The Departures of the Rev. Mr. Mosley

On Easter in 1772, as I described yesterday, Trinity Church of Pomfret, Connecticut, formally set up its governing structure.

The minister was the Rev. Richard Mosley, a Cambridge University graduate and former Royal Navy chaplain. The man who had founded the Anglican outpost, Godfrey Malbone, became one of the wardens.

A couple of weeks later, the Rev. David Fogg arrived from North Carolina. Malbone had invited him to be the church’s minister months before, but nothing had been heard from him since.

One day after that, a letter arrived from the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (S.P.G.) in London, approving of Mosley and granting him £30 per year in salary.

There was only one way to resolve this awkward situation. And that was how everything about Trinity Church was decided—whatever Godfrey Malbone wanted. He had had the idea for a church when few others in the area were Anglican. He had paid for its construction. He had solicited funds from rich acquaintances in Newport and Boston, and he had petitioned the S.P.G. and an old Oxford University friend, the bishop of Durham, for more support.

Malbone was also hosting the minister(s) at his house, and expected to do so for an undetermined time into the future. In a letter to Fogg’s mentor, the Rev. Henry Caner of King’s Chapel, he wrote:

We have no Glebe. I myself live in a Hutt, in which, however, God be praised! We have hitherto found very comfortable Provision, of which my Parson shall be heartily wellcome to His equal Share and shall be considered as one of my Family, as long as We each of us shall prove good-natured, I, on my Part, continue to live in Pomfret, and He, on His Part, continues to live single, for He cannot find Room wherein to cram a Wife, and if He could, as I have no Brats I am determined to have no Plague from those of other People.

All of which suggests that becoming Malbone’s parson might not have been a great prize.

That could explain why Mosley decided by 6 May to bow out. He wrote to the S.P.G. ten days later:

I had resigned up to Mr. Fogg, this Mr. Malbone’s appointing him, though every one man of the Parish would gladly have had me continued. I have done myself the honour of addressing the Bishop of London, for his further recommendation to Litchfield and Cornwall, vacant by the death of Mr. [Solomon] Palmer. I propose going next week there.

The London missionary society approved that move to a larger parish in Connecticut. However, by then Mosley had run into more trouble. The parishioners had been happy hearing services read by a local young man named Benjamin Farnham, who was planning to go to England to receive holy orders. When Mosley showed up, “many left the church.”

That dispute culminated in the S.P.G. dropping its salary subsidy for the Litchfield parish until their leaders wrote a humble apology endorsed by Anglican clergymen from larger churches in the region.

The Rev. Mr. Mosley had moved on again, settling before the end of the year at Johnstown, New York, a frontier settlement founded by Sir William Johnson in 1758. As minister of St. John’s church, next to Johnson Hall (shown above), Mosley reported fending off more New England Congregationalists and baptizing forty black people into the Church of England in May and October 1773.

In between those dates, in August, the minister made a return trip to Litchfield. While there, a former parishioner begged Mosley to marry his daughter and her fiancé, saying the next nearest Anglican minister was sixteen miles away. Mosley declined until the father of the bride brought a certificate from the town clerk, showing that the banns had been duly published.

That turned out not to be good enough. The local government, following Connecticut law, recognized a minister’s authority only within the town where his church was located. Mosley was hauled into court. According to him, “When the jury went out, the Judges were of the opinion, that they could not bring it against me; but, notwithstanding, (to see how much spite and malice reign there) they did.” He told the S.P.G. that he’d been fined £15 plus court costs, not to mention “the expense of my own travelling.”

The Rev. Samuel Peters wrote about the case with his customary exaggeration:

The Court mildly fined Mr. Mozley 20l. because he could not show any other license to officiate as a clergyman than what he had received from the Bishop of London, whose authority the Court determined did not extend to Connecticut, which was a chartered government. One of the Judges said: “It is high time to put a stop to the usurpations of the Bishop of London, and to let him know that, though his license be lawful, and may empower one of his curates to marry in England, yet it is not so in America; and if fines would not curb them in this point, imprisonment should.”

