Women, as well as men, when suspected murderers, had to go through the cruel and shocking “blood-ordeal.” This belief, supported by the assertions of that learned fool, King James, in his Demonologie, lingered long in the minds of many,—indeed does to this day in poor superstitious folk. The royal author says:—

In a secret murther, if the dead carkas be at any time thereafter handled by the murtherer, it will gush out of blood.

Sometimes a great number of persons were made to touch in turn the dead body, hoping thus to discover the murderer.

It has been said that few women were taught to write in colonial days, and that those few wrote so ill their letters could scarce be read. I have seen a goodly number of letters written by women in those times, and the handwriting is comparatively as good as that of their husbands and brothers. Margaret Winthrop wrote with precision and elegance. A letter of Anne Winthrop’s dated 1737 is clear, regular, and beautiful. Mary Higginson’s writing is fair, and Elizabeth Cushing’s irregular and uncertain, as if of infrequent occurrence. Elizabeth Corwin’s is clear, though irregular; Mehitable Parkman’s more careless and wavering; all are easily read. But the most beautiful old writing I have ever seen,—elegant, regular, wonderfully clear and well-proportioned, was written by the hand of a woman,—a criminal, a condemned murderer, Elizabeth Attwood, who was executed in 1720 for the murder of her infant child. The letter was written from “Ipswitch Gole in Bonds” to Cotton Mather, and is a most pathetic and intelligent appeal for his interference to save her life. The beauty and simplicity of her language, the force and directness of her expressions, her firm denial of the crime, her calm religious assurance, are most touching to read, even after the lapse of centuries, and make one wonder that any one—magistrate or priest,—even Cotton Mather—could doubt her innocence. But she was hanged before a vast concourse of eager people, and was declared most impenitent and bold in her denial of her guilt; and it was brought up against her, as a most hardened brazenry, that to cheat the hangman (who always took as handsel of his victim the garments in which she was “turned off”), she appeared in her worst attire, and announced that he would get but a sorry suit from her. I do not know the estate in life of Elizabeth Attwood, but it could not have been mean, for her letter shows great refinement.

CHAPTER IV.
BOSTON NEIGHBORS.

Accounts of isolated figures are often more interesting than chapters of general history, and biographies more attractive than state records, because more petty details of vivid human interest can be learned; so, in order to present clearly a picture of the social life of women in the earliest days of New England, I give a description of a group of women, contiguous in residence, and contemporary in life, rather than an account of some special dame of dignity or note; and I call this group Boston Neighbors.

If the setting of this picture would add to its interest, it is easy to portray the little settlement. The peninsula, but half as large as the Boston of to-day, was fringed with sea-marshes, and was crowned with three conical hills, surmounted respectively with the windmill, the fort, and the beacon. The champaign was simply an extended pasture with few trees, but fine springs of water. Winding footpaths—most interesting of roadways—connected the detached dwellings, and their irregular outlines still show in our Boston streets. The thatched clay houses were being replaced by better and more substantial dwellings. William Coddington had built the first brick house.

On the main street, now Washington Street, just east of where the Old South Church now stands, lived the dame of highest degree, and perhaps the most beautiful personality, in this little group—Margaret Tyndal Winthrop, the “loving faythfull yoke-fellow” of Governor John Winthrop. She was his third wife, though he was but thirty when he married her. He had been first married when but seventeen years old. He writes that he was conceived by his parents to be at that age a man in stature and understanding. This wife brought to him, and left to him, “a large portion of outward estate,” and four little children. Of the second wife he writes, “For her carriage towards myselfe, it was so amiable and observant as I am not able to expresse; it had only this inconvenience, that it made me delight in hir too much to enjoy hir long,”—and she lived with him but a year and a day. He married Margaret in 1618, and when she had borne five children, he left her in 1630, and sailed to New England. She came also the following year, and was received “with great joy” and a day of Thanksgiving. For the remaining sixteen years of her life she had but brief separations from her husband, and she died, as he wrote, “especially beloved of all the country.” Her gentle love-letters to her husband, and the simple testimony of contemporary letters of her relatives and friends, show her to have been truly “a sweet gracious woman” who endured the hardships of her new home, the Governor’s loss of fortune, and his trying political experiences, with unvarying patience and “singular virtue, modesty and piety.”

There lived at this time in Boston a woman who must have been well known personally by Madam Winthrop, for she was a near neighbor, living within stone’s throw of the Governor’s house, on the spot where now stands “The Old Corner Bookstore.” This woman was Anne Hutchinson. She came with Rev. John Cotton from Boston, England, to Boston, New England, well respected and well beloved. She went an outcast, hated and feared by many she left behind her in Boston. For years her name was on every tongue, while she was under repeated trials and examinations for heresy. In the controversy over her and her doctrines, magistrates, ministers, women, soldiers, the common multitude of Boston, all took part, and took sides; through the pursuance of the controversy the government of the colony was changed. Her special offences against doctrines were those two antiquated “heresies,” Antinomianism and Familism, which I could hardly define if I would. According to Winthrop they were “those two dangerous errors that the person of the Holy Ghost dwells in a justified person, and that no sanctification can help to evidence to us our justification.” Her special offences against social and religious routines were thus related by Cotton Mather:—

At the meetings of the women which used to be called gossippings it was her manner to carry on very pious discourses and so put the neighborhood upon examining their spiritual estates by telling them how far a person might go in “trouble of mind,” and being restrained from very many evils and constrained into very many duties, by none but a legal work upon their souls without ever coming to a saving union with the Lord Jesus Christ, that many of them were convinced of a very great defect in the settlement of their everlasting peace, and acquainted more with the “Spirit of the Gospel” than ever they were before. This mighty show and noise of devotion made the reputation of a non-such among the people until at length under pretence of that warrant “that the elder women are to teach the younger” she set up weekly meetings at her house whereto three score or four score people would report....