Six Women of Salem (60 page)

One of Susanna’s daughters, Susanna Babbidge (Bridget’s great-granddaughter), supported herself and her family for half a century by teaching reading and sewing to young children after being widowed at the age of thirty-one. She outlived all of her seven children, reared several of her grandchildren, and kept her wits and the ability to knit stockings until her death at the age of ninety in 1804. “Her natural faculties were superiour,” according to her minister, William Bentley, who memorialized her as “cheerful, of strong memory, & agreeable in all companies . . . an uncommon example of firmness, strength of mind, & of exemplary piety. The number of children she has educated is very great & the public esteem in which she is held is very sincere.” Likely more agreeable than Bridget, Mrs. Babbidge appears to have shared her traits of “firmness [and], strength of mind.” Although Salem generally knew who Bridget’s descendants were, Susanna Babbidge apparently never discussed her great-grandmother with Bentley.

At some point early on, the county court filed Bridget’s paperwork with documents relating to
Sarah
Bishop, both being referred to in the texts as Goodwife or Goody Bishop. Consequently, Bridget’s red bodice and red petticoat became associated with Edward and Sarah Bishop’s unlicensed tavern, thereby leading later generations to picture Bridget as a raucous barkeeper flouting Puritan conventions. Her identity was not clarified until 1981, and she was not officially exonerated until 2001.

M
ARY
E
NGLISH
,
homesick for Salem, persuaded Philip against relocating to New York permanently. In Salem they found their fine mansion stripped of its contents, supposedly with only a servant’s bed left in the house. Mary returned “to find her house plundered, and the lowest indignities offered to her property of every name; her enclosures destroyed and a wanton waste made of her dearest concerns.” Certainly a great deal was lost—confiscated by the sheriff or appropriated by neighbors. Family lore would believe more possessions were lost than Philip included in his detailed but admittedly incomplete list of items when he petitioned for restitution. Nevertheless, business papers from Eleanor Hollingworth’s time and other pre-
1692
documents survived. Mary’s girlhood sampler remained in the family, possibly overlooked as being of inconsequential worth, but the bobtailed cow was
definitely
penned in Sheriff Corwin’s yard.

Philip’s demands for a full account of what Corwin had confiscated continued to go unanswered, despite Governor Phip’s orders. While waiting, Philip set about repairing the house, possibly installing a secret room in the large garret, for one was discovered there generations later. Once the mansion was habitable, they brought their children home.

Despite his losses Philip nevertheless remained among the top 4 percent of Salem’s taxpayers in 1694. He had been in the top 1 percent before the witch panic and soon regained that status.

Philip must have felt some satisfaction that Governor Phips, his political enemy, was ordered to London to explain himself and died there of influenza in February 1694. The enquiry was for his handling of the defense against French raiders and noncooperation with customs tax officials. (The witch trials were
not
part of London’s concern.) But with Phips out of the way, Lieutenant Governor William Stoughton—former Oyer and Terminer chief justice—was in charge.

Mary gave birth to another son, Ebenezer, on April 21, 1694, but the boy does not seem to have lived long. Family tradition remembered Mary as dying that same year from consumption caught during her sufferings in 1692. However, she was still alive in June 1695, when “Mr. Philip English and Mary his wife,” as administrators of her Uncle Richard Hollingworth’s estate, brought suit against John Cromwell. Mary and Philip were still suing her Uncle Richard’s debtors on December 31, 1695, when they lost a case against Richard Read (or Rea), were ordered to pay £1:7:10 in costs, and appealed the decision.

In order to rebuild his own business Philip sued numerous parties, but most especially George Corwin; he had Corwin arrested for debt on February 26, 1696. The former sheriff, not a well man, could not post the necessary bail, though presumably someone else did so for him.

At a March 31, 1696, sitting of the Quarterly Court at Ipswich both Philip and Mary English were named in their successful suit against Richard Read, who appealed. This court also considered the case of English v. Corwin, with Joseph Neal representing the ailing Corwin, and decided that, as Corwin had been following orders in 1692, the confiscations were legal (rather than personal) and “the plaintiff is non-suited.”

