Bad Puritans: Samuel Gorton, Robert Coles, and the Founding of Rhode Island (Part 2)

A painting by artist Jean Blackburn depicting the town of Providence in about 1650.

In my last post, I wrote about my 9th great-grandfather Samuel Gorton, the religious leader and firebrand who founded Warwick, Rhode Island. While Gorton butted heads with nearly everyone he encountered, he was secure in his faith, his education, and in his commitment to a high moral standard. None of this can be said for my 9th great-grandfather Robert Coles. Robert was also a founding father of Rhode Island, and he was the father-in-law of Samuel Gorton's daughter Mahashalalhasbaz, but his route to Rhode Island took a very different path.

Robert Coles was born about 1605 in Sudbury, Suffolk, England. Nothing is known of his early years. His parents have not been conclusively identified, nor is there any indication of what Robert's trade may have been in England. In about 1629, Robert married a woman named Mary whose surname is unknown. In 1630, they emigrated to the British colonies in America. The place Robert lived undoubtedly influenced his decision to leave England.

Sudbury, England was a hotbed of Puritan sentiment during much of the 17th century. It was among the towns labelled "notorious wasps' nests of dissent." During the decade of the 1630s, many Sudbury families departed for the Massachusetts Bay Colony. [Source: Great Migration Study Project, Great Migration Begins: Immigrants to N.E. 1620-1633, Vols I-III.]

One of these Puritan areas was the Stour River Valley, on the border between Essex and Suffolk. This valley, where John Winthrop lived, became known as a godly kingdom. John Cotton, who became vicar of St. Botolph’s parish in Boston in 1612, also advanced a Puritan agenda. His preaching drew many godly men and women (likely including Anne Hutchinson) from surrounding towns to hear him preach. [Source: Partnership of Historic Bostons]

Sudbury's location, northeast of London, is shown with a red pin

John Winthrop, a leader in the Puritan movement, and the future first Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, had a lot of influence in Suffolk. While the details of their association are not known, Robert Coles apparently subscribed to Winthrop's doctrine and his growing belief that Puritans must physically separate themselves from the seemingly corrupt Church of England.

As a young man, Winthrop became convinced that England was in trouble: Inflation coupled with population growth had led men to pursue wealth at the cost of their souls. Efforts to reform the Church of England had faltered. Zealous bishops hounded religious dissenters who resisted obeying the rules. Puritans like Winthrop were persecuted. As he worried about his future, Winthrop became intrigued by a new venture, the Massachusetts Bay Colony, a commercial enterprise that offered the chance for religious freedom in the New World.

Winthrop struggled with the decision to abandon his homeland. He was keenly aware that hardships had claimed the lives of half the Pilgrims who had settled in Plymouth 10 years earlier. He had no illusions about the difficulties that lay ahead -- a hostile climate, bad food, sickness and isolation. When he survived a bad accident with his horse, he took this as a divine signal: God was calling him to create a holy community in the wilderness of New England. [Source: PBS]

Portrait of John Winthrop by an unknown artist

Winthrop signed on with the Massachusetts Bay Company in 1629 and spent the following year encouraging others to join him in emigrating to the new colonies. In 1630, he led a group of eleven ships that sailed from Yarmouth to Salem, the first five of which departed on April 8, and the rest in May. This group, called the Winthrop Fleet, included my 9th great-grandfather Robert Coles. After arriving at Salem in 1630, Robert and his wife Mary moved on to Roxbury, Massachusetts, where their first child, John Coles was born.

An illustration depicting the Winthrop Fleet arriving in Boston Harbor

Coles arrived in New England in the summer of 1630 as a passenger in the Winthrop Fleet, and was among the first settlers of the town of Roxbury. In October of that year he petitioned the Massachusetts Bay Colony's General Court in Boston to become a freeman and in 1631 he took the freeman's oath. He was a founding member of the First Church of Roxbury, which was a non-separating Congregationalist church established in 1631, and in 1632 he was one of two townsmen elected to represent Roxbury in the General Court. During his term, Massachusetts Bay became the first colony to adopt formal arbitration laws.

