...there is much talk here of the Witch Finder Matthew Hopkins being lately in Norfolk where it is rumoured some 40 women have been seized and tried. We are sore afraid that soone he may be here in Lynn and we must look to the safety of Anne Greenfield the bastard daughter of our servant Alice who being brought to bed of the child this two years since was taken into the arms of Oure Saviour leaving the care of her child to My Lady yr. sister. The childe was born with a redde weal beneath her arm which we fear the midwife who attended Alice may swear to be the Devil’s Mark. Therefore I entreat you to take this child into yr. household....
Kings Lynn, 3rd Aug. 1646”
Sir Edward sent directly for the child to come to his home near Lincoln where his eldest daughter Elizabeth and her nurse would care for her. Elizabeth who was just 20 had been betrothed the previous year to Sir Thomas Delamore of Southwell but in January the baronet, twice her age, had succumbed to an ague and Elizabeth, far from heart broken, had resumed housekeeping for her widowed father and her two young brothers. Anne flourished but, as Hopkins spread his net throughout East Anglia, wild accusations swept like some evil miasma northward across the Fen country to Lincolnshire. There were many rumours and questions asked in the City about the motherless child who recently had been brought so suddenly and secretly from King’s Lynn. Late in the Autumn of 1646 Elizabeth and Anne fled into Derbyshire where an old friend of Sir Edward had found them a cottage close by his estate. Elizabeth, her betrothal ring on her finger, set up house as Mistress Eleanore Gardner. .
All went well for more than two years, but in September 1649 Elizabeth wrote to her father:
“...my minde is muche taken upp with recent troubles. Anne two days since was playing with our hound on the greene beyond the cottage and in their romping her dresse was torne and her red weale made cleare to all. Two of the servants from the Manor saw, and even now are gossiping and questioning Annes birth, my Marryage and all the other detailes of our historye. I chastise them mightilie with my tongue but memories of the witches of Bakewell who were executed fortie yeares since in Derby are very present in mens mindes. I love Anne as if she were indeed my daughter and as Oure Saviour exhorted us to protect His Little Ones I must protect this childe. So I beg of you that Kit who has brought your giftes and gold to us may for a brief time stay with us and assist our removal into Yorkshire where I may by the Grace of God find a safe refuge for us...”
The next letter Sir Edward received from his daughter was sent from Thornthwaite, a small hamlet some miles inland from Whitby high up on the North Yorkshire moors. There she had found a suitable cottage and yet another chance for a new life. But Lady Elizabeth’s most painful rejection of everything she had been brought up to hold proper and sacred was still to come. She had already chosen to abandon her comfortable home, privileged life and expectations of marriage to some wealthy man, children of her own and high social status within the community. She had lived a lie pretending to be a married woman and had had to defend herself and little Anne against the spiteful tongues of greedy and superstitious women and the serious danger of betrayal to witch hunters. Now she believed she must choose between risking the salvation of her own immortal soul or putting at risk the safety of the child she so much loved and whom she saw as put into her care by the God whom she also so much loved.
She wrote to her father in April 1650:
“...The families amongst whom we dwell in this small village are Papists who are ministered unto by Fr. Nicholas Poskett who daily travells the Moors baptysing and instructing the children, bringing the Sacraments most secretly and reverendly to all who desire them. His People have been gentille with us but if we wish to live honestly amongst them and bee protected by them I believe that I must abandon my Protestant Faith and embrace that of the Popish Religion. My Little Maide is so precious to me that I will willingly riske any danger even to my immortal soul that she might be secure in the shelter of this isolated place and grow unharmed into womanhood. All my Joye is in her safetey and happinesse. Fr. Poskett knows of my secrets and Annes troubles and will receive us bothe into the Churche this coming month. I beg of you my dearest Father to pray for me. If you and my Churche cannot forgive my apostacie and betrayal of our Protestant Faithe then I hope and trust that Oure Most Merciful Lorde will see fit to do so....
I remaine ever your most loving and devoted daughter E.G.”
There are no further letters extant from Elizabeth to her father and we have no other record of her. Father Nicholas Postgate was denounced in 1679, found guilty of illegally baptising a child and was executed in York. Of Thornthwaite there is now almost no trace. Only a solitary farmhouse with sixteenth century bricks walls and a few low mounds in nearby fields, where probably cottages once stood, still remain. Anne “Gardner” survived until May 14th 1716 when her name was entered in the Parish Death Register - an entry which in a way may serve as an endorsement of the Lady Elizabeth’s success in her constant and indomitable struggle to make the child’s life safe and long and also, I trust, of her own consequent joy.
Naomi
1 comment:
Dear Joan,
to answer your question: now that I cannot use a lot of books and printed sources at a time, to say nothing of no longer being able to go to reference libraries and record offices I have to use my now very tiny personal library, the Net and my own memory.
Sources for the East Anglian Witch Hunts, Matthew Hopkins, the Derbyshire Witches and Father Nicholas Postgate came from all of these. Like most people I use Wikipedia quite extensively, but I try to check elsewhere anything on there about which I don't already know - which is most of it.
Nicholas Postgate is absolutely fascinating, and if we had been writing about men against the world I think I might have given him a piece to himself. He was a member of Oliver's family, although obviously not an actual ancestor.
John Palmer, Sir Edward and Lady Elizabeth, Anne Greenfield and Sir Thomas Delamore all came out of my head. Palmer, Greenfield and Gull are all names found in Norfolk and Lincolnshire in the seventeenth century, Delamore was probably an in-comer. The letters are all out of my head.
Most of the 'proper' research I did for some years before I had to retire was based on English private and public seventeenth century archives. The handwriting is usually quite easy and the language of seventeenth century English flows so beautifully that it is a pleasure to do the pastiche. I think my version of the punctuation and spelling is reasonably authentic.
Thornthwaite did not exist, but in my mind's eye it was somewhere between Ugthorpe and Egton Bridge, both of which are a few miles inland from Whitby. Father Nicholas actually spent the last few years of his life living in a cottage on the edge of Ugthorpe.
I suppose basically what I did was to attempt to write a piece of mixed fact and fiction in the service of the theme set for us without, I do hope, compromising the integrity of the real history of the time and also giving an authentic flavour of the time. However, that's for you and the others to judge rather than for me.
Love,
Naomi
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