But Philip was not through with George Corwin. He appealed to the Superior Court, but Corwin died at home on April 12, at the age of only thirty. Unable to drag his enemy to court, Philip apparently resorted—or threatened to resort—to the folk custom of impounding a debtor’s body until the bereaved family paid the debt. Such schemes were never legal but nonetheless happened in England and elsewhere from time to time, resulting in midnight funerals to avoid losing a body to creditors. Stories about Philip’s action ranged from his seizing the body and galloping off with it on horseback to only threatening to do so, prompting Corwin’s bereaved family to bury the body in the cellar of his own house until matters settled. Philip’s granddaughter related a version of the anecdote in 1793: “the body of Curwin the Sheriff was taken from the funeral procession & detained several days in a Cellar of the deceased’s House for a . . . debt & . . . plate, linen, &c. were delivered up” to pay it.

Besides the linen and plate the English family would keep as trophies, the late Captain Corwin’s estate, once the widow died, delivered £44:00:6 worth of miscellaneous goods to Philip on December 28, 1704.

Sometime after their 1696 lawsuit, Mary died, before Philip’s marriage to widow Sarah Ingersoll on September 20, 1698. Mary was probably buried in Burial Point, but no stone survives, and Salem’s vital records have no notice of her death.

At least one of her daughters was educated in Boston. Along with other young gentlewomen, Susanna attended Mistress Mary Turfrey’s boarding school, where her lessons included needlework. There she embroidered a two-foot-by-three-foot apron embellished with a crewel-work vase of flowers and birds worked in gold thread, far more decorative than her mother’s sampler of practical stitches. She would marry Jerseyman John Touzel, one of her father’s business associates, in 1700. By then Philip was not only back in the top 1 percent of Salem taxpayers but had also been elected to serve Salem in the House of Representatives.

Nine years later he joined with twenty-one others, including Nurse and Procter kin, to petition the government to help those “Blasted in our Reputations and Estates” by the witch trials. When the General Court moved to pay restitutions in 1710, Philip submitted a long list of items taken from his warehouses and his home—over £1,100 worth. He concluded by asserting,

The foregoing is a true Account of what I had seized tacking away Lost and Embazeld whilst I was a prisoner in the Yeare
1692
& whilst on my flight for my Life besides a Considerable quantity of household goods & other things which I Cannot Exactly give a pertickolar Acc[ount] off for all which I Never Resived any other or further satisfacon for them then sixty Pounds
3
s payd Me by the Administrators of George Corwine Late sherife deses’d.

And he did not neglect to mention the bobtailed cow.

The legislature had set aside only so much for restitution payments, and the other families, who had less to begin with, lost far more proportionately than Philip had. They refused his petition, yet Philip persisted, and in 1717 the government offered £200.

Once an Episcopal congregation formed St. Michael’s Church in Marblehead, Philip sailed across Salem Harbor to attend services there until he helped found St. Peter’s parish in Salem. In 1722 his temper flared into not only a denunciation of the late Reverend Noyes as the murderer of Rebecca Nurse and John Procter but also a declaration that the Salem Church was the “Devil’s church.” Sued for slander, he pled not guilty but again lost his temper, launching “vile” and “abusive language” against both the church and the justices he faced. A night in jail convinced him to apologize. However, the same thing happened again in 1724. His wife, Sarah, died around that time, his business was declining, and his family realized that Philip had become “clouded in mind.” In 1727 Philip granted son-in-law John Touzel power of attorney to enact his business matters and went to live with him and Susanna, paying them twenty shillings a week for room, board, and washing (far more than the two shillings and six pence of the basic jail charge).

But his mind continued to dim, with his “estate greatly wasted and daily wasting,” according to his son Philip Jr., even with Touzel handling the finances. The Salem selectmen granted guardianship of Philip English in 1732 to his friend Mr. Thomas Manning of Ipswich and to son Philip English, “innholder.”

Matters came to a head again “when Mr Touzel turned Father out of doors,” as son Philip complained when he had to take in the difficult old man. Philip lived with Philip Jr. until he died on March 10, 1736.

Philip’s mind may have been clouded, but he never forgot a grudge. During his last years—if not on his deathbed—when urged to forgive his enemies before he faced the next life, Philip reluctantly agreed, then added at one instance, “But if I get well, I’ll be
damned
if I forgive him!”