By May 1774, Mosley had grown ill in some way. (John Rowe recorded in March 1770 that the man suffered from an “Apoplectick fit.”) The minister decided the New York climate was unhealthy and returned to Britain, telling the S.P.G., “The only thing I regrett…is to go from so worthy and good a man as Sir William Johnson.” (Johnson died two months later.)

Thus ended the Rev. Richard Mosley’s American adventures.

Settling the Rev. Mr. Mosley in Pomfret

When the Rev. Richard Mosley arrived in Pomfret, Connecticut, in September 1771, asking about the need for an Anglican minister, Godfrey Malbone was cautious.

He certainly needed a minister for the little church he had designed and built himself. For over a year after forming his Anglican parish in northeast Connecticut, Malbone had presided over most of the services, reading from the Book of Common Prayer. But if he didn’t have a real minister soon, the town would deem his church to be nothing more than a tax dodge.

Malbone had asked the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (S.P.G.) in London to send a missionary, but no Englishman was willing to emigrate for such a small salary. Malbone also asked the Anglican clergy in his home town of Newport and in Boston.

The Rev. John Troutbeck, assistant at King’s Chapel, had instead recommended that the former Newport merchant leave Pomfret altogether:

I shou’d certainly advise you not to spend the very best Part of your Days amongst the Savages, for the Rustics in this Part of the World are not much better than Indians. Of all the People that have left off Business in this Town, & retired to a Farm, I cannot recollect one that, has not suffered by it; & I cou’d mention several, who have died extremely poor. To have a thoro knowledge of the Business, & to be able to endure the Fatigue of a country Life, a Man shou’d begin in his Childhood.

As for the rector at King’s Chapel, the Rev. Dr. Henry Caner, he appears to have recommended David Fogg, a young man from New Hampshire who had graduated from Harvard College in 1764 with an unusual interest in the Church of England. After a few years as Caner’s protégé while he earned his master’s degree, Fogg had sailed for England in May 1770 to receive holy orders. That’s definitely not how Fogg’s Harvard professors had hoped things would go.

When Caner wrote back to Pomfret, the Rev. Mr. Fogg was serving at his first assignment at St. Thomas’s in Bath, North Carolina (shown above). Malbone duly sent off an invitation to the young man. But it was a long way from rural Connecticut to rural North Carolina, and there was no response.

Then Mosley arrived from Boston in September 1771, bringing recommendations from two prominent Anglicans. On first acquaintance, Malbone liked Mosley’s “agreeable private Behaviour & Conversation,” which was important because he would host the minister until he got around to building the man a separate home. After hearing Mosley deliver a sermon, Malbone felt sure “he would be a very popular Preacher.”

Still, the colonel wanted to be sure, so he wrote back to Caner and Troutbeck:

the Gentleman is a perfect stranger to me; and I never heard of nor saw him until this visit, and the Business is of too delicate and important a Nature for me to act upon of my own Head. . . . I must beg the Favour of You, provided You have discovered by a Residence of Eleven Months of Mr Mosely at Boston, that his moral Character and Qualifications perfectly correspond with the Rules established by the Society, that You will be pleased to recommend him to me in Form as a proper Person to fill up this Mission.

The Boston rectors declined to recommend Mosley, saying they didn’t know him well enough. Caner added: ”He had met with the Fate of all Strangers that came among us, to be censured for a Freedom and Openess which do not exactly correspond with our Manners or the Taste of the Country.”

But Malbone wasn’t a typical Yankee either, and he came to like this former naval chaplain. So did the people of the region, according to Mosley. Writing in May 1772, he said he had “preached and lectured this winter frequently, both at Plainfield and Canterbury, though the season has been remarkably severe, and had a great audience each time.”

