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.

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.

Sopha, So Good

Was the Rev. Samuel Peters correct about when upper-class families in American port towns started to prefer sofas over beds where couple could bundle? Peters dated that shift to 1756, or about when he graduated from Yale College.

I tested his suggestion by looking for references for “sofa” (or “sopha,” as Peters spelled the word) in Readex’s Archive of Americana database. This was hampered by the fact that a search for “sofa” brings up a lot of false positives. The tricky long s of the 1700s and the less than crisp and uniform images mean that the program proudly fetches words like “Sold,” “so far,” “Snow,” and so on. (In fact, it probably fetches “so on.”) So these findings might well be incomplete.

The first reference to a “sofa” as a piece of furniture that I found in colonial American newspapers was a story about the Persian ambassador to the Turkish court published in Boston’s New-England Weekly Journal for 7 July 1741. The same anecdote was retold in the 10 Sept 1741 Pennsylvania Gazette, this time with the “sopha” spelling.

Moving westward, an anecdote from London in the Boston Evening-Post of 6 Jan 1766 describes the Duke of Dorset lying on “a large sofa.” Such references indicate that printers expected their Americans readers to know what the word sofa meant. But it was still associated with faraway households.

In the 4 July 1754 Pennsylvania Gazette, James White, “Upholsterer and Undertaker, lately arrived from London,” listed “sofa’s” among “all sorts of furniture” he could make. John Brinner, “Cabinet and Chair-Maker, from London,” put “Sofa Bed, Sofa Settee, Couch, and city Chair Frames” near the end of the long line of goods he offered in the 31 May 1762 New-York Mercury. Upholsterer John Brower used the spelling “sopha” in the 20 May 1766 New-York Gazette.

Perpetuating the stereotype, the new piece of furniture caught on later in Boston. The first mention I found in the newspapers come from an Anglican family with immense wealth from Caribbean slave-labor plantations. On 10 May 1773 the Boston Evening-Post advertised the sale of the estate of John Apthorp, including:

A large Sopha and ten Chairs, covered with the best crimson Silk Damask, and four large Window Currains of the same.

A small Sopha and five Chairs of the same Damask, in the Chinese Taste.

So whether or not Peters’s story about “a sopha is more dangerous than a bed” was fully accurate, it does make sense for rural New Englanders of the 1760s to have associated sofas with wealthy, suspiciously fashionable households in the port towns.

COMING UP: More on bundling.

(The sofa shown above, courtesy of the Traditional Fine Arts Organization, is dated to Virginia in 1790-1805, or a generation after Peters published his story.)

Speaking Up for Bundling “like a Roman heroine”

Yesterday I started to retell the Rev. Samuel Peters’s anecdote about “a shoal of good old women” berating a minister from some Northeast port after he had preached in a rural town against bundling, implying that women who participated in that custom were “naughty.”

Invoking the newly fashionable sofa, the local women suggested that the minister preach that “a sopha is more dangerous than a bed.” And then things got ugly:

The poor priest, seemingly convinced of his blunder, exclaimed, “Nec vitia nostra, nec remedia pati possumus,” hoping hereby to get rid of his guests;…

That’s a quotation from Livy: “We can bear neither our shortcomings nor the remedies for them.” I think the real meaning was: I’m a clergyman; I know Latin; so you ladies should stop bothering me.

…but an old matron pulled off her spectacles, and, looking the priest in his face like a Roman heroine, said, “Noli putare me haec auribus tuis dare.”

From Trebonius to Cicero: “Don’t think I speak this only to your ears [i.e., to flatter you].” (Though in most editions I see hoc in place of Peters’s haec.) Additional meaning: Don’t assume that we women are ignorant and easily cowed!

Others cried out to the priest to explain his Latin. “The English,” said he, “is this: Wo is me that I sojourn in Meseck, and dwell in the tents of Kedar![”]

Psalm 120.

One pertly retorted, Gladii decussati sunt gemina presbyteri clavis.

And I can’t find a source for that line. It may mean, “Crossed swords are double the key of priests” or “are twins of the key of priests.” Anyone?

The priest confessed his error, begged pardon, and promised never more to preach against Bundling, or to think amiss of the custom; the ladies generously forgave him, and went away.

Peters was a Loyalist in the Revolution, but he later came back to live in Vermont and New York. Connecticut authors of the 1800s spent a lot of pages arguing that he made up most of his claims about their colony’s bundling, blue laws, and other customs out of political spite. But does contemporaneous evidence support Peters’s claims?

