Templeton Family

As the Sixteenth Century played out and turned toward the Seventeenth Century — a time of exploration, colonization and, in England, civil war — some of our British forebears saw not only the flowering of their popular theatre from the pen of William Shakespeare, but also saw the growth and enrichment of an audience that was disaffected from the 'groundlings' lower classes that hugged Shakespeare's stage and the Elite that occupied the boxes that circled The Globe amphitheater's heights: the growing Calvinist English Middle Class. They had no truck with the 'popular' diversions of those less sanctified than they, and had little tolerance for those that loved the banality and morally-suspect 'theatre.'

Along with the increase of literacy occasioned by the publication of James I's "English Bible" in 1611, a new entrepreneurial class's surplus income created a society of men and women with leisure to read the Bible. The mercantile families of England were different than their Lombardian brethren; they were the first of a social class that hadn't existed ever before; not in the Roman dominion over Britannia, nor through the Dark Ages of feudal warlords and serfs. They were the first, ever, to enjoy legal protection of their personal enterprise along with the benefit of their own literacy -- and were the first to have recourse to written law, and to have have independent advocates before the Bar. And, they had money.

The creation of a new "class" of English families came with the increasing monetarization of wealth ("wealth" being counted in mobile cash and credit accounts rather than Feudal land-ownership, and the transition from a barter economy to a monetized economy) occasioned.

In the villages and countryside of the bountiful farming lands of southern England, in Kent, and across the fertile areas of East Anglia and Lincolnshire, the pragmatic, newly emancipated-from-the-land families — Protestant merchants and traders of the "Renaissance" that were distant from the conjoined Church/States of Italia— joined their local craftsmen, lawyers and yeoman (freeman) farmers to establish their own "Puritain" congregations dedicated to purifying the Church of England. And, they sought to expand their influence on local government against the influence of the State Churchmen that controlled much land and who held sway in local Courts of Civil and Church Law.

They didn't care for Shakespeare's London theatre; they condemned it, in fact. They read scripture and discussed theology, church issues, and politics in their country houses, along with the regulation of business. They sought definable rules to predicate their life decisions upon. They deduced that the predictable "rule of law" was preferable to the governance of capricious kings and landlords. They were the first to establish fixed prices for goods, rather than practice the arts of marketplace deceit. Their God was absolute, and so was their doctrine of of marketplace rules between men.

America's Puritan Plantation was founded in the midst of the European Reformation, a movement that swept from Martin Luther's church door across all of Northern Europe. It was a movement that sought to purge the Established Church of the corrupting influence of ill-gotten wealth and power — be it Roman Catholic or Church of England — and in the mix, they questioned the feudal organization of power-sharing between their spiritual leaders and their temporal aristocracy.

The active participation of the laity in this movement, in England, was fueled by King James' commissioning and publishing the Bible in the common language, and by the resultant empowerment of the countryside esquire and his household women by their ability to fix and interpret the text of their faith.

The literate, newly-created middle class of men and women that came to the Puritan movement shared a piety that shaped their ethic of humble and honest hard work and an intellectual independence that guided their economic, civic and religious life.

In the 1630s, Charles I ruled England without Parliament through a decade of international peace, economic stability and an expansion of overseas trade. Resentments from the king's enforcement of tax measures to finance a war in the '20s abated. Politically, it looked like Charles had set up conditions for a long and stable rule. However, religious conflicts festered between those middle-class reformers seeking to "purify" the church of vestiges of Roman corruption and the conservative Anglican bishops that sought to punish countryside parish nonconformists; the Anglican Cardinals were a key support of the monarchy and the local landed gentry.

Charles' appointment of William Laud as Archbishop of Canterbury aggravated those tensions. Laud sought to impose liturgical conformity and bishopric authority over Puritan congregations and other "dissenters," particularly the Scots. He and his minions were brutal in their enforcement in Britain: Alexander Leighton had his nose slit, his face branded and his ears cut off,1 a fate suffered by several other critics of the Archbishop. For his own part, Charles "blundered into a war" against Scottish Presbyterians by attempting to extend Laudian religious reforms including restoring Church lands and universal tithes -- a war he was not able to mobilize sufficient forces to win.

Meanwhile, Catholics grew in influence at court, and the king used Irish armies in support of his English army, armies largely officered by Catholics, to meet the reformist rebellion.2

Rather than risk imprisonment and torture or the indignity of European exile, many who objected to this "back door" Catholicism (and its strengthening of the old landed-aristocratic order "that paralleled and supported the political and social hierarchy"3), several leaders of the Separatist Movement chose to emigrate to the newly-established colonies in New England.

