Review of "The Savage Apostle"

King Philip's War, 1675-1676, was fought between the Native American tribes of New England, and the English colonists, many who were first-generation emigrants like William and Mary Dyer (William lived until 1677), or their children and grandchildren who were born in the colonies. The Dyers may have known Rev. John Eliot if he was one of the inquisitors on Anne Hutchinson's trial. William Dyer was acquainted with the Indian sachems Massasoit (whose signature mark was a sailboat or a bow) and his son Metacom/Metacomet. The Dyers' sons were involved with the war, and Samuel Dyer, their eldest son, rescued Rhode Island colonists from grave danger when he evacuated them to Newport. Katherine Marbury Scott lost both her sons in the war. Edward Hutchinson died a short time after being struck by a musket ball late in the conflict. We don't know much about the women who suffered death, injury, the firings of their homes and crops, and the loss of their children, but we can learn from the story of Mary Rowlandson, who was abducted by Native Americans and then redeemed. But fear not, our friend Jo Ann Butler is nearly finished with her volume encompassing this time, The Golden Shore.

I invite you to learn more about King Philip's War by reading The Savage Apostle, by John B. Kachuba. You can access the Amazon sales page and the other reviews by clicking the title hotlink.

The Savage Apostle, by John B. Kachuba

(Review by Christy K Robinson)

The Savage Apostle, named after John Eliot, the Congregational (Puritan) pastor to the Native Americans (“savages”) of New England, is the first historical novel by author John B. Kachuba. The “novel” genre assignment seems wrong, when the events and people were real and documented, but the narrative follows the thoughts and speech of two primary figures: Rev. John Eliot (1604-1690) and the Wampanoag sachem Metacom (1638-1676), also known as King Philip. Historical fiction can breathe new life into dusty history, when thought through as carefully as it was by author Kachuba.

The book begins with the musings of Eliot, who mourns the death of the Native American Sassamon, who was a Christian convert. Sassamon had been murdered and dumped in a frozen pond, perhaps by someone of his own tribe, or by the English settlers of Plymouth Colony. In 1675, tensions were high between the natives of New England, and the thousands of English families pushing them back into the wilderness. When the first settlers arrived in the 1620s and 1630s, they found whole villages made ghost towns by disease. They purchased land from native sachems, but by 1636, tensions broke out in the Pequot War, in which the Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay militias massacred thousands and sold women and children captives to the Caribbean slave trade (because they had a naughty habit of running away from their “servanthood” in New England). As tens of thousands of settlers arrived in the Great Migration, the various tribes suffered encroachment on their lands and waters, destruction of their crops by English cattle, and overhunting of fowl and deer. Over the next decades, even as John Eliot tried to convert them to Christianity and “civilization,” they lost civil rights and were treated disrespectfully by the second generation of colonists.

In the book, Metacom has equal time with John Eliot, as they both realize that war will come to New England, no matter how hard they work to avoid it. They both envision innocent deaths and burned-out villages. Eliot wonders if he has failed his God when he sees the “Praying Indians” deserting their villages ahead of the war to return to their tribes. He agonizes over the will of God: why did God seem to direct his missionary work, and then deny Eliot, in his old age, the fulfillment of happy, fulfilled Christian converts? Metacom wants only to die peacefully as an old man, with his children and grandchildren nearby, and go to the afterlife to be with his father and brother, but his advisors are bent on avenging the executions of the three Pokanoket men who were falsely accused and falsely convicted of murdering Sassamon.

Author Kachuba’s depiction of the exhumed body of Sassamon was (as I imagine) quite realistic, but so was his depiction of sudden emotion from Rev. Eliot, looking on the decomposing body of his friend and convert. “From where I now stood, trembling, I had an unobstructed view of the corpse, a view I would gladly have given up so as to have Sassamon’s memory from happier times live on within me… I had to close my eyes for several moments to calm my wild heart. My knees shook and I thought I should fall.”

I’ve read several books set in the time before and during King Philip’s War (among them Flight of the Sparrow, by Amy Belding Brown; Mayflower, by Nathaniel Philbrick; Caleb’s Crossing, by Geraldine Brooks), and have seen descriptions of Eliot and his ministry, and the English versus Indian conflict from several outside angles. It’s a new dimension to read about the precursors to war through the eyes of Eliot and Metacom, who perhaps had the best perspective.

