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.

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…”

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/