring in LaColle, Quebec. Their son Robert (1844) married Charlotte, the daughter of Godfrey Andrew and Mary Lett; among their six children was our Edith Francis/Francis Edith (the arrangement of her given names varies from source to source. She seemed to call herself Edith.)

This Robert gave me quite a start, because records show he died in the Somme, Picardie, France, in 1914. I pictured a 70-year-old doughboy dying in the trenches with the rest of the blighters. Then I recalled the Somme offensive happened in 1916. So I guess that after a lifetime of hearing his French neighbors boast about La Belle France, he decided to see for himself. It was his last hurrah.

From Being Homeless to an Ashery

The Woodleys had been in the Chazy, N.Y. area for three generations. Chazy is west of Lake Champlain in the Adirondack Mountains, just south of the Canadian border. Samuel Woodley had been born in Devonshire, England around 1770. After he immigrated about 1790, he married Phebe Lent, who belonged to an old New Amsterdam family.  They learned of land in New York State that the government was offering to settlers, so they attempted to establish a homestead in the wilderness about two miles east of a place called Flat Rock, a remote spot where the nearest neighbor was five miles away. But a plethora of bears, wolves, and an especially ornery colony of rattlesnakes, drove the family out.

Flat Rock State Forest

Samuel Woodley took refuge in Grand Isle, Vermont, but evidently did not prosper. On 26 February 1806 his family was issued an order “to depart town and find a place to settle” because “they had become destitute and without worldly goods.” They had to decamp within 20 days of being served notice, and were to be escorted to the next settlement or out of the state. In other words, the Woodleys were homeless “riffraff” and run out of town.

Because he had no choice, Samuel trudged back to the little cabin in the wilderness he had built five years before. It was far from any road, but at least it offered shelter. He finally realized it also offered a means of supporting his family.

Wikipedia explains it succinctly: “In the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries, potash production provided settlers in North America a way to obtain badly needed cash and credit as they cleared wooded land for crops. To make full use of their land, settlers needed to dispose of excess wood. The easiest way to accomplish this was to burn any wood not needed for fuel and construction. Ashes from hardwood trees could then be used to make lye, which could either be used to make soap or boiled down to make valuable potash…The American potash industry followed the woodsman’s axe across the country. After about 1820, New York replaced New England as the most important source…” The Champlain canal connected the area with Montreal, the major potash exporting port. 

Samuel had established an ashery in nearby Sciota by 1828, and in 1843 had sufficient means to will his sons 10 acres each, while his daughters received two acres each.

A Poet in the Family

One of John Saxe’s grandchildren was named after two of his uncles and became quite renowned. John Godfrey Saxe was a lawyer, humorist, and noted American poet. A nineteenth-century version of Ogden Nash, he was often published in a sophisticated periodical called The Knickerbocker. Here is a sample of his work, and please note that its construction is crisp, precise, and lacks any high Victorian sentimental dithering:

Rhyme of the Rail

Singing through the forests,

Rattling over ridges;

Shooting under arches,

Rumbling over bridges;

Whizzing through the mountains,

Buzzing o’er the vale,---

Bless me, this is pleasant,

Riding on the rail!

This charming delight zips through stanza after stanza, and its uncut version can be found on the Internet.

To this day, many descendants indulge in writing, especially poetry; our brains simply work this way and we can’t help ourselves. My mother and her sisters Virginia and Jinx were born in thrall to the muse Calliope, as were my sister Kathryn and I.

That last sentence indeed reeks of high Victorian dithering, but I’m postulating that our delight in poetry is an unwitting bequest from Frances Woodley Beers, whose legacy usually makes us wince. Or to phrase it more simply, every thorn has its rose.

John Godfrey Saxe is best known for re-telling the Indian parable, "The Blind Men and the Elephant."

Source: Wikipedia.com

A Loyalist Moves to Canada after the Revoluntionary Way

It was just a matter of time before Ebenezer Stockwell’s son Joseph started keeping company with Anna Maria Saxe, a young lady whose origins were not only un-Puritan but scandalously unorthodox.

Her grandfather John Saxe had been born into a prosperous Saxe-Gotha (principality of Hanover) family. His father Godfrey owned eight acres of prime farmland and was known as a “stern man of great strength and courage.” John left school at 13 after his father died, and supported himself with odd jobs as he and a friend traveled around Europe. Around 1750 they boarded a ship in Amsterdam, bound for the New World. After a 15-week voyage they landed in Philadelphia and John was apprenticed to a miller to pay for his passage. Unlike William Stockwell nearly a century before, both the voyage and the apprenticeship were his own choices.