As an author and a student of 17^th-century New England history, I found the personal narratives fascinating. The story is so believable as told here, that I’m tempted to think this is what must have happened. As a genealogy enthusiast, I knew some of the peripheral players in the story, and though they weren’t covered in detail in the book (which was proper), it drove me back to my files to compare information. And it fits! Those dusty ancestors contributed to the story in my head. Dr. Fuller administered a potion which may have killed Metacom’s brother. Others lived heroically through the atrocities of King Philip’s War, ferried colonists from grave danger to safety at Newport, or, like one great-great, didn’t survive, when he was taken captive and marched to Canada, where he was burned at the stake.

There were a few confusing bits in The Savage Apostle: Metacom’s flashbacks to his experiences with father and brother took us back about 13 years but didn’t explain the timehop. What was the medieval law of cruentation? And the Pokanoket name of Montaup (Mount Hope, Bristol, Rhode Island) and other places could have been set for the reader who is not from New England, by a map or two. Sure, I can Google them, but that would mean getting out of bed where I’m reading in the wee hours!

The book contains a reading list and discussion guide, and would be appropriate reading for high school and college history students, as well as history enthusiasts of all ages. The few descriptions of violence (at the very end of the book) are necessary to a book about the prelude to war. The physical book is well made and the text is easy on the eyes. The cover image appears to be an aerial view of a landscape with water and clouds in the distance. The cover texture feels a bit like peachskin.

Disclosure: The publisher sent me an advance copy of the book in exchange for an honest review.

This article is copyrighted. Copying, even to your genealogy pages, is prohibited by US and international law. You may "share" it with the URL link because it preserves the author's copyright notice and the source of the article.  

Old Boston, the angels' view

© 2016 by Christy K Robinson

This article is copyrighted. Copying, even to your genealogy pages, is prohibited by US and international law. You may "share" it with the URL link because it preserves the author's copyright notice and the source of the article.  

What a photo from above Boston.
This was taken from Lincolnshire-based Kurnia Aerial Photography with a drone on June 6, 2016.

This large parish church, St Botolph's (aka "The Stump"), was the church where Rev. John Cotton was the minister for 20 years, and Anne and William Hutchinson attended here often. (Their children were baptized in the local church in Alford.) The young William Dyer and his parents and siblings lived in nearby Kirkby LaThorpe, so it's very possible that the Dyers occasionally or regularly attended this large church. 

St Botolph's (Anglican) church is located in Boston, Lincolnshire, near the northeast coast of England. Boston, Massachusetts, was named after this town for several reasons, including that it was a center for Theophilus Clinton (4th Earl of Lincoln) who was a religious nonconformist with interests in the New England colonies, and for the hope that John Cotton would accept their repeated invitations to emigrate to New England.

After The Book of Sports was republished by King Charles I, and the bishops and archbishop of the Church of England cracked down on Puritan power, Cotton was forced into hiding for a year lest he be imprisoned (which could be a death sentence in itself). He sailed to the new Boston in 1633, and about ten percent of old Boston followed him.

William Dyer and his father, a farmer who owned his land about 15 miles to the west (behind the drone camera), were certainly familiar with the market square at the east end of the church. Whether they brought crops or wool or livestock to market, Boston was a second "hometown" to them.

Christy K Robinson is author of these books (click the colored title):

We Shall Be Changed (2010)

Mary Dyer Illuminated Vol. 1 (2013)  

Mary Dyer: For Such a Time as This Vol. 2 (2014)

The Dyers of London, Boston, & Newport Vol. 3 (2014)  

Effigy Hunter (2015)  

Anne Marbury Hutchinson: American Founding Mother (2018)

And of these sites:  

Discovering Love  (inspiration and service)

Rooting for Ancestors  (history and genealogy)

William and Mary Barrett Dyer (17th century culture and history of England and New England)

Where were Anne Hutchinson's trials held?

File deleted by author, but used as a chapter in the book, 

Anne Marbury Hutchinson: American Founding Mother (2018), by Christy K Robinson.

Anne Hutchinson: Brief life of Harvard's "midwife" from Harvard Magazine

Your independent source for Harvard news since 1898

Anne Hutchinson

Brief life of Harvard's "midwife": 1595-1643

by Peter G. Gomes
The Reverend Peter J. Gomes, B.D. '68, is Plummer professor of Christian morals and Pusey minister in the Memorial Church.

