William Browne, John Glover, and a Farmhouse in Swampscott

Save the Glover is a campaign by several historic organizations in Swampscott and neighboring towns to preserve an eighteenth-century farmhouse.

The house was originally built in the third quarter of the 1700s by William Browne (1737–1802), a wealthy and respected lawyer. It was his country estate since he already owned a mansion in Salem, as well as part of a family seat in what’s now Danvers.

Browne was elected to the Massachusetts General Court in 1762. Though he joined the Customs service in 1762 as collector for the port of Salem, he favored local merchants enough to keep getting reelected—until he voted to rescind the Circular Letter of 1768.

After that, Browne was firmly on the side of the royal government. Gov. Thomas Hutchinson rewarded him with appointments: as colonel of the Essex County militia, as judge in the county court, and eventually as the last royal appointment to the Massachusetts superior court in 1774. That same year, the London government named him to the mandamus Council.

Refusing to resign from the Council made Browne unpopular locally. Dozens of militia officers refused to serve under him. He moved to Boston late in 1774, to Britain in 1776, and to Bermuda as royal governor in 1781. The state of Massachusetts confiscated Browne’s real estate, including that country house and land.

Gen. John Glover (1732–1797) of the Continental Army bought the property and moved in with his second wife in 1782. He lived there for the rest of his life, welcoming fellow veterans and serving in local offices.

In 1793 the Rev. William Bentley recorded how “the general received us with Great Hospitality” when a committee came through to settle the boundaries of Marblehead, Salem, and Lynn. Glover evidently felt he still lived in Marblehead, but surveyors determined that his house stood in a narrow splinter of Salem which later became part of Swampscott.

The property remained a farm through the nineteenth century. The photo above shows how it looked about 1910. In the twentieth century, the original house became the core of a larger inn and then restaurant, both named, in fine Colonial Revival fashion, for Gen. Glover. For the last thirty years or so, however, that complex has been abandoned.

Originally the Save the Glover campaign sought to preserve the house from being taken down for a new residential development (to be called Glover Residences, naturally). However, the developer has scrapped that project. Now weather and decay are the biggest dangers to the Glover house.

Anderson on the Glover Houses of Marblehead, 18 Mar.

On Monday, 18 March, Judy Anderson will discuss “Five Glover Houses in Marblehead” at the Abbot Public Library.

Registration to attend this event in person has been closed, but I believe people can still listen in on Zoom.

The event description says:

Dive into Marblehead’s architectural heritage through a talk about five Glover family homes from the mid-1700s, with photos, beginning with General John Glover’s handsome Georgian-style home located on today’s Glover Square, near the public Town Landing on Front Street. Glover’s heroism in the American Revolution is well known. But this talk will feature stories about the homes, lives and families of General Glover and his three brothers.

General Glover’s home is one of Marblehead’s most significant houses, among nearly 300 homes that still survive from the 1700s, before the American Revolution began in 1775. Its elegant front doorway frame also makes it among the most stylish, since only about a half dozen from that time remain that were not updated or remodeled as styles changed. Unlike most homes from the 1700s, the Glover house also retains much of its original interior woodwork craftsmanship. In addition, one of its two front rooms has finely carved woodwork in the “Federal” or neoclassical style, from the decades before the War of 1812.

In 1781, toward the end of General Glover’s retirement from nearly seven years of grueling service in the Revolution, he purchased a farmhouse that is now located on a uniquely shared historic site in Swampscott, Marblehead and Salem. The house is thought to have been built in the 1750s in what was then Salem, though new evidence suggests it may have been built as early as 1732, the year Glover was born.

Over the fifteen years before General Glover’s death in 1797, he would serve in elected offices on the local, regional and state level, including as a Marblehead selectman, a Massachusetts state legislator, and on state committees that ratified the U.S. Constitution and oversaw land distribution in northern New England.