When William Thorne was made freeman in Lynn, Massachusetts Bay Commonwealth, on May 2, 1638, he, in a "general distribution of lands in Lynn, Essex County," was allotted "30 acres and tenn" [forty acres] to farm.4

With his oath, he was acknowledged as a church member having experienced a "transforming spiritual experience by God's grace," confirmed by his local church leaders; and as a property owner and shareholder in the Massachusetts Bay Company, he was enfranchised with the right to vote as on matters concerning the colony. Only a fraction of men in the colony -- 400+ out of 10,000 souls in the colony at the time --enjoyed that privilege. Thorne took the Freeman's Oath 5 and therewith enjoyed the right to speak out.6

The seeds of America's democracy can be said to have been planted in Massachusetts by a legalistic quirk of history. Through shrewd and patient negotiation, the Royal charter obtained by John Winthrop's company that bought out a failed colony on Cape Ann did not specify where the stockholders should meet. Winthrop and his associates also saw to it that, after they emigrated to the New World, they would be able to buy out their England-based backers, and thus gain unfettered control of the company and its New England land grant.

With that legalistic sleight of hand, the New England Company became different from all other colonizing enterprises. It allowed Winthrop's colony to take Company governance from the London clubs and after-dinner drawing rooms of British manors, and gave the colonists the right to decide matters amongst themselves, the shareholders, there in the New World.

It became a done deal with the Cambridge Agreement in 1629, and immediately the renamed Massachusetts Bay Company's interest shifted from commercial exploitation of the New World's lands and fertile fishing seas by England-based investors to goals that reflected the aspirations of the deeply religious professional men that controlled the new enterprise.

Winthrop and his friends had a vision for their colony: it would be a "City on a Hill," pure in its religious practice, far from the meddling interference of the Established English Church, and perhaps more important to future developments, the Colony set down a tradition of self-government that was jealously guarded.

Some time before May, 1638, the Thornes and their one- or two sons survived a North Atlantic crossing and arrived to hardships caused by that year's singularly inclement weather in New England. According to Winthrop's journal, the spring of 1638 was so cold that the settlers were forced to plant corn two- and three times because the plants froze and rotted in the ground. This was followed by an unusually warm summer and two "tempestuous storms" -- swirling hurricanes -- the first on August 3rd and the second on the 25th of September. The rains continued throughout the autumn and a considerable amount of snow arrived in October, according to Winthrop.7

We don't know exactly when William Thorne arrived in Massachusetts with his wife Susannah (nee Booth) and at least one son.8 Most of today's accounts say that Thorne was from Dorsetshire, on the southern coast of England, and several ships landed in Boston from Southampton, Yarmouth and Weymouth in 1637 and '38 -- logical ports of embarkation from Dorset.

There are suggestive coincidences that indicate that William and his young family may have hailed from Lincolnshire's environs, however:

Lynn, Massachusetts, had originally been named "Saugust" after its Indian appellation, upon its incorporation in 1630. When the community's first official minister, Samuel Whiting, arrived from King's Lynn, Norfolk, a town on the east coast of England adjacent to Lincolnshire, the grateful settlers changed the name of their community to Lynn in 1637 to honor him.9
One John Thorne from Moulton, Lincolnshire, arrived in Cambridge between 1620 and 1650 according to an emigrant list.10 We suspect he is the same John Thorne, a carpenter, first listed in Lynn, in 1638, and was part of William's family group, or, as Thorne family genealogist John Coutant Thorn describes the possible dangers of using one's real name on passenger lists at the time, may have been William..(further research is needed),
J. C. Thorn points out that 35 miles inland from Grimsby there's a town on the mouth of the Humber River that forms the northern border of old Lincolnshire named "Thorne," and the area has many Thorne place-names. He also reports the frequent occurrence of the names "Purdy" and "Birdsall" in the area, as well as the presence of a large "Booth" family in Great Grimsby. According to Thorn, the Purdys and Birdsalls were families that had strong Anabaptist leanings under Charles I. Later, in the New World, these families became intermarried with William Thorne's progeny, they all and several being settlers of Long Island, and many of them were founding congregants of the Quaker denomination in New York.11
Thorne, on the Humber, is just a few miles north of the Austerfield birthplace of William Bradford, "Puritan" expatriate to Holland, and chronicler of the voyage of the Mayflower, and the Sergeants Congregation in Scooby, Lincolnshire, that followed John Robinson and William Brewster to, first Holland, and then to America.12 While we must recognize that neighbors do not always share religious and civic values in their detail, the fact that the region harbored many Separatists cannot be denied.

