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Richard More, The Pilgrim Saint Who Sinned a Lot

Richard More was just six years old when his embittered legal – but not biological – father packed him off to the New World on the Mayflower, along with his brother and two sisters.

Indentured to William Brewster, he was the only one of the More children to survive past the first terrible winter in Plymouth. He returned to the sea at age 14 and spent most of his life as an enterprising ship captain. Richard More may have been the last of the First Comers to die, having lived long enough to witness the Puritan experiment go awry with the Salem witch trials.

The Mayflower in Plymouth Harbor by William Halsall.

During the course of a colorful lifetime he sailed the Atlantic, carried supplies to infant colonies, fought naval battles, fought King Philip’s War, ran a tavern and married at least three wives, not all sequentially. As a First Comer who survived the Ancient Beginning, he enjoyed certain privileges. He took full advantage of them.

Richard More

Richard More’s legal parents were Katherine and Samuel More, landed gentry in Shropshire, England, on the Welsh border. His real father, though, was probably Jacob Blakeway. Katherine and Jacob were betrothed before her father arranged a marriage with Samuel More, when Samuel was 17 and Katherine 25. Katherine had four children in quick succession: Elinor in 1612, Jasper in 1613; Richard in 1614; and Mary in 1616.

Mayflower plaque in St. James Church in Shipton, Shropshire commemorating the More children baptism. courtesy of Phil Revell.

By the time the youngest came along, Samuel More began to notice they looked more like Jacob Blakeway than him. He accused Katherine of adultery, seized the children and stashed them with a tenant. Katherine didn’t deny the charge. She argued her betrothal to Blakeway meant she’d married More illegally. After years of court battles, Samuel More won the right to pack the children off to the New World on the Mayflower – a likely death sentence.

He didn’t care. He called the children “a spurious brood” and justified his cruelty by claiming to send them away from their home, where “great blotts and blemishes may fall upon them.”

First Comer

By the end of the first winter in Plymouth Colony, Elinor, Jasper and Mary had all died.

Six-year-old Richard, the lone survivor, grew up a servant for elder William Brewster. He lived in the Brewster household with his two sons, Love and Wrestling, who were about his age. Later two older children, Patience and Jonathan, joined them. Richard helped the family with chores, learned to read and write and attended Sunday meeting, where William Brewster often presided.

William Brewster

His indenture ended in 1627, when he turned 14. The next year he was apprenticed to Isaac Allerton, a merchant seaman. Allerton married one of William Brewster’s daughters, Fear, who arrived in Plymouth in 1623. Richard sailed with Allerton up and down the coast buying and selling fish, grain, tobacco and other commodities.

Sometime in the 1630s, More sailed to England — exactly when and why is unclear. He then returned to Plymouth in 1635 on the Blessing. Romance must have bloomed on the voyage, for a few months after his arrival he married a fellow passenger, Christian or Christiana Hunter.

They lived on a 20-acre farm in Duxbury, where the Plymouth settlers had distributed land and begun to spread out on it. The Mores didn’t stay long, but sold their property in 1637. They then moved 50 miles north to another Puritan settlement, Salem Neck. Together they would have seven children.

From Stranger to Saint

When Richard More boarded the Mayflower as a six-year-old child, he did not belong to the tight-knit group of 40-some Separatists who called themselves Saints. He belonged to the other, secular group of about five dozen people called Strangers.

Signing the Mayflower Companct 1620 by Jean Leon Gerome Ferris.

As time passed, the Mayflower settlers took on a mythic aura. They had suffered and survived the “Ancient Beginning.” So in 1643, Richard More became a Saint when the Puritan congregation in Salem admitted him as a member.

But for a Saint, he had a good deal of the sinner in him.

He became a sea captain and pursued the coastal cargo trade he’d learned from Allerton, delivering provisions to colonies in Virginia, New York, the West Indies and Nova Scotia. He probably carried tobacco, grain, salt fish, lumber and fur to England and the West Indies. In 1674, he started a tavern in Salem, selling beer and cider.

