The Jamestown Brides

The Bartered Wives of the New World

Jennifer Potter

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2018
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781782399155
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

The extraordinary story of the British women who made the perilous journey to Jamestown, Virginia, to become wives for tobacco planters in the New Colony. In 1621, fifty-six English women crossed the Atlantic in response to the Virginia Company of London's call for maids 'young and uncorrupt' to make wives for the planters of its new colony in Virginia. The English had settled there just fourteen years previously and the company hoped to root its unruly menfolk to the land with ties of family and children. While the women travelled of their own accord, the company was in effect selling them at a profit for a bride price of 150 lbs of tobacco for each woman sold. The rewards would flow to investors in the near-bankrupt company. But what did the women want from the enterprise? Why did they agree to make the dangerous crossing to a wild and dangerous land, where six out of seven European settlers died within their first few years - from dysentery, typhoid, salt water poisoning and periodic skirmishes with the native population? And what happened to them in the end? Delving into company records and original sources on both sides of the Atlantic, Jennifer Potter tracks the women's footsteps from their homes in England to their new lives in Virginia. Giving voice to these forgotten women of America's early history, she triumphantly invites the reader to journey alongside the brides as they travel into a perilous and uncertain future.

PART ONE

England and its Virginian Colony

Come all you very merry London Girls,
that are disposed to Travel,
Here is a Voyage now at hand,
will save your feet from gravel,
If you have shooes you need not fear
for wearing out the Leather
For why you shall on shipboard go,
like Loving Rogues together,
Some are already gone before
the rest must after follow
Then come away and do not stay
Your guide shal be Apollo.

Lawrence Price, ‘The Maydens of Londons brave adventures, / OR, / A Boon Voyage intended for the Sea’, London, printed for Francis Grove on Snow-hill, 1623–1661

CHAPTER ONE

The Marmaduke Maids

Some time after Sunday 12 August 1621, thirteen young women gathered beside the burgeoning wharves and storehouses at East Cowes on the Isle of Wight, waiting for a lighterman to row them out to the Marmaduke anchored in the roads.¹ Already a month into their journey, they had travelled by boat from London to Gravesend and after a short stay had continued overland to Portsmouth then by boat across the Solent to Cowes on the island’s northern coast.² The Virginia Company had commissioned the Marmaduke’s master, John Dennis, to pick up passengers and goods from the Isle of Wight, and here the women had stayed until the boat was loaded and the winds and the tide turned in their favour.

The hand-picked women travelled without family, apparently of their own volition, in response to the company’s call for ‘maydes for Virginia’ – English women ‘young, handsome and honestlie educated’ willing to cross the Atlantic to marry planters in its colony of Virginia, then less than fifteen years old.³ Promised a free choice of husband, the women doubtless remained ignorant of the financial nature of the operation: that they formed part of a ‘magazine’ or trading enterprise designed to bring much needed cash from individual investors to replenish the company’s now empty coffers.

Among those whose fortunes we shall track is Catherine Finch from the small rural parish of Marden in Herefordshire, where she was baptized in the church of St Mary the Virgin, perched beside the sluggish River Lugg in a broad flood plain surrounded by gently undulating farmland. The long-distance footpath across the Welsh Marches runs through the straggling village, which remains deeply agricultural to this day, its old-world charm dislocated by shimmering rivers of polytunnels protecting the soft-fruit crops of the region’s thriving agribusinesses and refrigerated lorries thundering through its narrow country lanes.

As parish records for Marden survive only from 1616, it has not been possible to check the age that Catherine declared to the Virginia Company (twenty-three in 1621), but you can still touch the fourteenth-century sandstone font where she was baptized and admire the fine brass plate commemorating the ‘Pietie and Virtues’ of a gentlewoman from Catherine’s time: Dame Margaret Chute, who died on 9 June 1614 following complications in childbirth, the day after her infant daughter, Frances.⁴ Clearly a member of the upper gentry, Dame Margaret is dressed in the court fashions favoured by Queen Anne of Denmark, wife of the Stuart King James: low neckline, tight bodice winged at the shoulders and pointed at the waist, cuffs and raised collar in expensive needlepoint lace, necklace of pearls and one visible dangling earring. Her children appear beside her, a surviving daughter dressed like a scaled-down version of her mother and the dead baby wearing a lace collar and bib over her swaddling clothes. The young Catherine will have seen the Chute family at church, seated according to their station in life, which placed her own family somewhere between the middle and the back.

From Marden, the orphaned Catherine Finch travelled to Westminster to live in service with her quarrelsome brother Erasmus Finch, crossbow maker to King James and later to King Charles I. Erasmus then lived on the less favoured ‘landside’ of the Strand, a wide thoroughfare connecting the two cities of London and Westminster where poor and middling sorts of people lived in tenements squeezed between the grander houses of aristocrats, courtiers and gentlemen’s lodgings. Two other brothers lived close by: Edward, described variously as a goldsmith and a locksmith, a little way east along the Strand in the parish of St Clement Danes, and John, also a crossbow maker, in St Martin’s Lane off the Strand, a winding thoroughfare running northwards from Charing Cross to the church of St Giles-in-the-Fields flanked by land only recently turned over to housing. Brother John would rise to be one of ten assistants in the newly formed Company of Gunmakers under Master Henry Rowland, the king’s master gunmaker, outranking Erasmus Finch, who appears among the commonality of ‘Skilful Artists’.⁵