Whatever his origin, William Thorne soon became a respected member of his community in Lynn, Massachusetts Bay Colony. We know this by his election as a juror at the sitting of the Essex Court on June 29, 1641. By then, sitting in judgment of his fellow congregants, Thorne had already aligned himself with a group that advocated a dangerous breach with Anglican dogma. Later in the same year, 1641, he was charged and fined f 6 2/3 by the Boston court for "giving assistance to escaped prisoners ... concealing, hiding & supplying" them.13

He was undoubtedly helping friends fleeing religious persecution by the colony's governors.

From the outset, Massachusetts Colony was a theocracy where doctrinal conformity was adjudged right along with civic misbehavior. It was a colony where a friend of William Thorne's could be hauled into court for "idle and unprofitable spending of his time," and Miller was punished accordingly, and another man was earlier adjudged as holding "dangerous opinions," a charge and judgment that was sufficient grounds for Roger Williams' banishment from the colony into the winter wilderness (and pliable acceptance or deadly rejection of the Indians in the forest) in the winter of 1635.

Puritan punishments were no more charitable than those meted out by Laud's ecclesiastic courts: tied to the back of a cart, a Doctrinal miscreant would be paraded through the several towns of the Colony while being whipped. That was a Colonial "spectacle" of particular note, in Massachusetts Bay Colony. One eyewitness recalled the 1631 case of Phillip Ratcliff who " spoke boldly and wickedly against the government and Governors here, using some words as some judged deserving death." Instead, he was "whipped, and had both his ears cut off in Boston."14

Strict orthodoxy was not easy to maintain among a cloistered and educated community filled with independent and strong-willed people, in a time of such theological ferment. The colony's Puritan fathers seemed to have particular problems with their literate and strong-willed women.

Many are familiar with the problem Governor John Winthrop had with Anne Hathaway. Less well known is the story of Lady Deborah Moody. She was born into a wealthy and well-connected Dutch family in London, 1586. In England, she had begun to associate with Anabaptists – Protestants that did not believe that infant baptism was founded upon scriptural authority. Widowed in 1629, and finding Archbishop Laud's religious persecutions intolerable, she boarded ship for Massachusetts in 1639, arriving in Lynn in 1640.

In Lynn, she was attracted to the ideas of Roger Williams, a prickly minister whose letters and tracts were influential on both sides of the Atlantic. Williams remained in touch with like-minded folks in Massachussetts Colony from his banishment to the community he founded on Narragansett Bay. Lady Deborah soon became an influential religious voice in Lynn and in her home church in Salem, gathering around her a number of people friendly to her nonconformist views.

Her Anabaptist convictions were viewed as a "damnable heresy" by the Puritan leadership, and they took action against her. Winthrop wrote in his journal in July, 1643:

Among those "infected with anabaptism" was William Thorne. Not waiting to be summoned before the court, "Goodman Thorne" and the others removed first to Sandwich, a community in Plymouth Colony on the "ankle" of Cape Cod that was founded by ten men from Saugus (Lynn) in 1637,16 presumably so that they could worship in the manner they'd come to believe was in accordance with scripture. The Moody group arrived there probably at the end of 164217 to organize passage to Long Island.

John Bowne of Flushing, Long Island, recorded in his journal that "William Throne came from Sandwich to Flushing 1642.18 He would well remember William since Thorne would later be among the original patentees founding Flushing, and more significantly to Bowne is the fact that Browne's oldest daughter married Thorne's third son, Joseph.

Moody and her party petitioned William Kieft, the Dutch governor of New Amsterdam (New York), to sanction their settlement at Gravesend, Long Island, under the protective proximity of Fort Amsterdam. Soon after their buildings had been raised in June, 1643, Indians stirred up by Kieft's attempts to tax them and by the slaughter of over 100 0f their number at Corlear's Hook, went on the war path. The 40+ men of the community were able to repel an attack, but raiding continued throughout the area -- Staten Island, Harlem and Long Island -- with fields destroyed, cattle killed and barns burned. The Gravesend settlers took refuge in the more defensible Flatlands, nearby, possibly at Amersfort "among the Dutch, directly north of Gravesend."19 It was only after Kieft was able to strike a treaty with Indian leaders on August 30, 1645, that a period of peace enabled the settlers to return to Gravesend.

Lady Deborah was the only woman to initiate, lay out and lead the establishment of a colonial settlement when Governor Kieft granted its patent on December 19, 1645. The patent was unique in that it not only provided for the town's self government, but allowed "freedom of conscience" in religious practice.20

William Thorne was allotted 40 acres at the Gravesend settlement along with a number of others that had earlier been in Lynn, Massachusetts Bay. William had been active with the founders of Flushing in the interim, however. The settlers arrived in the winter of 1644 or spring of 1645, and was one of the patentees of the town when it was granted on October 10, 1645. He received his planter's allotment of land in 1646 and may have moved his residence there at that time. The timing of his movements remains obscure, but he was undoubtedly a permanent resident at Flushing when he was appointed, along with John Townsend and John Hicks, as a magistrate on April 27, 1648.

