A Bodwell family story · London and North Wales · 1654–1675
Plague, fire, a king's revenge and a trade in children: the world of a boy from Houndsditch
Henry Bodwell was born, much evidence indicates, in Houndsditch, just outside the old City wall at Aldgate, in January 1654, when England had no king. By the time he was twenty-one he was a soldier on the Massachusetts frontier, three thousand miles away. No record tells us when he sailed or why. But we know a great deal about the London he grew up in, and those twenty years were among the most frightening the city has ever lived through. In one decade Henry's world went through a revolution, a religious purge, a plague, a great fire and a war. This page sets his family's story against that background.
A word of caution first. The events below are the conditions Henry left behind, not proven reasons he left. Where we join the two, we say so.
When Henry was baptized at St Botolph Aldgate on 17 January 1653/4, Oliver Cromwell had been Lord Protector for barely a month. Charles I had been executed five years earlier, and England was a Puritan republic. Theatres were closed, Christmas was officially abolished, and the Church of England's bishops and prayer book were swept away.
Henry's family seems to have been at home in that world. His mother (again, most probably - although we still hope to lock this down), Mary Tiffin, had been raised by her great-aunt's family, the Wilsons, who are said to have had Parliamentary connections. And in April 1656 a Henry Bodwell, as a trustee of Botwnnog School on the Llŷn Peninsula, wrote to Cromwell's Council of State about the school's future. If that was Henry's father, as one researcher believes, then the Bodwells were people Cromwell's government knew and trusted.
Some time after that letter, Henry's father died. Henry was probably still a small child.
On 29 May 1660, Charles II rode into London to wild celebration. The republic was over, and the new government wanted revenge on the men who had killed his father. In October 1660 the surviving "regicides," the men who had signed Charles I's death warrant, were tried and executed at Charing Cross, hanged, drawn and quartered in front of crowds. In January 1661 the bodies of Oliver Cromwell and two of his colleagues were dug up from Westminster Abbey, hung at Tyburn and beheaded.
For families who had served the Commonwealth, the message was clear. Old loyalties were now dangerous. A family that had written to Cromwell's Council a few years earlier, and that may have had relatives on the wrong side, had every reason to keep its head down.
Another researcher's family tree says Mary Tiffin's family had close ties to three of the regicides, and suggests this is why young Henry was later sent to New England. We have not yet seen the evidence for those ties. If it holds up, it would make the events of 1660 part of the Bodwells' own story rather than just its background.
The new Parliament set about rebuilding the Church of England and pushing out the Puritans. The Act of Uniformity required every minister to use the Book of Common Prayer and accept the bishops. On St Bartholomew's Day, 24 August 1662, about two thousand ministers who refused were forced out of their churches. Further laws followed: in 1664 it became a crime to attend a religious meeting outside the Church of England, and in 1665 ejected ministers were banned from coming within five miles of a town.
Puritan families now faced fines and prison for worshipping as they believed. For many of them, one place still stood for everything they had lost: New England, where Massachusetts was still run by Puritan ministers and magistrates. Sending a child there was sending him into the world his parents had hoped England would become.
In the middle of these years, on 16 July 1663, a Mary Bodwell married Richard Lucas at All Hallows, London Wall, a few minutes' walk from Houndsditch. If, as seems likely, she was Henry's widowed mother, then Henry, aged nine, now had a stepfather.
In the spring of 1665 plague broke out in the poor parishes outside the City walls. By the late summer it was killing thousands of Londoners a week. Anyone with money and somewhere to go left the city, and the King and court moved to Oxford. The official Bills of Mortality counted nearly 70,000 plague deaths in London that year, and the true figure was probably closer to 100,000, perhaps a quarter of the city's people.
Aldgate, Henry's birthplace, was one of the worst places to be. Daniel Defoe, who was a small child in London at the time, later described in his Journal of the Plague Year a great pit dug in the churchyard of St Botolph Aldgate, the church where Henry had been baptized, into which more than a thousand bodies were thrown.