One of Catherine’s companions on the Marmaduke was Audry (Adria) Hoare, a shoemaker’s daughter from the lace-making town of Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire. Baptized on 25 August 1604 at the parish church of St Mary the Virgin, Audry was the youngest child of Thomas and Julyan Hoare, aged barely seventeen when she sailed, two years younger than the age she gave to the Virginia Company. She had at least four older siblings, three sisters (Joan, Agnes and Elizabeth) and brother Richard, apprenticed to a fustian dresser.⁶ Unlike many of her fellows, Audry Hoare had both parents still living when she was brought to the Virginia Company by her married eldest sister, Joane Childe, who was living in Blackfriars ‘down in the Lane neer the Catherne wheell’, which might refer to a tavern or to a tenement building.⁷ Stretching north from the Thames, this lively neighbourhood was popular with gentry and much favoured by players, musicians, composers and artists. Shakespeare was a shareholder in the small, indoor Blackfriars Theatre and even bought a substantial house here in 1613, which he bequeathed to his daughter Susannah on his death just a few years later.⁸

On the face of it, neither Catherine Finch nor Audry Hoare had an obvious reason to join the shipment of young women willing to risk their futures on finding a husband in the New World. Audry Hoare had close kin living in London and well connected relatives who might have helped her attract a husband: one of her first cousins was a merchant, Master Thomas Biling, and another an upholsterer in Cornwall. Catherine Finch enjoyed even more advantages. She lived with her brother, a craftsman with royal connections, in one of the capital’s most vibrant and fashionable neighbourhoods, within easy reach of the river and the open spaces of St Martin’s Field, and she had other family living nearby. Surely her chances of finding a husband were better than most? But all three brothers commended her to the Virginia Company, either because they wanted to rid themselves of responsibility for their unmarried sister, or because Catherine herself was more than willing to adventure her life overseas. Perhaps the truth lies somewhere in between: that through his royal connections or neighbourhood gossip Erasmus Finch caught wind of the company’s plan to ship marriageable women out to the colony and successfully convinced his sister to take up the challenge.

It is easy to see why a third Jamestown bride aboard the Marmaduke wished to travel to Virginia. Also considerably younger than the age she gave to the Virginia Company, Ann Jackson was bound for Martin’s Hundred, some ten miles downriver from Jamestown, to join her bricklayer brother John Jackson, who had represented the new settlement as one of its two burgesses in Virginia’s first general assembly held in 1619. Born within sight of Salisbury cathedral and baptized on 24 September 1604 in the parish church of Sarum St Martin, several years after two brothers, Ann Jackson came to the Virginia Company with the blessing of their father William, a man of ‘known honesty and conversaton’.

By the time Ann sailed, William Jackson had moved from Salisbury to Westminster and was living in one of the overcrowded tenements squeezed into dingy alleyways between the grand houses of Tuttle (Tothill) Street inhabited by the nobility.⁹ No mention is made of Ann’s mother so I can only assume she had died and that Ann was keeping house for her father, who was attracted like many others to the densely populated parish of St Margaret’s to serve the courtiers and bureaucrats of Westminster. Since his name does not appear in the various tax assessments for the parish, he was either subletting or judged too poor himself to contribute towards the upkeep of paupers, but as a gardener William Jackson will have found plenty of work tending the large gardens running north and south from Tuttle Street.¹⁰

The maids who sailed by the Marmaduke left England from East Cowes across the Medina estuary from Cowes Castle, sketched here by the Dutch artist Lambert Doomer.

While account books and ledgers can tell you the names of the passengers taken on board, they cannot tell you what those passengers were thinking, or how the women viewed their prospects as they waited for the flat-bottomed barge that would take them out to the Marmaduke.

Already one of their number had jumped ship: the widowed Joan Fletcher, at twenty-eight one of the oldest in the group and by all accounts the best connected, born into a prominent family in Cheshire and Staffordshire that included members of parliament, viscounts, a lord chancellor and even an earl. Her paternal uncle, Sir Ralph Egerton Knight, may be identified as one of two Ralph Egertons of Betley in Staffordshire, either ‘Radus [Ralph] Egerton de Betley, Armiger’, who married his relative Frances Egerton in January 1577, or their first-born son Radus, baptized at Betley three years later.¹¹

Perhaps the widowed Joan Fletcher had taken fright at her companions or at the cramped conditions and undeniable hardships of travel in early seventeenth-century England. It can only have been a last-minute decision as the trunk containing her personal possessions was loaded onto the ship before she changed her mind, or had it changed for her.¹² All we know is that she was ‘turned back’ at the Isle of Wight and her place taken by An[n] Buergen, who may have been of German or French origin since Buergen in all its variant spellings is not a local name.¹³

The ship’s master, John Dennis, carried with him a letter from the Virginia Company to the governor and council in Virginia, clearly written before Joan Fletcher’s hurried departure, as it includes among the ship’s passengers ‘one Widdow and eleven Maides for Wives for the people in Virginia, there hath beene especiall care had in the choise of them; for there hath not any one of them beene received but uppon good Comendacons, as by a noat herewth sent youe may perceive’.¹⁴ In fact thirteen women sailed on the Marmaduke as part of the bridal shipment, according to a second note written by Nicholas Ferrar, merchant and younger brother to John Ferrar, who was then deputy to the Virginia Company – in effect its chief administrator – and the Ferrars’ clerk, Tristram Conyam. The thirteen included eleven maids from the original...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface: Witness
• Part One: England and its Virginian Colony
• Intermezzo: Maidens’ Voyage
• Part Two: Virginia
• Endnote: Return to Jamestown
• Appendix: A List of the Maids
• Acknowledgements
• Endnotes
• List of Illustrations
• Index