The first thing John did in America was to take an oath of allegiance to King George II. This must have seemed a natural thing to do, because Saxe-Gotha was located in the principality of Hanover, which George II also ruled as its duke. Events were to prove that John didn’t take his oaths lightly.

Once his apprenticeship was completed, John Saxe managed a flour mill in Valley Forge and then moved to New York City.  He began to court Catherine Weaver, the daughter of German immigrants who lived in Rhinebeck, New York, and after they wed he moved there to operate another mill.

John Saxe, Loyalist by George J. Hill, describes the couple. “John was said to be nearly six feet tall, with broad shoulders, small feet, light brown hair, blue eyes, an aquiline nose, and a firm mouth and chin...His wife was described as a beautiful woman, somewhat below medium height, with a fair complexion, black eyes, and dark curling hair.” She was praised as an “excellent housekeeper, a faithful wife and mother”.

At the onset of the Revolution, John declared himself to be a Loyalist. His sense of honor left him no other choice. In 1779 he was arrested and jailed for his “attachment to the Enemy,” but soon escaped and joined the Ansbach Jaegers (Hessian mercenaries) as a scout.

After the Revolution was over, his property was confiscated so he and his entire family high-tailed it to Canada. They journeyed up the Hudson River until they found themselves on Lake Champlain in an open boat, and finally found their way to Missisquoi Bay, at a location now known as Philipsburg, Quebec.

About three thousand displaced Loyalists joined the Saxe family and their associates on the northeastern shore of Lake Champlain. But the precise location of the international boundary line proved to be confusing. To quote from one explanation of what took place, “he [John Saxe] settled in Philipsburg, P.Q., Canada, and built a grist mill on Rock Mill, cleared the land, and settled down as a Canadian. However, when the government resurveyed the boundary line, he found that his mill was in Highgate, Vermont”.

A Philipsburg, Quebec log cabin dating to the Revolutionary War period. Source: http://www.quebecheritageweb.com.

John’s fifth son Godfrey Saxe was the family black sheep. He fathered a daughter by an unknown woman, possibly related to him, whom he didn’t bother to marry. This “wrong side of the blanket” child was Anna Maria Saxe who married Joseph Stockwell. She was born in Vermont in 1804 and died in Mooers, N.Y. in 1890.

A Statue of Deacon Samuel Chapin

In 1881 a descendant, a congressman, commissioned master sculptor Augustus St. Gaudens to produce a work memorializing Deacon Samuel Chapin. The piece "...emphasizes the piety, and perhaps the rigidity, of the country's religious founders..." Its eight feet of intimidating pride and assurance of divine approbation is location in Merrick Park, Springfield, MA. Photo courtesy of  http://farm5.statisflickr.com

Hannah and Benajah Stockwells’ son Ebenezer (1778) married a much older widow, Abi Holbrook Lee (1764). Abi was the great-great granddaughter of another Puritan superstar, Deacon Samuel Chapin. Born in Devon, England, he became a selectman and a commissioner (magistrate) in Springfield, Massachusetts. He also was a mainstay of the local church. These colonists had not yet realized that religion and government, like oil and water, should not even attempt to mix.

Around 1800 Ebenezer Stockwell bought a house in Highgate, Vermont and moved his family into this recently established enclave of Loyalists and Lutheran German immigrants. He became the “principal agent, or foreman” for Ira, a brother of Ethan Allen. 

Tried as a Witch

William and Sarah Stockwell’s son Ebenezer married Mary Singletary of the Singletary-Cooke clan. In 1735 they produced a son named Benajah (which was an eighteenth-century twist on a traditional name, like our present Josh or Liam) who married Hannah Gale.

Hannah had one vaguely distinguished line of heritage, being descended from a wheelwright grandly known as Lord Symond Fiske, Lord of the Manor of Stadhaugh (in Suffolk, England). He inherited all this grandeur from his grandfather Daniel, who was Lord of the Manor of Stadhaugh during the reigns of Henry IV and Henry V.  Lord Symond even awarded himself a coat of arms.

Unsurprisingly, the Fiske clan eventually became involved with the Dissenters and immigrated to New England.

Hannah had another line of heritage that was more than “vaguely distinguished:” it played a part in the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s most horrific episode. Her great-great grandmother was Rebecka Towne Nurse, a Norfolk, England-born matriarch who raised eight children and was a devout member of the Salem Congregationalist church. She served as a midwife well-versed in using herbs to alleviate her patients’ sufferings, while her husband Francis was a successful craftsman and served as Salem Towne’s constable in 1672. They were both highly esteemed pillars of the community. But they made the mistake of indulging in a long series of property disputes with a powerful family, the Putnams, and they challenged the appointment of a local minister.