In February 1772, Malbone fended off an inquiry by a Pomfret town committee seeking to inspect Mosley’s credentials, as I described over the past two days. That opportunity to get the better of his neighbors appears to have cemented Mosley in Malbone’s plans. The two men talked about Mosley becoming Trinity Church’s permanent minister. Meanwhile, a 24 January letter from the S.P.G. approving a £30 matching grant for a salary was on its way across the Atlantic.

On 22 April, Easter Sunday, Trinity Church had its first formal organizational meeting. Eighteen members signed bonds to pay the Rev. Mr. Mosley £28 per year, which they thought was close enough to the contribution they expected from London. Malbone and Dr. William Walton became church wardens. The congregation chose to save money by paying its clerk only twenty shillings a year and not hiring a sexton.

And then the Rev. Daniel Fogg arrived in Pomfret, ready to take the pulpit that had been promised to him by letter.

TOMORROW: Two men enter, one man leaves.

“Proceeding from the small share of light that is within us”

So you want to read the “instrument” that Godfrey Malbone composed for the committee of Congregationalists who came to his house in February 1772, questioning the credentials of his new Anglican minister, Richard Mosley?

The statement that addressed the dispute over whether Trinity Church could operate in what today is Brooklyn, Connecticut, with its congregants excused from the tax that would otherwise go to the established Congregationalist meeting and the cost of its new meetinghouse (shown here)?

The paper that Malbone asked the committee to sign after he read it, though they refused to make any promises, even though he insisted again and again, and they resisted just as many times?

The document that Malbone finally read out “as distinctly, emphatically and Yankily as I was able to do”?

Okay, here it is:

WE, the subscribers, appointed a Committee by the Society of Brookline, in the Township of Pomfret, in the County of Windham, in the Colony of Connecticut, for the inspection and transaction of the Religious concerns of the Society, do hereby make known, certify and declare unto all manner of persons, that to prevent as much as in us lies, every possibility of chicanery, fraud or collusion in those who have seceded from our independent congregational meeting, (where the worship of God is singly, simple, truly and spiritually performed, according to the very sensible and righteous manner which was framed and here established as the glorious Truth, by the great sagacity, wisdom and policy of the religion of our pure, holy and renowned forefathers,) and declared themselves conformists to the Church of England, and have invariably acted agreeable thereto since the month of Oct. 1770:

We, in consequence of that high and great authority, the utmost they could possibly bestow, delegated to us by the said Society of Brookline, or which we, being very active and zealous members, assumed of ourselves, it is no matter which, called upon Richard Mosley, Clerk, who presumes to style himself Legis Legum Baccalaurius a degree of honor conferred upon him by the University at Cambridge, in Great Britain, in consequence of his studies and literary merit, during a seven years residence at St. John’s College; and pretends to have been duly and legally ordained Deacon and Priest, according to the Cannon Law of said Church of England, and to have lately been employed in the service of his Majesty, George the 3d, by the grace of God, King of Great Britain, France and Ireland, a Chaplain on board of his ship Salisbury of 50 great guns, commanded at Boston by the honorable Commodore James Gambier, and also to have frequently and publicly officiated as a Priest in each of the several Churches of the said good Town of Boston, the several Rectors or Ministors whereof may, for aught we know, have been such negligent, stupid, idle, and irreverent blockheads, as to have been very indifferent and careless whether they received and admitted into their desks and pulpits an impostor or not, provided they might have their business performed without any care or trouble to themselves.

The Lords of the Admiralty, also, may have been equally to blame, in suffering themselves to be imposed upon by appointing to the cure of a National ship, a worthless, vagrant person, without a due inquisition into his qualifications and religious character, previous to such, his appointment. Nay, who knows but the pretended Bishop who ordained him, that Bishop’s predecessor and the whole series of them up to the very founder of their order Himself, may have been, all of them impostors and their religion a cheat?

And yet, notwithstanding, it is reasonable presumption, the said Richard Mosley, in virtue of this before mentioned pretended power, with very great effrontery, (not having aforehand consulted our will and pleasure, and obtained our gracious consent for the same,) claimeth a right, and hath absolutely exercised the five months last past, the said office of Priesthood, according to the rites and ceremonies of the said Church of England, in this very Parish of Brookline, the like whereof hath never before been practiced or heard of in all Windham County.

