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.