On June 2, 1922, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts received from the Anne Hutchinson Memorial Association and the State Federation of Women's Clubs a bronze statue of Anne Hutchinson. The inscription read in part:

In Memory of Anne Marbury Hutchinson Courageous Exponent of Civil Liberty and Religious Toleration

It might have added that Mrs. Hutchinson was the mother of New England's first and most serious theological schism (traditionally known as the Antinomian Controversy); that in debate she bested the best of the Massachusetts Bay Colony's male preachers, theologians, and magistrates; and that as a result of her heresy the colony determined to provide for the education of a new generation of ministers and theologians who would secure New England's civil and theological peace against future seditious Mrs. Hutchinsons "when our present ministers shall lie in the dust," as the inscription on the Johnston Gate puts it. Thus, Anne Hutchinson was midwife to what would become Harvard College...

Read the rest of the story at Harvard Magazine, http://harvardmagazine.com/2002/11/anne-hutchinson.html



________________________________

Christy K Robinson, the author of this Dyer research blog and three books on William and Mary Barrett Dyer, has been invited to participate in a conference on Anne Hutchinson, held in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and New York in July 2016. Christy will take her place on a panel discussion, and speak about Anne Hutchinson and Mary Dyer at Harvard University. (Which, as you may know, is a very big deal!) If you can help with the expense of travel, accommodations, and research into both Dyer and Hutchinson records, please use the Paypal donation button in the sidebar of this website.

Mary Dyer changed the world. This is how.

© 2016 Christy K Robinson

Mary Barrett Dyer didn't stop to ask if the people of New England who were being beaten and whipped (with scarring for life), imprisoned in Boston and New Haven prisons without heat during polar blizzards, fined into poverty, having their property confiscated and given to the religious magistrates to dispense, or were hanged, were "worthy" of her sacrifice.

Mary Dyer purposely left a place of safety on Shelter Island, literally crossed the ocean to get to Providence, and walked more than 40 miles through dangerous wilderness, to give up her life if the theocratic government would not rescind their "bloody law" against non-conformists. She didn't sneak into Boston: she boldly appeared there when there were hundreds or thousands more people in town for the annual elections and superior courts.

She wasn't an obscure, no-name bumpkin: she was a co-founder of Portsmouth and Newport. She was the wife of the first attorney general in America, an admiralty court judge, the commander-in-chief of the Anglo-Dutch war in New England waters, and solicitor general of Rhode Island. She was better educated than many men of her generation. She'd been reprieved from the gallows seven months before, in a scripted drama cooked up by the governor, his staff, and several ministers, because they knew killing her would  antagonize the many people who respected and sided with Mary.

Mary defied that theocratic government to call attention to their brutality and injustice, and was prepared to die to stop their practices and spare people of conscience. People like Quakers and Baptists, and those who didn't share the same beliefs as the oppressors. And she went through with it, even when she was offered her life if she'd just leave Massachusetts.

That's what love does. That's what a mother would do for her children, and other peoples' children, young or old. And whether or not we carry Mary Barrett Dyer's DNA, we are all her children because of her civil disobedience unto death. That was love. Be like Mary. Love one another, whether they're worthy or not. It will change your life. And it will change the world.

Christy K Robinson is author of these books:

We Shall Be Changed (2010)

Mary Dyer Illuminated Vol. 1 (2013)  

Mary Dyer: For Such a Time as This Vol. 2 (2014)

The Dyers of London, Boston, & Newport Vol. 3 (2014)  

Effigy Hunter (2015)  

Anne Marbury Hutchinson: American Founding Mother (2018)

And of these sites:  

Discovering Love  (inspiration and service)

Rooting for Ancestors  (history and genealogy)

William and Mary Barrett Dyer (17th century culture and history of England and New England)

Editornado [ed•i•tohr•NAY•doh] (Words. Communications. Book reviews. Cartoons.)

 If you enjoy this Dyer website (200 articles so far) or the books, please consider helping with the research expense at the Paypal button on the sidebar of this website. Thank you very much! 

May Day, the Maypole, and sincerely-held beliefs in the 1620s

© 2016 Christy K Robinson

This article is copyrighted. Copying, even to your genealogy pages, is prohibited by US and international law. You may "share" it with the URL link because it preserves the author's copyright notice and the source of the article.  

Was it a religious strike against a pagan symbol, or was it a commercial interest that made the destruction of the Maypole such a tempest?

Thomas Morton was a bad, bad man. He was of a similar age with Anne Hutchinson, Gov. John Endecott, and Gov. John Winthrop, born in 1590. He was an English lawyer before he sailed to Massachusetts Bay in 1622, returned in 1625, and became a thorn in the side of the Plymouth Pilgrims and later the Puritans who founded Salem and Boston.

