Bridgett

Might Bridgett have looked like this interpreter at the Plimoth-Patuxet Museum? Perhaps so. What a coincidence!

You might think that sharing a couch with a descendant of the man who besmirched our earliest Travis mom’s reputation would be an awkward experience. 

Not in the least. 

“So, what do you think happened?” I asked Bethany Groff Dorau, my companion on the couch.

“Based on what I see in the records, I don’t think there was enough proof to convict them of fornication,” Bethany replied. “There wasn’t an eyewitness or a confession. But it does seem like there was an affair.”

Bethany runs the Museum of Old Newbury in Newburyport, Massachusetts, an upscale seacoast town north of Boston. Bridgett Travers, our ancestor and the mom in question, was an early settler of old Newbury. So was John Emery, Bethany’s ancestor and the rogue in question. Bethany is a robust figure with graying hair, a nose ring, and tattoos on both arms. A down-to-earth, tell-it-like-it-is historian, she has a gift for describing long-ago people, like John Emery, in a way that brings them to life.

“I picture him like this aging hippie, you know?” she said, speaking of Emery in his later years. “This aging Deadhead that just likes to have people party at his house.” You don’t often hear Puritans described as hippies, especially by a museum director who resembles a hippie herself. “An aging Deadhead that invested in Apple stock,” she added. “A wealthy guy with power and influence, so he’s not as vulnerable as a lot of other people.”

To my right as we talked stood two thin-waisted mannequins wearing lacy wedding dresses from the nineteenth century. To my left, on the couch, sat Bethany, a student of women’s history and Puritan life. (1) Once a rich merchant’s mansion, the museum over which she presides is packed with rich people’s things. We sat in the front parlor, where the merchant and his successors entertained their guests. The last of them lived 100 years, and her larger-than-life portrait dominates the room. “This museum doesn’t reflect you,” I said to Bethany after we had talked for a while. She laughed. “No,” she said. “It will, though.” I don’t doubt her. She carries herself with an easy, welcoming  confidence that John Emery’s contemporaries might have seen in him.

We know very little about Bridgett. Even her maiden name remains a mystery, as does when, how, or why she came to New England. She might have been a Fitts; a Robert Fitts and his sister, named Bridgett, lived in next-door Salisbury. The Travis and the Fitts family genealogies say that’s her, but the definitive genealogy of all early Puritans finds the evidence inconclusive. So we can know her only as Bridgett, at least until she steps into colonial records as the wife of Henry Travers and the mother of his two children. In her time, this was her essential identity. In public even John Emery would have called her Goody Travers, short for good wife.

Henry is something of a mystery too. The family genealogist identified several strands of Traverses in England from which Henry might have descended, but he couldn’t tie him conclusively to any of them. Before coming here he probably lived in the county of Wiltshire, England, where he became a follower of a Puritan leader, the Rev. Thomas Parker. (2) Henry was among thirty-eight men, including Parker, who were required to take an oath of allegiance to the king before the Mary and John, the ship that would carry them to New England, could set sail. They arrived in May of 1634 in Boston Harbor, and spent their first year in what’s now Ipswich, near the coast north of the city. The next spring they won permission to establish a new community, Newbury, ten miles up the coast along the shore of what’s now called the Parker River. A bigger river with direct access to the sea, the Merrimack, ran just four miles farther north—but Henry and his fellow settlers were farmers, not merchants or sailors, and they built their first village right where they landed, close by an extensive, tidal salt marsh that offered a ready-made source of feed for their livestock. Henry’s house stood just one door down from John Emery’s, across from the village green and close enough to the river to savor the tang of salt air and the luscious smell of mud flats at low tide, as I did on my explorations. (3) Newbury was a Puritan community, centered around the meeting house on the green at which the Reverend Parker presided every Sunday.

I don’t know how and when Henry and Bridgett Travers met, but it didn’t take long. Their first child, Sarah, arrived in 1636. By 1642, Newbury had grown to the point that its residents decided to move the center of town a few miles inland, to what’s called the Upper Green. There Henry built a new house at a fork in the road just north of the green, now occupied by a gas station. The family’s second child, James, from whom we’re descended, was born in 1645—the year before Bridgett found herself in court, accused of infidelity. (4)

We can’t really know what transpired between John Emery and Bridgett, or exactly where, or precisely when. The record of the Essex Quarterly Court’s session of September 1646 is spare and only the trial’s outcome is documented. A multitude of matters crowded the docket. The scribe recorded a series of births, deaths, wills, and estate inventories. Grand jurors summoned colonists to answer charges at a future session in a series of cases, often related to alcohol: selling wine without a license, “being disguised with drink on the Sabbath day,” being “disguised with drink and … swearing very profanely,” and engaging in a fight in someone’s house that required the constable’s attention. Three people stood accused of harvesting peas on the Sabbath, while Henry Pease of Marblehead swore under oath that he heard another man call Goodwife James a witch, that the man believed she could take the form of a cat, and that his garden did not prosper because she lived nearby. Hana Smith, accused of stealing a silk girdle and a pair of cotton gloves, then lying about her crime, was sentenced to sit in the stocks, surely a humiliating experience.

