Nooks and Corners of the New England Coast

by Samuel Adams Drake

Mr. Coggeshall. "Mr. Peters takes upon him to forbid me. I shall be silent."

As the governor was about to pass sentence, Mr. Coddington arose and spoke some manly words:

Mr. Coddington. "I do think that you are going to censure, therefore I desire to speak a word."

Governor. "I pray you speak."

Mr. Coddington. "There is one thing objected against the meetings. What if she designed to edify her own family in her own meetings, may none else be present?"

Governor. "If you have nothing else to say but that, it is a pity, Mr. Coddington, that you should interrupt us in proceeding to censure."

Despite this reproof, Mr. Coddington had his say, and one of the assistants (Stoughton) insisting, the ministers were compelled to repeat their testimony under oath; which they did after much parleying and with evident reluctance. It is curious to observe that in this trial the by-standers were several times appealed to for an expression of opinion on some knotty question.[261] Had it not involved the liberty and fortunes of many more than the Hutchinsons, its ludicrous side would scarcely have been surpassed by the celebrated cause of "Bardell vs. Pickwick."

There is something inexpressibly touching in the decay of an old and honorable name—in the struggle between grinding poverty and hereditary family pride. Instead of finding the Coddingtons, as might be expected, among the princes of Newport, a native of the place would only shake his head when questioned of them.

Touching the northern limits of Newport is a placid little basin called Coddington's Cove. It is a remembrancer of the old governor. The last Coddington inherited an ample estate, upon the principal of which, like Heine's monkey, who boiled and ate his own tail, he lived, until there was no more left. The Cossacks have a proverb: "He eats both ends of his candle at once." Having dissipated his ancestral patrimony to the last farthing, the thriftless and degenerate Coddington descended all the steps from shabby gentility to actual destitution; yet, through all these reverses, he maintained the bearing of a fine gentleman. One day he was offered a new suit of clothes—his own had the threadbare gloss of long application of the brush—for the Coddington escutcheon that had descended to him. Drawing himself up with the old look and air, he indignantly exclaimed, "What, sell the coat of arms of a Coddington!" Nevertheless, he at last became an inmate of the poor-house at Coddington's Cove; and that is the way the family escutcheon came to be hanging in the City Hall. I tell you the story as it was told to me.