He settled with some investor-adventurers in what is now Quincy, and proceeded to drink with the Indians and to give them guns to procure furs—which terrified the Pilgrims 26 miles to the south. Morton was no Separatist, Pilgrim, or Puritan, but an Anglican who would rather be hunting and fishing than sitting in a church, anyway. You can read more about Morton and his run-ins with Massachusetts government at his profile, http://www.nndb.com/people/056/000114711/ . (Hint: he was jailed several times, and died poverty-stricken in Maine in the 1640s.)

There probably were no women in Morton's Merrymount
community, unless they were servants or Indians.

Perhaps the event that Morton is remembered for the most is that he and his men set up an eighty-foot Maypole at a hill he named Merrymount (half a mile from Mt. Wollaston, where the Hutchinsons would own a farm from 1634 on), and there, his adventurers drank and danced with the Indians on the first day of May, 1625.

"The Inhabitants of . . . Mare Mount . . . did devise amongst themselves . . . Revels and merriment after the old English custome; (they) prepared to sett up a Maypole upon the festivall day . . . and therefore brewed a barrell of excellent beare . . . to be spent, with other good cheare, for all commers of that day. And . . . they had prepared a song fitting to the time and present occasion. And upon May day they brought the Maypole to the place appointed, with drumes, gunnes, pistols and other fitting instruments, for the purpose; and there erected it with the help of Salvages, that came thether to see the manner of our Revels. A goodly pine tree of 80 foot longe was reared up, with a peare of buckshorns nayled one somewhat neare unto the top of it: where it stood, as a faire sea mark for directions how to finde out the way to mine Hoste of Mare Mount."

(Morton, The New England Cannan, Book III, Chapter 14.)

Things that are 80 feet in length:
brigantine, Airbus A380, truck.

Now, an 80-foot pole is eight stories high, the length of an Airbus A380, and it would weigh about 10 tons, and that seems very large for a community of bachelors to fuss about. I watched a 1985 video of the raising of an 80-foot Maypole in Slingsby, UK, where they dug a large hole in which to seat the pole, then raised it with a crane before a band played “God Save the Queen.” To raise a 10-ton tree trunk with ropes and men to balance and stabilize it seems like a lot more work than drunken rebels would enjoy.

Did Morton's people raise the Maypole with its antlers on top as a billboard for ships coming into Massachusetts Bay, that they had furs and hides to sell to European traders, in competition with the Pilgrims who were supposed to be providing furs as a generous return to their investors? If they wanted an excuse to drink their barrel of beer and do some manly feat, a 20-foot pole with a flag would have sufficed. But an 80-foot pole might be a landmark to ships spotting a trading post.

Or maybe Morton and his company raised the Maypole and its secular revelry to purposely annoy and outrage their sober Pilgrim neighbors, who, along with the Scottish Presbyterians and the English Puritans, considered the Maypole to be a pagan idol. This seems to be the tack that Pilgrims used to justify their later actions.

May Day was a spring fertility festival in many European cultures, going back to prehistory. It was a cross-quarter day, halfway between the spring equinox and the summer solstice, when the “veil” between the spirit world and our world was weak, and spirits could enter human beings and lead them astray. It was a time of sexual initiation, and girls who met boys in the tall grass or bushes came back with gowns of green, stained with chlorophyll. Early May was the time to plant peas, beets, spinach, squash, and melons.

During the centuries of Roman Catholic influence and authority, Christian churches were built at pagan worship sites to both conquer the previous culture’s gods and votive sites, and assimilate the old ways and worshipers into the new rites. Many astronomical, seasonal dates that had honored pagan gods were supplanted with saint festivals and holy days (holidays). Old customs took on new meanings, even if they were very thinly disguised.

At the English Reformation in the 16^th century, maypoles fell into disuse as the Puritan movement took the new Anglican Church further away from its Catholic (and therefore contaminated, pagan) roots. But the Puritans bent too far for many English people, and instituted a harsh, rigid, fundamentalist way of life that grated on Anglicans. In 1618, King James I, who had been plagued by rebellious and intransigent Puritan ministers, published a booklet called The Book of Sports (see article in this blog), that gave permission to, even directed, his subjects to break the Sabbath gloom with playing games and getting some healthy exercise. Among the activities the king suggested was to hold May games and set up Maypoles.