Wherefore, as of our invaluable and indubitable right, and not to derogate from the high office, trust and authority committed to our exercise and keeping by the said Society of Brookline, We were not abashed, shamefaced, nor mealy-mouthed, but impertinently, boldly and peremptorily demanded of him, the said Mosley, the inspection and examination of his said letters of orders which he (undoubtedly influenced by the religion he professeth, which he saith ordaineth. that if a man take away thy coat to let him have thy cloak also,) took not the least offence at, but in a most becoming, humane and condescending manner, upon our solemn promise of signing with our Christian and Sir names, this present acknowledgment, declaration and certificate, immediately produced: and it appears to us, that the said Rev. Richard Mosley is really what we thought, or said we thought he only pretended to be; and that he is truly and absolutely, charged with the orders, both of Deacon and Priest, granted by his grace Robert, by Divine Providence, Lord Archbishop of York, which we have employed our best faculties to inquire into, and to the very utmost of our skill, knowledge and judgment, proceeding from the small share of light that is within us, pronounce them to be valid and genuine, and do hereby acknowledge ourselves to be therewith fully and duly satisfied.

In testimony whereof we have hereunto signed our names, at Brookline aforesaid, this 12th day of February, 1772.

Malbone had obviously enjoyed composing this document. He stated, “I made it ridiculously formal, availing myself of many of their common terms, in compliance with their own taste, as it would better open their eyes, and expose them to themselves.”

Needless to say, the committee of Malbone’s neighbors—Joseph Holland, Samuel Williams, and Josiah Tasset—were not so pleased.

According to Malbone, the men left “as much ashamed and confused as you can possibly imagine” to rendezvous with other townspeople “at a house moderately distant.” Their report of the conversation got more people angry. Malbone wrote: “they swore vengeance, and fire and faggot was the word.”

TOMORROW: Trouble for the Rev. Mr. Mosley.

(Malbone’s instrument and letter describing it appear in the Documentary History of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America, edited by Francis L. Hawks and William Stevens Perry and published in 1863.)

The Committee and Colonel Malbone

When Godfrey Malbone of Pomfret, Connecticut, set up an Anglican church and arranged for the Rev. Richard Mosley to preach there in the fall of 1771, that wasn’t just a matter of religious freedom.

It was also a financial matter. Malbone had been a principal contributor to his town’s established meeting, and he was withdrawing his support just when (and because) that congregation had voted to build a new meetinghouse. Furthermore, he had pulled away a bunch of other thrifty parishioners with him.

And there were legal questions. New England law gave ministers jurisdiction over religious ceremonies in the towns where they had been called to the pulpit. But the charter for Malbone’s congregation spilled from the village of Brooklyn, where Trinity Church still stands (shown above), to neighboring towns. And who was this Mosley anyhow?

In February 1772, a committee of three Pomfret town leaders—Joseph Holland, Samuel Williams, and Josiah Tasset—came to Malbone’s house “to inspect Mr. Mosley's letters of orders,” he later reported.

Malbone had been raised as the son of a wealthy Newport merchant and studied at Oxford. He was a militia colonel and owner of a great deal of land. He had lived in Pomfret, he said, for six years without any trouble. And clearly he felt affronted by this visit from some country deacons.

Malbone described their discourse this way:

The contention lasted full two hours, near the close of which I told them that I considered their present conduct as their last effort; that they were then uttering their last dying speech; that, as they knew they could not, by their own laws, do any more against the Church, they had not sense enough to conceal their implacable malice; but had very foolishly taken this ridiculous step to gratify an impotent resentment.

However, I was willing to indulge them, even in their follies; and as I had been favoured by a notice of their intended visit, the evening before, I had drawn up an instrument in writing, which, if they would sign, I would satisfy them as far as it was in my power; and I would promise as much for Mr. Mosley.