Bigamy?

In 1645, 10 years after his marriage to Christian, a “Richard More of Salem” married Elizabeth Woolnough in St. Dunstan’s Church in Middlesex, England. That “Richard More of Salem” left town in a hurry after he was charged with drunkenness in the company of a prostitute. Historians don’t agree on whether it was the Mayflower Richard More who cut that swathe through Middlesex in the 1640s. Whether it was or not, that Richard More had a daughter named Elizabeth, after her mother.

While still in his 30s, the Puritan elders considered Richard More an “Ancient Freeman” and gave him land in Plymouth. A fighter as well as a lover, he fought a naval battle against the Dutch near New York in 1653. The next year he joined a fleet of English ships to capture the French fort at Port Royal. And in 1675, after King Philip’s War broke out, he marched with a thousand-man militia to what is now South Kingstown. There he joined in the Great Swamp Fight, a massacre of as many as 1,000 Narragansett Indians, mostly noncombatants.

Christian More gravestone in Salem.

Christian died in Salem during King Philip’s War, in 1676. Samuel quickly remarried Jane Crumpton. Two years after her death, the 72-year-old man was caught performing “gross unchastity” with another man’s wife. The Salem elders censured him.

According to the records of the First Church of Salem, Old Captain More had been for many years “under suspicion and a common fame of lasciviousness at least some degree of incont[in]ency.” Sundry brethren and elders spoke to him several times about his debauchery. However, they had no proof and could go no further.

Then, left to himself, three witnesses saw him commit “gross unchastity” with another man’s wife. Justices of the peace censured old Captain More for his scandalous sin, and the church elders cast him out of the parish.

Salem Witch Trials

Richard repented, however, and returned to the church in 1691. In 1692, he witnessed the hysteria of the Salem witch trials – a second perversion of Puritan zealotry during his lifetime. The first had sent him to Plymouth Colony, an orphaned, six-year-old servant.

Richard More gravestone in Salem.

Richard More died sometime between April 1694 and April 1696, possibly the oldest surviving First Comer. He lies buried in the Charter Street Burial Ground in Salem.

With thanks to Mayflower Lives by Martyn Whittock.

Images: Plaque By Phil Revel, Shipton, Shropshire – https://www.flickr.com/photos/[email protected]/6809987125, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18269228. Christiana More grave marker By Max Anderson, Chicago IL – https://www.flickr.com/photos/[email protected]/6809950259, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18269206. Richard More grave marker By eagle.dawg – Richard More, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18184059. This story updated in 2022.

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John C. Colt, Samuel Colt’s “Bad” Brother, Commits a Macabre Murder

Too bad John Colt didn’t use one of his brother Sam’s revolvers to kill Samuel Adams in 1841. If he had, Samuel Colt probably would have capitalized on the tremendous publicity surrounding the murder. Because Sam Colt not only made millions making guns, he was one of the first Madison Avenue ad men. Any publicity was good publicity, and Colt was an easy name to spell.

Unfortunately, John Colt had killed Samuel Adams with a hatchet. Then he had cut him up, stuffed him into an oblong box and hired a cartman to take the gruesome cargo to a ship bound for New Orleans.

It might be a story of good brother-bad brother. But the murder of Samuel Adams and its aftermath suggests the two Colt brothers were both very gifted and very flawed. They may have been married to the same woman – at the same time.

And John Colt only killed one person. Samuel Colt’s guns killed many.

Samuel Colt

John Colt

John Caldwell Colt was born March 1, 1810, in Hartford, Conn. His brother Samuel arrived four years later. The boys started life with a privileged childhood and an indulgent mother who came from one of the city’s leading families.

But then their mother died and their father lost his money in the financial panic of 1819. Shunned by Hartford’s social elite, their new stepmother made the boys go to work.