Judy Anderson is a social and cultural historian with a focus on architecture, daily life, and women’s and family history. She was curator of Marblehead’s Jeremiah Lee Mansion for a decade, and can lead expert walking tours of the town.

This talk coincides with a campaign to “Save the General Glover Farmhouse,” the home John Glover bought in 1781. Before the Revolution, that house had belonged to Superior Court justice William Browne.

This event will run from 6:30 to 8:00 P.M. Here is the link to attend by Zoom.

How William Browne Returned to Bermuda

William Browne was one of the last justices of the Massachusetts Superior Court under British rule.

In fact, I’m not sure he ever got to hear a full case since he arrived on the top bench just as the court-closing movement took off.

I wrote a series of posts in 2019 clearing Browne of involvement in the James Otis–John Robinson coffee house brawl of 1769, as some authors had guessed. That was another man named William Brown (actually William Burnet Brown) with ties to Salem.

Last November, the Royal Gazette newspaper in Bermuda reported some pleasantly surprising William Browne news:

A historical treasure valued at $30,000 depicting an 18th-century governor now has a place of pride at the Bermuda Historical Society after a surprise donation.

A portrait of William Browne from his days as a student at Harvard University has gone from a Pennsylvania home to the walls of the society’s headquarters on Queen Street in Hamilton. . . .

William Browne, originally from Salem, Massachusetts, was a judge whose political sympathies ran counter to the American Revolution against the British.

He ended up being forced out and his property was seized — but the British Prime Minister, Lord North, appointed him to govern Bermuda, where he served from 1782 to 1788.

Mr Bermingham said the society’s acquisition of the painting began this June with a one-line e-mail from Judi Wilson from Pennsylvania, asking if the BHS was interested in a gift of a Joseph Blackburn painting of Mr Browne.

The painting was being donated by Ms Wilson’s mother, Judith Herdeg, from Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania.

The family had researched the figure in their painting and discovered from a lecture at the Winterthur Museum, Library and Gardens in Delaware that Bermuda lacked a portrait of the governor.

Ms Wilson told the society: “As my mother’s health has declined, she was insistent that Mr Browne should find a home where he will finally be truly appreciated and honoured for his role in his world.”

As governor, Browne welcomed Loyalist refugees and then lobbied the imperial government to make Bermuda a free port, allowing trade with the new U.S. of A. He retired from being governor in 1788, traveling to London to seek compensation for his own property losses in the war. Browne spent the last years of his life in Britain.

“Thus ended the Superior Court”

As I described yesterday, when the Massachusetts Superior Court tried to open a new session in Boston on Tuesday, 30 Aug 1774, all the men chosen for juries refused to serve under Chief Justice Peter Oliver.

John Adams was away at the First Continental Congress, so his former clerk William Tudor described the judges’ response for him: “The Court told them they should consider of their Refusal, and then adjourn’d to next Day.”

The jurors didn’t change their minds. On the morning of 31 August the court sat again. Oliver and associate justices Foster Hutchinson and William Browne were at the Province House, meeting with Gen. Thomas Gage as part of his appointed Council. That body advised the governor to keep his redcoats in Boston and not “send any Troops into the interior parts of the Province.”

Tudor wrote that the justices who remained on the bench

…continued all the continued Actions till next Term. They agreed to let us file Complaints and to enter up Judgement on them; which we had imagined they would not consent to, as some of the Judges the first Day had said that if the County would rise and prevent them doing Business generally, they should decline finishing it partially, and the County must thank themselves for the Inconveniences of their own Madness.

The next day:

One small Point was argued by Mr. J[osiah]. Q[uincy]. and [Samuel] Fitch, a few Complaints read, and after Mr. Fitch, in Complyance with a previous Vote of the Bar, had reccommended four of Us to be admitted to the Atty.’s Oath, the Court adjourn’d to next Day.

Tudor was among the young men hoping to be admitted to the Boston bar at this session.