“Of what nature is this instrument, sir?"

“You shall know, gentlemen, if you will have the patience to hear me read it quite through: but you must promise not to interrupt me, and also to sign it before you leave the room. Upon these conditions you shall have the examination of Mr. Mosley’s orders, and I will satisfy you as to the right of Induction.“

“We shall be very glad to hear it read to us: we promise to hear it, but cannot to sign it, until we know whether we like it or not. It may be a bond for money. What is it?"

“Why, gentlemen, you have had your whim in coming hither and making a very ridiculous demand. I am willing to gratify you, provided, in turn, you will let me have my whim in making this demand, and your conduct thereupon public. It is nothing like a bond, I assure you, but a writing drawn up for this sole purpose.”

“We shall be glad to hear it; we promise to be patient, and to sign it if we like it.”

So Malbone finally read the document he had prepared, “as distinctly, emphatically and Yankily as I was able to do.”

TOMORROW: The instrument.

A Church in Pomfret, Connecticut

When Cmdre. James Gambier sailed his flagship Salisbury back to Britain in August 1771, he left behind the ship’s chaplain, the Rev. Richard Mosley.

I’m still not sure why, but Mosley had decided to seek a post as an Anglican minister in New England, which was missionary territory.

Literally, the Puritan-founded colonies were so unfriendly to the established church and contained so few Anglicans outside of the port towns that the London-based Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (S.P.G.) paid or supplemented the salaries of ministers willing to work there.

One such barely hospitable spot was Pomfret, Connecticut, a small town in the northeast corner of that colony known best for being where Israel Putnam of the village of Brooklyn killed a wolf in her den (shown above). How did any Anglicans end up there?

That story began with a Virginian named Godfrey Malbone (1696-1768) coming to Newport, Rhode Island, in his twenties. He was a member of the Church of England, not from an old Puritan family. Malbone built a fortune through privateering and transatlantic trade, commissioning a large mansion in town and another in the countryside. He invested more money in Connecticut real estate, hoping to develop a quarry and settlements in Pomfret.

In the 1760s Malbone’s businesses faltered. He had to mortgage property to the Boston Customs officer Charles Paxton. He assigned the Connecticut land to his sons in 1766 and died two years later.

The eldest son, the second Godfrey Malbone (1724-1785), had attended the University of Oxford in the 1740s before returning to Newport. With his father’s death, he had to move to that little town of Pomfret and try to get the most value out of the real estate there.

According to the Rev. Dr. Ezra Stiles of Newport, writing in January 1770:

Col. Godfry Malbone of Newport owns about one quarter of the Land in the small parish of Brookline in Connecticutt. For some years he voluntarily consented to pay a part of the ministerial Tax, as making a parish & settling a minister there has given perhaps a fourfold Value to his Land. I am informed that lately the parish voted to build a new Meetinghouse. His Lands as he is an Episcopalian are exempted by Law of that Colony. Perhaps he felt himself under some Obligations of honor to contribute a part.

Malbone had thus been supporting the Congregationalist meeting that was the town’s established church. But faced with the prospect of a rising tax bill for the new meetinghouse, Malbone with “his wife & family” decided they wanted to have their own church instead. Stiles continued:

I hear to-day that he had engaged to erect an episcopal chh there—prevailed upon 25 Families as is said to declare for the chh—& lately procured a Subscription here of three hundred Dollars in the Fryday Night Club, towards building a chh—& sent home to the Bp of London by Collector [Joseph] Harrison, to get the Society to erect a Mission.

Col. Malbone is a Gentleman of Politeness & great Honor, was educated at Oxford, and dispised all Religion. But now is become a zealous Advocate for the Church of England.

Stiles also claimed that part of Malbone’s pitch to neighbors to join the Anglican congregation was that they wouldn’t have to pay as much as in their previous meetings, given the financial support coming from London and Newport.

