“Let not that man be trusted who can voilate private faith”

The Massachusetts Whigs were flabbergasted by the evidence that Dr. Benjamin Church, Jr., was corresponding with someone behind enemy lines.

By the fall of 1775, those men had worked alongside Dr. Church for a decade. He had helped to compose instructions for representatives, correspondence to Whigs in Britain, and political verse for engravings.

The doctor had delivered the Massacre memorial oration in 1773. He had represented Boston in the Massachusetts Provincial Congress and then the General Court, serving on the most sensitive committees.

His fellow legislators had chosen Church to take important documents to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia, and then to escort Gen. George Washington across the state from Springfield. He was serving as the top doctor in the Continental Army.

Church’s erstwhile colleagues wrote to each other in astonishment.

One group of Massachusetts Patriots who didn’t express such surprise, however, were the Massachusetts Whigs’ wives.

Those women had noted Church’s habit of extramarital affairs, rumored as early as 1769. By 1774 he was maintaining a mistress outside of Boston. To other men’s wives, the doctor’s betrayal of Sarah Church made it easy to believe he’d betrayed his political movement as well.

Abigail Adams wrote to her husband John on October 9:

You have doubtless heard of the viliny of one who has professd himself a patriot, but let not that man be trusted who can voilate private faith, and cancel solem covanants, who can leap over moral law, and laugh at christianity.

Mercy Warren, wife of Massachusetts house speaker James Warren, added her voice three days later:

I fear a Late Instance of perfidy and Baseness in one who Rancked Himself among the Friends to the Rights of society and the Happiness of the Community Will occasion many Inviduous Reflections from the Enemies of the American Cause.

I was Ever sorry that there should be one among the Band of patriots Whose Moral Character was Impeachable for when the Heart is Contaminated, and the Obligations of private Life Broken through, And the man has thrown of[f] the Restraints Both of Honour and Conscience with Regard to His own Domestic Conduct, what Dependance is to be Made on the Rectitude of His public Intentions.

Abigail Greenleaf, wife of the publisher Joseph Greenleaf, wrote to her brother Robert Treat Paine on 14 October:

How Sir, did you receive the news of the Perfidy & treachery of Docter Church? Was it not in Silent astonishment? It will I believe, bow down the grey hairs of his Father & Mother, with Sorrow to the grave. His Poor wife too, is an object of the Pitty, & Compassion of every one. She still Loves him, tho, he has treated her in so base a manner. If she looses her senses I think twill not be strange; but it will be melancholy.

Abigail Adams came back to the topic on 21 October:

What are your thoughts with regard to Dr. Church? Had you much knowledg of him? I think you had no intimate acquaintance with him.

“A foe to God was ne’er true Friend to man
Some sinister intent taints all he does.”

The wise response to such questions from a spouse was of course: ‘I agree with you, dear. I barely knew the man. You’re so right.’

Looking Back on Dr. Church and Mary Lobb

I started investigating Dr. Benjamin Church’s last years because I’d made an error in an old posting about him, and wanted to be more accurate. And I admit to hoping to find new information to make up for the lapse.

In that respect, I think I filled out details of the abortive attempt to trade Dr. Church for Dr. James McHenry, prisoner of war, future aide-de-camp to George Washington, and future Secretary of War.

There are more Dr. Church mysteries to clear up. Though documents confirm that his widow was named Sarah, some early sources say he “married Miss Hannah Hill, of Ross, in Herefordshire, a sister of his early friend, a young student in London.” So Sarah Church might have been the doctor’s second wife. And we still don’t know the name of his mistress.

What really tickled me about that inquiry was how it spiraled off in a direction I never imagined. I looked up Capt. James Smithwick’s name in hope of tidbits about Dr. Church’s departure, and stumbled into the life of the captain’s widow, Mary Lobb—separated from her next husband, joining Boston’s first Catholic church, doling out real estate in her dotage.

Those topics fit Boston 1775 promise of “unabashed gossip,” my cheeky term for intriguing facts about individuals’ lives. They taught me a lot, and offered a great reminder of how the approximately 16,000 people in Revolutionary Boston were interconnected in so many ways. Because of that social network, looking through historical keyholes at individuals helps to illuminate the broad social movement behind the launch of the U.S. of A.

That movement also spiraled off in directions that people of the time never imagined. In the late 1760s, Dr. Benjamin Church joined other Massachusetts gentlemen in protesting Parliament’s new taxes, an attempt to restore autonomy to their traditional, Congregationalist-dominated society. Fifteen years later, their movement had led to Mary Lobb’s freedom to worship in a Catholic church in the heart of Boston. Amazing.

(Above is an image from the Massachusetts Historical Society showing the bustling center of Boston in 1801, as painted by James Brown Marston.)

Tracing Sarah Church and Her Children

By July 1777, Sarah Church, wife of accused traitor Dr. Benjamin Church, realized that she was no longer welcome in America. A mob carrying off your possessions tends to have that effect. Sarah gathered the silver plate that remained and bought passage for herself and her children to France, and from there to Britain.

