Shropshire England Archives - New England Historical Society

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/25709911@N08/6809987125, 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/25709911@N08/6809950259, 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.

For centuries, historians thought the four young More children who arrived on the Mayflower were homeless orphans. Not until 1959 did a document surface that revealed the truth. They were the Mayflower love children, landed gentry descended from King Edward III and banished by their cuckolded father.

What kind of person tears four little children from their mother and puts them in the hands of strangers? Then sends them on a difficult, dangerous 3,000-mile voyage, to a likely death in a forbidding wilderness? That person even had them indentured as servants – including little four-year-old Mary.

The Mayflower

The short answer is an angry, bitter, self-righteous and well-connected Puritan. Samuel More, after banishing his children, would later cause the deaths of others in his charge.

The Mayflower Love Children

The story begins with Katherine More, the daughter of Jasper More, a Shropshire bailiff who built Larden Hall with his own hands.

Jane Small, Katherine More’s grandmother

Larden Hall sat on 1,000 acres of land, but Jasper More had no male heirs to inherit his property. His sons had died, and English law prohibited women from inheriting property. Jasper’s cousin, Richard More, was a respected parliamentarian who also owned an estate, Linley, in Shropshire, close to the Welsh border. And Richard had an unmarried son.

So Jasper and Richard made an arrangement. Katherine, 25, would marry Richard’s 17-year-old son, Samuel. Richard also paid Jasper 600 pounds for Larden Hall. Thus the estates would remain in More family hands.

But Katharine already had a partner closer to her own age, a yeoman farmer at Larden Hall named Jacob Blakeway. They later claimed they had a betrothal agreement.

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

But on February 4, 1610 (O.S.), Katherine More married Samuel More. Over the next six years they had four children: Elinor, or Ellen, baptized on May 24, 1612; Jasper, baptized Aug. 8, 1613; Richard, baptized Nov. 13,1614; and Mary, baptized April 16, 1616.

Court Battles

Samuel spent a great deal of time in London as secretary to Lord Edward Zouche, a family friend. Zouche was a diplomat and an investor with the Virginia Company. While Samuel was away, Katherine and Jacob did play—or so Samuel concluded. By 1616, he decided the More children looked a lot more like Jacob Blakeway than they looked like him. He accused Katherine of adultery.

Lord Edward Zouche

Katherine didn’t deny the accusation. She said Jacob Blakeway was her husband. She then tried to get an annulment from Samuel. But unfortunately for Katherine, the witnesses to their betrothal contract had died. Had they survived and testified, the Blakeway family could have lived happily ever after.

Custody Fight

Samuel, with his father’s help, went to court to cut the four children out of his will. Then he hatched a plan to get rid of them.

First, he sent the children to live with a tenant on his estate, out of the reach of their mother. Katherine tried and tried to get them back. She discovered the tenants’ cottage where Samuel had stashed them and went there to see them. According to court documents, she then tried to take them away. “[I]n a hail of murderous oaths, [she] did teare the clothes from their backes,” the record stated. However, she failed.

Between December 1619 and July 8, 1620, Katherine and Samuel took their custody battle to court 12 times. Unfortunately for Katherine, the ultimate decision rested with the Privy Council – and Samuel’s friend and employer, Lord Zouche, served as a privy counselor. And so, unsurprisingly, the Privy Council denied Katherine’s final appeal on July 8, 1620.

Human Trafficking

When Katherine’s appeal failed, Samuel had a cousin take the four little children to London. From there they’d be delivered to the group of Puritans who intended to establish a colony in the New World. Not coincidentally, Zouche had invested £100 in the Virginia Company, which financed the Mayflower’s voyage to North America.

In London, the More children stayed with the disreputable Thomas Weston, a merchant who dealt with the Pilgrims. Someone described him as “eager to reap quick profits from the New World, and not very scrupulous about the means.”

Weston took the children to Philemon Powell, later convicted as a smuggler. Powell delivered them to the Pilgrims’ agents in London. They were then parceled out as indentured servants. Elinor, the oldest at eight, went to Edward Weston. Jasper, seven, belonged to John Carver, the first governor of Plymouth. Richard, six, and Mary, four, went to the household of William Brewster, the Pilgrims’ spiritual leader.