Malbone’s church started to go up in June 1770. The following April, the Rev. Samuel Peters of Hebron and another Anglican missionary in Connecticut traveled to Pomfret to dedicate this building as Trinity Church.

As for the S.P.G. in London, in March 1771 its secretary sent a letter to Malbone approving the establishment of a missionary parish covering Pomfret, Plainfield, and Canterbury and offering a salary of £30 per year. However, for that money they couldn’t find any English clergyman willing to emigrate to Connecticut.

With the S.P.G.’s blessing, Malbone wrote to various contacts in America, seeking an Anglican priest. Some recommended a recent Harvard graduate named Daniel Fogg, who was preaching in far-off North Carolina, but letters to him went unanswered.

In September 1771, the Rev. Richard Mosley arrived from Boston. He came with letters of recommendation from the Boston merchants Henry Lloyd and Shrimpton Hutchinson. According to Mosley, reporting to the S.P.G. in 1772:

Upon finding Mr. Malbone had taken so much trouble, and had been at so much pains, and had been at so great an expense, to erect a Church for the worship of Almighty God here at Pomfret, where few were disposed and inclined to join it, and the venerable Society’s charity not being able, together with their small means, to get a minister from England to do the service, I was willing to encourage so good an undertaking, being in hopes that it might be serviceable both to religion and the people’s salvation. These motives have influenced me to stay with them ever since Sept. 13th last.

Mosley and Malbone made no long-term commitments to each other. But Trinity Church in Pomfret, Connecticut, began to have regular sermons from former Royal Navy chaplain Mosley starting on 13 Sept 1771.

TOMORROW: A committee of Congregationalists.

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.

Capt. Preston at the Castle

The Boston Whigs don’t appear to have been surprised or terribly upset when Capt. Thomas Preston was acquitted of murder for the Boston Massacre in October 1770.

The 5 November Boston Gazette reported the not guilty verdict without comment.

Writing to John Wilkes on behalf of the Whigs, young merchant William Palfrey complained at length about how the jury had been seated and called the trial a “farce,” but he also said:

It must however be confessed that the confusion of that unhappy night was so great that the Witnesses both for the Crown & the prisoner differed materially in some parts of their testimony, and even in my own mind there still remains a doubt whether Capt Preston gave the orders to fire, as the two Witnesses who swore to that point, declared also that Capt Preston had on a Surtout Coat, which he proved was not the case.

Preston and his friends nonetheless still feared a lynching, or at least more harassment. On 31 October, the captain wrote to Gen. Thomas Gage in New York:

They have endeavourd to lodge an Appeal against me, in behalf of one of the relations of the deceasd, but it won’t lie, as there are not any near enough of kin now surviving, but their busy malice has found out another way to distress me, by sueing me for damages on acct. of the wounded, & if taken wou’d involve me in endless lawsuits…

The next day, Lt. Col. William Dalrymple added, “I understand there are fresh warrants out against him.” No lawsuit went forward, however.

To be safe, Capt. Preston had headed for Castle William, where the 14th Regiment could protect him against both mobs and constables.

We even have a glimpse of the captain’s departure for that island fort in a document that Christie’s auctioned in 2005. That was a handwritten copy of Preston’s “Case,” including a section not published in the London newspapers.

Bound with that plea for a pardon was a letter from the Rev. Richard Mosley dated 7 November. He recounted the captain’s trial and stated, “After Capn Preston was discharged…I escorted him to a boat” headed to Castle Island. Mosley believed the locals still wanted “Blood for Blood.”

Mosley was then the chaplain of H.M.S. Salisbury, which had arrived in Boston harbor earlier in October carrying Commodore James Gambier, recently appointed naval commander of the North American station. Some Whigs had speculated that the Crown had sent the warship to Boston to ensure the town remained peaceful during the Massacre trials.

As for the Preston/Mosley document, I don’t know where it is now. The selling price was over a quarter-million dollars, so it’s not in the Boston 1775 collection.

TOMORROW: Preston’s own view of his trial.