John Colt was a reckless, adventurous boy who meandered through life as an adult. He chose one career then veered off to another. He had been a riverboat gambler, a drinker, a runaway, a womanizer, a thief – as well as a brilliant accountant. In 1838, he published a textbook on double-entry bookkeeping, which went into 45 printings.

He moved to Manhattan and hired a printer named Samuel Adams to print his textbook. He had an apartment in a fancy building. In May of 1841, his beautiful young mistress moved in with him. By September she was very, very pregnant.

Samuel Colt

Sam, unlike John, had a fixed purpose in life from an early age. He wanted to make guns and explosives. His father backed his early attempts to make guns, but Sam needed more financing for development. So he toured the country lecturing on the virtues of nitrous oxide, ending his talk with a fireworks show.

He saved enough money to go back to developing his gun, a revolver with a rotating cylinder. In 1835, he sailed to England to obtain a patent for it. While there he met a beautiful, illiterate 16-year-old named Caroline Henshaw. He then married the girl.

Or did he? Historians disagree. According to some, he brought her back to the United States with him, but never admitted he’d married her. Others make no mention of her marriage to Samuel Colt.

In 1836, Sam borrowed enough money, mostly from relatives, to start making guns in Paterson, N.J. However, hardly anyone bought them. Then his financing began to dry up with the Panic of 1837, one of the worst in U.S. history. Colt entertained prospects for sales and backing as if he had plenty of cash. His cousin, a principal investor, scolded him for the enormous liquor bill he’d run up.

In September 1841, Samuel Colt went to New York City looking for more investors. He was drinking in a bar at the City Hotel with a couple of prospects when his distraught brother John came looking for him.

Horror Story

What transpired on Sept. 17, 1841 was worthy of an Edgar Allan Poe story. In fact, Poe did modify a version into a story, The Oblong Box. And Herman Melville mentioned it in his short story, Bartleby, The Scrivener.

At 4 pm on that day, a Friday, Samuel Adams called on John Colt at his office on the corner of Chambers Street and Broadway. Adams demanded $71.15, which he said Colt owed him. Colt disagreed, saying he only owed Adams $55.85. They began to argue, and then they fought. According to Colt’s confession, Adams shoved him against the wall and twisted his neck handkerchief so that he could hardly breathe.

…[W]e came to blows. We then grappled and as he was overpowering me, I reached for a hammer, which was on my desk, and I struck him over the head until he released his hold and fell unconscious. He expired shortly afterward. Blood flowed in torrents from the wounds and after washing it up, I decided to notify the authorities.”

But then he decided against it. He didn’t want to besmirch the reputation of his family – his wealthy relatives, his brother the judge in St. Louis, his other brother the up-and-coming arms manufacturer.

He went to find his brother, staying at the City Hotel. Sam Colt, drinking in the barroom with prospective investors, told his brother to wait upstairs. But John Colt couldn’t wait more than a few minutes, so John Colt returned to his office.

Finding the body in the box

Mr. Gross

Colt had a long wooden box in the corner of his office. He decided to ship the body in the box to another city. It wasn’t easy. He stripped Adams’ clothes and tied him up, but his knees stuck out. So Colt stood on top of the box until it closed and nailed it shut. He threw Adams’ clothes into a public outhouse, washed his clothes in a public bathhouse and addressed the box to a fictional Mr. Gross in New Orleans.

The next morning he hailed a cartman from the office and paid him to take the box to the Kalamazoo in the East River. The box was put aboard the steamer, but the weather turned stormy. The Kalamazoo couldn’t sail.

The Arrest

Unbeknownst to John Colt, his neighbor had heard a sound like foils clashing and a violent fall on the floor. The neighbor notified the landlord and the police, and he kept a close watch on John Colt. When he read in the newspaper that Samuel Adams had gone missing, he reported his suspicions to the mayor, Robert Morris. The mayor then ordered the head of the cartmen to investigate. They quickly figured out where the box had gone, and the Kalamazoo was unloaded. The cartman who took it from Colt recognized it immediately.