On the morning of Friday, 2 September, “there were a Number of printed Bills stuck up at the Court house and other Parts of the Town, threatening certain Death to any and all the Bar who should presume to attend the Superior Court then sitting.” Someone with access to a print shop had produced those death threats, making them all the more ominous.

The justices postponed “All the new enter’d Actions” as well as the old ones. Then the jurists noticed that people were taking advantage of the lack of juries to enter appeals, thus postponing judgments against them. Tudor wrote to Adams at length on whether this tactic was valid. “You had but one [case] in this Predicament,” he added.

The court swore in one new attorney: Nathaniel Coffin, Jr., a professed Loyalist. The other three young men hung back. Finally, the justices adjourned. “Thus ended the Superior Court and is the last common Law Court that will be allowed to sit in this or any other County of the Province,” Tudor wrote.

That same day, thousands of rural militiamen gathered in Cambridge in what was later dubbed the “Powder Alarm.” People inside Boston worried about an armed invasion. By evening, it was clear that the rest of the province was no longer going to cooperate with the royal authorities at all.

William Molineux’s refusal to serve as a juror under Chief Justice Oliver in the summer of 1773 had grown into the legislature’s march to impeaching Oliver, crowds closing the courthouses in rural counties, Suffolk County citizens boycotting juries, and finally a halt to all Superior Court business. Colonial Massachusetts’s judicial system was frozen, and in some areas would stay jammed up until past the Shays Rebellion in the late 1780s.

“They all to a Man refus’d taking the Oath”

William Molineux refused to pay the £6 fine the Massachusetts Superior Court imposed on him for refusing jury duty in the fall of 1773.

Publicly, that was because Molineux was protesting how Chief Justice Peter Oliver accepted (or at that point not denying that he would accept) a salary from the Crown rather than the people of Massachusetts.

Privately, Molineux might have had another reason: he was in debt to Boston for £300 for money advanced for a public-works venture.

In February 1774, as the Massachusetts General Court moved to impeach Oliver, the merchant petitioned that legislature to block this fine on his behalf. The assembly declined to take action for Molineux alone.

On 28 July, Gov. Thomas Gage wrote to Chief Justice Oliver from Salem about how Molineux had still not paid his fine for refusing jury duty. He promised to support the judges if they demanded that £6 and threatened to jail the merchant.

But in August 1774 Parliament’s new Massachusetts Government Act made even more people refuse to cooperate with the court system under Oliver.

In the western counties, popular protest took the form of hundreds of men massing around the courthouses and keeping the justices out.

Bostonians didn’t dare to do that since their streets were once again patrolled by redcoat soldiers. So on 30 August they emulated Molineux’s refusal.

William Tudor (shown above later in life) wrote to his mentor in the law, John Adams, on 3 September:

Tuesday the Superior Court opened and Mr. Oliver took his Seat as chief Justice. When the grand Jury were called upon to be sworn they all to a Man refus’d taking the Oath, for Reasons committed to Paper, which they permitted the Court, after some Altercation, to read.

The Petit Jury unanimously followed the Example of the Grand Jury; their Reasons together with the others You will read in the Masstts. Spy.

The jurors’ protests were also published as handbills by Edes and Gill. Among the grand jurors were longtime activists Thomas Crafts and Paul Revere, John Hancock’s younger brother Ebenezer, and William Thompson, whose granddaughter supplied the texts to the Massachusetts Historical Society in 1875.

In different ways the grand and petit jurors pointed to these reasons:

• The General Court had impeached Chief Justice Oliver.
• The Massachusetts Government Act had taken control of the courts from the people and put them under the Crown.
• Justices Oliver, Foster Hutchinson, and William Browne had accepted seats on the Council, now appointed under the new law instead of elected by the legislature as the charter specified.

The judges, attorneys, and young men waiting to be admitted to the Boston bar (like Tudor) tried to figure out what to do.

TOMORROW: The last court session.

