Rev. Richard Mosley and the Boylston-Molineux Marriage

A couple of days ago, I mentioned the Rev. Richard Mosley, chaplain of H.M.S. Salisbury. He wrote about Capt. Thomas Preston’s trial for murder.

Mosley’s presence may help in the quest to answer one of the vexing genealogical mysteries of pre-Revolutionary Boston.

According to family historians, Mosley was the minister who married Ward Nicholas Boylston to Ann Molineux. The ceremony reportedly took place on the Salisbury while it was in Portsmouth harbor, with a special license from New Hampshire governor John Wentworth.

Since Boylston was the son of Benjamin Hallowell, Jr., a Customs Commissioner, and Molineux was the daughter of William Molineux, one of Boston’s most radical anti-Crown activists, their marriage raises lots of questions. Mosley’s presence doesn’t help to answer the question of why. But it may help to answer the question of when, or at least narrow down the window.

H.M.S. Salisbury arrived in Boston harbor on the morning of 10 Oct 1770, as reported in the newspapers and the diary of John Rowe. It sailed for Britain at the end of August 1771. We have glimpses of the commodore in command of the ship, James Gambier, and chaplain Mosley in Boston in the intervening months:

• 10 Dec 1770: While in Boston harbor, Cmdre. Gambier signed a proclamation about deserters printed in the Boston News-Letter and other papers.
• 28 Jan 1771: Gambier and his wife had a baby daughter baptized at King’s Chapel with Lt. Gov. Thomas Hutchinson, Lady Agnes Frankland, and Ann Burch, wife of a Customs Commissioner, as sponsors.
• 8 February: Gambier signed another proclamation, also in Boston harbor.
• 9 March: Rowe wrote in his diary, “The Chaplain Mr. Mossely of the Salisbury was taken in an Apoplectick fit yesterday which hindered him coming to our house.”
• 14 March: Gambier presided over the firing of cannon to salute new royal appointments.
• 2 April: Rowe saw both Gambier and Mosley at a dinner for a charitable society.
• 29 May: Gambier attended the opening of the legislative session at Harvard College.
• 4 June: Gambier hosted a ball that Rowe attended.
• 21 June: Gambier dined at Ralph Inman’s house in Cambridge.
• 6 August: Gambier entertained Boston’s elite on the Salisbury.

I haven’t yet found mentions of the Salisbury visiting New Hampshire. It could have zipped up and back in some of the gaps in that timeline, with the biggest good-weather gaps coming in April-May and July 1771.

Notably, the first child of the Boylstons’ marriage, young Nicholas, arrived before the end of 1771. So maybe we learn a little about the why as well.

COMING UP: Mr. Mosley’s North American career.

Ann Molineux Marries Ward Nicholas Boylston

Earlier in the week I promised to discuss the mysterious marriage of William Molineux’s eldest daughter, Ann. I want to thank Boston 1775 reader Donald Campbell for pushing me on this topic last month. I’d read the following material before, but I hadn’t followed up on it or tried to put it together.

Ann Molineux, as I described earlier, was the first child of the marriage between William Molineux and Ann or Marianne Guionneau. She was baptized on 24 Aug 1748.

Ward Hallowell was born on 22 Nov 1747 to merchant captain Benjamin Hallowell (1725-1799) and his wife Mary Boylston (1723-1795). In 1757 the captain commanded a small warship called King George, commissioned by the province of Massachusetts. After the fighting with France he sought a lucrative post within Britain’s Customs service, rising in 1770 to be one of the five Customs Commissioners overseeing all the ports of North America. In the early 1770s the Hallowells bought a mansion in Jamaica Plain, just outside Boston.

Ward was his parents’ oldest surviving child, but he was not destined to carry on the family name. [It’s so rare to be able to write a sentence like that these days.] Instead, Ward’s maternal uncle Nicholas Boylston of London, having no children of his own, offered to make Ward his heir if he agreed to change his surname. Since Uncle Nicholas was immensely rich, this was not a hard decision. In his late teens Ward Hallowell sailed to London to start learning the business. In 1770 he became Ward Nicholas Boylston by royal decree, and in 1771 he became, yes, immensely rich.

[The Nicholas Boylston in London was not the same as the Nicholas Boylston whom John S. Copley painted in Boston, though he, too, was immensely rich.]

The following appears in the first volume of Mary Caroline Crawford’s Famous Families of Massachusetts, published in 1930.

He [Ward Nicholas Boylston] chose for a wife—probably about 1770...—Ann Molineux, daughter of William Molineux, Boston merchant and friend of Samuel Adams. The union of this son of a supporter of the king with the daughter of a Boston patriot apparently was clandestinely planned, as the ceremony was performed under a permit issued by Governor John Wentworth of New Hampshire. The marriage probably occurred at Portsmouth.

Not long after becoming a benedict, Boylston went abroad for an extended tour. Then the Revolution broke out and he was obliged to seek refuge in London. Apparently he did not bother much about his wife’s comfort or welfare and that lady’s troubles so preyed on her mind that she long hovered on the verge of insanity. Finally she lived apart from her husband. But in 1779, after having been deserted by him in London, she started for America,—and died on shipboard. The funds for her support, during the last part of her life, seem to have been furnished by her brother William...