Finally, toward what appears to be the end of the session, came John Emery and Bridgett’s turn. The court made no record of their testimony. The judges found Emery found guilty of “miscarriage with the wife of Henry Travers,” a term used to characterize sexual misconduct that falls somewhere between “unchaste words” and “ravish by force” in the list of one hundred and nine terms that one doctoral student cited in her dissertation on such offenses in Puritan New England. Bridgett was convicted of a “misdemeanor,” which didn’t make the list of carnal offenses. Bridgett’s punishment, a fine of ten shillings, amounted to a sixth of Emery’s: a fine of three pounds. The judges also gave Emery the option of a public whipping; I’m going to guess he paid the fine. In addition, he was required to pay a witness fee to Christopher Bartlett, the man who testified against them, presumably to compensate him for the time he spent in court. 

“That had to hurt,” Bethany said. (5)

Finally, the court issued what amounted to a seventeenth-century restraining order. By decree of the judges who heard the case, Emery was bound “to good behavior and not to frequent the company of the wife of Henry Traverse” again. 

I think it’s a remarkable finding, given that the judges might have been disposed to come down harder on the man than the woman in what was a patriarchal society. Although we can’t know what the witness, Christopher Bartlett, said, or what Emery or Bridgett offered in their own defense, it’s clear how the judges saw the situation. Bethany reads the record the same way I do. “To me that would say that he was more the aggressor,” she said. “It’s totally in keeping with his personality too.”

If what transpired between Bridgett and Emery was a simple matter of flirtation, even a squeeze of the hand, they wouldn’t have landed in court. “That would have happened all the time,” Bethany said. People being people, adultery did too. In stopping short of an adultery conviction, the outcome of Bridgett’s trial is typical. “There are so many cases where a couple is accused and everybody comes into court and testifies about who’s chasing whom,” Bethany said. “And often there’s not a smoking gun witness to actual fornication. No pregnancy, no outraged spouse. So it’s basically like, there’s enough to suspect that something is going on here, and you need to leave each other alone.”

I find the prevalence of reasonable judgment rather than Old Testament severity remarkable too. It’s very much at odds with the reputation from which Puritans suffer, shaped as it is by Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1850 novel of Puritan adultery, The Scarlet Letter, and the horrifying anomaly, decades after Bridgett’s time, of the Salem witch trials. Bethany attributes the pragmatism to the reality of living in a frontier community.

“When the court is at its best with women, children, servants, even the enslaved, it’s trying to figure out what’s best for the community,” she said. “They obviously wanted everybody to stay in line. But ultimately I think they had an understanding of human nature.” There’s a reason beyond research that Bethany speaks with conviction about such matters: she was raised in a religious commune herself, and didn’t move to the family’s ancestral home in Newbury until she was ten. As a child she lived with what she called the lingering principles of the Puritan church. “The one thing that has always been interesting to me about that,” she said, “is that so many things that look like they have a religious or a personal spiritual cause, even if they’re explained as that, have a practical reason. That’s my own bias.”

As a believer in marriage and happy ever-after, I wish that I could say Bridgett and Henry succeeded in putting the John Emery episode behind them. (6) Alas, in 1648, Henry wrote his will, left his family, and went to sea. Presumably he sailed back to England. He never returned, and Bridgett heard of him—not from him, but of him, in some secondhand report—only once again, two years later. If he told her his purpose, she didn’t record it. Bethany, as is her way, suggested that Henry’s reason might have been as practical as settling his parents’ estate. But what drew many colonists home again was the outbreak of a series of English civil wars in 1642, bringing an abrupt end to the Great Migration. Those in the reverse migration that followed joined in the fight to overthrow the king and establish their homeland as a Puritan state, a quest in which they succeeded in 1649.

Whatever his reasons, Henry opened his will with a grim acknowledgment of the risks: “I Henrie Travers of Newbury, having occasion to go to Sea and know not whether I shall live to Come againe, I do by this present declare my last will and Testament …”

Henry’s decision to leave his wife and two children behind put Bridgett in a tenuous position. In my time we’d call her a single mom. What’s more, Henry left his home and land to his son, James, who was three, to be inherited when he turned twelve. To Bridgett, he willed their bed (his most valuable possession), a bed cover, “a kittl and a Scillet and my wheat and barly and my Swine and my debts that is owing to me,” along with anything else he hadn’t specifically willed to James or Sarah, his firstborn. Henry also forbade Bridgett from altering the property without the consent of the men he named to oversee his wishes. Willing her any money he was due proved a hollow gesture. When he sailed for England, Henry stood five pounds in debt, forcing his wife to play from behind. Leaving their house to his son was not unusual, at least in principle. In Puritan times and for many years after, expectations were clear: the eldest son inherited the farm. Typically, a widow was entitled to a third of the estate’s remaining value, with the rest divided among the younger children.