The pastor and the Putnam family took advantage of the prevalent witch hysteria and decided to make an example of the Nurses by destroying Rebecka and her sisters. They dragged them before the Court of Oyer and Terminar (Hear and Determine) and charged them with witchcraft. A group of teenage girls engaged in some hysterical trumpery to ensure the sisters were condemned.

This plaster statue depicts Rebecca Towne Nurse, Mary Towne Esty, and Sarah Towne Cloyse. The statue, located in the Salem Wax Museum of Witches and Seafarers, was a 1970 work of Yiannis Stefinarkis. The photo was taken by Benjamin C. Ray in 2001.

As Rebecka and her sister Mary went to the gallows on 19 July 1692, a minister urged her to admit her guilt. She snapped, “You are a liar! I am no more a witch than you are a wizard!”

She was buried in an extremely shallow grave to emphasize her unworthiness of a proper Christian burial, but in the dark of night her heartbroken family dug her up and reinterred her on their family homestead. John Greenleaf Whittier’s words now appear on her gravestone:

O Christian Martyr who for truth could die

When all around thee owned the hideous lie!

The world redeemed from Superstition’s sway

Is breathing freer for thy sake today

While composing this entry, the motto of Mary, Queen of Scots kept flashing through my brain: In my end is my beginning. Today Rebecka has a sea of descendants, and we must never embroider her memory into something quaintly grotesque, like the witches in the film Hocus Pocus. Our kinswoman was murdered by corrupt local authorities, and this sorry truth shouldn’t be forgotten.

A Shanghaied, Indentured Servant

Mary Singletary, sister of John Singletary, wed into a family that came to the New World not through religious convictions, but by an event that might have been penned by Robert Louis Stevenson.

William Stockwell was the son of another William Stockwell and born in Scotland around 1650. Any plans the young man may have made for his future were abruptly torn to shards and tossed to the winds when he was shanghaied and thrown aboard a ship bound for the American colonies. Once he reached Massachusetts, he was forcibly indentured to a master to pay for his passage. After a few years of servitude, he became an upstanding citizen of Ipswich, Massachusetts and had a meetinghouse seat assigned to him. At this point, his father ventured across the sea to join him.

The area had been thus described by Captain John Smith in 1614: “…there are many sands at the entrance of the Harbour…Here are many rising hills, and on their tops and descents are many corn fields and delightful groves…plain marsh ground, fit for pasture, or salt ponds. There is also Oakes, Pines, Walnuts and other woods to make this place an excellent habitation, being a good and safe harbor.” Ipswich was established by an extraordinary group of pioneers, “men of substance and education, who were among the key founders of the Puritan Commonwealth”. Most of these “men of substance” were farmers, fisherman, shipwrights, and traders.

In 1685 William married a local girl, Sarah Lambert (1661), whose family had long dwelled in the St. Dionis neighborhood of London before immigrating. They produced eight children.

In 1704 the governor of the province of Massachusetts granted a charter for the new town of Sutton to be established. Its proprietors offered 100 acres free to each family who settled there within a specified period. A list dated 1717 mentioned the names of William Stockwell, John Stockwell, and William Stockwell (the last two named were elder Stockwell sons) as people who received these grants.

After William’s death in 1727 “ye widdo Stockwell” was granted a seat in the Sutton meetinghouse.

A Scalping in the Family

Nathaniel Singletary was born in 1644, and evidently had a foot or leg ailment. His brothers were enlisted to fight in King Phillip’s War (King Phillip was an understandably rebellious Native American), but Nathaniel was “dismissed from training for Lameness in 1662”. He married Sarah Belknap, who had been born in the heavily wooded market town North Weald, Essex back in England.  They were farmers in Haverhill, Massachusetts Colony and had nine children.

The Indian massacre of colonists at Swansee, Phymouth Colony started King Philip's war.
Source:  http://muskegonpundit.blogspot.com

This is how Chase’s History of Haverhill describes Nathaniel’s demise: “On the 13^th of August [1689] a small party of Indians made their appearance in the northerly part of the town and killed Daniel Bradford. Then they went to the field of Nathaniel Singletary, near by, where he and his oldest son were at work. They approached in their slow and serpent-like manner until they came within a few rods, when they shot Singletary, who fell and died on the spot. His son attempted to escape, but was soon overtaken and made prisoner. The Indians then scalped Singletary and commenced a hasty retreat. The prisoner soon eluded their vigilance and returned home on the same day to make glad the hearts of his afflicted relatives.”