Morris joined police in arresting John Colt. He confessed and pleaded self-defense. Brother Sam paid for his high-priced defense with shares in the company.

The Trial

During the trial, witnesses testified that the wounds on Samuel Adams head included a small round hole. They suggested John Colt killed Adams with his brother’s new invention. In one of history’s more bizarre product placements, Samuel Colt put on a marksmanship show with his revolver.

John Colt’s sinful living arrangements with his mistress didn’t help his case. The jury found him guilty and the judge sentenced him to hang.

Then things got really strange.

John Colt asked to make an honest woman of Caroline, who had given birth to a son named Samuel. On the day of his execution, he married Caroline in New York’s Tombs prison with Sam and John Howard Payne (who wrote Home Sweet Home) in attendance. His jailers left them alone for an hour for a conjugal visit.

As the moment for his execution approached, the Tombs roof burst into flames. Prison guards ran to put out the fire. When they returned to Colt’s cell, they found him in a pool of blood, a knife protruding from his heart. They presumed his wedding guests had slipped him the knife.

The Tombs

Rumors

For years afterward, people claimed to have seen John Colt alive and well. They believed his friends or maybe his brother had set the fire, substituted a corpse with a knife in it and spirited him away.

New York’s police chief wrote a book claiming he’d fled to California with his wife.

And historians speculate that John Colt’s mistress Caroline was really Caroline Henshaw, Mrs. Samuel Colt.

Samuel Colt ultimately succeeded in his arms business. He struggled for another five years after his brother’s death until the Texas Ranger bought a thousand revolvers for us in the Mexican War. He built a factory in Hartford, and married the well-born Elizabeth Jarvis in 1856. They had four children, but only one made it to adulthood and then drowned at the age of 35.

All along he sent money to Caroline, who had moved to Europe with her son. Samuel Colt referred to the boy as his ‘nephew,’ always in quotation marks. As a young man, he went to work in the Colt arms factory, where Hartford knew him as Sam Colt’s favorite nephew.

The arms business prospered, and Samuel Colt become one of the richest men in the United States. However, he died from complications of gout, however, in 1862 at the age of 47. His wife, Elizabeth, gave birth to their stillborn child after he died.

In his will, Samuel Colt named his nephew as one of his heirs, bequeathing him $2 million in today’s money. Elizabeth Colt contested the will in court, and Samuel Colt produced a valid marriage certificate proving his mother had married her husband in Scotland in 1838.

This story was updated in 2022.

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The Hypnotized Bride of 1908 – Madelon Kenmore Looker Coburn Le Compte

In 1908, police in New Hampshire drew up a complaint against Madelon Kenmore, a woman they knew as Madelon Coburn. The charge was bigamy.

Born in 1878 as Madelon Kenmore, she claimed English heritage but grew up in Astoria, Long Island. In 1905, at just 17, she eloped to Albany with Irving Looker, a young son of a diamond merchant. So why, the police wanted to know, had she married a New Hampshire minister named William Coburn in 1908?

Rev. William Coburn ran a sanitarium in Wakefield, N.H. where he sold patent medicines and treated certain patients. He was financially successful. But perhaps not too wise in the ways of love.

A widower, Coburn fell in love with one of his young patients, Medelon Kenmore. However, Madelon did not inform Coburn that she was already married. She had threatened divorce, even hired private investigators to catch Irving Looker having an affair. But she had not completed the process.

When confronted with the charge of bigamy, Madelon at first denied it. She swore she had never married Coburn. Coburn’s sons supported their father’s claim.

Further, the Rev. Orrin Baker swore that he had performed the marriage ceremony. Not only that, he said, he had received a letter from a woman calling herself Madelon Looker, asking that he destroy all records of the marriage because her husband was accusing her of bigamy.

