“There’s a king in every crowd.”
– Russell Wilson, NFL quarterback
The Mayflower carried many families we have chosen to remember well. Admire, even. Brewster and Bradford. Standish and Alden. Howland and Hopkins.
But the Billingtons? No, not so much. They were the colony’s outspoken rebels. The scoundrels. The fringe. Who would want to claim them as their ancestors?
Okay, I admit its tempting.
Trouble From the First
John and Elinor Billington were non-Separatist Anglicans from Lincolnshire. They joined the pilgrim company late, in Southampton, and sailed aboard the Mayflower with their two sons John and Francis. Francis was fourteen years old.
Nearly everything known about them comes from references made in the writings of Governor William Bradford, who did not hold the family in high regard. The profanest among us, to use his words.
The first recorded trouble came while the Mayflower was still anchored off Cape Cod in Provincetown Harbor, when young Francis nearly blew up the ship. The incident, as recorded in Mourt’s Relation [with modern spelling]: Francis ”in his father’s absence, had got gunpowder, and had shot off a piece or two, and made squibs, and there being a fowling piece charged in his fathers cabin, shot her off in the cabin, there being a little barrel of powder half full, scattered in and about the cabin, the fire being within four feet of the bed between the decks, and many flints and iron things about the cabin, and many people about the fire, and yet by Gods mercy no harm done.”
Reckless and foolish, young Francis was. But what boy hasn’t played with fire? This is particularly true of boys like Francis, who saw his parents continually clash with the Plymouth leadership,
In 1621 John Billington was tried before the whole company for disobeying a “lawful command” of Captain Myles Standish. John was sentenced to have his neck and heels tied together, but after showing some penitence, and it being his first offence, he was forgiven.
In 1624, when the Anglican minister John Lyford was banished from Plymouth Colony, Lyford named John Billington as one of his supporters. Billington denied it, and was allowed to remain in Plymouth.
Bradford could not have been overjoyed about it. In 1625 he wrote to Robert Cushman, one of the colony organizers, saying, “Billington still rails against you, and threatens to arrest you, I know not wherefore; he is a knave, and so will live and die.”
Then in 1630, John Billington Sr. killed a man. Of the event, Bradford wrote: “He and some of his had been often punished for miscarriages before, being one of the profanest families amongst them; they came from London, and I know not what friends shuffled into their company. His fact was that he waylaid a young man, one John Newcomen, about a former quarrel and shot him with a gun, whereof he died. …[He] was arraigned, and both by grand and petty jury found guilty of willful murder, by plain and notorious evidence. And was for the same accordingly executed.”
Billington is said to be the first person executed in New England. Hung, drawn, and quartered in accordance with the practice of the day.
Francis’s older brother, John, had died sometime between 1627 and 1630, leaving him and his mother Elinor to inherit his father’s estate.
Elinor was no stranger to trouble herself. In 1636, she spent time in the stocks for slandering the preacher John Doane. She eventually remarried in 1638, dying a few years later in her early sixties.
In 1634, Francis married widow Christian Penn Eaton, when he was twenty-eight. They had the dubious honor of being the first couple punished for fornication prior to their marriage. How they were caught remains a mystery, as their first child was not born until a year after the wedding.
Christian had three children from a prior marriage, plus a stepchild. The couple went on to have nine children of their own. The brood proved to be more than they could manage, at least as far as the colony leadership was concerned, and many of the children were apprenticed to other families while still young.
It’s not clear this arrangement was completely voluntary. One child, Joseph, repeatedly ran away from his master to his parents house. Colony records suggest Francis and Christian were happy to keep him, but the powers-that-were forced them to give him up.
Much is made about their dire financial situation. Francis was sued and fined and at one point sentenced to be whipped if he didn’t pay twenty pounds. However, at other times he was able to purchase land, using what funds cannot be ascertained. He also served on committees and other organizations that attest to continued membership in colony affairs.
After nearly five decades in Plymouth, the couple moved inland to Middleborough in 1669, where they lived until their deaths in 1684. Their son Isaac claims to have supported them for the last several years of their lives.
Little more is known, which raised the question: Were the Billingtons such bad eggs?
Some seem to excuse the behavior of the family, who found themselves at odds with the colony leadership while simultaneously being completely reliant on them for survival. Others have gone so far as to say John Billington “stoutly supported individual choice and freedom of speech, raising the voice of America’s first ‘opposition’ to governing authority, undoubtedly at great personal sacrifice.” Some say he’s America’s first true patriot.
And to be fair, not all the stories recorded about the Billingtons are bad. When the company was first exploring the New England shores, John (or possibly Francis) climbed a tree high enough to see a large body of water inland. To this day, the 269 acre warm-water pond is called the Billington Sea.
And Elinor, one of only four adult women to survive the first winter (there others were Mary Brewster, Elizabeth Hopkins, and Susanna White Winslow) helped host the natives the following autumn for the first “thanksgiving” feast. She might have slandered a priest, but that was hardly the defining moment of her life.
And then we have Bradford’s inherent bias as the narrator. If the Billingtons had done anything noteworthy or redeemable, would he have dutifully recording it, or said “Yes but…” and left their good deeds out of his narrative?
True, Bradford’s view seems grounded in more than simple religious differences. While he himself was a devout Separatist seeking to establish a spiritual paradise, he worked closely over the years with many of the other Anglicans. Non-Separatists such as John Alden and Stephen Hopkins served as assistant governors and appear to have held Bradford’s high esteem. The Billingtons were an exception, not victims to some broad prejudice on the part of the governor.
In the end, what we think about the Billingtons says more about us, and our own view of current government authority, than perhaps it does about them.
They do, however, serve as a reminder that everyone’s ancestors are a mixed bag, particular when looking back so many generations.
They also show us our ancestors don’t necessarily define us. One Billington descendant, James Garfield, became the 20th US President. So, just because our forbears bucked the system doesn’t mean we should.
Even if, again, it’s sometimes tempting.
We descend from Francis and Christian Billington’s son Isaac through Herbert Kimball’s maternal grandfather George Peabody.
Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Bradford_(governor)
https://www.geni.com/people/Francis-Billington-Mayflower-passenger/6000000002298453082
https://www.geni.com/people/John-Billington-Mayflower-passenger/6000000004368404864
Wicked Moxie 