Pilgrims John Carver, William Bradford and Miles Standish at prayer during their voyage to North America. 1844 painting by Robert Walter Weir.

Unbeknownst to their mother, the Mayflower love children set sail on Sept. 16, 1620. To some, it seemed like a death sentence.

To Samuel, it seemed the right thing to do to what he called “a spurious brood.” He justified his cruelty by claiming “great blotts and blemishes may fall upon them” at home.

Death Sentence

The voyage to the New World took a miserable nine-and-a-half weeks. The Mayflower, about 80 feet long, was grossly overcrowded with 102 passengers and 30 crew, along with pigs and chickens. The passengers subsisted on hardtack, salt pork, pickles, dried meat, oatmeal and beer—even the children.

On good days, the passengers could leave the cramped, fetid cabins below to get fresh air on deck. But October brought few good days, as North Atlantic storms tossed the little ship. Seasickness plagued the passengers, and the stench of vomit joined the stinking slop buckets below deck.

Cabin of the Mayflower II.

The Mayflower anchored in Provincetown Harbor on Nov. 11, 1620. All the passengers had survived, except for William Butten, a servant who died three days before the Pilgrims sighted land.

But then others began to perish. It’s unclear exactly when the Mayflower love children began to succumb. Seven-year-old Jasper More probably died on Dec. 16 in Provincetown Harbor. Three others died during the weeks that the Mayflower lay anchored off Cape Cod.

Then in the terrible winter that followed, half the Mayflower voyagers perished. Scurvy had weakened many of them. That and other diseases carried them off, according to William Bradford.

Jasper’s older sister Elinor died in February. Mary, the youngest, died that winter as well, sometime before her fifth birthday.

Richard was the only one of the Mayflower love children to survive. He lived to a ripe old age, and his colorful life story is told in another post.

Why Those Two Girls?

Martyn Whittock, in Mayflower Lives, points out that 75 percent of the women, 36 percent of the boys and half the men died in Plymouth that winter. He notes that only two girls perished: Elinor and Mary, love children.

“That seems just too coincidental,” Whittock wrote. “One has a feeling that maybe, just maybe, one of the main reasons why Ellen and Mary More died was that they were not loved.”

Their mother in far-away England did love them. In 1622, Katherine More went to court again to find out what happened to her children. There she found out the terrible truth. Or at least part of it. She had no way of knowing that three of her children had died.

Of little Mary More, Whittock wrote,

[I]n the terrible upheavals and suffering that first disrupted, and then ended, the life of such a little girl we can see something of how a little innocent could get crushed between the turning iron wheels of legal and historical events; the determined actions of adults; and the cold ambitions of others.

Aftermath

In 1625, Samuel More married again. The next year, though, he had to get a royal pardon because, technically, he still had a living wife—Katherine.

The keep at Hopton Castle.

After that, Katherine More and Jacob Blakeway disappear from the historical record.

Samuel More, however, reappears again causing the death of others. During the English Civil War, Samuel More held Hopton Castle for the Parliamentarians. A Royalist force 500 strong stormed the castle, held by only 30 men. The Royalists offered to let the garrison surrender, but More refused. The Royalists massacred the Parliamentarians—all except Samuel More.

Anthony Wagner

In 1959, Jasper More went looking in his attic for old documents. His friend, genealogist Anthony Wagner, had suggested the search. More was a descendent of Richard More, the only Mayflower love child to survive to adulthood. More found the document of the 1622 court proceedings that tells the tragic tale of the Mayflower love children. Historians had their answer.

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With thanks to Mayflower Lives: Pilgrims in a New World and the Early American Experience by Martyn Whittock.

Images: Mayflower cabin By Kenneth C. Zirkel – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=57283684. Hopton Castle By Ostrich, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4360823. Mayflower plaque By Phil Revel, Shipton, Shropshire – https://www.flickr.com/photos/25709911@N08/6809987125, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18269228. This story was updated in 2022.

Shropshire England

Richard More, The Pilgrim Saint Who Sinned a Lot