TOMORROW: When did sofas become common in America?

“Those city ladies who prefer a sopha to a bed”

The Rev. Samuel Peters (1735-1826) was a Connecticut minister of the Church of England, thus a minority within the Puritan-founded colony and a natural Loyalist. He moved to England in 1774 and seven years later published a history of Connecticut that included a lot about the mistreatment of Loyalists and the curious habits of New Englanders—some of which might even have been true.

Among other topics, Peters wrote about bundling: the custom of letting young unmarried couples visit or sleep together in bed. Sometimes families used boards and bags to prevent the couple from having sex, but the most powerful barrier was gravity—the gravity of the social consequences if the woman became pregnant.

Peters was snarky about bundling, but not entirely negative, as this anecdote shows:

About the year 1756, Boston, Salem, Newport, and New-York, resolving to be more polite than their ancestors, forbade their daughters bundling on the bed with any young men whatever, and introduced a sopha to render courtship more palatable and Turkish. Whatever it was owing to, whether to the sopha, or any uncommon excess of the feu d’esprit, there went abroad a report, that this raffinage produced more natural consequences than all the bundling among the boors with their rurales pedantes, through every village in New-England besides.

In 1766, a clergyman from one of the polite towns, went into the country, and preached against the unchristian custom of young men and maidens lying together on a bed. He was no sooner out of the church, than attacked by a shoal of good old women, with, “Sir, do you think we and our daughters are naughty, because we allow of bundling?”

“You lead yourselves into temptation by it.”

They all replied at once, “Sir, have you been told thus, or has experience taught it you?”

And there’s no right answer for that question, is there?

The Levite began to lift up his eyes, and to consider of his situation, and, bowing, said, “I have been told so.”

The ladies, unâ voce, bawled out, “Your informers, Sir, we conclude, are those city ladies who prefer a sopha to a bed; we advise you to alter your sermon, by substituting the word Sopha for Bundling, and, on your return home, preach it to them; for experience has told us that city folks send more children into the country without father or mothers to own them, than are born among us; therefore, you see, a sopha is more dangerous than a bed.”

Click on the thumbnail above for a Colonial Williamsburg article about colonial American courtship rituals.

TOMORROW: The argument is translated to a higher level.

Gleanings from the Web This Week

Today I’m passing on some choice passages from items about the eighteenth century I’ve recently read. First, Adam Gopnik commented in the New Yorker on the historical basis of Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol:

Much of it is bogus, to be sure—though modern Masonry borrowed some oogah-boogah from the Egyptian past, it was an Enlightenment club, whose greatest product was “The Magic Flute,” and which was about as sinister, and secretly controlled about as many governments, as the Royal Order of Raccoons in “The Honeymooners.”

For more substance, Anthony Vaver at Early American Crime analyzed the nature of eighteenth-century colonial immigration to the colonies that became the U.S. of A.:

Of the 585,800 immigrants to the thirteen colonies during the years 1700-1775, about 52,200 were convicts and prisoners (9 percent of the total). During these same years, slaves by far constituted the largest group of immigrants (278,400; 47%), followed by people arriving with their freedom (151,600; 26%) and indentured servants (96,600; 18%). Note that almost three quarters of all the people arriving in the American colonies during this time period did so without their freedom.

I also enjoyed Vaver’s previous installment, about how the British government and the businessmen who benefited from transporting convicts to the American colonies tried to continue doing so after the Revolutionary War. After all, why would those new “Americans” object to their former empire’s criminals?

Finally, Brad Pasley at Publick Occurrences 2.0 provides our dose of unabashed gossip with some quotations on the old American habit of “bundling”:

It meant that a courting couple would be in bed together, but with their clothes on. With fuel at a premium, it was often difficult to keep a house warm in the evenings. Since this is when a man would be visiting his betrothed in her home, they would bundle in her bed together in order to keep warm. A board might be placed in the middle to keep them separate, or the young lady could be put in a bundling bag or duffel-like chastity bag. The best protection against sin were the parents, who were usually in the same room with them.

Pasley reproduces the Rev. Samuel Peters’s writings on this topic. Peters was a Connecticut Loyalist, happy to say anything embarrassing about the nation he left behind (and then returned to). Peters is also our major source on Puritan “blue laws,” which he exaggerated. So Pasley adds, “Apologies to any social historians who may have more bundling expertise than me if I am spreading any common myths here.”

But bundling was no myth.

TOMORROW: A young British officer receives an invitation to bundle.