The widowed Sarah gave birth to her last child a few days later. In 1707 Nathaniel and Sarah’s son Richard also died at the hands of Native Americans.

The 14-year-old escapee was our ancestor John Singletary. He married Mary Greele (1678), whose family had originated in England and Wales, but settled in Massachusetts by 1660. Mary’s maiden name reminded me of a similar, more famous last name, so I investigated it further. Indeed Mary’s birth family was to eventually produce that famous politician and newspaperman Horace Greeley, who advised his countrymen to “go west”.

John and Mary were hard-working “planters” (a glorified term for farmers) who couldn’t afford to send their children off to school. But they educated their offspring at home in a manner befitting descendants of Sir Anthony Cooke of Gidea Hall. One of their sons was a justice of the peace, served in a colonial general court, and was elected to sit in several legislatures. He had absolutely no Loyalist sympathies but spoke against the new United States constitution’s ratification; he simply feared the document might undermine true republican principles. A contemporary praised him as an “Earnest Christian”.

An Puritan Fighting with Oliver Cromwell in Ireland

Religious strife in England was increasing. In 1645 George Cooke abandoned his

prosperous Massachusetts Bay Colony mill, sailed back across the Atlantic, and joined Cromwell’s army as Colonel of a regiment of foot soldiers. They sent him to Ireland. Alas, he was a fiendishly efficient officer. In 1649 Cooke's regiment captured Wexford. Members of the New Model Army slaughtered all the inhabitants who had gathered around a great cross (an unfortunate “Popish” symbol) in the marketplace, begging for mercy.  George became renowned for his cruelty and brutality. In 1652, Cooke's men imprisoned 300 men and children in a house and set it on fire, killing everyone inside. Atrocity followed atrocity. Finally in April 1652, Cooke and his mounted escort engaged in a running fight with the troops of an Irish patriot, Captain Nash. It all ended with Nash and Cooke falling “dead together to the ground”.

A contemporary writer lamented, “…the flower of chivalry in the county of Kilkenny faded with the death of Captain Nash.” I have found no lamentations for the death of Colonel George Cooke.

Oliver Cromwell and the New Model Army in Ireland. Source: http://www.nam.ac.uk/

 While George Cooke grimly pursued his destiny, most of his immediate family remained in Massachusetts and were reverently regarded by the other colonists as something akin to Puritan royalty. A relation of theirs, Richard Singletary (ca. 1600), was looking for a new wife, after a woman known as “Goodwife Singletary” died in 1638. George Cooke's daughter, Susannah was of a marriageable age.

There’s a strange rumor about Richard. Supposedly a nursemaid kidnapped him as an infant, so that ambitious members of his noble family could not murder him to inherit his title and wealth. She put him on a ship to the New World where he was raised as a foundling, in ignorance of his origins.

This is a fine plot for a Victoria Holt-ish potboiler romance novel, with a dollop of The Pirates of Penzance thrown in for extra spice, but it can’t be true. Records praise Richard for his good education, which would not have been obtainable for an obscure colonial orphan. He named his children after various Dunham-Singletary family members back in England, so obviously he was familiar with them. It turns out these people had long used the last names Dunham, Donham, Singleton and Singletary interchangeably, which confusion might have hinted at mysterious origins and inspired the swashbuckling conspiracy theory.

The Cooke family was not unknown to him, as his parents had been first cousins directly descended from Henry Cook IV, the brother of Sir Anthony Cooke of Gidea Hall.  Despite the dropped “e”, the Singletarys were extended members of the Cooke clan.

Richard was a suitable match for our Puritan princess. He was a prosperous “Freeman” of Salem when he married Susannah in 1639. He was twice elected as a “Select Man” and became a planter and proprietor. Together they produced seven children who married into other prominent families.

Escape to the Massachusetts Bay Colony

William Cooke and his wife Martha had seven children before he died in 1615. Martha White Cooke was only around 30 when widowhood struck her, and not about to resign herself to a life of single parenthood. Almost immediately she married Jonus Cooke, who must have been a relation of her late husband. He definitely shared his predecessor’s religious predilections so his stepchildren, and the three children his relationship with Martha produced, grew up steeped in the Puritan mindset. 