In 1633, Coles was in the first company, led by John Winthrop the Younger, that went to Agawam where he was granted a large home lot on the Ipswich River at present-day East and Cogswell Streets and 200 acres—a property now called Greenwood Farm—on the neck of land north of town. He moved to Salem in 1635 where he received a home lot in town and 300 acres of farmland south of Felton Hill "in the place where his cattle are by Brooksby. [Source: Wikipedia]

Robert and Mary had three children together:

1. John Coles (b. 1630; d. 1676; m. Ann)
2. Deliverance Coles (b. 1632; d. 1663; m. Richard Townsend)
3. Ann Coles (b. 1634; d. 1695; m. Henry Townsend)

If you were to just read the details above, it would be easy to assume Robert was a typical Puritan, involved in the work of settling new communities, filling civic and religious leadership roles, and parenting young children. However, the court records of the time tell a different story. Robert Coles was a notorious drunk, and between 1631 and 1634, his behavior escalated to the point that it placed him firmly outside the confines of what was acceptable to the Puritans. The Puritans, for all their rigidity and righteousness, were not inherently opposed to alcohol. The drinking of alcohol and its use for medicinal purposes were a commonplace part of early colonial life. What was unacceptable was public drunkenness and drinking on the Sabbath when one was meant to be in church. We don't know if Robert had a problem with alcohol prior to his arrival in New England, but once there, his tendencies landed him in hot water immediately.

In 1631, Coles was fined five marks (about £3 then and US$850 in 2022) for drunkenness aboard the Friendship and at Winnissimet, now Chelsea. The Friendship was carrying two hogsheads (more than 120 gallons) of flavored mead called metheglin. Coles's fellow carousers—who were not pious Puritans—included Edward Gibbons, a former polytheist "who chose rather to Dance about a May pole...than to hear a good Sermon" and Samuel Maverick, a wealthy Anglican "very ready to entertain strangers." In 1632, Coles was again fined for drunkenness, this time in Charlestown. In addition to his fine of £1 he was required to appear before the General Court and the Court of Assistants to publicly confess.

Coles was charged a third time for drunkenness in 1633, along with fellow settler John Shatswell, at Agawam. Shatswell was fined £2, but Coles was fined £10 (about US$2900 in 2022) for multiple offenses: drunkenness, encouraging Shatswell's wife to drink, and "intiseing her to incontinency and other misdemeanor." Coles was also sentenced "to stand with a whte sheete of pap on his back wherein a drunkard shalbe written in great letters, & stand therewith soe longe as the Court thinks meete...." [Source: Wikipedia] 

The Puritans were big fans of public punishment. They used shame as a tool to keep their communities in line. What was more shameful than being made to stand in a town square and be disciplined and chastised in front of ones neighbors? Puritan courts sentenced offenders to be restrained in bilboes, "a long heavy bolt or bar of iron having two sliding shackles, something like handcuffs, and a lock. In these shackles were thrust the legs of offenders or criminals, who were then locked in with a padlock. Sometimes a chain at one end of the bilboes attached both bilboes and prisoner to the floor or wall." [Source: Alice Morse Earle, "Curious Punishments of Bygone Days"]. Those convicted of crimes might be publicly whipped, branded, or made to stand in a visible place with a cleft stick secured to their tongue. Colonial law enforcers also liked to hang signs on sinners advertising their crimes, and then make them stand in town squares for some length of time wearing their signs. When that castigation proved insufficient, words or letters might be sewn onto their clothes, and the guilty party forced to wear it for a longer period. There are a number of instances of this kind of punishment in colonial records, including the following:

• In 1636, William Bacon was sentenced to stand in stocks wearing a large letter "D" for drunkenness.

• In 1639, Margaret Henderson of Boston was fined and sentenced to stand in the town center wearing a paper that declared her “ill behavior.”

• In 1656, a woman from Taunton and Plymouth was whipped, fined, and sentenced to wear a red "B" on her clothing to indicate the crime of blasphemy.

• In 1673, Widow Bradley of New London was sentenced to wear a paper pinned to her cap to advertise her shame.

• In the 1600s, a Massachusetts court legislated that if someone twice interrupted a preacher during worship, they had to pay a fine of five pounds and stand on a 4-foot block wearing a sign that read, ‘WANTON GOSPELLER.’

One of the most famous of these punishments was the one given to my 9th great-grandfather Robert Coles. After many previous convictions, and apparently no change in his behavior, in 1634, a court in Roxbury delivered a severe verdict.

The court orders that Coles, for drunkenness by him committed at Roxbury shall be disfranchized, weare about his necke & soe to hange upon his outward garment a D made of redd clothe & sett upon white, to contynue this for a yeare & not to leave it off at any tyme when hee comes amongst company.... [Source: Records of the Court of Assistants of the colony of the Massachusetts Bay, 1630–1692. Vol. 2. Boston: Suffolk County]

An illustration showing various forms of Puritan punishment, which includes a man, perhaps Robert Cole, wearing a scarlet "D" [source]

Robert was stripped of his right to vote, and for a year, he had to wear a large red "D" sewn onto a white background on his clothes, as a symbol of his persistent drunkenness. If this sounds familiar, it is because this punishment was an inspiration for Nathaniel Hawthorne's famous novel, The Scarlet Letter. Hawthorne based the sanctions imposed upon his heroine, Hester Prynne, on several historical sources, including that of an English man named William Prynne, whose face was branded with the letters "S" and "L" after he criticized an archbishop. In The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne gave Hester a sentence more like those handed down in colonial America, where convicts were made to wear signs, and specifically the one given to Robert Coles, who was sentenced to wear a scarlet letter emblazoned on his clothes.

