Chesapeake (33 page)

Not only would Paxmore be whipped—and word had sped through the town that he might well die of his lashes—but a female Quaker had also been apprehended, and she was to be lashed too. Her name, Paxmore heard, was Ruth Brinton, and she had already been exiled from Virginia because of her brazen adherence to the Quaker heresy, and she had been whipped in Roxbury.

‘Women we give only six lashes,’ the jailer explained with a sense of real compassion. ‘They can’t stand much more, but they say this one is a vixen. She kept preaching while they beat her, and in Roxbury to silence her they had to beat her across the mouth.’

From Virginia! Could it be that this Quaker woman was the one of whom Kenworthy had spoken, a calm, determined, God-sent woman who exuded sanctity and gave men courage? He tried to interrogate the jailer, but the man only repeated that this one was a vixen, and that when she was whipped, the good people of Ipswich would see something.

This so agitated Paxmore that he demanded to see the local judge, and when that worthy man appeared in the cell, Paxmore said, ‘To whip a woman is indecent and against the will of God.’

‘We have a law,’ the judge said.

‘It cannot be the law of God.’

‘Who are you to determine what God wills?’

‘He speaks to me.’

The judge put his two hands before his face as if to ward off evil. ‘It’s a good thing, Paxmore, that you’re leaving Massachusetts. We have no place for evil men like you.’

The carpenter, seeing that it would be no use to argue further with this
righteous man, bowed his head and said, ‘Allow me to take her lashes.’

‘But the sentence has been written.’

‘In the mercy of God, allow me to take her lashes.’

‘That would accomplish nothing. After here she has six more in Duxbury.’

‘Oh, dearest Father!’

‘Are you appealing to God against God’s law? We have a sentence on this woman, in writing.’

‘Thee had better go,’ Paxmore said, ‘and hide thyself in a deep well, for God will surely seek thee out.’

These prophetic words disturbed the judge, and he said in a voice of reasoning, ‘Paxmore, it would be fatal to give you six more lashes. The doctor told us you might not even survive the ten that are due you. Sleep in peace before tomorrow, and quit Massachusetts. You do not belong among the godly.’

When Edward Paxmore and Ruth Brinton were tethered to the same cart, they formed an incongruous pair—he tall and awkward, she small and delicately proportioned. But when the sheriff stripped them both to the waist, with watchers ogling in delight, their common heritage became obvious: each back was flayed and marked with indented scars. There was no man or woman.

Of course she drew the greater comment, for when the Puritans surged forward to see at close quarters a half-naked woman, with the great welts already marking her back, they shouted their satisfaction, and one cried, ‘She won’t forget Ipswich!’

Twice Paxmore tried to speak to the woman tied beside him, and twice the local judge ordered the constable to silence him, as if words passed between the two proscribed Quakers might contaminate the theocratic town. But on the third try he succeeded. ‘Is thee the woman from Virginia that Thomas Kenworthy—’ The constable struck Paxmore brutally across the mouth and shouted, ‘Silence, infidel.’ But the woman nodded, and through bloody lips Paxmore said, ‘He was hanged,’ and she replied, ‘So shall we all be,’ and the whippings began.

It was not customary for women to be lashed in Ipswich, so the crowd was large and appreciative. They watched approvingly as the nine cords cut into her back on the first three lashes, and then a whisper of suppressed excitement swept through the crowd as the fourth lash fell.

‘She’s bleeding in front!’ a woman in the crowd shouted, and the spectators pressed forward to see for themselves where the tips of the lashes had laid open the breasts.

‘Good blow, Robert,’ a man called. ‘Hit her again!’

‘Oh,’ the beaten woman moaned as the last two blows fell.

‘Well struck, Robert. Now the man.’

Paxmore would not remember his punishment at Ipswich. The first blow pulled his face sideways, and all he could see was the Quaker
woman beside him, a small, dark-haired woman limp and faint, with blood dripping from her breasts. That night they were parted, he to exile in Rhode Island, she to her final installment in Duxbury.