By this time, much of the extended Cooke clan was firmly in the Dissenter camp. The movement drew its support from two principal groups of lay adherents: a minority of nobles and gentry, and a much larger group of “middling sort of people” like merchants, yeomen and artisans. In other words, folks who actually worked for a living. They rejected the episcopacy---the established Church of England as an extension of the Crown itself---and espoused the formation of a Reformed Protestant Church offering simplified rituals and a more personal relationship with God.

Martha Cooke’s sons George and Joseph were part of an underground network that concealed non-conformist preachers from arrest, and possible execution, by officers of the Crown.

In 1621 Francis Cooke (born in Gidea Hall) and his son John left England on the Mayflower to found the Plymouth colony. You can be sure his relations followed his adventures with sharp interest.

The Mayflower in Plymouth Harbor. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Cooke_(Mayflower_passenger)

In 1635, George and Joseph Cooke realized it was advisable for them to leave England. They disguised themselves as a wealthy Dissenter’s servants and sailed with him on the Defense to Massachusetts.

On 3 March 1636, George Cooke was admitted as a Massachusetts freeman (which gave him the right to vote), became a representative of the Assembly and, in 1645, its Speaker. In 1637 he was appointed Captain of the Artillery Company, and once returned to Boston with nine Indians captured during an “excursion.” That year he also established the first water-powered gristmill in the Cambridge area.

More family members quickly followed him to the New World. By 1638 at least Martha Cooke, her son Phillipe, and her daughter Susannah (our foremother) were also living in the Bay Colony.

The College Fellow Married a 14 Year Old

Richard Cooke’s early life resembled his father’s, Sir Anthony Cooke. Raised in the same milieu as his five famously accomplished sisters, he followed his father to the English court and served alongside him in the privy chamber. In the spring of 1553 he sat in Parliament for the borough of Stamford in his father’s stead, because the reclusive Sir Anthony simply declined the honor.

Richard died in 1579, a mere three years after his father. His chief heir, another Sir Anthony Cooke, proved to be a flamboyant, Cavalier-type wastrel, and the rest of the family watched helplessly (well, some of them tried to help, but he was a lost cause) as he frittered away the estate his forefathers had so prudently accumulated.

Another son, William Cooke (1562) magnified his grandfather’s Dissenter Protestant inclinations. He received his BA on 3 November 1582 and his MA on 22 July 1587 from Magdalen College. He became a fellow of that college, but Magdalen College fellows weren’t permitted to marry. He resigned his position in 1598 when a spunky, fetching fourteen-year-old girl (an attested “daughter of a gentleman”) came to his studious attention. Once a family man, he became the second vicar of Crediton, Future events suggest that he raised his children in the Dissenter creed.

Crediton High Street today. Source: http://www.geograph.org.uk

Life in Crediton was a far cry from the splendors of Gidea Hall where he was raised. Located directly northeast of the Cornwall peninsula, it lies in a narrow vale not far from those two storied wastelands, Dartmoor and Exmoor. In 1644 a traveler described it as “a big lousy town…houses be mostly of clay without any timber in the walls…”

Sir Anthony, A Protestant Reformer

One of Sir Anthony Cooke's daughters married William Cecil, Lord Burghley, who funded Sir Anthony’s exile to the Continent. Our noble progenitor made the mistake of supporting Lady Jane Grey’s quest for the throne, so when Mary Tudor became Queen, he fled the country. While in Strasbourg he heard Peter Martyr lecture, and the experience reinforced his Protestant inclinations. He stayed abroad for three years, corresponding with the leading reformers in Europe and writing pamphlets for circulation in England.

He returned home when Elizabeth I ascended the throne and promptly began writing her lists of instructions on how to handle religious issues. Gloriana reacted as she always did when some male presumed to give her orders: she totally ignored him. Undiscouraged, he participated in a number of commissions concerning the establishment of the Church of England, but fussed about the new church being too elaborate and “Popish”.

Book of Common Prayer, Church of England. Source: http://www.search.windowsonwarwickshire.org.uk/

A modern biographer condemns Sir Anthony as having a “dark and unforgiving nature.” A seventeenth-century historian was kinder: “Sir Anthony took more pleasure to breed up statesmen than to be one. Contemplation was his soul, privacy his life, and discourse his element.”

The last decade of his life was spent in consolidating his estate and refurbishing Gidea Hall, where Queen Elizabeth visited him in the summer of 1568.

Gentleman of the Privy Chamber

 Cooke noblemen married aristocratic women with the names of de Malpas, Knollys-Belnap, and Saunders. The ladies’ backgrounds were Norman, usually results of various Plantagent indiscretions.