The Love Triangle

Soon, Madelon was at the center of a standoff. William Coburn declared that he still loved Madelon. He would make their marriage legal if she would go ahead with her divorce from Irving Looker. Irving said virtually the same thing. If she would drop the divorce matter and have her marriage to Coburn annulled, he would gladly reunite with her.

Then Madelon’s lawyer changed her story dramatically. She had, in fact, married Coburn. The evidence was clear. But the marriage happened when she was being treated at his sanitarium under hypnosis. He had married her while she was completely under the spell of hypnosis and could not recall any of it.

Whatever evidence she had was enough to persuade New Hampshire’s Gov. Charles Floyd to drop any attempt to extradite Madelon to face bigamy charges.

Gov. Charles Floyd

Having cleared away the New Hampshire charges, Madelon’s lawyer returned to the court to announce her decision. She was pressing ahead with her divorce from Irving Looker. She presented evidence that he had been at a hotel with another woman.

Finally in April of 1909 the court found for Madelon and she won her divorce. They cleared the way for Madelon to return to Rev. Coburn.

The Bumpy Road to Love

Not so fast, her lawyer said. His next stop was New Hampshire where he intended to have Madelon’s marriage to Coburn annulled. It would give her a fresh start at age 30.

Rev. Coburn took a prolonged trip west to avoid additional embarrassment, though it’s doubtful he outran the story. The hypnotized bride made headlines across the country.

Madelon Kenmore Looker Coburn made one more trip down the matrimonial aisle. This time she married an engineer from Long Island, Edward Le Compte, whose wife had left him for their chauffeur. Madelon’s first marriages were tame compared to the Le Compte union.

Madelon was a wealthy woman, both in her own right and because of her husbands. She drove in a bright yellow limousine and lived well.

But her relations with Edward quickly grew tense. They fought over a house he gave to his first wife. They were arrested for arguing so loudly in the street that they were declared a nuisance and sentenced to 30 days in jail each.

The Last Lawsuits of Madelon Kenmore

In 1912, the couple began slugging it out in court for a divorce. Edward managed to convince the court to lock Madelon up in an insane asylum. After three days she was released and proceeded to court to charge he was dishonest and scheming against her.

While locked away he had stolen furniture and silver from the house. Madelon accused Edward of trying to strangle her. Her father bailed his son-in-law out of jail.

Postcard view of Wakefield (Sanbornville is a village within the town)

Madelon’s family, meanwhile, said they felt she was mentally unsound. A psychiatrist said she suffered from “litigating paranoia,” a disease that prompted her to incessantly file lawsuits against others. He also noted that Madelon relied heavily on patent medication with ingredients that could explain some erratic behaviors.

The couple tried a brief reconciliation, and Madelon borrowed $6,000 to help Edward relaunch his career. Edward absconded with the money. He would return home later, sick with tuberculosis. Madelon nursed him for several months until he was so sick he had to be hospitalized. He died in the hospital, though not before he wrote to her and asked forgiveness.

If you liked this article, you might enjoy In the Gilded Age, Marriages Began in NY and Ended in RI, America’s Divorce Capital. This story was updated in 2022.

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In 1795 Dr. Elisha Phelps Takes a Wife – Or Two

In 1795, Abigail Wheelock looked out the window of her house in Hanover, N.H., to see Suky Eastman stepping out the back door of her neighbor’s house and into a carriage driven by Dr. Elisha Phelps.

The seemingly innocent scene would come back to shock New Englanders some 40 years later when it became a key element in a sensational libel trial.

Courting (illustration by Howard Pyle).

Suky, from a poor family in Rochester, Vt., worked for a tailor named Walton in Hanover. Walton’s wife asked Abigail Wheelock to talk with Suky about her relationship with Dr. Phelps. Abigail spoke with Suky and said it was improper for the doctor to be courting her because he was a married man.

