A Bodwell family story · London, Lichfield and Surrey · 1631–c. 1667
The mother of the first Bodwell in America, and the life that shaped his
Every Bodwell in America descends from one boy, Henry, who was born in Houndsditch in January 1654. We know a good deal now about his father's side, the Bodvels of Wales. We have known much less about his mother. Her name was Mary Tiffin. By the time she was fifteen she had buried nearly her whole family. At eighteen she married a man twice her age, and by her mid-twenties she was a widow with a small son. She probably did not live to see that son sail for New England. This is her story, pieced together from parish registers, wills and the work of other family researchers.
This page tells Mary's story on the assumption that the baby Henry baptized in London in January 1654 is the same Henry Bodwell who appears in Newbury, Massachusetts, by 1675. The evidence points strongly that way, but it is not yet proven. No record found so far, in England or America, says in so many words that Henry of Newbury was the son of Henry and Mary Bodwell of London.
Much of Mary's early life also comes from another researcher's family tree on Ancestry, which is carefully built from London parish registers. Some of it we have checked ourselves, and some we have not yet seen. Where a detail is uncertain, this page says so.
Mary was the eldest child of John Tiffin and Joan Spencer. Her father was about 24 when she was born, and her mother about 19. She was probably baptized at St Swithin London Stone in the heart of the City of London on 16 April 1631. The entry is a puzzle: it sits in a space in the register between entries for 12 and 28 April, added in a different hand, and seems to mention "Tiffen" and "Mr Spencer's daughter." Her sister Jane was baptized in the same church in June 1632, which supports it.
St Swithin's took its name from the London Stone, an ancient block of stone set into the street outside, said in legend to be the stone from which the city's distances were measured. It was a prosperous parish of merchants and tradesmen. Then, in the mid-1630s, the family moved more than a hundred miles north to Lichfield in Staffordshire, a cathedral city, where three more children were born.
Mary's little brother John died before he was five. It was a common loss in those years, but it was only the first.
Lichfield was not a safe place to be as the 1640s began. When the Civil War broke out in 1642, its cathedral close was fortified and besieged three times in 1643 alone, by both sides in turn. By 1646 the Tiffins were back in London, living near the river in the small parish of St Peter Paul's Wharf. We do not know exactly when or why they returned, but a family with young children had every reason to leave a city under siege.
In the summer of 1646, as the first Civil War was ending, plague broke out in London again. It was a smaller outbreak than the Great Plague would be nineteen years later, but in the crowded lanes by the Thames it was no less deadly. In the Tiffin household it came in August.
Mary's sister Sara, aged about 11, is buried.
Her sister Jane, aged 14, is buried.
Her mother, Joan, aged about 34, is buried.
Her father, John, aged about 39, is buried the next day.
In five weeks, Mary lost her mother, her father and both the sisters nearest her in age. She was fifteen. The only family left in the house was Anne, who was eight.
Plague households in this period were often shut up with their sick, the door marked and watched, so that the healthy were locked in with the dying. We do not know whether that happened to the Tiffins. But the burials, one after another, a few days apart, tell their own story of a summer that Mary would never forget.
St Peter Paul's Wharf, where the Tiffins died, was one of the smallest parishes in the City, a cluster of lanes running down to the Thames below St Paul's. Its church burned in the Great Fire of 1666 and was never rebuilt. Today nothing of it remains but a name in old registers.
Two orphan girls with no parents left needed someone to take them in. The most likely candidates were their great-aunt, Mary (Tiffin) Wilson, their grandfather's sister, and her husband, Rowland Wilson. The Wilsons had moved out of the City in 1634 to Merton Abbey in Surrey, on the site of a great medieval priory a few miles south-west of London.
That Mary Wilson cared about her great-niece is not in doubt. When she made her will in September 1659, thirteen years later, she remembered her by name. A girl raised at Merton would have lived among a wealthy family with close ties to the Parliamentary side in the Civil War, a connection that would matter later in Mary's story.
In January 1649, King Charles I was executed outside his own Banqueting House in Whitehall. Four months later, on 27 May, Mary Tiffin was married at St Saviour's, Southwark, the great church at the south end of London Bridge that is now Southwark Cathedral.
Wedings, 1649, May 27 — Henry Bodwell & Mary Tiffin
She was eighteen. Her husband, Henry Bodwell, was a gentleman about twice her age. One researcher believes he was born at Pwllheli in Wales around 1612, the grandson of Hugh Gwyn of Bodvel. If so, the London orphan had married into an old Welsh gentry family, though one whose fortunes were already fading. We don't yet have proof of that link. What we do know is that Mary, with no parents to arrange a match, married an older man of some standing, which may have been the best security a young orphan could hope for.