Sir Thomas’ grandson Sir John Cooke (1473) died at 43, leaving his eleven-year-old son Anthony to be raised by his uncle Richard Cooke, a diplomat for Henry VIII, and his stepmother, first a lady-in-waiting to Katherine of Aragon and later to Princess Mary.

Sir Anthony Cooke of Gidea Hall proved to be one of our most distinguished ancestors.  At the end of Henry VIII’s reign, he obtained his only court office, “Gentleman of the Privy Chamber,” which he maintained until the death of Edward VI. He taught the boy king, who made him a knight of the Bath, “good letters and manners”. Other children in the royal circle like Lady Jane Grey were also his students.

Etching of Sir Anthony Cooke. One statement from his funeral monument states: "Sir Anthony Cooke, knight, named tutor to King Edward VI because of his exceptional learning, prudence, and piety. Source: Wikipedia.

When he was about 17, he married a girl he had long been contracted to, Anne Fitzwilliam. Anne was a wealthy knight’s daughter and a descendant of Geoffrey Plantagenet, Count of Anjou, by mistress #1, mistress #2, or mistress #3. By the way, Geoffrey in turn claimed direct descent from Charlemagne.

Please don’t get too excited about this. Every person of European origin can claim Charlemagne as a forefather. He lived a long time ago, and fathered 20 children. And the Plantagenets were very, er, sociable fellows themselves. Years ago, a book called The Last Plantagenets hit the best-seller list. Even its author, Thomas B. Costain, must have realized the title was misleading:  our earth will harbor Plantagenet offshoots until the sun supernovas and engulfs it.

 Anthony Cooke wrote Anne a touching epitaph, where he praised her for being attractive, but not so stunning that her beauty interfered with his studies.

Sir Anthony “The Scholar” was famed in Tudor England for personally educating his daughters as well as his sons. These daughters married spectacularly well and were renowned as poets and translators of religious and classical works in their own rights. Eventual Cooke offspring ranged from Sir Francis Bacon to the marvelous historical romance novelist Daphne du Maurier. Oh, and to some politician named Barack Obama.

The Lord Mayor and Gidea Hall

Jean de Ross's daughter Ena turned her back on the “Scots Wha’ Hae Wi’ Wallace Bled” business and married an Englishman, Harold Cooke.

Harold Cooke’s (born 1345) family lived in the City of London before the Norman Conquest, so they were likely a Celtic-Saxon mixture.  Sometime before 1106 William Daniel Cooke moved out to Leicester’s countryside. At this point the Cooke men married women with decent but unpretentious last names like Hook, Miles and Auscomb.  

The names of Harold Cooke’s father and grandfather have been lost altogether, but they definitely were offspring of the earlier Cookes, who were what Jane Austen would term “gentry”. Ena, the granddaughter of the Fourth Mormaer of Ross, wouldn’t have forsaken her glorious if bloody heritage to grovel in a hovel with a peasant. She may have been young and in love and all that rot, but she was still a patrician, and her aunt was a Queen Consort.

The connection with Ena de Ros and her family had a salubrious effect on the Cooke fortunes. One of Ena and Harold’s sons became Sir Norman. Sir Norman’s grandson Thomas (born 1422) was a successful draper (he wasn’t an interior decorator; “drapers” dealt in cloth and all sorts of dry goods) who had his own merchant ship, owned numerous lucrative parcels of real estate, and was the Lord Mayor of London. He made the mistake of involving himself in the War of the Roses by lending money to the beleaguered Queen Margaret, and so was imprisoned for a while. The victorious Edward IV fined, released, then re-imprisoned, re-fined, and re-released him; fortunately Sir Thomas wasn’t high enough on the Royal Enemies List to merit more lethal vengeance.

Sir Thomas’s greatest contribution to his family was in purchasing an old London manor house called Gidea (pronounced “giddy”) Hall, built before 1250. In 1466 he was granted a license to “crenellate” his house, which meant to fortify it. It took two years, and excavating an actual moat, for Sir Thomas to be satisfied. The estate consisted of a main manor house with two adjacent wings forming three sides of a courtyard. There was an open colonnade on the fourth side, and a number of outbuildings completed the property.

Succeeding generations of Cookes loved this grand establishment. Sir Phillip Cooke was born there in 1454, as was his son Sir John in 1473.

Gidea Hall in 1908. Source: http://jaysteeleblog.wordpress.com/

Abducted to Minnesota in 1352?

Uilleam’s son Aodh [Hugh], the Fourth Mormaer of Ross, (born 1276) lived and died in a manner that surely gratified the shades of his forefathers.