The subsequent history of Edward Paxmore in Massachusetts seems a grotesque nightmare. After his final whipping in Ipswich, the constable led him to the border of Massachusetts, and in the cold weeks of late March 1661, stole every piece of clothing he had and shoved him naked into Rhode Island. The citizens of the first village he came to were accustomed to receive such exiles from the theocracy to the north, and quickly dressed him in clothes too small. He was given a set of carpenter’s tools and within four weeks was back in Massachusetts, a gangling carpenter preaching the Quaker doctrine and keeping himself in jeopardy.

Records show that he was arrested in Ipswich in 1662 and lashed through four towns before he was expelled once more into Rhode Island. The records do not show this, but again he arrived completely naked.

He returned to Massachusetts in 1663 and was again whipped through three towns and exiled, naked. In January 1664 he was back, his shoulders a mass of crisscrossing scars, his voice deepened and impassioned in the work of conversion. This time he was apprehended in Boston and taken before Judge Goddard, who was appalled at his appearance: he was emaciated from meals missed while fleeing; borrowed clothes many sizes too small hung curiously from shoulders which sagged as if borne down by unseen burdens; his eyes no longer flamed; and his deportment was much altered. He was not deferential to authority, he sought argument, and his colloquy with Judge Goddard, recorded both by officers of the colony and by crypto-Quakers eavesdropping at the court, was vigorous:

GODDARD
: Why have you come back, when you have already received an even hundred lashes? Is your back so stout it can withstand everything?

PAXMORE
: Why does thee persist in persecutions? Is thy heart so black it is impervious to a sense of guilt?

GODDARD
: Why would guilt be upon me?

PAXMORE
: Because thee acts in defiance of God’s law and the king’s.

GODDARD
: Are you presuming to claim that the just law of the king is bad?

PAXMORE
: I do so claim, but I am not required to, for the law itself states that it is bad.

GODDARD
: Do you know that you speak treason? As well as heresy?

PAXMORE
: If I speak against the king, I speak treason, this I confess, but the king himself will declare thy law void, because it is against his intentions and is bad.

GODDARD
: Do you think that the King of England will alter a law because some fractious Quaker asks him to?

PAXMORE
: No, because the reasoning of a just God asks him to, and he will obey.

GODDARD
: You truly believe that the great law of Massachusetts will be changed to suit you.

PAXMORE
: Not to suit me. To suit the everlasting laws of God.

GODDARD
: You presume to interpret the wishes of God. What college in England did you attend? Did you study theology at Harvard? If so, what bishop ordained you to interpret God’s law?

PAXMORE
: I studied at night, in the cell of thy prison, and my teacher was Thomas Kenworthy, whom thee murdered.

(Everyone who attended this trial, Puritans and Quakers alike, remarked that when Edward Paxmore made this statement a pronounced change came over Judge Goddard. He dropped his sarcasm and lost his self-assurance. He also lowered his voice, leaned forward more, and engaged the prisoner in debate on a new level.)

GODDARD
: You know that I do not want to order you whipped again.

PAXMORE
: I am sure thee doesn’t, good Judge, for the terror of Kenworthy’s death rests on thy conscience.

GODDARD
: Then why don’t you remove your hat, as a sign of respect for this court?

PAXMORE
: Jesus instructed us to remain covered.

GODDARD
: If I send you in peace to Rhode Island, will you stay there?

PAXMORE
: I must go where God sends me.

GODDARD
: Thomas Paxmore, don’t you realize that you’re making it very difficult for the Massachusetts Colony to deal with you? Won’t you leave us in peace?

PAXMORE
: I bring peace.

GODDARD
: A strange kind of peace. We have a good colony here, a good religion that suits us perfectly. All we ask is that you leave us alone, and all you do is preach treason and sedition and heresy.

PAXMORE
: I come back to thy court, Judge Goddard, because I am instructed of the Lord.

GODDARD
: What constructive message could you possibly bring?

PAXMORE
: That thy sin of tenth March 1661 can be expiated. (At this strange statement the judge shuffled his papers.)

GODDARD
: I did not sentence you on that date. Nor Thomas Kenworthy, neither.