Our pleasure likewise is, That the Bishop of that Diocesse take the like straight order with all the Puritanes and Precisans within the same, either constraining them to conforme themselves, or to leave the County according to the Lawes of Our Kingdome, and Canons of Our Church, and so to strike equally on both hands, against the contemners of Our Authority, and adversaries of Our Church. And as for Our good peoples lawfull Recreation, Our pleasure likewise is, That after the end of Divine Service, Our good people be not disturbed, letted or discouraged from any lawful recreation, Such as dauncing, either men or women, Archery for men, leaping, vaultings or any other such harmelesse Recreation, nor from having of May Games, Whitsun [Pentecost] Ales; and Morris dances, and the setting up of Maypoles & other sports therewith used, So as the same be had in due & convenient time, without impediment or neglect of Divine Service: And that women shall have leave to carry rushes to the Church for the decoring of it, according to their old custome…

Morton’s first maypole-raising was in 1625. As a lawyer and a subject of England, he knew he was within his rights, and fulfilling King James’ order, to set up a maypole in his town. It seems that when Morton wasn’t being removed against his will to England and bouncing back to Massachusetts, he was drinking with the Indians, dealing guns to the Indians, and setting up a phallic symbol to madden the Pilgrim neighbors.

But while Morton and his men were drunkenly contemplating their handiwork in 1628, Plymouth sent their military man, Myles Standish, to arrest Morton. Twenty-six miles on foot, or several hours of sailing, seems quite a distance for the Pilgrims to reach out to punish Morton, on his own land, for his revels. (The Pilgrims, who had escaped English persecution by fleeing to the Netherlands before risking their lives in savage wilderness of America, went out of their way to put an end to Morton’s religious beliefs and practices in the New World.) They deposited Morton on an island with some provisions, until a ship could take him back to England, but he escaped with the help of his Indian associates. 

John Endecott, in his first term as governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony, visited Merrymount in 1629, and had the Maypole taken down. Chopping it with an ax would be more dramatic, but he may have pulled it down with ropes. (An 80-foot tree trunk might be useful as a ship mast.) Of course, you remember Endecott as the governor who sent four Quakers, including Mary Dyer, to the gallows from 1659-1661, tortured and imprisoned hundreds of others, hanged a woman who believed she saw the ghost of her dead child, and beat people to a pulp (including Baptist minister Obadiah Holmes Sr.) if they didn’t conform to his narrow fundamentalism.

It wasn’t solely Endecott doing those actions. He was elected to office for numerous one-year terms as governor and assistant governor between 1629 and his death in 1665. Obviously, there was an element of colonial society who shared his ideology of religious government and enforcing certain beliefs.

In our society, we see similar events and responses in the news on a daily basis. Like the Maypole story, much of the news involves religious groups proclaiming their beliefs on morality issues such as same-sex relationships, sex outside marriage, contraconception and pregnancy termination, the death penalty, domestic violence, child molestation, anti [-Islamic/-Catholic/-Semitic/-pagan/-atheist, etc.]. There are also reports about prayer in public meetings, schools, and the military; and the existence of monuments or displays of the Ten Commandments at government buildings.

Knowing your history, and the forces and personalities behind it, is vitally important in slowing and stopping religious intolerance and oppression. Mary Dyer and her husband William, and the entire colony of Rhode Island, worked for years to develop a society of tolerance and human rights for all faiths, even those without faith, because without that provision, there is no true freedom. Mary intentionally defied Gov. Endecott and his system, and died to prove that religious liberty was a life and death matter. William Dyer, John Clarke, and Roger Williams codified that liberty in their constitution (the Charter of 1663), and their successful experiment with religious liberty and separation of church and state (a pet issue of Anne Hutchinson) was a huge influence on the United States Constitution written in the next century.

__________________________ 

More reading on Morton or the Maypole

http://lolmanuscripts.blogspot.com/2010/05/shepherds-ingenuity-or-praise-of-green.html

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http://newenglandfolklore.blogspot.com/2010/05/thomas-morton-and-maypole-of-merrymout.html Good material on Merrymount., which is in Quincy, half a mile from Mt. Wollaston (where the Hutchinsons owned land).

