Aiding and abetting ... a Quaker?

Well, I found my first family scofflaw. He is listed in the family tree as Henry Howland of Fenstanton, and he has a small rap sheet that includes entertaining a married woman in his house, to which the husband objected, and aiding and entertaining Quakers.

Didn't know those were crimes? Welcome to the early Plymouth colony in Massachusetts, where being a Quaker could result in a variety of punishments, including hanging. First a quick bit about Henry. 

He was born in Fenstanton, Huntingdonshire, England in about 1603. I'm not sure when he immigrated to America, but he appears in a list detailing an allotment of cattle to the settlers in 1624. He and two of his brothers, John and Arthur, all came over, but not on the same ship. John, who is my great-to-the-x grandfather, has his own claim to fame that I'll look at next week, so Henry is a many times removed uncle. 

We know John came as a servant, something many immigrants did in order to afford passage, and presumably his brothers did as well. As the end of a servant's contract, he -- remember women had few useful rights at the time-- could become functioning members of the colony by taking the Freeman's Oath, in which one pledged fealty to the governing authorities, and sometimes to the church, depending on whether you lived in the Massachusetts Bay Colony or Plymouth Colony. 

Henry's name appears on the Plymouth Colony freemen list in 1633 and again in 1637, 1639 and 1658. But his name is scratched out on the 1658 list. This seems to stem from a pernicious habit of associating with Quakers, allowing them to meet in his house. A couple of the sources I looked at insisted that Henry had become Quaker by that time, but the records from the time call him a Quaker or "manifest encourager of such." 

Having been fined multiple times for encouraging Quakers, Henry would be ordered to appear in court in late 1659 to face charges, be convicted and censured as an "abettor and entertainer of Quakers." Sound kinda kangaroo court-like doesn't it? This is important because by being stripped of his freeman status, he could not hold public office or vote. 

What was so bad about the Quakers that just hanging out with them could cause a person to lose his rights? 

You should remember that the Puritans and Pilgrims who populated the two Massachusetts colonies came to America in large part to escape the persecution they encountered in England for operating outside the authority of the established church. 

But in one of those complications of the neat little histories we learned in school and repeat often, it turns out these seekers of freedom could be religious bigots themselves and use their authority to oppress religions they didn't agree with. Roger Williams, who famously established the first Baptist church in America, began life in America as a Puritan. His had religious ideas that didn't fit well with the Puritan understanding of true religion, and they essentially ran him off.

Quakers, on the other hand, were quite radically different, and their core belief that humans could have a direct encounter with God messed with the whole hierarchy of the church established by Puritans and Pilgrims, especially when it came to another core concept: communal discernment. No voting, no top-down decrees. When Quakers started showing up on American shores, especially in Massachusetts, in the 1650s, they met with much less than a warm reception. 

In 1650, the Plymouth colony made it a crime to slander a church or minister and prescribed punishments for profaning the Sabbath. Another bill made church attendance mandatory. 

When the Quakers showed up, they were whipped, banished from the colony, fined, and in Massachusetts Bay, some were hanged. In 1658, the Plymouth Colony banned ships carrying Quakers from landing, and any such ship could be seized. 

They passed other laws forbidding colonists from housing or aiding Quakers, hence Henry's legal problems, and approving imprisonment -- just for being a Quaker -- as a punishment. Quakers were described as instruments of Satan and proponents of anarchy. So much for religious freedom and tolerance, eh? 

Despite the opposition, the Quakers continued to come and eventually established a Society of Friends in Sandwich, MA. In 1660, a woman named Mary Dyer became the last Quaker to be executed. Her death, and those of the others, were reported to King Charles II, who banned the executions. By 1677, Quakers could live and worship as they pleased.

Oh, and that charge of entertaining a married woman? That came after his disenfranchisement, and Henry "stiffly denied" the allegation, which seems to have let him off the hook. Unfortunately for him, he still had a habit of harboring Quakers, which earned him more fines. 

Much of the information about Henry's life comes from The Great Migration Begins, Immigrants to New England 1620-1633, vol. 2. This information is repeated in a number of sites across the Internet. Information about the Quakers is adapted from massmoments.org, a project of Mass Humanities.

Image: Henry Howland identifying picture on FamilySearch.org