“They understood he was not the person intended”

One of the minor but telling disagreements between Josiah Quincy, Jr., and the government ministers he met in London in November 1774 involved the new lieutenant governor of Massachusetts, Thomas Oliver.

After meeting with Quincy, the secretary of state, Lord Dartmouth, described their conversation to former governor Thomas Hutchinson.

Among other things Quincy warned that the people of Massachusetts were strongly opposed to the new Council, appointed by writs of mandamus from London rather than elected. Specifically, he said:

the new Counsellors were in general persons the most exceptionable to the Province, of any which could have been pitched upon, and only one whom the people were satisfied with, which was the Lt. Governor, and he by chance, for they understood he was not the person intended, but that the name of the Ch. Justice was mistaken.

That new appointee, Thomas Oliver, was only in his forties and had not been active in politics before. Massachusetts Whigs suspected that the government in London really meant to name Chief Justice Peter Oliver to succeed his late brother, Andrew Oliver (shown above). Or at least that bureaucrats believed Thomas Oliver was a member of the same family.

I thought the same thing, and said so, in presentations about the “Powder Alarm,” in which Thomas Oliver played a central role. There just didn’t seem to be any other explanation for how the man attracted any attention in London.

But then John W. Tyler, who’s busy editing the Correspondence of Thomas Hutchinson for the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, alerted me to a 29 Mar 1774 letter, to be published in an upcoming volume. In that dispatch to Lord Dartmouth, Gov. Hutchinson discussed candidates to replace Andrew Oliver. William Browne of Salem preferred a seat on the bench. Hutchinson’s next choice was Customs Commissioner William Burch. The provincial secretary, Thomas Flucker, might be persuaded to exchange his hard job for an easier one with a slightly smaller compensation.

And then:

There is a gentleman of the same name with the late Lieut. Governor but of another family Thomas Oliver Esq. of Cambridge, now Judge of the Provincial Court of Admiralty which he must quit in case of his appointment. He has a handsome Estate, is a very sensible man & very generally esteemed. He is Cousin German to Mr. [Richard] Oliver the Alderman and City Member [of Parliament]. I know not how the Alderman stands affected to Government but this Gentleman has been steady in his opposition to all the late measures and I think the Administration in case of the absence of the Governor may be safely trusted with him.

Thus, when the secretary of state appointed Thomas Oliver to be Massachusetts’s new lieutenant governor, he had heard about the man and knew he wasn’t part of the same family.

How did Lord Dartmouth respond to Josiah Quincy suggesting the new lieutenant governor was nothing but a big mistake? According to Hutchinson, “Ld. D. interrupted him here and said it was strange the people of N.E. should suppose the Ministry so inattentive as not to ascertain the names of the persons they appointed.”

Quincy doesn’t seem to have recognized that that was a polite aristocratic way of telling him he was talking through his hat.

As with so many of these conversations, Quincy’s outlook was so far away from how the ministers saw things, and all the men were so certain about their beliefs, that they were speaking past each other.

TOMORROW: A failure of communication.

Evacuation Day Lecture Now Online

I’ve put “The End of Tory Row,” my Evacuation Day talk for Longfellow House–Washington’s Headquarters, online at YouTube.

Because this was an online talk, I loaded my PowerPoint up with more graphics. I hope those survive my clicking while speaking, the Zoom recording, and finally the compression for YouTube.

One thing I said in the talk is that no one could figure out why the Crown chose Thomas Oliver to be Massachusetts’s new lieutenant governor in 1774. At forty years old, he was hardly a senior figure among supporters of the royal government, and he hadn’t been active in politics. The best explanation seemed to be, I said, that bureaucrats in London got him mixed up somehow with the family of his predecessor, Andrew Oliver.

After the talk, John W. Tyler, currently editing The Correspondence of Thomas Hutchinson for the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, sent me the text of Gov. Hutchinson’s letter to the Earl of Dartmouth on 29 Mar 1774. That document shows that I wronged Thomas Oliver—at least one person in Massachusetts thought he could be a capable lieutenant governor.

