Flew the Coop
For 2023, I’m writing responses to the 52 Ancestors in 52 Days prompts provided by Amy Johnson Crow on her ”Generations Café” website and Facebook page.
According to the website Vocabulary.com, when you say someone “flew the coop,” you mean he fled, took to his heels, cut and ran, broke away, bunked, escaped, headed for the hills, hightailed it, went on the lam, ran away, scarpered, scatted, took to the woods, or turned tail. So there.
I had a lot of ancestors who flew the coop “one step ahead of the sheriff,” but the main character in my most interesting story is my 11th great-grandfather the Rev. John Cotton (1585-1652), who came to Massachusetts in 1633 as part of the Puritan Great Migration.
John went to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he served as a sizar (kind of an early work-study student). After receiving his BA from Trinity, he earned an MA at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, called “the most Puritan college in the kingdom.” He then accepted a fellowship at Emmanuel College that allowed him to continue his studies for another five years. During this time he began his work as a preacher. In 1610, at the age of 27, he was appointed vicar of St. Botolph’s Church in Boston, described as “the most magnificent parochial edifice in the kingdom.”
His theology developed over the years, and he became not only strongly anti-Catholic but also opposed to the established Church of England, which had in his view separated from the Catholic Church in name only. Cotton became an important member of the separatist Puritans (the Pilgrims). At St. Botolph’s, Cotton was renowned for his preaching and his lectures. He began to hold “alternative” services where Puritanism could be more fully embraced; he was suspended for this at one point, but was soon reinstated and was able to operate comfortably under tolerant bishops until Charles I, who became king in 1625, began to crack down on Puritans.
In 1630, Cotton traveled to Southampton to preach a farewell sermon to the members of the Winthrop Fleet that was embarking to settle a colony at Massachusetts Bay. Cotton had been part of a planning conference for this trip, but he did not emigrate with them. After seeing these colonists on their way, Cotton and his wife became seriously ill with malaria; Cotton recovered, although his wife died. He began to think about joining the emigrants in Massachusetts.
In 1632, he remarried (to a widow, Sarah Hankred Story, who had a daughter), and received word almost immediately after that that he was to be summoned to the High Court for his non-conforming practices. The threat to his safety was so great that he disappeared into the “Puritan underground” in England, staying for a time in Northamptonshire, Surrey, and other places around London. Members of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, hearing of his plight, wrote to him urging him to come to New England. He reunited with his wife and step-daughter and they made their way to Kent, where they boarded the Griffin – which was also carrying fellow minister Thomas Hooker and Samuel Stone, along with Edward Hutchinson, the oldest son of Puritan leader Anne Hutchinson. Sarah had a child while they were on board the Griffin; they names him “Seaborne.” Yes, yes, he was.
Cotton settled in the Massachusetts town of Boston, which had been named after its English counterpart in 1630. He is recognized today as the preeminent minister and theologian of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. There are more twists to this story. The sixth child born to John Cotton and Sarah, Mary (or Maria), married Increase Mather, another prominent Puritan minister in Massachusetts, who was president of Harvard College for 20 years and was also connected to the Salem Witch Trials. Increases’s father was Richard Mather, another prominent Puritan minister in England and in Boston. Mary and Increase had several children, including Puritan Minister Cotton Mather, who became prominent in his persecution of witches in Salem.
Just to make things a little more confusing: after the death of John Cotton in 1652, his wife Sarah married Richard Mather. Richard thus became Mary Cotton Mather’s stepfather as well as her father-in-law. I think.
On our recent genealogy research trip to England (September 2022), we visited Boston and toured St. Botolph’s. The Puritan legacy is strong there, as these pictures will attest.