In 1655, two years before James would inherit the family property, Bridgett petitioned the same court that had ruled on her affair for the right to “enjoy her house and land” until her son turned twenty-one. She struck a tone both resentful—she called her inheritance “meane”—and proud: “The honored Court may be pleased to understand that since my husband went away I have paid the five pounds and laid out about twenty more for building … and breaking up the land, and also my daughter being now marryed I have payed to her two heifers.” 

There’s no record of the court’s response to Bridgett’s petition, but in the end, justice was served. In September 1659, the judges took up Henry’s estate, based on the assumption that he was dead and guided by an inventory of what was still considered his property. Its total value: ninety-two pounds, seventeen shillings, and six pence. The bed Henry had willed Bridgett along with a bolster and two pillows were worth two pounds. The house and the land Henry had willed to his son were worth eighty. But the court chose not to follow Henry’s will—as it turned out, he had not recorded it—and instead named Bridgett the administrator of the estate. The court awarded Sarah twelve pounds beyond the three pounds she had already received from her mother, perhaps the value of her wedding heifers, and James got thirty pounds. These awards were secured by the value of the land. The rest of the estate, about fifty pounds in value, went to Bridgett.

By this time Sarah was about twenty-three, James fourteen, and Bridgett was no longer a single mom. In May of the same year, 1659, she married Richard Window of Gloucester. Perhaps her remarriage influenced the judges’ decision; it’s impossible to know. Bridgett also outlived her second husband, who died seven years after they married. The value of his estate, which included the money Bridgett brought into the marriage, was 212 pounds. Window gave Bridgett an allowance of 30 shillings and awarded the rest of his estate to his children, leaving her to return to court once again, arguing for more. (7) The judges awarded her a cow. Bridgett apparently lived out her final years in the home of her daughter, Sarah. Her challenging life came to its end with her death in 1673.

The choices and circumstances Bridgett faced, like Jonathan’s, were to a large extent shaped by her time. A woman's rights were subordinate to those of her husband and effectively vanished once married. “The woman’s own choice makes … a man her husband,” wrote John Winthrop, an early colony leader and a lawyer by training. “Yet being so chosen, he is her lord, and she is to be subject to him, yet in a way of liberty, not of bondage; and a true wife accounts her subjection her hour and freedom.” Much has changed—but that change has come slowly. Women didn’t win the right to vote in this country until 1920, nearly 250 years after Bridgett died, and even today women are typically paid less than men for doing the same work. But of course, Bridgett still made her own choices, just as I have. Among them, possibly, was cheating on her husband. Her later success in providing for her children and growing the estate suggests capabilities that would have gone untapped if Henry hadn’t left her. I admire her for that.

Whether Bridgett regretted her first marriage or her dalliance with John Emery, however far it went, we can’t know. Certainly, I’ve made mistakes in life, and I’ll bet you do too. As humans we are—so far, anyway—inescapably flawed. But in Puritan times especially, that didn’t stop many people from striving for something better, our ancestors among them.

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Footnotes

1. Bethany is also the author of a compelling blog on the museum website and A Brief History of Old Newbury, which is just that: a succinct, readable, and useful history on which I’ve relied. [Jump back]

2. Wiltshire is a county in southern England west of London. The mysterious, ancient religious site of Stonehenge lies within it. [Jump back]

3. Despite centuries of development along the Massachusetts coast, the salt marsh continues to define the shoreline of the river where Henry and his neighbors first settled. The Parker and Merrimack rivers bound a finger of land that points toward the Atlantic. Newburyport, established later along the Merrimack, retains the prosperous luster of its days as a center of world trade, while Newbury still features the open fields of a farming community, now growing subdivisions along with crops. [Jump back]

4. The year before. Hmmmm. Not going there. [Jump back]

5. If Emery was any sort of gentleman, he’d have paid Bridgett’s fine too. I can’t imagine Henry doing it. [Jump back]

6. John Emery certainly did—and he continued in his roguish ways, too. Admirably so, in at least one respect. In the 1650s, when Quaker missionaries arrived in New England, they were quickly and vigorously persecuted. Four were actually hanged in Boston. That didn’t stop Emery from hosting Quakers overnight at his house, more than once. On one occasion, when Parker and a group of angry followers showed up to demand that the Quakers be turned out, Emery and his wife told them—in Bethany’s words—to “beat feet down the street.” Parker did. But Emery also liked to party, and that never changed. In his later years, he came to depend on a British doctor for treatments that might have involved opium. He hosted the doctor at his home too—even after his guest took off his clothes and climbed into bed with a flirtatious young woman whose husband had left her in Emery’s care. [Jump back]

7. There are 20 shillings in a pound, so each year’s allowance amounted to less than 1 percent of the estate’s value. [Jump back]