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Overview
David Lindsay, researching old records to learn details of the life of his ancestor, Richard More, soon found himself in the position of the Sorcerer's Apprentice-wherever he looked for one item, ten more appeared. What he found illuminated not only More's own life but painted a clear and satisfying picture of the way the First Comers, Saints and Strangers alike, set off for the new land, suffered the voyage on the Mayflower, and put down their roots to thrive on our continent's northeastern shore. From the story, Richard emerges as a man of questionable morals, much enterprise, and a good deal of old-fashioned pluck, a combination that could get him into trouble-and often did. He lived to father several children, to see, near the end of his life, a friend executed as a witch in Salem, and to be read out of the church for unseemly behavior. Mayflower Bastard lets readers see history in a new light by turning an important episode into a personal experience.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781429976992 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 04/01/2007 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 272 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
David Lindsay has previously published several books, including The Patent Files: Dispatches from the Frontiers of Invention and Madness in the Making: The Triumphant Rise and Untimely Fall of America's Show Inventors . He has also written for New York Press, American Heritage, The Village Voice, The Wall Street Journal and The American Experience. In addition to being a successful historian, he is also a founding member of the music groups the Klezmatics and They Might Be Giants. David Lindsay lives in New York City
David Lindsay has previously published several books, including The Patent Files: Dispatches from the Frontiers of Invention and Madness in the Making: The Triumphant Rise and Untimely Fall of America's Show Inventors . He has also written for New York Press, American Heritage, The Village Voice, The Wall Street Journal and The American Experience. In addition to being a successful historian, he is also a founding member of the music groups the Klezmatics and They Might Be Giants. David Lindsay lives in New York City
Read an Excerpt
Mayflower Bastard
A Stranger Among the Pilgrims
By David Lindsay
St. Martin's Griffin
Copyright © 2002 David LindsayAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-7699-2
CHAPTER 1
Swan Song
But to his son and heir his house and land he assigned,
With an old will and charge to hold the same bountiful mind,
To be good to his neighbors and to his tenants kind,
But in the ensuing ditty you shall hear how he was inclined;
Like a new Courtier of the King's ...
—"The Old Courtier of the Queen's" (traditional English ballad)
The story begins long ago, before you were born, in a tunnel. The tunnel was supposed to have opened behind the fireplace at Larden Hall, threading its way beneath the sheep-spotted hills of Shropshire, a mere stone's throw from Wales, and emerging some ten miles distant, at Wenlock Priory. That no one has ever found such a tunnel hardly makes any difference. Its very impossibility was the point of the fable, because it said that the land was wrong and, since every gentleman was of the land in those days, that a particular gentleman had been wronged by his wife in that tunnel, which could not have been true, because there could never have been such a tunnel, and thus the children could never have been. There are less economical ways to protest the violation of marriage vows.
Admittedly, Katharine More had never expected to find herself in such a bind. The youngest daughter of a local bailiff who had built Larden Hall with his own hands, Katharine had grown up assuming, quite naturally, that one of her elder brothers would live to be heir. But Jasper More had kept a loose house, like the new squire in the ballad of the day, and he had spent much of his time dunning the locals to fill his own coffers while his children ranged as they would. In 1607 the price of their freedom was named: Katharine's elder brother got into an argument over a woman and, in the duel that followed, was felled by a pistol shot. With Katharine's sisters already married and her other brothers dead of disease or fate, she was thrust to center stage of the household, with responsibilities she had never imagined as hers. And that she was in no position to take on.
Neither you nor I will ever know if she and Jacob Blakeway were already in love by that time. There are documents that hint at the truth — the lease for the farmland that the Blakeways rented from the Mores, with Samuel More's signature firmly affixed to the back; the confusion decades later as to the exact time and place that Samuel and Katharine were wed; the look of the road leading down from their official wedding site to the town where the Blakeways lived, a wild, overtangled stretch that resembled a ravine more than a place to set foot in for any conceivable business. ... But these are mute clues to a question that remains unanswerable, the question that lies at the heart of all stories, as it must for yours as well: When and where, the sages ask, does love begin?
