Thomas Boylston Adams and His Relations

In 1772, John and Abigail Adams had a third son, whom they named Thomas Boylston Adams (shown here, some years later).

The following August, John Adams explained this baby’s name this way:

Sept. 15. 1772 Thomas Boylston Adams was born at Braintree and Christened the next Sunday by Mr. [Anthony] Wibert. The childs great, great Grandfather was of the name of Thomas Boylston and built the Old house at Brooklyne where my mother was born; My mother had also an Uncle of the same name The father of the late Nich. Boylston Esq. and the present Thomas Boylston. Merchant.

As discussed the last couple of days, Adams personally knew the brothers Nicholas and Thomas Boylston.

He also knew—heck, everyone knew—that Nicholas had died in 1771 without any children. He had left most of his huge fortune to a nephew, born Ward Nicholas Hallowell (1749–1828). In return, that young man had legally changed his name to Ward Nicholas Boylston in 1770.

Nicholas’s brother Thomas also had a large fortune. He also had no children. Was he also looking for an heir?

And might knowing there was a little boy in the extended family who already bore his name (albeit from a common ancestor) have caught Thomas’s attention? Did the Adamses consider the prospect of an inheritance, even a little bit? After all, “Thomas Boylston. Merchant” did get a mention in this genealogical note about the baby, despite being only a first cousin twice removed.

As it turned out, Thomas Boylston lost his money in the failure of a London mercantile firm in 1793. He even spent time in a British debtors’ prison before dying in 1798. So there was no fortune to inherit.

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?