The debate in Europe and England, not to mention in the common rooms of colonial houses, between the established church's emphasis upon "works" as proof of fealty to the teachings of Christ versus the new idea that the individual's transformation came with faith, continued to rage. In 1647, George Fox, in England, had an epiphany of the presence of the living Christ within himself, according to his own account. Fox began preaching the present reality of Christ rather than the historical proscriptions of scripture as being the foundation of religious experience. He immediately eschewed the ritual of Church of England worship and even church membership as the measure of faith. In fact, he challenged the authority of priest, bishop (and Archbishop) by rejecting the clergy's monopoly on Christian ministry, and utterly rejected the church's connection with the state. Fox's ideas and proselytizing found ready adherents who began meeting, and who, from John 15:15 ("... I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you."), took to calling themselves "Friends." An English judge derisively called them "Quakers" because it had been noticed that people tended to shiver during silent worship as the spirit moved them. The movement accepted the appellation proudly.

The first Quaker missionaries crossed the Atlantic to Boston in 1656 and were quickly imprisoned then shipped out of the colony by the Puritan fathers of Massachusetts. In 1657, Quakers found a ready audience in the English settlements of Long Island. Deborah Moody incurred the anger of the governor of New Netherlands by holding the first Quaker meeting in the colonies in her Gravesend home. The missionary, Robert Hodgson, attracted large crowds of both Dutch and English to his meetings. The rigid religiosity of the Dutch government was no less severe than the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay, however. Hodgson was imprisoned and flogged. Governor Peter Stuyvesant promulgated an edict that none were to consort with or give comfort to Quakers.

This edict outraged the good citizens of Flushing. William Thorne and his eldest son, William Jr., joined with fellow town leaders in writing a "Remonstrance" (def: "An expression of protest, complaint, or reproof, especially a formal statement of grievances" - dictionary.com) addressed to the Governor on December 27, 1657. In it, they said that they "cannot condemn them...neither can we stretch out our hands against them, to punish, banish or persecute them... ." Citing the freedom of conscience accorded by their town patent, they served notice to the Governor that, "our desire is not to offend one of His little ones, in whatsoever form, name or title he appears in, whether Presbyterian, Independent, Baptist or Quaker, but shall be glad to see anything of God in any of them, desiring to doe unto all men as we desire all men should doe unto us, which is the true law both of Church and State; for our Savior saith this is the law... ."20

Their Remonstrance was among the first formal declarations of the principal of separation of church and state in the colonies.

William Thorne, Sr., had been expanding upon his land holdings through this period. In 1657 he was a founding "Proprietor" of Jamaica, Long Island.21 A move to that community may have been dictated by the renewed raiding of Indians, placing him and his family closer to the protection of the fort and numbers of defenders.

Exactly when William died is not clear. It is assumed by genealogists that he passed before 1664, "when his name was not included among those principal English residents among the Dutch on Long Island who were offered citizenship by the Connecticut Assembly." His death was certainly earlier than the 1669 date when his wife, Susannah, was noted as being estranged from her second husband, William Hallet of Flushing.22

William and his wife are said to be buried in the Friends Burial Ground in Flushing, New York.

12 Philbrick, Nathaniel, Mayflower - A Story of Courage, Community, and War, (U.S.) Viking Penguin, 2006-2007.

13 Thorn, op. cit. ALSO: Massachusetts Genealogical Records, 1600s-1800s "Pioneers of Massachusetts". p. 156.

14 Clapp, Roger: Ed. Beardsley, John, The Memoir of Capt. Roger Clapp of Dorchester, 1680, The Winthrop Society, http://www.winthropsociety.org, 2003.

15 Dewan, George, "A 'Dangerous' 1600s Woman," http://www.newsday.com, Newsday, Inc., 2004.

16 Plimoth Plantation, Inc., "Plymouth Colony 1628-1692," http://www.plimoth.org, 2003.

17 Savage, James, citing Lewis, A Genealogical Dictionary of the First Settlers of New England [...], Vol. IV, Genealogy Publishing Co., Baltimore, 1965. p.291.

21 New York Historical Records, reprinted at http://www.newsday.com/extras/lihistory/vault/hs301a1v.htm, Newsday, Inc. 2004.

22 Middleton and Taylor, Thornes and Allied Families, p. 1. ALSO: Allen (citing Shotwell, p. 45), Thorn, and others.

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