Marriages, on the other hand, are more easily tracked. (Indeed, perhaps that is why matrimony exists.) On her wedding day, Katharine was already twenty-three years old — roughly the same age that her grandmother Jane Pemberton had been two decades earlier when she sat for a portrait by Holbein, a miniature revealing the proud swan of the family coat of arms. Jane had been a headstrong woman, keeping her maiden name after marriage, and Katherine may well have searched that very painting for resemblances that day. Was her neck as straight? Her face as gaunt? Her hand as delicate? Was her gaze the same mixture of determined and plaintive?
At some point, consciously or not, Katharine must have seen her grandmother's ambiguous expression staring back from the mirror, for her husband-to-be was hardly a swan. Samuel More was her fifth cousin, of that there can be no doubt, but he had none of the fine looks of her side of the family. Nor could he boast of his own father's features: Richard More the elder had a splash of the raffish about his eyes, and a thin nose that, underscored as it was by a spare mustache, suggested wit. Samuel's face, on the other hand, was pudgy, his best expression slightly embarrassed, his eyebrows pinched in worry.
It appears that their parents were not unaware of a lack of passion between the two and that the wedding was accordingly dispatched with some desperation. Arranged marriages, for openers, were all but archaic by that time. Though this one had the undeniable virtue of keeping the More estates in the family, the terms also bespoke a certain cold practicality. Unlike many unions, which saw the parents of the bride agreeing to "table" the couple — that is, to house them — Samuel and Katharine's marriage settlement specifically asked for the arrangement to be conducted "without tabling," thus allowing Samuel to remain at his own Linley Hall, ten miles to the west of Larden Hall, at his leisure. The iciness shows through in the family finances as well: the new- lyweds were given separate yearly allowances of twenty pounds each, as if to emphasize the unimportance of inquiring too closely into each other's affairs.
The wedding took place on February 11, 1611, in the Shipton church, under the conventional square wooden tower. Katharine and Samuel spoke the words of promise and faith and forever, the Anglican minister blessed their union, and the fact was recorded in the parish records. Everything else then began to happen off the record — or, if you prefer, in the tunnel.
IN SOME WAYS, little has changed in this border county since your day. The roads, though paved now, are still largely empty. The sheep are still there, too, their shaggy wool giving them the aspect of wandering strays. Shropshire today is still very far from the tensions of world events, and still quite conservative in its politics.
When I made a pilgrimage there, my guide was Donald L. Harris, a retired schoolteacher and the preeminent authority on Richard's early childhood. A man of brisk opinions and generous impulses (who with his wispy white hair and square jawbore a marked resemblance to my grandfather), Don showed me around, allowing me to lock horns with him on arcane historical disputes as we went.
One of our requisite stops was, of course, Larden Hall — or rather, what is left of it. The original Larden Hall stood until 1968, when it was dismantled and delivered to a Texas outfit called Canterbury Interiors, which apparently turned around and sold it off piecemeal. The new Larden Hall is a specimen of serviceable brickwork dropped into a spectacular pastoral, inhabited by a Mrs. Jones. When I was introduced as the descendant of the first tenants, she chirped, "My! You're looking well!"
The original manor, located behind Mrs. Jones's home, was not looking at all well, however. The rooms where Katharine played out her flamboyant drama and where her son Richard crawled, then walked, have been reduced to a whiskery stone hutch about the size of a walk-in cooler, studded with unexpected doorknobs.
Don offered the only postmortem possible. "It's a shame is what it is," he said.
The other ancestral home — the one that passed down from Samuel's side of the family — has fared considerably better. An eighteenth-century Palladian manor some few miles west of Larden Hall, Linley Hall radiates stability, if not grandeur. Approaching it, one passes a serene pond stocked with swans.
But there are peculiarities beneath this stately exterior. Upon entering the front door, I immediately became aware of a gruesome sight. High above me, on the stairwell wall, hung a still life depicting an assortment of fowl, all of them dead. At the center of this painting — and clearly its subject — is a swan, still bleeding from a wound at its neck.
This seemed to me to be someone's idea of a sick joke, because the swan was, and is, the symbol of the More family. Traditionally it appears on the coat of arms, in the impossible argot of heraldry, "Sable a Swan argent beaked and legged Or, a bordure engrailed of the last," and is accompanied by the motto Deus dabit, meaning "God will provide." Usually, the swan is not portrayed as being dead.
