Six Women of Salem (6 page)

Family lore would spin a tale of a Huguenot Chevalier’s disinherited son who defied his parents and ran away to sea at age twelve seeking his fortune, who fetched up in Massachusetts utterly penniless until Eleanor Hollingworth spied him trudging past her gate and, taking pity on the lad, offered him beer in a silver mug and invited him to stay.

In fact, however, English was on good terms with his Jersey kin, Jersey law prevented him from being disinherited, he was not a Huguenot refugee, and he had already established a network of trading contacts in France, Sweden, and Spain before taking advantage of New World opportunities—so much for family lore. He evidently
did
board with the Hollingworths between voyages and certainly conducted business with William as they traded with the West Indies and Europe in Maine lumber, Virginia tobacco, and fish from Winter Island.

Nevertheless, William did not prosper as much as he may have hoped.

In 1672 he conveyed a house used as rental property to his unmarried daughter Mary—or rather Eleanor did. Although she was officially acting on his behalf in this transaction, how much she decided on her own when he was away at sea is unclear. Perhaps the transfer was a means to protect income property; after all, for a short time later, on June 1, 1672, Eleanor again acted as attorney to mortgage their own home to Philip Cromwell (a Salem butcher wealthy enough to lend money on the side) for £250 “in money and goods.”

But William’s string of bad luck continued.

In 1674, due to his losses at sea, the Salem selectmen granted his wife a license to keep an ordinary (a tavern where a set meal was ­offered) in her mortgaged house. Eleanor called it the Blue Anchor, and, as she had a brew house in the yard, she made the beer she sold. Such licenses were renewable yearly on the condition that the business ­remain respectable and the premises be available “to provide for the accommodation of the courts and jurors, likewise all other matters of a public concern proper for them.”

The following year, on September 1, Mary (still in possession of the rental property) married her father’s colleague Philip English. He would be remembered as being “of middle stature and strong physically . . . high spirited: not ungenerous, impulsive withal, and at times choleric [i.e., with a temper] . . . kind to the poor, yet not over conciliatory to his peers.”

Philip was one of the first in a wave of Jersey immigrants to New England. Despite his anglicized name, he, like the others, generally spoke French as his first language and kept his accounts in French as well. Many of the Jersey families who settled in Salem would cluster conspicuously in the neighborhood outside the Neck. Some people distrusted them because of their sudden numbers, their foreign language, and their habit of suing for debt at the drop of a hat.

Jersey folk were Protestant—not Catholic like most French—but they were Anglican rather than any of the Puritan denominations. Nevertheless, their neighbors wondered if they might collude with the Canadian French raiders. Jerseyans were also largely Royalist; in fact, Philip’s own godfather and possible kinsman, Sir Philip De Carteret, had harbored the fugitive Charles II from the Puritan forces. New England’s Royal Governor Andros, from Guernsey—another Channel Isle—encouraged Jersey emigration in order to counteract the ­Puritan settlers’ influence. More specifically, Philip English brought over many Jersey immigrants, most of them as bondservants—the men mainly working as mariners, the women as domestics in Salem and Marblehead.

Although Jersey and the other Channel Isles lay only a few miles off the coast of France, they were (and still are) part of British territory. The islands were once ruled by the dukes of Normandy, including the one called William the Conqueror who successfully captured England for his own. As England absorbed its conquerors, the Isles retained their Norman flavor, developing their own laws based on Norman and French traditions.

Mary gave birth to her first child on February 21, 1677, a daughter also named Mary. In the same year both Philip and William set sail again. William headed for Virginia, and Philip embarked on a complicated trans-Atlantic route. First, he sailed from Salem to Jersey, then he put his ketch in at St. Malo, the nearest French port. There he signed a contract with the agent of Jersey investor, Sire Moise Coubel, promising a 30 percent profit and itemizing his intended route. English would sail his ketch from St. Malo to Boston (presumably with French goods); then, loaded with New England cargo, it would sail to Spain, the Bay of Biscay, Bordeaux, England, and then back to Jersey or St. Malo, wherever the investor wished to collect his profits. Philips’s complicated trading was successful, and he returned to Salem only to find that no one knew the whereabouts of his father-in-law.

When William’s homecoming was more and more overdue, Eleanor inquired at every vessel that arrived at Salem, but no one could say for sure what had happened. Rumors suggested the ship had been lost at sea, and by November Eleanor had to ask the local court for help. The magistrates granted her power of attorney (as she had been acting all along), put her husband’s estate in her hands, and ordered her to “act in the improvement of it as if her husband were yet alive until more information be received or the court order otherwise.”

Eleanor had not only daily expenses to cover but also her husband’s debts—the mortgage and unpaid bills to mariners and suppliers. Nevertheless, as she later told the court, she paid “out of my own labor not diminishing his estate” and took out loans “which I was trusted for and am in debt for most of it still.” Some of these creditors threatened to arrest her for the debt, including Hugh Woodbury, her husband’s kinsman.

Finally, in November 1678, the court assumed William must have died and granted Eleanor administration of his estate. The inventory of her husband’s possessions included the still-mortgaged house and land; beds and bedding; her kitchen implements; tables and chairs; “Seven Framed pictures”; and her husband’s black suit. The amount of unpaid debts far outstripped the worth of William’s estate. No one ever did learn what happened to her husband.

While widow Hollingworth wrestled with the debts, applied for tax abatements, continued to operate the Blue Anchor, be deposed occasionally in court about fist fights that occurred there, and provisioned outgoing ships with bread and beer, Mary gave birth to a son on May 23, 1679. She named him William, but like his lost grandfather, the boy did not live.

Later that same year Goodwife Elizabeth Dicer, a neighbor from two houses east, got into a public argument with Eleanor. What provoked Goody Dicer’s outburst is not preserved, but neighbors heard her shout that Eleanor was “an old baud” and wished “that the plague might take her.” Then she accused Eleanor of being not only “a black mouthed whore,” but also a “black mouthed witch . . . and a thief, and all her children” (which included Mary English as well). Goody Dicer found herself in court for her “railing words,” abuse, and curses. Whether said in anger or out of conviction, such an allegation was serious, as witchcraft was a capital crime. Witnesses evidently spoke
for
Eleanor, and the court fined Goody Dicer. (During this same session the court granted administration of Thomas Oliver’s estate to his widow, Bridget.)

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

M
ay I with Mary choose the better part,

A
nd serve the Lord with all my heart,

R
escue his word most joyfully

Y
live to him eternally.

E
verliving God I pray,

N
ever leave me for to stray.

G
ive me grace thee to obey

L
ord grant that I may happy be

I
n Jesus Christ eternally.

S
ave me dear Lord by thy rich grace

H
eaven then shall be my dwelling place.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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