There was renewed conflict with the English whose King Edward III was a far more determined man than his father. The Battle of Halidon Hill (1333) was a horrible massacre. Wikipedia sums up Aodh’s fate: “Scots honour was saved by the Earl of Ross and his Highlanders, who fought to the death in a valiant rearguard action.”

His wife Margaret Graham died the same year; if she still were alive at the time of the battle, his fate wouldn’t have surprised her. For generations the main functions of the Scots nobility had been to fight the English and to fight each other. I’ve noticed our titled ancestors often were elderly when they led their clansmen into battle, fully anticipating that death, not victory, awaited them.

Aodh’s children soldiered on. His main heir was known as ”Uilleam de Ross, Fifth Mormaer of Ross, Justicar of Scotia”. A daughter outdid this, becoming Queen Consort of Scotland.

We are descended from a “lesser” son, Jean de Ross. All we know about him is he married the noblewoman Margaret Comyn and fathered a daughter Ena.

The Kensington Rune Stone, found in Minnesota by a farmer, Olaf Ohlman in 1898.
Source of the photo: Kensington Rune Stone Museum.

Online records hint at a very odd fate for Jean: ”died 3 December 1352 in Minnesota, USA”. Some gullible soul must have come up with this after watching preposterous programs on the History Channel.  This place and date indicates our Jean was a Knight Templar (or a Viking) on a secret mission to the New World accompanied by Sir William Sinclair (right after he built Rosslyn Chapel) to secrete the Holy Grail. Or perhaps it was the Ark of the Covenant, and/or establish an enormous land claim.  He might have been traveling with (or captured by) a band of itinerant Norse warriors and dropped dead after helping carve the Kensington Rune Stone. And let us not exclude the possibility of abduction by a UFO…

Saner suggestions have him dying in Scotland or England. 

Switching Sides

Fearchar’s son Uilleam (William) de Ross was born in 1220, and was even more aggressive than his father. This Second Mormaer of Ross instigated a campaign to reconquer the Hebrides by eliminating its Norwegian settlers. A Norse record takes terse note of this: “In the previous summer [1295] letters came east from the Hebrides…and they brought forward much about the dispeace that the Earl of Ross…and other Scots, had made in the Hebrides, when they went out to Skye and burned towns and churches, and slew very many men and women…They said that the Scottish king intended to lay under himself all the Hebrides.”

The Mormaer was rewarded for his victory with the Isles of Skye and Lewis. The earldom of Ross had grown a wee bit.

His son Uilleam II de Ross (born 1249) found Scottish politics to be a double edged sword: he was in danger from the blade no matter which direction he brandished it. In 1294 he joined with other Scots noblemen like Sir Patrick Graham of Kincardine in acknowledging little Margaret of Norway as the heir of King Alexander. Also like Sir Patrick, he fought in the Battle of Dunbar where he was taken into English custody.

Uilleam’s forbears had all married noblewomen who today are little more than names jotted down on paper. These dutiful creatures main functions were to bear heirs and keep their highborn mouths shut. But when Uilleam wed Euphemia de Berkeley (her family still exists as Barclay. As in Bank.) he got more than a submissive womb. Evidently Euphemia was raised to have a mind of her own. She defied her in-laws’ chest thumping and openly supported the English cause. She convinced Edward I to release her husband and appoint him warden of Scotland north of the Grampians.

Now officially pro-English, Uilleam became one of Robert Bruce’s earliest enemies. When a band of Bruce’s supporters and family members sought sanctuary in St. Duthac’s chapel in Tain, Uilleam arrested them and handed them over to the English crown.

Historic Tain, Scotland

In 1306 Bruce’s fortunes took an upturn, and his men attacked Uilleam’s holdings in the south and west. By 1308 the Mormaer of Ross was forced to submit to Bruce, who graciously rewarded his acquiescence with a pardon and the restoration of his title and territories. This bribe and the realities of power kept Uilleam in the Bruce camp.

Uilleam fought alongside Bruce in the Battle of Bannockburn, and signed the Declaration of Arbroath a few years later.

Descendants of Lady Macbeth

Sir David Graham’s bonnie daughter Margaret (born 1305) married a man by the name of Aodh (we English-corrupted offspring say “Hugh”) de Ross, Fourth Mormaer of Ross, whose background was every bit as distinguished, and as violent, as her own.