I had come to Linley Hall to research a portion of the More family papers — a welter of documents in boxes, most of them gathered by Sir Jasper More, the heir of Linley Hall until his death a few years ago. During my visit, Justin Coldwell, the present heir, managed to project a splendid imitation of English gentry — casual, indifferent, immeasurably droll.
"Ahh, Richard More," he said, consulting the ceiling before handing me a plate of Italian artichokes. "Wasn't he the one who went to America and behaved dreadfully?"
I immediately felt at ease around Justin, so later that day, when he offered me a ride back to the bed-and-breakfast in nearby Shrewsbury, where I was staying, I took the opportunity to ask him about the painting.
"Yes, well, dead animals are cheaper than live ones," he quipped, gripping the wheel with his gloves. It was by the Dutch painter Pieter van Oordt, he said, and had been housed in Spain just before Justin bought it on auction at Christie's.
I asked him if the swan's fate was a conscious comment on how he felt about the family.
"Well, aren't you a clever boy!" he replied without dropping a beat. The dead swan, he explained, symbolized the end of the More line, because he was descended from a collateral branch. With the confidence only true gentry can muster, he added, "I'm actually sort of an impostor, you see."
I thought about that for a moment. Then, well aware of my American accent, I said, "You know, I am a direct descendant in the More line — from Katharine's side. Think I should I get myself a painting of a living swan?"
Justin was most amused at the idea. He continued to chuckle the rest of the way to Shrewsbury, where he dispatched me with the utmost civility. From there he hastened onto a train to London, where, it seemed to me, he had some terribly unimportant appointments to keep.
In that, he was keeping up on an old, old tradition.
IF, as the bard put it, all the world's a stage, then London in the 1610s was stage center. In the previous century the rural manors had been the lifeblood of the culture, but at the dawn of the seventeenth century (granted, I speak of the times before your Ancient Beginning), London was exploding with vitality. The textile monopolies of Elizabeth's reign had produced a wealthy merchant class (to which the mothers of both Samuel and Katharine belonged), and from the cloth they yielded came an array of fashions so diverse as to suggest costurmery rather than dress.
What an outpouring of popish pretense there was! Ruffs grew so large that their diameter was restricted at royal occasions, literally to allow enough berth for people to enter and exit a room. In Cheapside, the profusion of fabrics was such that "even those of base birth and below the yeomanry in standing, went daily in silks, velvets, damasks, taffetas, and such-like," making it impossible, as some noted loudly, to know anyone's rank on the street.
Of course, where there are costumes, actors soon must follow, and so they did. It was not uncommon for country squires — and Samuel More was exactly that — to be away from their manors, hobnobbing in London, for two years at a stretch. By 1633 so many squires were abandoning the home fires that a law was passed requiring them to spend at least part of the year on their estates.
Samuel, even in his unformed adolescence, was as avid a city- goer as any, and just as keen on making his way in the world. His specific entry came through the Zouches, a family of considerable influence at court. Sometime before 1616, when Samuel began to "forbear" his wife — a verb meaning "to avoid" — he took a position as the personal secretary to Edward, Lord Zouch, a post he kept until his lordship's death in 1625.
If Samuel needed a change from his situation at home, Lord Zouch provided a first-rate opportunity. Zouch had spent his youth on the Continent as a self-admitted wastrel, and he continued in that vein well into his maturity — abandoning a wife who did not please him, reigning over the Council of the Marches of Wales like a despot, even deigning to be interred in the end beside his wine cellar, a decision that his friend the playwright Ben Johnson made hay of in his epitaph:
Wherever I die, oh, here may I lie
Along by my good Lord Zouche,
That when I am dry, to the tap I may hie,
And so back again to my couch.
Because he could offer the thrill of stag hunting at his country- seat in Bramshill, Zouch also attracted the ever wavering attention of King James. Zouch's favorite cousin, Sir Edward Zouch, further sharpened the royal interest with masques at his city residence, a fine-brick palace not far from Woking that had formerly been a getaway for Edward IV, Henry VII, and Henry VIII.
