Fran\u2019s great-grandfather (if you go back an additional eleven generations) was Governor Dudley of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. \u00a0I sometimes joke about Fran\u2019s family hanging Quakers and witches, so I felt it was time to get some of this straight. Turns out that there is something to these stories, but not as written above. Thomas Dudley was the first colonial governor elected by \u201cfreemen\u201d voting in America (1634). There is a story here, because the first official governor under the Charter was Winthrop, but he was not elected in an open election. The prior governing council had held their own election without any announcement that an election would be taking place, and they proceeded to elect themselves. When the \u201cfreemen\u201d learned of this, they revolted and demanded that the next election be public. So they elected Dudley, Winthrop\u2019s former Deputy Governor (or vice-president in today\u2019s parlance), and the two essentially switched places. Don\u2019t think everyone could vote — \u201cfreeman\u201d was a defined category representing perhaps a quarter of the total population of the colony. However, they numbered some thousands, and so this was a highly significant step for freedom in place of voting by a council of eight or of decisions being made in England (as for other colonies). These Puritans were rebellious from the start.<\/p>\n
Dudley rotated in and out of the Governor\u2019s Office for some years (he was four terms Governor and thirteen terms Deputy Governor). Fortunately for Fran, Dudley was not Governor at the time that the Quakers were hanged because he had already died (1653), well before Quakers became an issue in the Colony. But he doesn\u2019t get away scot free because he was directly involved in the banishment of Anne Hutchinson. (My primary source for the following is The Emancipation of Massachusetts <\/em>by Brook Adams [1887, reprint 1962]. I have also used a variety of other sources for this post, and much of my source material is online if you look carefully and find appropriate scholarly sources, or ask me).<\/p>\n In November 1637 Anne Hutchinson was brought before an Ecclesiastical Criminal Court, and a member of that court was Deputy Governor Dudley, recorded in the records as follows:<\/p>\n Dudley;\u00a0 \u201c\u2026if she in particular hath disparaged all our ministers in the land, that they have preached a covenant of works, and only Mr. Cotton a covenant of grace, why this is not to be suffered\u2026\u201d (p. 237). \u00a0<\/p>\n And it wasn\u2019t, as the court officially banished Anne Hutchinson from the Colony.<\/p>\n In Dudley\u2019s favor, he was one of the founders of Harvard a year earlier in 1636, and as Governor in 1650 he signed the official papers of incorporation of Harvard that still govern that University. For generations the family felt that it ran the place (and it somewhat did). It is that legacy to which Fran\u2019s mother, Ann Bradstreet Clark, rebelled. Ah, but her name brings us to the next generation. Anne Dudley Bradstreet was Thomas\u2019 daughter (google Anne Bradstreet for the story of America\u2019s first poetess; we read from her work at our wedding) and wife of Simon Bradstreet (also a 1636 Harvard founder and also a Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony\u2026and there are others later, e.g., Governor Joseph Dudley). Anyhow, Simon fortunately was not Governor at the time of the hanging of the Quakers, but he showed no love for them and is on record as instrumental in a court decision to whip an unrepentant Quaker, as follows:<\/p>\n \u201cSimon in a fierce rage, told the court, \u2018That if such fellows should be suffered to speak so in the court, he would sit there no more.\u2019 So to please Simon, Eliakim was sentenc\u2019d to be stripp\u2019d from his waste upward, and to be bound to an oak tree that stood by their worship-house, and to be whipped fifteen lashes.\u201d (pp. 330-331)<\/p>\n On the other hand, Simon was the last freely-elected Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony before the King revoked the Charter (the Colony was getting much too uppity) and appointed a Royal Governor. Simon thereby misses opprobrium for the 1990 Salem witch trials. They occurred during the difficult transition period between the two forms of government, and the lack of any central government at that time may help to explain why the hysteria was allowed to go unchecked for so long. But the family did not go unaffected\u2026Fran\u2019s relative Rebecca Nurse was hanged as a witch. It didn\u2019t help that she was so elderly and deaf that she couldn\u2019t hear the charges brought against her by a jealous neighbor.<\/p>\n And don\u2019t forget, we have Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr\u2019s silk underwear (and more), and Fran is named for Wendell Jr\u2019s wife Fanny Dixwell.\u00a0 But those are the recent family matters, and enough of that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Fran\u2019s great-grandfather (if you go back an additional eleven generations) was Governor Dudley of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. \u00a0I sometimes joke about Fran\u2019s family hanging Quakers and witches, so I felt it was time to get some of this straight. Turns out that there is something to these stories, but not as written above.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-264","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-family"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.peacefulways.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.peacefulways.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.peacefulways.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.peacefulways.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.peacefulways.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=264"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/blog.peacefulways.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":267,"href":"https:\/\/blog.peacefulways.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264\/revisions\/267"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.peacefulways.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=264"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.peacefulways.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=264"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.peacefulways.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=264"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}