REVEREND STEPHEN WILLIAMS.
It has been said that one of the greatest trials of Mr. Williams's stay in Canada was the discovery that his little daughter, Eunice, had been taught by her Canadian captors to say prayers in Latin. But this was only the beginning of the sorrow of the good man's life. Eunice was a plastic little creature, and she soon adopted not only the religion, but also the manners and customs of the Indians among whom she had fallen. In fact and feeling she became a daughter of the Indians, and there among them she married, on arriving at womanhood, an Indian by whom she had a family of children. A few years after the war she made her first visit to her Deerfield relatives, and subsequently she came twice to Massachusetts dressed in Indian costume. But all the inducements held out to her to remain there were in vain. During her last visit she was the subject of many prayers and lengthy sermonising on the part of her clerical relatives, an address delivered at Mansfield August 1, 1741, by Solomon Williams, A. M., being frankly in her behalf. A portion of this sermon has come down to us, and offers a curious example of the eloquence of the time: "It has pleased God," says the worthy minister, "to incline her, the last summer and now again of her own accord, to make a visit to her friends; and this seems to encourage us to hope that He designs to answer the many prayers which have been put up for her."
But in spite of these many prayers, and in spite, too, of the fact that the General Court of Massachusetts granted Eunice and her family a piece of land on condition that they would remain in New England, she refused on the ground that it would endanger her soul. She lived and died in savage life, though nominally a convert to Romanism. Out of her singular fate has grown another romance, the marvel of later times. For from her descended Reverend Eleazer Williams, missionary to the Indians at Green Bay, Wisconsin, who was in 1851 visited by the Duc de Joinville, and told that he was that Dauphin (son of Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette), who, according to history, died in prison June 9, 1795. In spite of the fact that the evidence of this little prince's death was as strong as any which can he found in history in relation to the death of Louis, his father, or of Marie Antoinette, his mother, the strange story—first published in Putnam's Magazine for February, 1853—gained general credence, even Mr. Williams himself coming gradually to believe it. As a matter of fact, however, there was proved to be a discrepancy of eight years between the dates of Williams's and the Dauphin's birth, and nearly every part of the clergyman's life was found to have been spent in quite a commonplace way. For as a boy, Eleazer Williams lived with Reverend Mr. Ely, on the Connecticut River, and his kinsman, Doctor Williams, of Deerfield, at once asserted that he remembered him very well at all stages of his boyhood.
Governor Charles K. Williams, of Vermont, writing from Rutland under date February 26, 1853, said of the Reverend Eleazer and his "claims" to the throne of France, "I never had any doubt that Williams was of Indian extraction, and a descendant of Eunice Williams. His father and mother were both of them at my father's house, although I cannot ascertain definitely the year. I consider the whole story a humbug, and believe that it will be exploded in the course of a few months." As a matter of fact, the story has been exploded,—though the features of the Reverend Eleazer Williams, when in the full flush of manhood, certainly bore a remarkable resemblance to those of the French kings from whom his descent was claimed. His mixed blood might account for this, however. Williams's paternal grandfather was an English physician,—not of the Deerfield family at all,—and his grandmother the daughter of Eunice Williams and her redskin mate. His father was Thomas Williams, captain in the British service during the American Revolution, and his mother a Frenchwoman. Thus the Reverend Eleazer was part English, part Yankee, part Indian, and part French, a combination sufficiently complex to account, perhaps, even for an unmistakably Bourbon chin.
NEW ENGLAND'S FIRST "CLUB WOMAN"
Even to-day, in this emancipated twentieth century, women ministers and "female preachers" are not infrequently held up to derision by those who delight to sit in the seat of the scornful. Trials for heresy are likewise still common. It is not at all strange, therefore, that Mistress Ann Hutchinson should, in 1636, have been driven out of Boston as an enemy dangerous to public order, her specific offence being that she maintained in her own house that a mere profession of faith could not evidence salvation, unless the Spirit first revealed itself from within.
Mrs. Hutchinson's maiden name was Ann Marbury, and she was the daughter of a scholar and a theologian—one Francis Marbury—who was first a minister of Lincolnshire and afterward of London. Naturally, much of the girl's as well as the greater part of the woman's life was passed in the society of ministers—men whom she soon learned to esteem more for what they knew than for what they preached. Theology, indeed, was the atmosphere in which she lived and moved and had her being. Intellectually, she was an enthusiast, morally an agitator, a clever leader, whom Winthrop very aptly described as a "woman of ready wit and bold spirit."
While still young, this exceptionally gifted woman married William Hutchinson, a country gentleman of good character and estate, whose home was also in Lincolnshire. Winthrop has nothing but words of contempt for Mrs. Hutchinson's husband, but there is little doubt that a sincere attachment existed between the married pair, and that Hutchinson was a man of sterling character and worth, even though he was intellectually the inferior of his remarkable wife. In their Lincolnshire home the Hutchinsons had been parishioners of the Reverend John Cotton, and regular attendants at that celebrated divine's church in Boston, England. To him, her pastor, Mrs. Hutchinson was deeply attached. And when the minister fled to New England in order to escape from the tyranny of the bishops, the Hutchinsons also decided to come to America, and presently the whole family did so. Mrs. Hutchinson's daughter, who had married the Reverend John Wright Wheelwright—another Lincolnshire minister who had suffered at the hands of Archbishop Laud—came with her mother. Besides the daughter, there were three grown sons in the family at the time Mrs. Hutchinson landed in the Boston she was afterward to rend with religious dissension.