These were nighttime affairs: on a nearby hilltop, a tower with a kind of lantern acted as beacon to guide King James on his way. Some years before Samuel arrived in London, one such affair — typical in kind if not in measure — began with an actress toppling into the lap of the king of Denmark and ended with the characters of Love and Charity "sick and spewing" from alcohol poisoning. "The entertainment and show went forward," a friend of Lord Zouch's had remarked, "and most of the presenters went backward, or fell down; wine did so occupy their upper chambers."
Falling in with the Zouch retinue, Samuel could easily drown his worries in the pageantry of it all — and "abandon a wife who did not please him" in the bargain. Love threw up, Charity gagged, and a country squire had a chance in life.
But you were interested in confessions; let us move to them.
ALMOST EVERYTHING that is known about Richard More's early childhood comes from a document written by Samuel in 1622 in response to a petition by Katharine to Lord Chief Justice James Lee, which demanded an explanation for what had become of her children. Katharine's petition has since been lost, and Samuel's Declaration does not entirely fill in the gaps. Crucial information is missing, and the sequence of events as described is maddeningly vague. Samuel's Declaration also represents the point of view of an angry man, with no particular need to see his wife's position. Say, then, that it provides enough evidence to be more than a blank slate, and enough mystery to encourage the taking of sides.
As Samuel began to forbear his wife, his wife began to have children in rapid succession. Her first child, Ellen, was born on May 12, 1612. A son, Jasper, followed on August 8, 1613. Perhaps things continued to go smoothly between the Mores even then. But by the time Richard More was baptized, on November 13, 1614, a cruel physical fact was becoming all too plain. As Samuel put it, there was a "likeness and resemblance of most of the said children in their visages and lineaments of their bodies" to a certain Jacob Blakeway, "a fellow of meane parentage & condicon."
Men will make their bid at immortality in the hearts of women, and Jacob Blakeway, in choosing Katharine for a lover, was one of the few who succeeded for only that reason. The son of Edward Blakeway, Jacob was baptized on July 25, 1583, in Stanton Long Parish, a community immediately to the south of Shipton. In 1608 he and his father renewed the lease on a parcel of sloped land owned by Katharine More's father, Jasper. Jacob later apparently worked it in some capacity, although he lived in nearby Brockton. Later on, the lease ended up among Samuel's effects with his own signature affixed to the back — an elegant way of stating who was really boss.
Other than these facts and a few scattershot appearances in Samuel's Declaration, history has little to say of Jacob. He appears only as a distant figure on the landscape, his muscular outline stirring the heart of the wife and, eventually, making the husband's blood boil. We may, however, ponder those "visages and lineaments" of which Samuel wrote, and find ourselves resting on the eyes. Samuel's portrait shows a man with dark eyes — dark green perhaps, but probably brown, as his father's eyes clearly are in his portrait. We might infer, then, that Jacob's eyes were blue.
An uneasy sequence is thus suggested. Like all children, Richard More did not look like anyone in particular when he was an infant. The damning evidence — say, a small nose that contrasted with the Pinocchio-like protuberances of Samuel — already written in the faces of Ellen and Jasper, would not yet have been apparent. For the moment, Samuel could only look upon the young Richard with a suspicion of what he would become.
Before he knew how to speak, Richard More was being observed not in wonderment but for the crime he symbolized a crime that was only slowly coming into view. Would his lineaments confirm the portent of those eyes gazing up from the cradle, or would they contradict it?
THE ROLE Jacob Blakeway played in history remains a sensitive subject in Shropshire to this day. Everyone freely admits that he and Katharine had an affair, the sultry rhythms of which produced several illegitimate children. Yet some things are still too disturbing to be asserted.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Mayflower Bastard by David Lindsay. Copyright © 2002 David Lindsay. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Griffin.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgments,Preface,
Introduction: The Casting Out,
1. Swan Song,
2. Religious Company,
3. The Promised Land,
4. A Mother's Wish,
5. To Sea,
6. Providence and Desire,
7. A Familist Affair,
8. The Double Life of Richard More,
9. The Bell,
10. The Quaker Crisis,
11. Battles Large and Small,
12. Under Watchful Eyes,
13. Hypocrisy Unmask'd,
14. Hysteria,
Aftermath: Stone Remains,
Notes,
Partial Bibliography,
Index,