Abigail as a Young Woman

Kristin Luce, August 2014

Beyond the questions of Alice Martin Bishop’s (AMB) parentage and origins (and that of her husbands), one question that haunts AMB researchers is what happened to Abigail Clarke — Alice’s oldest daughter — after her mother’s execution. Through all of our research, we haven’t found anyone who has been able to place Abigail after 1649, when the PCR notes that John Churchill was appointed to sell her father George Clarke’s house for her “use and good” (vol. 2).

This order, in fact, is the only reason we even know there was an Abigail. The only mother-child relationship for Alice that we have direct evidence for is that of Alice and Martha, which is specified in the PCR’s account of Martha’s murder and Alice’s conviction. As we’ve discussed before, no mention is made of Abigail or Damaris (Alice’s youngest daughter) by Rachel Ramsden during her two visits to the house that day, or by the coroners, who arrived later.

But Abigail is mentioned in the PCR the following year, in May 1649, as the daughter of George Clarke. John Churchill, of Plymouth, is ordered to dispose of “the house and land [that heretofore] was George Clarke’s for the use and good of Abigaell Clarke, daughter unto the said Gorg Clarke.” If we assume this is our George Clarke — and we haven’t yet found any other George Clarkes in Plymouth at that time — then we can confidently assume that this Abigail, who several months after Alice’s execution needs someone to provide for her, was a daughter from his marriage to Alice.

Someone, at some point, guessed Abigail’s birth date to be about 1641/1642, and that is the date used in all accounts of Abigail and AMB that we’ve found so far. It’s an interesting calculation, as it comes two years after George and Alice were married, a length of time longer than the average wait for a first child, but maybe there was an infant who died before Abigail was born.

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Team Pilgrim vs. Team Puritan

Pilgrims and Puritans are not interchangeable terms, nor is one a subset of another. They shared a common faith, the Anglican Church (aka Church of England) and, as colonial neighbors, often collaborated. Both believed in purifying and simplifying Anglican practices and that Scripture was the guiding source for a community’s moral codes. Both groups also advocated literacy, so that each person could read the Bible.

Pilgrims settled Plymouth Colony beginning in 1620 with the arrival of the Mayflower. They continued to settle Plymouth towns into the 1630s.

Puritans were the founding families of Massachusetts Bay Colony (Arriving 1630 onward, Boston, western Massachusetts and into Connecticut.).

Pilgrims insisted state and church should be separate, and were known as Separatists. To be clear, as an astute reader pointed out, the Pilgrims earned the name Separatists because they had dissociated with the church of England — not simply over their stance that church and state not bleed into one another’s activities.  At this point, we can’t go much further without clarifying a few things. Not all passengers on the Mayflower were religious dissidents. The passengers who left England to separate from the Church of England referred to themselves as Saints. The Saints referred to the other passengers as Strangers. For our purposes here, we’re referring to both groups as Pilgrims

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The Intimate Lives of Puritan Women

Erin Taylor, August 2014

We are always trying to make puritans of the Puritans.

Plymouth Colony, Eugene Stratton, 191.

Here is your spouse’s bed; creep into it, and in your arms of faith embrace him, bewail your weakness, your unworthiness, your diffidence, etcand you shall see he will turn to you.

Governor Bradford’s undated letter to “a faithful woman in her heaviness and trouble.” 

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