PAXMORE
: Thee sentenced the Quaker woman Ruth Brinton to be whipped through Boston and Ipswich and Duxbury. A woman … to be lashed naked. (There was a long pause.)

GODDARD
: We must defend ourselves. Sedition and heresy eat at the roots of our society. Our colony and our church must defend themselves.

PAXMORE
: The burden of that defense sits most heavily on thee, good Judge. I see in thy face the marks of sin. I shall pray for thee.

GODDARD
: You leave me no escape, Edward Paxmore. I sentence you to be lashed to the wheel of the great cannon and to be whipped forty times, and then to be taken down and hanged.

PAXMORE
: I forgive thee, good Judge. Thee bears a heavy burden.

The carpenter was dragged away to the cell in which his conversion had taken place, and he would have been hanged except that an unprecedented event took place. Late on the Wednesday night before the Friday hanging, Judge Goddard, tall and lonely, sought out the sheriff and directed that officer to open the cell door and then to lock it securely after the judge had entered to talk with the condemned man.

‘Edward Paxmore,’ the stern judge began, ‘I cannot have your blood on my hands.’

‘Good Judge, thee should have no blood on thy hands.’

‘But suppose a citizen gives secrets to the French and by this act delivers the colony to the enemy?

‘That would be treason.’

‘Or if a tax collector murders a merchant to take his wife?’

‘He has committed an offense against God’s law.’

‘Do you not confess that your treason is as great? A destruction of the church God has ordained for Massachusetts?’

‘Does thee truly believe that God has personally ordained thy harsh and horrid church, so devoid of love?’

‘I do. God is a stern taskmaster, as you have learned.’

‘God is love, and if He does condemn the tax collector for murdering the merchant and hangs him, He does so in a forgiving mood, just as He forgave King David for a similar crime.’

‘Paxmore, I cannot see you die. If I commit an illegal act, will you swear by the God you love not to reveal it?’

This offer presented Paxmore with a double difficulty: as a Quaker, he was forbidden to swear—that is, to use God’s existence as security for what he, a mortal, was affirming; and as a Christian, he did not want to be the cause of another man’s committing an unlawful act. But he felt deep sympathy for the travail Judge Goddard was undergoing, so he said quietly, ‘I am forbidden to swear, good Judge, but I know thy torment, and I will affirm.’

‘I accept.’

‘I do so affirm.’

‘And as to the illegality, the act is mine alone, Paxmore, and does not require your participation.’

‘So be it.’

The judge summoned the jailer and caused the cell door to be unlocked. He then surprised that official by leading Paxmore from the cell
and into a waiting carriage. Before the judge climbed aboard, he handed the jailer a handful of coins and swore him to secrecy. With that, the carriage headed for the harbor.

‘You are to go to Maryland,’ the judge said. ‘There they are more tolerant.’

‘Is not Maryland a part of Virginia? There they whip Quakers, too.’

‘The two have broken apart,’ the judge said, ‘or so I am told.’

‘There will be work in Maryland,’ Paxmore said. But then he gripped the judge’s hand. ‘I am not fleeing death, for I am not afraid. Thee is sending me away.’

‘I am,’ the judge agreed, and after a pause he confided, ‘The death of Thomas Kenworthy strangles me at night. Not the hanging, for he was a heretic and deserved hanging. But the whipping prior … the wheels of that great cannon …’

‘Yet you sentenced me to that same cannon. Forty lashes … I would not have lived.’

‘I did it because …’ Goddard could find no logical explanation; perhaps he had done it to curry favor with the mob, more likely to justify the action he was about to take.

In the era when Massachusetts backed Parliament, and Maryland the king, it was not easy to travel from one to the other. Few ships sailed, for neither place produced goods required by the other and there were no roads, or carriages to ride upon them. On the other hand, it was easy to reach London, for it was the center of government, of manufacturers and learning; large ships, some surprisingly swift, crossed back and forth constantly and inexpensively, and many captains formed the habit of stopping en route at the fairest of the Caribbean Islands.