Serious Mental Imbalance - 52 Ancestors #44

Mary Shard was married twice. Her first husband was John Gove and they had six children before he died. Mary and John Gove are my 11X great-grandparents. Her second husband was John Mansfield. John Mansfield came from a good family, but he seemed to have conflicts with most of his relatives. He is described in his Great Migration sketch as demonstrating “serious mental imbalance throughout his adult life…” Among other things, he accused his brother-in-law, Robert Keaynes, of cheating him out of his rightful inheritance. John Mansfield had two sisters in Massachusetts. His sister, Elizabeth, was the wife of the Rev. John Wilson and his sister Anne was married twice, first to Capt. Robert Keayne and second to Samuel Cole.

John Mansfield was born about 1601 and died on June 26, 1674. He married Mary (Shard) Gove after her first husband, John Gove, died in January 1648. The family lived in Charlestown. Shortly after their marriage, Mary gave birth to twins, John Jr. and Elizabeth. Mary died on March 4, 1682. John's frequent petitions to the courts document his obsession with obtaining an inheritance from the estate of Robert Keayne. 

However, this obsession is not the only evidence of his "serious mental imbalance," John proved himself incapable of caring for his family.  In the Middlesex Court records, he says of that his home is "all open above and rotten under." Eventually, the two children of John & Mary (Shard) (Gove) Mansfield were removed from the household. They were only eight years old.

John Jr. was placed with his aunt, Anne (Mansfield) Keayne, for a period of ten years. He was to be kept in school for the first three years and then to spend seven years in an honest trade or employment. Elizabeth was placed with the family of Mr. Samuel Whiting, Jr. of Lynn. “John Mansfield, their father, is not capable by reason of misgovernment of himself and wife to educate and bring them up as they ought to be…”

I wonder what was going on in the lives of Mary's children from her first marriage and what they thought of their mother's household. Her son, Edward Gove, my 10th great-grandfather, was getting married about the time his half-siblings were removed from her care. Did the twins have a relationship with their mother after they reached adulthood and after their father died?

John & Mary (Shard) Gove

Edward & Hannah (Partridge) Gove

Joseph & Mary (Gove) Sanborn

Samuel & Mary (Sanborn) Prescott

Jeremiah & Mary (Hayes) Prescott

Elisha & Mary (Marston) Prescott

Thomas & Hannah (Prescott) Edgecomb

Oliver & Mary (Edgecomb) Philbrick

Benjamin P. & Jane (Matthews) Philbrick

Francis Llewellyn & Mary Elizabeth (Philbrick) Cotton

Ray Everett & Annie Florilla (Gibbs) Cotton

Fern Lyndell Cotton - my grandmother

Imprisoned in the Tower of London

Tower of London

Edward Gove was an early inhabitant of New Hampshire. About 1655, he moved from Massachusetts to Hampton, N.H. There he married Hannah Partridge, not Hannah Titcomb as seen in some sources. Proof of her identity is established in the New England Historical and Genealogical Register, Vol. 146, p. 15. Edward and Hannah lived on their farm and raised a large family - thirteen children, although not all survived to adulthood.

In 1682, Gov. Cranfield became the third royal governor of New Hampshire. Two descriptions of Cranfield come from historians Charles Bell, who called him "a needy, arbitrary and unscrupulous man" and Joseph Dow, who described him as "a man as unprincipled and as greedy of gain as the King himself." He after repeatedly butting heads with the colony's eleven member assembly, he dissolved it completely. This prompted an uprising that is sometimes called Gove's Rebellion. It was really more like a drunken and disorderly evening than a rebellion. Led by a trumpeter, Gove and some like-minded local men armed with pistols and swords "raised a ruckus" and were quickly arrested and then released. They expected that to be the end of it. Gov. Cranfield seemed to have other ideas and had them re-arrested and put on trial for high treason. Two weeks later, at the trial, most of the men were sent home but Edward Gove was found guilty...and the sentence for high treason was death! And what a gruesome sentence it was!

The sentence from Judge Richard Waldern:
"You Edward Gove shall be drawn on a hedge to ye place of Execution and there you shall be hanged by ye neck, and while yet living be cut down and cast upon ye ground, and your bowels shall be taken out of your belly, and your privy members cut off and burnt while you are yet alive, your head shall be cut off, and your body divided into four parts, and your head and quarters shall be place where our Sovereigne Lord ye King pleaseth to appoint."

Gov. Cranfield quickly sent Gove off to England for the sentence to be carried out. Edward Gove spent three years in the Tower of London. In petitioning for her husband's release, Hannah Gove described her husband as prone to "a distemper of lunacy or some such like, which he have been subject to by times from his youth and yet is until now, though at times seemingly rational." Gove decided to go with the "everyone else was doing it, so I didn't think it was wrong" defense citing other disturbances he had witnessed in the past. It's kind of funny that this excuse has survived the test of time and is still popular today. Finally, the King was decided that Gove would be released and he returned to Hampton. I wonder what Hannah's life was like while he was gone and how it changed when he returned. Edward Gove died in 1691.

When I visited the Tower of London (which is really a complex with multiple buildings and grounds) with students in 2008, I had no idea that I had a relative who had been imprisoned there. Here are some pictures I took.

Traitor's Gate

Cages for the ravens kept at the Tower

Students outside the Tower

Edward & Hannah (Partridge) Gove
Joseph & Mary (Gove) Sanborn
Samuel & Mary (Sanborn) Prescott
Jeremiah & Mary (Hayes) Prescott
Elisha Prescott
Thomas & Hannah (Prescott) Edgecomb
Oliver Smith & Mary (Edgecomb) Philbrick
Benjamin & Jane (Matthews) Philbrick
Francis Llewellyn & Lizzie (Philbrick) Cotton
Ray Everett & Annie (Gibbs) Cotton
Fern Lyndell Cotton - my grandmother

Sources:

Dearborn, Clarkson. "Seabrook Sketches." The Granite Monthly 15 (1893): 335-41.Google Books. Web. 26 June 2013.
Gove's Rebellion of 1683
1981 Nashua Telegraph article in Google News Archive