Philip’s body was buried on March 15, 1736, in St. Peter’s churchyard on land the family had donated. The church bell tolled his passing. Unfortunately, no stone remains to mark the spot.

The family was then left to settle his estate and, now that the widower was deceased, Mary’s estate as well. Philip’s outstanding debts triggered a flurry of lawsuits, including one from the family of George Hollard, who had not only hidden him in 1692 but also provided for him and Mary while they lived in the Boston jailer’s house as well as cared for their daughter Mary when they fled to New York.

Philip’s daughter Susanna Touzel made sworn statements about these episodes but, “by reason of Sickness & bodily Infirmity,” was unable to travel to Boston or even to the Probate Court’s sittings in Salem. As Francis Ghatman “Churgion” wrote, “she hath an ulcerous bone in her legg and by [that] reason it is much inflamed.” Both she and her husband, John, soon died, leaving three minor children.

Susanna seems to have passed the Corwin spoils to
her
daughter Susanna, who married John Hathorne, a grandson of Judge John Hathorne. When elderly, Widow Hathorne regaled her minister William Bentley with the family stories, showing him the Corwin silver along with the sampler worked so long before by her grandmother. Mary English, Bentley noted on May 6, 1783, “had the best education of her times. Wrote with great ease & has left a specimen of her needlework in her infancy, or Youth. It is about 2 feet by 9 inches, like a sampler. It concludes with an Alphabet & her name, in the usual form. The figures are diversified with great ease & proportion, & there are all the stitches known to be then in use, & an endless variety of figures in right lines, after no example of nature.”

After Widow Susanna (Touzel) Hathorne died in 1802, Bentley helped appraise the family possessions in the old English Mansion, marveling that this was probably “the last time the remains of the first generation were to be seen together in any town of Massachusetts. The singular pride of this family has rendered them tenacious of the lands & of the moveables of their ancestors, & a more curious sight was not to be seen in America.”

Ownership of the mansion was divided among the heirs, with the “spoils” from Corwin passing to Mary’s great-granddaughter Susanna (Hathorne) Ingersoll and later to her only surviving child, Susanna. (Another branch of the family kept Mary’s acrostic poem. In 1859 it belonged to “a lady of Boston, one of her descendants.”) Like her parents, this Susanna Ingersoll lived in the former Turner Mansion, later remembered as the House of the Seven Gables after her cousin Nathaniel Hawthorne depicted a similar house in his novel of that name. She also came into possession of the whole of the English Mansion, now run down—a tavern in the basement, roof ornaments lost, and facade gables replaced by rows of small attic dormers. When workmen demolished it in 1833, they discovered the secret garret room.

Susanna Ingersoll, who never married, adopted the cook’s son Horace Connolly and, on her death in 1868, left her estate to him. Although he was then the Episcopal rector of St. Mark’s in Boston, he undertook several other careers in his lifetime with little success, eventually losing his inheritance—the prized family silver, including the pieces from Corwin, melted for scrap—before dying in poverty.

The sampler, however, survived. Connolly may have sold it to someone more concerned with preserving artifacts of Salem’s past. When Salem antiquarian George Curwen died in 1900, he willed a large part of his collection to Salem’s Essex Institute—including Mary English’s sampler. Curwen is a variant spelling of the name Corwin, and George Rea Curwen was descended from Judge Jonathan Corwin of the witchcraft court. The piece remains in the collection of the Peabody Essex Museum, the Essex Institute’s successor, an example of history’s ironies.

O
nce the trials wound down,
ANN PUTNAM
receded into obscurity, with hints about her life tied to the recorded activities of her husband, her fortunes rising and falling with his.

Thomas had to make up for the losses on his farm incurred during the growing seasons of 1692, when he spent so much time absent, in town on court business—the £5 the court paid him in December 1693 for his writing duties would not go far. He certainly paid close attention to the Village’s problems with the rates committee, which still refused to collect the taxes needed both to pay Reverend Parris and to mend the meeting house, which had received such hard use by the crowds during the witch hearings. Thomas’s half-brother Joseph Putnam was on that committee along with once-suspected Daniel Andrews and Rebecca Nurse’s husband Francis.