This letter shows that after Andrew Oliver’s death Hutchinson sent four names of possible stand-ins to the Secretary of State’s office. The governor wanted someone who could back him up, not knowing that he would soon be superseded by Gen. Thomas Gage.

The four names Hutchinson proposed were:

• William Browne of Salem. As of 29 March, he asked to be considered for a seat on the Massachusetts Superior Court instead, and was indeed appointed to that bench just in time for the courts to be shut down.
• William Burch, a Customs Commissioner born in England and based in Massachusetts since 1767—Hutchinson’s top choice.
• Thomas Flucker, the provincial secretary.
• Thomas Oliver.

About the last, Hutchinson wrote:

There is a gentleman of the same name with the late Lieut. Governor but of another family Thomas Oliver Esq. of Cambridge, now Judge of the Provincial Court of Admiralty which he must quit in case of his appointment. He has a handsome Estate, is a very sensible man & very generally esteemed. He is Cousin German to Mr. [Richard] Oliver the Alderman and City Member. I know not how the Alderman stands affected to Government but this Gentleman has been steady in his opposition to all the late measures and I think the Administration in case of the absence of the Governor may be safely trusted with him.

Lord Dartmouth’s office thus had a little information about Thomas Oliver and knew that he wasn’t from the same family as Andrew and Peter Oliver. His distant cousin Richard Oliver was about to speak out against the Boston Port Bill in Parliament, but the government didn’t hold that against Thomas.

Hutchinson was anxious to have a lieutenant governor in place because if he died, became ill, or left the province without one, the power of acting governor would fall to the Council, led by its senior member, and the Council was more and more ranged against him. Again, Hutchinson didn’t know that in August that elected Council would be replaced with one appointed from London.

Thus, I was mistaken in saying no one in Massachusetts considered Thomas Oliver to be lieutenant governor material. He was at the bottom of Hutchinson’s short list, but he was on the list.

“Count Brown” of King William County, Virginia

In 1767, William Burnet Brown moved out of Massachusetts.

He sold his father’s country house on Folly Hill, “Browne Hall,” to his cousin William Browne, by then one of Salem’s representatives on the Massachusetts General Court. [That meant this property went from William Browne to his son William Burnet Brown to his cousin William Browne, causing immense headaches for future chroniclers.]

It looks like Brown sold his mansion in Salem to his aunt Elizabeth, mother of William Browne, who had remarried Epes Sargent and then been widowed again. She eventually sold that property to her son Paul Dudley Sargent, later a colonel in the Continental Army.

William Burnet Brown, his wife Judith, and their infant children moved to her home colony of Virginia. He bought the King William County estate called Elsing Green from Carter Braxton, a politician who would become one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. Braxton might have needed cash in 1767 because he was caught up in treasurer John Robinson’s embezzlement of colonial funds.

The mansion house of Elsing Green is shown above. It was built beside the Pamunkey River in the late 1710s. Around it were dependencies, one of those buildings dating to the 1690s; gardens; and fields of tobacco. The estate rested, of course, on the backs of the black workers enslaved there. In the early 1780s the state tax assessors counted seventy-five people working a thousand acres.

Soon Brown brought his sister Mary, his only surviving sibling, to live at Elsing Green. Their voyage in late 1767 was delayed by a storm that blew their ship aground near Stonington, Connecticut. The 24 Dec 1767 Boston News-Letter reported that all the passengers and “the Baggage and Horses of Mr. Brown” were safe.

Living in colonial Virginia was quite different from living in colonial Massachusetts, but the shift was probably not so drastic for William Burnet Brown as it would have been for others. He was an Anglican, not a Congregationalist, so the church worship was the same. He had grown up immensely rich and being served by enslaved black domestic servants. He now had to run a large agricultural plantation, but his wife and her Carter relatives no doubt helped him adjust to the Virginia way of doing things. He became a justice of the peace, and eventually his neighbors called him “Count Brown” for his wealth.