The dates of their voyages aren’t clear. Back in Massachusetts, the state included Church’s name on its list of people banished for disloyalty in October 1778, and confiscated his Boston house for sale to support the war effort.

In England, Sarah Church petitioned the Crown for support. She referred to “certain services” that her husband had done for the Crown, and said Gen. Thomas Gage could provide more details. A Mr. Sparhawk testified on her behalf, saying that Dr. Church had been a British spy. In addition, a Loyalist named William Warden stated in his own petition for support that “he was sent by General Gage to Salem and Marblehead to receive intelligence from Dr. Benjamin Church, but failed to execute his business.”

These documents seem to confirm what the American authorities of that time were never quite able to prove: that Dr. Church had been a paid spy for the Crown.

The royal government granted Sarah Church an annual pension of £150, which she collected until her death in August 1788.

The couple’s two sons, Benjamin (born 1758) and James Miller (born 1759), had apparently both started to train as doctors under their father when he was arrested.

According to Boston author James Spear Loring, who said he got information from Church descendants, Benjamin “married a lady of London, and became a surgeon in the British army.” Some books don’t mention Benjamin, apparently because there’s no record of his baptism in Boston (the family may not have moved from Rhode Island yet), and he wasn’t mentioned in his grandmother’s 1794 will (so perhaps he died before that year).

James Miller “was granted an appointment as surgeon’s mate and ensign to the West Middlesex Militia in England”; he retired as that militia’s surgeon in 1817 and died fourteen years later, receiving a small pension as a Loyalist of £12.10s. per year.

The family also included two girls, Sarah (born 1761) and Hannah (born 1764). I find it notable that there’s no sign the Churches had any children after that—four is a small number for an eighteenth-century couple who could have children at all. Benjamin and Sarah Church might therefore have been estranged for a decade before the Revolution.

The younger Sarah Church married a Loyalist refugee named Benjamin Weld. Some sources say he was also her cousin, and she indeed had a cousin of that name. But it’s more than possible that there were multiple Benjamin Welds.

Hannah married a London merchant named William Kirkly and had sixteen children, said Loring in the 1852 edition of his Hundred Boston Orators. However, in the next edition of that book, published two years later, Loring said her husband was named Kirkby. (Other sources use the spellings Kilby and Kirby, just to confuse matters further.) Loring said “a descendant of this branch” was his source on the Church family, meaning they kept up some sort of connection with people in Massachusetts.

In fact, a “Mrs. Hannah Kirkby” married William Longhurst in Boston in 1807. That year’s town directory listed Longhurst as a shopkeeper on Newbury Street. I’ve seen a report that government records from the War of 1812 list William and Hannah Longhurst as British subjects living in Boston; Hannah was said to be forty-five years old, meaning she was born in 1767. John Haven Dexter’s genealogical notes in an earlier town directory (part of the collection of the New England Historic Genealogical Society) state that Mrs. Hannah Longhurst died on 7 Apr 1836 at age 68—giving a birth year of about 1768.

So was Hannah Kirkby Longhurst the younger daughter of Dr. Benjamin Church, discreetly returning to the town of her birth? Or is this simply coincidence?

Dr. Church’s Second Riot

We wouldn’t know it from the letter and legislative resolution I quoted yesterday, but the Massachusetts authorities actually tried to put Dr. Benjamin Church aboard a ship to British-occupied Newport, Rhode Island—perhaps even on the same day that those documents were written. And citizens responded with a small riot.

As far as I can tell, our sole source for that action seems to be the petition of Church’s wife Sarah to the Crown, quoted and summarized in E. Alfred Jones’s Loyalists of Massachusetts:

General [William] Howe, commander-in-chief of the British Army in America, having been informed of the wretched condition of Dr. Church, sent one [James Mc]Henry, a surgeon and a prisoner, to be exchanged, and this arrangement was approved by the [Massachusetts] Provincial Council, but the mob, with General [William] Heath at their head, prevented the exchange, and caused Church to be removed from the cartel vessel and re-committed to gaol.

Some historians have difficulty imagining Heath at the head of a mob. Of course, he might have been at the head of a detachment of Continental troops and/or Massachusetts militia blocking the way. Or Sarah Church might have meant that the crowd knew Heath opposed the prisoner exchange, and therefore acted on his behalf. Or perhaps he really did participate in forcing Church back to the jail.

The crowd apparently then proceeded to make their displeasure clear by mobbing Dr. Church’s old house, where his family was still living. Jones’s statement of Sarah Church’s petition says:

Not content with casting him into prison, the mob broke open his house and pillaged or destroyed all the contents, without leaving even a change of clothes for his wife and children, or even a bed to lie on. The only property she was able to recover was a small quantity of silver plate, barely sufficient for her to pay for her passage to England. Permission was refused her for the direct passage to England and she was obliged to travel first to France.

That attack seems especially unfair for Sarah since Benjamin had taken up with a mistress years before; that woman’s mistakes had led to the capture of his coded letter into Boston.

At the end of the day, Dr. Church was back in the Boston jail where he’d started.

COMING UP: So many loose ends! What happened to Sarah Church and the children? What happened to Dr. James McHenry? And, of course, what happened to Dr. Church?