For Henry's mother, this would have been a nightmare she had lived before. In the plague of 1646, when she was fifteen, Mary Tiffin had watched her father, mother and two sisters die in the space of five weeks.
One researcher's tree records that Mary died before 1667, but gives no date or source. The plague of 1665 is an obvious possibility. If she died then, Henry was an orphan at eleven, living with a stepfather who was not his own family. That is exactly the situation the family legend describes. It is a guess, but a guess the records might one day confirm: a burial of Mary Lucas in 1665 would settle it.
On the night of 2 September 1666, a fire started in a baker's shop in Pudding Lane. Driven by a strong east wind through streets of timber houses, it burned for four days. It destroyed about 13,000 houses, 87 parish churches and St Paul's Cathedral, and left most of the walled City in ashes.
The fire was finally held near the northern line of the old wall. All Hallows, London Wall, where Mary Bodwell had married Richard Lucas three years earlier, survived. Houndsditch, outside the wall, was spared. But a twelve-year-old boy living in that corner of London would have watched the sky burn for days, and seen the homeless camped in the fields outside the city afterwards.
England was at war with the Dutch from 1665 to 1667. In June 1667 the Dutch fleet sailed up the River Medway, burned English warships at their moorings and towed away the flagship, the Royal Charles. London panicked. Press gangs roamed the riverside taking men and boys for the navy.
The docks had another, quieter danger for a boy. Throughout this period, London had a notorious trade in "spiriting": luring, tricking or simply kidnapping children and young people and shipping them to the colonies, where their labour could be sold as indentured servants. A ship's master who brought a healthy boy to New England could sell his indenture for several years' work. The trade was such a scandal that in 1664 the government set up an office to register servants going overseas, to try to stop it.
While Henry was still a schoolboy, his stepfather shipped him to America with the intention of gaining possession of the estate to which Henry was heir, and the ship's captain robbed him and indentured him at Newbury.
Set against what we now know, the legend no longer sounds far-fetched. A stepfather, a ship's captain, a boy indentured on arrival: every part of it describes something that really happened to London children in the 1660s. Indentures for boys usually ran until they were about twenty-one. Henry turned twenty-one in January 1675, and that year is when he first appears in the Massachusetts records.
On the Llŷn Peninsula, the Bodvel family was tearing itself apart. In 1662, John Bodvel of Bodvel, a former Royalist colonel, lay sick and deep in debt in London, and made a new will leaving his estates to distant cousins. His daughter's in-laws, the powerful Robartes family, fought it in Chancery and in the House of Lords. In 1666, an Act of Parliament set the will aside, and the Bodvel lands passed out of the Bodvel name for good.
If Henry's father really was a Bodvel of Pwllheli, as one family tree suggests, then the years of Henry's boyhood were also the years in which any family hope of a Welsh estate disappeared. Whatever "estate to which Henry was heir" the legend remembered, by 1666 there was little left to inherit.
Set side by side, the family's story and the nation's fit closely together.
The family's own legend, and the explanation that fits the records best so far. His mother remarried when he was nine, and his first appearance in Massachusetts comes just when an indenture would have ended.
After 1660, families linked to Cromwell's government had reason to fear. Sending a son to Puritan New England put him beyond the reach of the new regime.
If the family were Puritans, Massachusetts was the one place a boy could be raised in the faith that England now punished.
An orphaned or unwanted boy in a ruined city was exactly the kind of child that spirits and ship's masters looked for.
These reasons are not exclusive. Most likely, several of them worked together.
Henry was born the year Cromwell took power and was a boy when the king came back for revenge. He grew up within sight of the plague pits and the burning City, and lost his father, probably his mother, and any claim to a Welsh estate before he was a teenager. Somewhere in those years he was put on a ship, and he never came back. In Massachusetts he fought, married, farmed and lived to be over ninety. Of everything he left behind in London, he seems to have carried with him only one thing that we can still see: he named his first son Henry, and his second daughter Mary.