Suky assured Abigail that she would do nothing improper. She knew Dr. Phelps was married and that she certainly would not try to marry him until or unless he had divorced his wife. Shortly thereafter, Suky left Hanover. Dr. Phelps paid for her to attend school in nearby Haverhill, and soon thereafter he set up shop in Windsor, Vt.

Elisha Phelps

Dr. Phelps’ road to Vermont was a bit of a crooked trail. In 1787, Phelps had married Molly Bartlett in Chatham, Conn. The union of two well-known Connecticut families soon produced children. But shortly after the marriage, Molly took ill, suffering a variety of ailments, including partial blindness.

Elisha Phelps hired Hopy Talbot of Pocatapaug Flats to care for Molly and manage the household. In lieu of payment, Hopy received room and board, clothing and an allowance for her needs. But Hopy was more than a caretaker. She was also Elisha’s mistress.

The arrangement didn’t last long. Molly learned the details of Hopy and Elisha’s relationship and forced Hopy to leave her job. Molly’s illnesses grew worse, however. With her blindness nearly complete, Elisha Phelps found a new housekeeper to take Hopy’s place. The new caretaker was a seamstress from Hanover, N.H. – Suky Eastman.

But Suky had told her friends that she had entertained Dr. Phelps only on condition that he planned to divorce his wife. Winslow Warren of West Fairlee, Vt., would recall that the courtship between the married doctor and Suky hardly went unnoticed.

“I heard some talk . . of riding the said Doctor Phelps on a rail, in consequence of his said intimacy with the said girl,” Warren said.

Marriage — Or Not?

But before anything happened, Suky left for school. Soon, Suky and Elisha relocated to Vermont. The arrival of the Phelps family stirred interest in the upper Connecticut River valley. Rumors persisted that Dr. Phelps had another family in Connecticut.

For the next 20 years, however, Dr. Phelps would practice as a doctor and operate a store, where he sold opium, among other things. And Suky lived with him as his wife. They raised a family, and he died in April of 1819.

Suky inherited Dr. Elisha Phelps’ estate and would go on to remarry. There the story remained until 1835 when the husband of one of Dr. Phelps children stepped forward to tell an outlandish story. He described how Elisha Phelps had arrived in Vermont and in the process scandalized people in New Hampshire, Vermont and Connecticut.

Roswell Field was a Vermont-born lawyer who had married Mary Almira Phelps, one of Elisha Phelps’ children by his marriage to Molly. Field filed suit to challenge Suky’s right to the property she had inherited nearly 20 years after Elisha’s death.

Town Pump

He published notice of the claim in the Bellows Falls Intelligencer. Publication of the challenge prompted a lawsuit for libel by Suky. The trial that followed put on display all the lurid details of the Phelps history.

Elisha and Molly’s children charged that Suky had not legally married Elisha Phelps and that he had never been legally divorced. They painted a picture of her as a woman of loose morals and suggested she had deliberately defrauded them of their inheritance. They even brought out rumors that Molly’s blindness had been brought on by a drug given to her by Elisha Phelps.

Suky, meanwhile, insisted that her marriage was legitimate. Field’s lawyers made a savage attack on her character, arguing that she had disgraced herself in pursuing a married man, bragging that she had convinced him to give her an education and make a lady of her by abandoning his wife.

“The immoral character of the intercourse between (Suky) and Dr. Phelps was directly proved … all who lived at Hanover well recollected her. Suky Eastman seemed to have been as well known on Hanover plain as the town pump,” he charged.

In the end, the jury found that Field had, indeed, libeled Suky. He had not proved his case. But in the process of the trial, the jury also concluded that Suky didn’t have much of a reputation to damage. Instead of the $10,000 she sought, the jury awarded her just one dollar.

Afterwards

Roswell Field had the record of the trial, held at Woodstock, Vt., published. In 1839, he left New England for Saint Louis. There the pugnacious lawyer would make a name for himself championing the cause of Dred Scott, in the landmark Dred Scott case that attempted to outlaw slavery.