Unfortunately, Crawford didn’t say where her information came from. It may have been from Nellie Zada Rice’s Molyneux Genealogy, published in 1904; I haven’t seen that book, but I understand from an online description that it doesn’t cite original sources either. The implication of the passage above is that someone in the twentieth century saw a marriage document issued by Gov. Wentworth for Ward Nicholas Boylston (or Ward Hallowell) and Ann Molineux. Everything else could be based on family traditions—probably the Boylston family.

The date of the marriage would be significant since Ward Nicholas and Ann Boylston’s first child, Nicholas, was born in 1771, according to the Boylston Family Papers at the Massachusetts Historical Society. Was his impending arrival the reason the couple went to New Hampshire? Or did they leave Massachusetts to wed because of opposition from their families?

This marriage is even more intriguing because the groom’s father and the bride’s father were on opposite sides of the pre-Revolutionary political conflict, they were both leaders within their factions, and they were both hotheads. Molineux once threatened to kill himself if he wasn’t allowed to lead a huge crowd in a march on the acting governor’s mansion. Hallowell got into fisticuffs with Adm. Samuel Graves in 1775 even though there was a war on and they were on the same side.

So a marriage between Molineux’s daughter and Hallowell’s son, particularly a secret one, should be the stuff of Montagues and Capulets. And then when that marriage went sour? As gossip, it must have been huge. Yet I can’t recall or unearth a single mention of this union in contemporary diaries, newspapers, or other records—anything before 1930. Anyone? Anyone?

Growing Up Molineux

Boston merchant William Molineux and merchant’s daughter Ann Guionneau married at the end of 1747, and started having children eight months later. These are the names that appear in the records of Boston’s Trinity Church (shown here, courtesy of Julie L. Sloan), along with the many creative ways Bostonians rendered the family name:

• Ann, “Daughter of Will. & ____ Mullinux,” baptized 24 Aug 1748
• William, “Son of William & Ann Mullinex,” baptized 16 Nov 1749, with one sponsor being “Mrs. Guno,” probably his maternal grandmother
• Richard, “Son of William & Mary Ann Mullenix,” baptized 2 Feb 1751
• John, baptized 13 Aug 1753
• Elizabeth, “Wm. & Marian [Molineaux],” baptized 26 Jan 1758

Of these five children, the boys are much better documented than the girls, but I haven’t found any other mention of Richard at all, which probably means he died young.

The Molineux family was then living in William’s house on Orange Street, a stretch of modern Washington Street. In 1753 the couple deeded that house to William Bowdoin, and the Thwing database doesn’t give a clue about where they lived for the rest of the decade. Molineux had bought a lot on Harvard Street in 1749, but apparently that was a real-estate investment; he sold it twenty years later, apparently still as an empty lot.

On 14 July 1760 the family moved into a large house on Beacon Hill, between the homes of wealthy merchants Thomas Hancock (uncle of John) and James Bowdoin. This mansion became known as “Molineux House,” and William Molineux would live there the rest of his life. The site now lies under the Massachusetts State House, about where the statue of Gen. Joseph Hooker stands.

Both William and John Molineux attended the South Writing School across the Common on West Street and learned handwriting skills from Master Samuel Holbrook. Samples of their elaborate work—probably end-of-year demonstration samples—are filed with other Holbrook papers at Harvard’s Houghton Library. The girls Ann and Elizabeth probably had private lessons in various genteel feminine skills, possibly even private writing lessons from the same Master Holbrook, but I know of no record of their education.

As a young man (or an old boy) William, Jr., shows up in the record of two eye-catching legal events of the early 1770s. First, he observed the Boston Massacre from the balcony of Joseph Ingersol’s Bunch of Grapes tavern across King Street. One of his companions, Jeremiah Allen, testified to seeing guns fired from the Customs House behind the soldiers. Even though William’s father pressed hard to prosecute Customs officials in that shooting, William, Jr., was never called to testify.

In 1771 William, Jr., was a witness in court when John Gray sued Lendall Pitts for assault. This trouble started when Gray or another boy had impersonated a girl so well that he attracted Pitts’s amorous attentions. Young Molineux testified:

I saw him dressed in Womens Cloaths. He had the outward Appearance of a Woman, a Gown and Womens Cloaths. I saw a Couple of young Gentleman gallanting him. Pitts was one, I was very sensible they were taken in. Plaisted was the other. They appeared to be very loving—she rather Coy. I called out to Pitts at New Boston [i.e., around Beacon Hill and perhaps Mount Whoredom]. He turnd a deaf Ear. He came back and said he had a very clever Girl, and went to her again.

When Pitts realized he’d been fooled, or later when he heard Gray joking about the incident, he demanded satisfaction. The phrases “chuckle headed son of a Bitch” and “woolly headed Rascall” came up. Pitt smashed Gray on the head with a cane. And Gray sued.

As if that dispute couldn’t get any further from our usual conceptions of colonial Boston, during the Dec 1771 trial James Otis, Jr., apparently took it upon himself to stand up and tell the court how Clodius had cross-dressed in classical Rome. That went over so well that later that day Gov. Thomas Hutchinson reported that Otis had been removed, “bound hand and foot,” to an asylum by his family.

The brief record for this case appears in The Legal Papers of John Adams, and it’s summarized in Brenton Simons’s Witches, Rakes, and Rogues. It only makes sense when we consider how a bunch of young men, a little too rich for their own good, can have fun at each other’s expense.

COMING UP: Miss Molineux’s mysterious marriage.