Brown still owned real estate up north. An attorney advertised in the 27 Jan 1769 Connecticut Journal of New Haven about a large amount of property for sale in that colony.

Brown was probably visiting Boston on business of that sort in September 1769 when he happened to witness the fight between James Otis, Jr., and John Robinson (no relation to the late Virginia treasurer). Why he got involved, swinging his cane and striking John Gridley, is unclear. But it caused some legal difficulties in the following weeks, as I’ll soon discuss.

Brown returned to Virginia, and I’ve seen no evidence that he ever visited Massachusetts again. He was never politically active. The only time his name appeared in the newspapers during the Revolutionary War was in 1779 when he advertised “a fine black horse” called Othello for either stud (“will cover mares for 20 dollars the leap”) or sale (for three payments spread out over up to ten years).

William Burnet Brown died in the spring of 1784, aged only forty-five. He was buried at Elsing Green. His daughter Judith married Robert Lewis, a nephew of George Washington. Without surviving sons, Brown willed the plantation to a grandson on condition that the child take his name. The name of William Burnet(t) Brown(e) has therefore been passed on to this day.

William Burnet Brown, Skinny Legs and All

Like his first cousin William Browne, William Burnet Brown was a wealthy man and therefore rather well documented in eighteenth-century sources and nineteenth-century accounts.

However, almost none of those accounts connect him to the fight between John Robinson and James Otis, Jr., in the British Coffee-House in September 1769. That’s because he wasn’t even living in Massachusetts at the time.

In fact, the longest modern profile of Brown was written for Princetonians, the reference series on all men who went to Princeton College. It doesn’t mention the Otis incident at all, instead saying Brown “sank almost without trace” from prominence after 1767. So let’s start filling some gaps.

William Burnet Brown was born on 7 Oct 1738 in Salem. (Brown spelled his name both “Brown” and “Browne” in newspaper advertisements, and later sources spelled his middle name as “Burnett.” I’m using the simplest form.) At the time middle names were rare in New England, but little William’s parents gave him one for two reasons:

• To distinguish him from his first cousin, the future Massachusetts Justice William Browne, born the previous year.
• To remind people of his illustrious maternal line, including his great-grandfather, His Grace Gilbert Burnet (1643-1715), bishop of Salisbury; and his grandfather, the Hon. William Burnet (1688-1729), governor of both New York and New Jersey (1720-1728), and then both Massachusetts and New Hampshire (1728-1729).

William Burnet Brown’s father was Col. William Browne (1709-1763), a wealthy man and officeholder in Essex County. His mother was born Mary Burnet in 1723, married at the age of fourteen, and died of consumption at twenty-two, when her eldest son was about seven. Col. Browne later remarried.

After his cousin William went to Harvard College, William Burnet Brown headed south to join the class of 1760 at the College of New Jersey. The Princetonians profile speculates that this was because Col. Browne “was much given to theological speculation and controversy” and disliked the orthodox Congregationalists of New England.

I think it’s more notable that William B. was old for a college student. His cousin graduated from Harvard at the age of eighteen a few weeks before William B., a few weeks shy of seventeen, entered the New Jersey college’s grammar school for remedial lessons before becoming a freshman. So it’s possible the family chose that young college because it was the only one that would take him.