Suky would slide back into relative anonymity after the trial. Meanwhile, Edward Elisha Phelps, Suky and Elisha’s son, would go on to become a prominent, respected physician in Hanover, N.H.

This story about Elisha Phelps was updated in 2022.

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Puritan Justice and the Case of Ruth Read (aka Rebekah Rogers)

At first glance, it’s hard to imagine William Read running afoul of Puritan justice. But his second wife, Ruth Read, caused his problems.

Read came to New England in 1635 as part of a group of colonists led by Rev. Joseph Hull. He first lived in Weymouth, Mass., and later Boston. William and his wife Susannah already had two children when they departed England. He was 28 and she was 29.

The son of a knight and a tailor by trade, Read was prosperous enough to bring a servant with him, and in America he was elected to the Massachusetts General Court. He also served as a constable and selectman in Weymouth, though he and Susannah moved to Boston in 1644.

In Boston, William established his tailor’s shop and the couple steadily continued having children until Susannah died in 1653 in Boston. Scarcely six months later, William remarried.

Ruth Read

William then married Ruth Crooke, a widow some 20 years younger than he. Ruth and William had 11 more children through 1669, when she returned to England ostensibly to visit family.

When Ruth Read returned in 1673, she had a surprise for William: A two-year-old baby. She told William she named the baby John Rogers, whom she had adopted from his father, also John Rogers. But the story soon began unraveling as witnesses came forward with a different story.

In England, people knew Ruth as Rebekah Rogers, wife of John Rogers (also sometimes known as Timothy). The two had married and presented young John as their son.

What’s more, not only was Rebekah actually Ruth, but John/Timothy wasn’t actually John. He was Augustin Lyndon, a Boston shipwright.

The case created a sensation as witnesses came forward.

The Trial

Job Laine testified that Ruth Read had confessed to him that she had lived with Lyndon as his wife, and that they had a child together. Roger Judson testified that he had witnessed Ruth and Augustin engaged in inappropriate behavior. And Jeremiah Cushing testified that Augustin Lyndon was, in fact, the same man as John Rogers.

To make matters worse, letters between Ruth and Augustin revealed the true nature of their relationship.

The court in Massachusetts issued its finding in March of 1673: Ruth and Augustin had married, despite the fact that both had already married. Ruth received a harsh sentence.

Whorish Carriage

Ruth Read being committed to prison brought to the bar to Answer for that having been about four years in England absent from her husband and bringing with her a child of about two years old affirming that she received at Branford England that Augustin Lyndon who changed his name to John Rogers and herself by the name of Rebekah Rogers as she also affirmed between whom several letters (as if man and wife) had passed between them which are on file, and that John Rogers told her the child’s name was John Rogers, and most impudently returning to these parts imposing said child on her husband William Read.

The court banished Ruth from Massachusetts, giving her given two months to leave. Should she return, she would receive further punishment:

The Court sentences the said Ruth Read that named herself Rebekah Rogers if found in this colony two months after this date that she stands in the market place on a stool for one hour with a paper on her breast with the inscription THIS I STAND FOR MY ADULTEROUS AND WHORISH CARRIAGE and that on lecture day next after she be severely whipped with thirty stripes.

There is no record of Lyndon being charged for his part in the masquerade. Lyndon’s wife Mary did seek and receive a divorce from him in 1679 on the grounds that he had deserted her, changed his name to John Rogers and married another woman.

As for Ruth/Rebekah, she left Massachusetts and moved to Connecticut. William went with her. In September of 1674 William petitioned the court asking that she be allowed to return, but the petition was rejected. Both apparently never returned to Massachusetts. William died in 1679 in New London, Conn.

In Connecticut, Ruth Read married again, this time to Robert Percy. She died there in 1681.

This story last updated in 2022.

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