From 1634 to 1635, Robert wore his scarlet "D." After living for some time in Roxbury and Agawam (later Ipswich), in 1635 Robert took up residence in Salem. In December 1635, Robert was granted 300 acres of land just west of central Salem. With his holdings across three Massachusetts communities, Robert now owned a considerable amount of land. He made enough money farming those lands and with milling operations that he prospered despite his many convictions.

Another notable resident in Salem in 1635 was Roger Williams. Williams would shortly become one of the founding fathers of Rhode Island, as discussed in my previous post about Samuel Gorton. Williams believed in the separation of church and state, something the Puritans vehemently opposed. Their whole raison d'être in the colonies was to create a pure society based on their religious beliefs, and they considered Williams' teachings dangerous and heretical. Williams was forced out of Salem during a blizzard in 1636, and he fled southward, establishing the Providence Plantation in Spring of that year. It is not known whether Williams and Coles interacted during their overlapping time in Salem, or whether Coles was, at that time, drawn to Williams' religious persuasions, but it seems likely. Robert Coles followed Roger Williams to Providence in 1637.

An illustration depicting Roger Williams welcoming settlers to Providence

Between his final known conviction in 1634, and his departure for Providence in 1637, life was rocky for Robert Coles. He may have stopped drinking to excess, for he was not in court on such charges after 1634. However, it seems that his wife, Mary, may have followed in his footsteps. In 1634, Robert and Mary were excommunicated from their church in Roxbury, and the parish noted in its records that Mary "did too much favor his ways, yet not as to incur any just blame, she lived an aflicted life, by reason of his vnsetlednesse [unsettledness] & removing fro place to place." [Source: Boston Registry Department (1884). Records relating to the early history of Boston. Vol. 6]. It is not clear when Mary died, but it was likely sometime between her daughter Ann's birth in 1634 and Robert's move to Salem in 1635. Mary would have been young at the time of her death, probably in her late 20s. She left behind three children under the age of five.

In about 1637, before departing Salem for Providence, Robert married again. His second wife, Mary Hawxhurst, was the daughter of Sampson Hawxhurst, the vicar of Nuneaton in Warwickshire, England, and his wife Elizabeth. Mary also emigrated to the colonies with the Winthrop Fleet in 1630, traveling with her brother, Christopher Hawxhurst. Robert and Mary had five children together.

1. Daniel Coles (b. 1637; d. 1692; m. Mahahshalalhasbaz Gorton)
2. Elizabeth Coles (b. 1639; m. John Townsend)
3. Nathaniel Coles (b. 1642; d. 1678, m. (1) Martha Jackson (2) Deborah Wright)
4. Sarah Coles (b. 1646; d. 1692; m. Thomas Townsend)
5. Robert Coles (b. 1648; d. 1715; m. Mercy Wright)

You may notice that all four of Robert Coles' daughters married men with the surname Townsend. Three of these men, John, Henry, and Richard Townsend, were known to be brothers. However, Thomas Townsend, who married Sarah Coles, is not believed to be closely related to them. 

You may also notice that Robert's two youngest sons married women with the surname Wright. Deborah and Mercy Wright were sisters, the daughters of Nicholas Wright and his wife Ann. Their brother, John Wright, married Mary Townsend, the daughter of Ann Coles. So, three Townsend siblings married three Coles siblings, and three Wright siblings married two Coles siblings and a child of a sibling.

Daniel Coles was one of the two Coles siblings who did not marry a Wright or a Townsend. He married Mahahshalalhasbaz Gorton, daughter of Samuel Gorton. I descend from their son Samuel Coles. However, I also descend from Daniel's sister Ann Coles, via her daughter, Susannah Townsend. This means Robert Coles is my 9th great-grandfather on two different lines of my family tree.

A chart showing how I descend from my 9th great-grandfathers, Robert Coles and Samuel Gorton,
ending with my second great-grandfather, John Thorne Griffin.

In 1637, Robert left Salem and followed Roger Williams to Providence. He brought with him his wife, Mary, and his four small children. The youngest, Daniel, was born not long before the move. 