In 1763 William B. Brown’s father died, and he came into a big inheritance. The colonel’s will, quoted by Ezra Dodge Hines in Browne Hill and What Has Happened There, with Some Account of the Browne Family, states these bequests to his eldest son:

All my farm and lands at Royall Side with my land at Porter’s Neck [in Danvers], with the farm house and out houseing, stock and utensils, and the house on said farm, which I have built and named “Browne Hall” after the place in Lancashire, England, from whence my ancestors originally came, to William and the heirs male of his body lawfully begotten, and for want of such issue, the remainder to my son Samuel, and heirs male of his body lawfully begotten, and for want of such issue male, remainder to son Benjamin and heirs male, of his body lawfully begotten, and for want of such issue male, remainder to son Thomas, and heirs male of his body lawfully begotten, and for want of such issue in him to revert to my proper heirs. And to prevent any doubt whom I mean by heirs male in this devise, and in other parts of this my last will, I do hereby declare them to be, what by the laws of England they would be understood to be, and are not to be construed otherwise by any colour of any particular law or laws of any of the Colonys of America.

To William all pictures Tapestry, Library and medals, the same to be deemed heirlooms, and to pass with my said house called “Browne Hall,” to the heirs males, to whom my said house is limited as aforesaid. But my other sons and all their issue male, are to have the perusal of any of the books, in the said Library and liberty of borrowing them from time to time, as they have occasion for them, giving receipts for them in a receipt book, fixed to the Catalogue of the said Library, and useing them carefully and returning them safely, after a reasonable time allowed them for the reading thereof, when the receipts given are to be cancelled.

To William, one gilt cup, embossed with silver which was my said wife’s and formerly belonged to her grand-mother, Bishop Burnet’s Lady, which grand-mother was descended of the Duke of Buccleugh’s family. This is to be deemed an heir loom, and to pass with my said house of “Browne Hall” to the heirs males, to whom my said house is limited, that so it may remain as a memorial of their noble extraction. . . .

To William, two dutch knives, in a sheath of velvet, powdered with pearl; being a marriage covenant of Apollonius Scott, and Maria Vanderhoog, the father and mother of the said Bishop’s Lady.

The mansion that Col. Browne proudly called “Browne Hall” was known to locals at least as early as 1796 as “Brown’s Folly.” It stood on what’s still called Folly Hill in Beverly. Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote about the mansion in 1860, but someday I’ll discuss the real story behind it. For now, I’ll just say that in 1763 William Burnet Brown inherited a very valuable property.

The “pictures” that came with the estate included “a copy of Holbein’s portrait of Sir Anthony Browne, Viscount Montacute,” “a fine [painting] of the Bishop,” and portraits of his parents, perhaps by John Smibert. The “Tapestry” consisted of “Gobelin tapestry hangings, the gift to Bishop Burnet of William of Orange.” And there was “an inlaid box, in which the episcopal sermons were kept.”

In sum, William Burnet Brown was about as close to a British aristocrat as one could find in Salem, Massachusetts. Which was advantageous for him, because he had been sent home from Princeton after less than two years.

TOMORROW: A true American aristocrat.

William Browne: Justice, Councilor, but Not Coffee-House Brawler

Technical difficulties—i.e., a power outage after a storm, and attendant recovery work—threw off my posting schedule this week. I hope to catch up over the next few days.

The last posting quoted merchant captain Mungo Mackay describing William Burnet Brown as one of the men involved in the fight between James Otis, Jr., and John Robinson in the British Coffee-House on 5 Sept 1769. It finished with the question, “Who was William Burnet Brown?”

The answer starts with the fact that he was not William Browne, whom several authors have identified as that man in the midst of the action. That Browne was a prominent supporter of the royal government in Massachusetts, but he was probably nowhere near the British Coffee-House that day.

William Browne was born in Salem on 27 Feb 1737. His father was a wealthy merchant, and he went to Harvard, graduating in 1755. Three years later he married Ruth Wanton. Though Browne practiced law, he appears to have spent most of his time managing the property he inherited—collecting rents, selling land, and making mercantile investments. He was a deacon and a militia colonel, responsibilities that neighbors expected rich men to take on.

In 1762 Browne was elected to represent Salem in the Massachusetts General Court, as his namesake uncle had before him. He became an active supporter of Gov. Francis Bernard and London’s policies. In 1768 he was one of the scant seventeen members who voted to rescind the body’s Circular Letter to other colonial legislatures.