______________________________

http://www.nndb.com/people/056/000114711/  profile for Thomas Morton

Christy K Robinson is author of these books:

We Shall Be Changed (2010)

Mary Dyer Illuminated Vol. 1 (2013)  

Mary Dyer: For Such a Time as This Vol. 2 (2014)

The Dyers of London, Boston, & Newport Vol. 3 (2014)  

Effigy Hunter (2015)  

Anne Marbury Hutchinson: American Founding Mother (2018)

And of these sites:  

Discovering Love  (inspiration and service)

Rooting for Ancestors  (history and genealogy)

William and Mary Barrett Dyer (17th century culture and history of England and New England)

Political correction

© 2016 Christy K Robinson

This article is copyrighted. Copying, even to your genealogy pages, is prohibited by US and international law. You may "share" it with the URL link because it preserves the author's copyright notice and the source of the article.  

Writers, reporters, critics, political satirists, internet trolls, and message-bearers, be glad of your constitutional rights to free speech and the privileges of citizenship.

Once upon a time in 1663-1664, in New Netherland (Long Island, pre-New York), the inhabitants of Bushwick complained of having money extorted by the Dutch West Indies Company (WIC), for the rights of citizenship. They could see that the colony was slipping away from the Netherlands, to become an English possession.

This unrest, after three Anglo-Dutch naval wars in the English Channel, the Caribbean, and the East Indies, preceded the Dutch surrender of New Netherland to the English. 

(Remember that William Dyer, Mary's husband, had been Commander-in-Chief-Upon-the-Seas in the 1652-54 First Anglo-Dutch War, part of which was carried out on a privateer basis in Long Island Sound.) 

In May 1664,

Jan Willemsen Van Iselsteyn, commonly called Jan of Leyden, for using abusive language and writing an insolent letter to the magistrates of Bushwick, was sentenced to be fastened to a stake near the gallows, with a bridle in his mouth, a bundle of rods under his arm, and a paper on his breast bearing the words,

Lampoon-riter

False-accuser

Defamer of Magistrates

 After this ignominy he was to be banished, with costs. 

On the same day, William Jansen Traphagen, of Lemgo, for being the bearer of the above insolent letter to the magistrates of Bushwick [who were employed by the WIC], as well as for using very indecent language towards them, was also sentenced to be tied to the stake, in the place of public execution, with a paper on his breast, inscribed 'Lampoon carrier.' His punishment, also, was completed with banishment and costs.  Source: A History of the City of Brooklyn: Including the Old Town and ..., Volume 2, By Henry Reed Stiles

https://books.google.com/books?pg=PA338&lpg=PA338&dq=Jan+of+Leyden,+Bushwyk&sig=2ULENXeWqFpTbTeLk2HaiW-CNqw&id=p3MxAAAAMAAJ&ots=keZTaTn1T5&output=text

A "lampoon" is defined as "a sharp, often virulent satire directed against an individual or institution; a work of literature, art, or the like, ridiculing severely the character or behavior of a person, society, etc." The word was relatively new, about 20-30 years old, in 1664.

The bridle sometimes had spikes on the tongue (see image with bridle attachments), and was meant to reduce its wearer to the mute state of a farm animal. New Haven Colony tied a "key" into the mouth of Humphrey Norton, a Quaker missionary, to silence him, and if you look at the implements in the foreground of the image, you see the bridle bits look like keys.

To sum it up, the WIC government of Dutch Long Island were demanding money of the citizens, perhaps by taxing them or withholding rights over money, and several people protested in writing, since they were undoubtedly aware that the Dutch rule was doomed because the English were coming in. The WIC magistrates deemed this protest sedition and squelched it by bodily punishment, banishment, and court costs. Then the English took over in September 1664.

In the 1670s, William Dyer Jr. (son of William and Mary) was the King's customs inspector for New York, and the Mayor of New York.

Jan of Leyden wasn't the only man to be "insolent," use bad language, or react violently in the Dutch colony when his rights were threatened. I had a Dutch ancestor in that town, Dirck Volkertze, who was known, more than once, to settle arguments with a knife! On the other hand, their minister, Johann Theodorus Polhemus, also my ancestor, was well-respected and faithful to his God and his flock for decades, during both Dutch and English rule.

Related story about bridles in this site: Dorothy Waugh, young Quaker woman, described her experience with the bridle in Carlisle, England.
  
**************** 

Christy K Robinson is author of the books:

·          We Shall Be Changed (2010)
·          Mary Dyer Illuminated (2013)
·          Mary Dyer: For Such a Time as This (2014)
·          The Dyers of London, Boston, & Newport (2014)
·          Effigy Hunter (2015)
·          Anne Marbury Hutchinson: American Founding Mother (2018)