In 1638, Robert was recorded as a founding member of the church in Providence, the first Baptist church in the colonies. The minister, Ezekiel Holliman, baptized Roger Williams, Robert Coles, and about a dozen other men at the first gathering of church members. In this small group of men was William Carpenter, who is also my 9th great-grandfather on a different (but connected) family line.

William Carpenter's great-grandson, Timothy Carpenter, married Phebe Coles,
great-granddaughter of Robert Coles.

Robert Coles was one of the first 13 settlers of Providence.

Each of the original proprietors received a narrow, five- or six-acre, river-front home lot that stretched eastward from Towne Street, now Main Street, to "a highway," now Hope Street in present-day College Hill, Providence, and they received shares of upland and meadow on the south side of town. Robert Coles's home lot was on the Great Salt Cove between the lots of Thomas Olney and William Carpenter and along the ancient "highway" called the Wampanoag trail, now Meeting Street. The land granted to him south of town laid east of Mashapaug Pond. [Source: Wikipedia]

The plan showing the original division of home lots in Providence.
Robert Coles' lot is 20th from the top, right next to William Carpenter.

In fall of 1638, Robert also built a home on the Pawtuxet River in what is now Pawtuxet Village. In 1640, he signed the Plantation Agreement at Providence, an accord that amended the 1637 Providence Agreement. This agreement was one of the first compacts regarding governance in the colonies, and was a precursor to the United States Constitution. Notably, among the 39 signers of the agreement were two women, a radical statement during a time in which women were not included in government and were not permitted to vote. As mentioned in my post about Samuel Gorton, the founders of Rhode Island were ahead of their time in favoring rights for women and honest dealings with their Native American neighbors.

In addition to being one of the first political compacts, the Providence Agreement also contains the first expression in the new world of the separation of church and state—achieved by limiting the town meeting to “civil things.” [Source: Charles Evans, “Oaths of Allegiance in Colonial New England"]

By 1648, Robert had moved to Warwick, Rhode Island, the town founded by my 9th great-grandfather, Samuel Gorton. Robert operated a mill in Warwick and lived there until his death in 1654.

The early years of Robert's life in the New England colonies are so strikingly different than his later years. He grew from a repeat offender, in and out of court, censured for his drunkenness to the point that his punishment inspired a major work of American literature, to an upstanding founding father of the capital of Rhode Island. Sometime between 1634 and 1637, Robert, "seems to have reformed... and there is certainly nothing in the Providence town records or those of Warwick, where he afterwards resided, to indicate that he did not lead a perfectly correct life in both places." [Source: The MacDonough-Hackstaff Ancestry, Rodney MacDonough]. At the time of Robert's death, he was a major landowner in Rhode Island. He left an estate valued at more than £500, a large amount in those times. Not enough has been written about Robert's personal and religious convictions, and what may have inspired him to turn his life around, but by the time he arrived in Rhode Island, he was clearly a changed man.

After Robert's death, his wife Mary married Matthias Harvye. In 1661, they moved to Oyster Bay, on Long Island, in New York. All of her children went with them, either in 1661 or in the years that followed. Three of Mary and Robert's sons founded the community of Musketa Cove, now Glen Cove. In Oyster Bay, Musketa Cove, and in Flushing, Queens, where some of the family later moved, several really fascinating branches of my family converge. The Townsend, Feakes, and Bowne families were Quakers, considered radical and unlawful, and persecuted for their beliefs. Continuing the legacy of their forbearers in Rhode Island, these families fought fiercely for their right to practice religion as they saw fit, enduing imprisonment, banishment, and myriad other challenges. I'll talk about them in future posts.

According to Wikipedia, some of Robert Coles' notable descendants include the following:

• Walter Chrysler, who founded the Chrysler Corporation
• Novelist Miriam Coles Harris
• American Revolutionary War spies Robert Townsend and Sally Townsend, who were siblings and members of the secret Culper Ring
• Spy Jesse Coles, who was captured while carrying a message to General Washington
• Robert R. Coles, chairman of the Hayden Planetarium

This concludes the series on my "bad Puritan" ancestors, Samuel Gorton and Robert Coles. Neither one fit into Puritan society, whether due to their unconventional religious beliefs, or their inability to abide by Puritanical law. Gorton, Coles, and many others like them, ended up in Rhode Island, a safe haven for those who found themselves outside the strict and rigid communities established in Massachusetts. The cities founded in Rhode Island by religious dissidents, notably Roger Williams, Anne Hutchinson, and Samuel Gorton, paved the path for a future America, one that endeavored to separate government from religion and truly allow its citizens freedom of worship. The fulfillment of that promise was a long way off, and some may say we're still working on it today, but the early Rhode Island communities firmly set a stake in the ground for those ideals.