According to the Rev. William Bentley, writing after Browne had died, “30 persons in Salem approved of his willingness to rescind, but the Town justified the Court & sent to the new Court in 1769 new Representatives.” In other words, the Salem town meeting chose not to reelect him.

The Crown then rewarded Browne with a royal appointment as a judge of the Inferior Court of Common Pleas in Essex County. He also occasionally served as a fill-in on the Superior Court of Massachusetts.

In 1774, as the conflict between the Crown and the people of Massachusetts heated up, the royal government named Browne to a permanent seat on the Superior Court. I’m not sure he ever actually heard a case since Patriot crowds were making sure the courts didn’t meet. In addition, militia officers refused to serve under Browne any longer.

The London government also appointed Browne to the new mandamus Council, and he took the oath before Gen. Thomas Gage in Salem in August 1774. The people of Massachusetts rose up against that change in the provincial constitution, making Councilors their particular targets. Browne moved into Boston for safety, though Bentley wrote: “It was supposed that the favour of the people was so great towards him, that he might have returned home from Boston had the public mind been properly represented to him.”

Justice Browne left Massachusetts after the Revolutionary War started, reaching Britain by May 1776. The state confiscated as much of his property as it could a couple of years later, but he remained a wealthy man. From 1781 to 1790 Browne served the British Empire as royal governor of Bermuda. He died in England on 13 Feb 1802.

Bentley recalled Browne as “short, and of a full habit, and remarkable for large legs [i.e., calves], by which he had distinction from another W.B. of the town.”

“William Brown” is a common name, of course, and some documents from the Otis-Robinson fight do indeed give that name for the man who intervened on Robinson’s side. But the accounts that include a middle name help us to clear the name of William Browne and point the finger at William Burnet Brown—his first cousin.

COMING UP: So who was William Burnet Brown?

“All the Seals have been taken out of the Council Chamber”

Hace you seen the last royal seal of Massachusetts?

At left is a picture of the impression the seal made. It shows the royal arms of Great Britain, with the lion and unicorn fighting for a crown, within a motto denoting the reign of George III.

As the Massachusetts Secretary of State’s website explains, royal governors Francis Bernard, Thomas Hutchinson, and Thomas Gage used this seal on official commissions in the 1760s and early 1770s.

And then, in the middle of the siege of Boston, the royal seal disappeared. Gen. Gage issued a proclamation dated 3 Oct 1775 offering “a Reward of Ten Guineas” for its return.

The governor also summoned his Council and appointed a committee to find out where the seal had gone. On 6 October, Lt. Gov. Thomas Oliver, Chief Justice Peter Oliver, Treasurer Harrison Gray, William Browne, and Richard Lechmere reported back that they had conducted “a strict enquiry and examination under oath, of all those persons who have been returned to us, as having had access to the Council Chamber between the Ninth day of September and the Fourth of October.” They had collected affidavits. But they had found no answers and no seal.

As reported in the Colonial Society of Massachusetts Transactions, Gage had to report to the Earl of Dartmouth, Secretary of State:

Boston 9th October 1775

My Lord…

I must inform Your Lordship that a Theft has been committed on the Province, and that all the Seals have been taken out of the Council Chamber where they were kept. This was observed on the 4th Inst; on the 6th I sent a Message to the Lieutenant Governor and Council, to make every necessary enquiry they possibly could, into the matter, which they have done, and I am sorry to tell Your Lordship without any good effect; which you will see by their answer to my message, which I have now the honor to transmit to Your Lordship.

I’m curious why the governor reported that people had noticed the seal was missing on 4 October when his proclamation was dated 3 October. Perhaps the young printer John Howe had made an error, or perhaps Gage had. He was about to leave Massachusetts for good, sailing away on 11 October, so he had a lot of other things on his mind.

TOMORROW: Did Patriots steal the seal?