His earldom had been minted by Fearchar mac an t-sacairt (Son of the Priest), First Mormaer of Ross. In spite of his name, Fearchar’s parentage wasn’t at all scandalous. His father had been the hereditary Abbot of Applecross, a lay position of power and influence. These men took no vows of abstinence and were as free to marry as any other nobles. They were descended from King Kenneth III of Alba (“Scotland” per se didn’t yet exist) through the King's granddaughter Gruoch ingen Boedhe Mac Cenaeda mhic Dubh. Today she’s known as Lady Macbeth.

Fearchar was an extremely powerful Celtic nobleman from the Ross area who benefitted by upholding the authority of the King of Scots. He emerged from obscurity as a local warlord in 1215 to crush a large scale uprising against King Alexander II.

The Chronicle of Melrose reports that: “Machentager attacked them and mightily overthrew the king’s enemies; and he cut off their heads and presented them as gifts to the new king…And because of this, the lord king appointed him a new knight.”

“Mormaer” indicates more than a mere knighthood. It means something like “Great Steward”; later centuries replaced it with the West German term “Earl”.

Ross was a breathtakingly magnificent tract of land. Its million-and-a-half mainland acres ran along the north rim of the Great Glen from sea to sea, and it reached out to embrace numerous small islands off its west coast. It was truly a jewel in the royal crown; well worth fighting for, and evidently worth killing for.

The Declaration of Arbroath

Sir Patrick Graham's son, Sir David Graham of Kincardine (born 1260) was captured and taken to England as a prisoner-of-war. He was released a year later on condition that he would fight for Edward I in foreign wars.

He gratefully returned to Scotland, where the new king, Robert the Bruce rewarded his “good and faithful service” with several land grants. Sir David also traded his holdings in Dunbartonshire for lands in Old Montrose in Forfarshire.

Mugdock Castle in Old Montrose. Source: Pinterest.com 

At this place and time, loyalties slid around as easily as carved figurines on a chessboard. And the more Sir David dealt with the English invaders, the angrier he got.

In 1320, along with fifty other “magnates and nobles”, he signed the Declaration of Arbroath. It was sent to Pope John XXII and was nothing less than an avowal of Scottish independence. In part it reads, “…for, as long as but a hundred of us remain alive, never will we on any conditions be brought under English rule. It is in truth not for glory, nor riches, nor honours, that we are fighting, but for freedom…for that alone, which no honest man gives up but with life itself.”

Believing he was ending hostilities, Sir David was a guarantor of a treaty with England in 1322. But the unstable and ineffective King Edward II declared the treaty illegal and downright treasonous. It took a few more years, and the loss of many more lives, for “proud Edward” to “think again,” withdraw his troops, and forsake all pretenses to the Scottish throne.

Noble Scots

To quote the immortal Bette Davis, “Fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.” It turns out some of my grandmother’s forebears didn’t merely react to history.

They made it.

Her first recorded family members are no more than vague shapes in a thick Scottish mist. During the Dark Ages, they were petty kings and lairds holding sway over portions of a divided land we wouldn’t recognize today. They were baptized by their relation St. Columba, “The Apostle to the Picts” and in a great hall’s flickering firelight listened to tales of Queen Medb, Niall of the Nine Hostages, and the warrior Pendragon .

Early in the 13^th century, a personality emerges. Sir David Graham of Dundaff was born in his father’s Ayrshire castle in 1210. He served as the sheriff of Berwickshire, obtained a charter for vast tracts of land from King Alexander III and acquired the property of Kincardine in Perthshire.

His heirs were similarly involved in their country’s politics. His son Sir John de Graham was killed in 1298, fighting alongside his close friend William Wallace in the Battle of Falkirk.

Sir John de Graham. Source: clan-graham-society.org 

Another son, Sir Patrick Graham of Kincardine, was more diplomatic. Back in 1281 he had been sent to negotiate the marriage of Prince Alexander of Scotland and Margaret of Flanders. He acknowledged Margaret, Maid of Norway, as heiress to the Scottish throne. In 1292 he swore fealty to England’s Edward I and agreed to the betrothal of the Maid to Edward’s heir, the future Edward II.

This situation seems very genteel, but it wasn’t. Seven-year-old Margaret died of “seasickness” on her bridal voyage and was buried at sea. The only certainty about the child’s fate was her being tossed overboard.

Sir Patrick was summoned to attend Edward I into France in 1294, and while engaged in this “honor”, became disenchanted with the English.

In 1296, he died in the Battle of Dunbar, defending King John Balliol against English invaders. He was considered one of the noblest and wisest of the Scottish barons, and even impressed Edward’s soldiers with his bravery and gallantry. 

Battle of Dunbar. Source: Pinterest