By the early 1650s Henry and Mary were living in Houndsditch, the street running along the outside of the old City wall from Aldgate towards Bishopsgate. It took its name from the ditch that once ran below the wall, notorious for the rubbish, and dead dogs, thrown into it. By Mary's day it was a busy, crowded street of tradesmen, known for its dealers in old clothes and metal goods.
There, in January 1654, her son was born. He was baptized the same day, which usually meant his parents feared he might not live.
17 — Henry Bodwell son to Henry Bodwell & Mary his wife born & baptized ye 17th — Houndsditch
If, as we believe, this is our Henry, he lived for ninety-one years and founded the Bodwell family in America.
Here is why we think the London baby is our Henry. In 1678, at Newbury, Henry Bodwell gave his age as 24, which fits a birth in January 1654 almost exactly. He named his first son Henry and his second daughter Mary. And Bodwell was a very rare name in London at the time.
One piece of evidence would come close to settling it: any record from the American side giving Henry's birthday as 17 January. The London register shows the baby was born and baptized on the same day, 17 January 1653/4. If a family Bible, a gravestone, a letter, an old family history or a descendant's notes records that Henry of Newbury was born on 17 January, it would tie him to St Botolph Aldgate almost beyond doubt.
If you have such a record, or know where one might be, please share it at charlie@bodwellfamily.org.
Few other traces of these years survive. In 1657 a woman named Jane Newell left twenty shillings in her will to "Mary Bodwell," a small but real kindness. Then, some time after April 1656, Mary's husband died. We do not know where or how. A Henry Bodwell (indexed as "Bedwell") was buried at St Margaret's, Westminster, in June 1657, but it is not certain that he was Mary's husband. By her late twenties at the latest, Mary was a widow with a small boy to raise.
The world Mary had grown up in had turned upside down. In 1660 the monarchy returned, and families with Parliamentary connections, like the Wilsons, found themselves on the losing side. Her great-aunt had died around 1659. Mary was a widow with a son and little to support them.
On 16 July 1663, at All Hallows, London Wall, a short walk from Houndsditch, a Mary Bodwell married Richard Lucas.
The register does not say whether this Mary Bodwell was a widow, and the year at the top of the page still needs to be confirmed. But she fits Mary's age, name and neighbourhood exactly, and no other Mary Bodwell has been found in London at the time. Proof would come from a later record calling her "Mary Lucas," perhaps in her sister Anne's papers or a Lucas family baptism.
Young Henry was nine. The family legend, passed down in Massachusetts for three hundred years, says that while Henry was still a schoolboy, his stepfather shipped him to America to get hold of the estate he was heir to. For a long time that sounded like a story. Richard Lucas is the first real stepfather we have found.
The Ancestry tree records that Mary died before 1667, but gives no date or place. Two years after her second marriage, in 1665, the Great Plague swept through London and killed perhaps a hundred thousand people. Aldgate, where Mary had lived and where her son was baptized, was among the worst-hit districts. It is possible, though not proven, that the plague which had taken her family when she was fifteen came back for her at thirty-four.
If she married Richard Lucas, she would have been buried as Mary Lucas, not Mary Bodwell. That may be why no one has yet found her grave. A memorial on Find a Grave places her at St Margaret's, Westminster, but without a date, and it seems to be based only on the 1657 Bedwell burial.
What we do know is this: within a few years of her second marriage, her son was gone from London, and by 1675 he was in Newbury, Massachusetts.
Probably baptized at St Swithin London Stone.
The family moves to Lichfield; three more children are born.
Her brother John dies.
Plague kills her two sisters, her mother and her father. Mary is 15.
Probably raised by her great-aunt Mary Wilson at Merton Abbey, Surrey.
Marries Henry Bodwell at St Saviour, Southwark.
Son Henry born and baptized, Houndsditch.
Widowed.
Left twenty shillings in Jane Newell's will.
Named in her great-aunt Mary Wilson's will.
Marries Richard Lucas at All Hallows, London Wall.
Dies, perhaps in the Great Plague of 1665.
A burial for Mary Lucas, or a will or administration in her name, would settle it. The 1665 plague burials of Aldgate and the parishes near London Wall are the place to start.
Anne was alive after 1662. A will or marriage of hers that mentions "my sister Mary Lucas" would prove Mary's second marriage, and might even mention her nephew Henry.
A John Tiffin, a London barber-surgeon born at Tetney in Lincolnshire, died in 1643 and left everything to his sister Jane Tiffin. He was not Mary's father, whose wife and children were still living then, but he may well have been a relative. His will is at The National Archives (PROB 11/191/88).
No other children of Henry and Mary Bodwell, or of Richard and Mary Lucas, have yet been found. A brother or sister for Henry may still be hiding in the registers.
Mary Tiffin never saw America, and her name appears in only a handful of records. But her life was the hinge on which the whole Bodwell story turned. She survived the plague that took her family. She married the man who gave her son the Bodwell name. And her second marriage may have set her son on the road to a ship and a new world. When Henry Bodwell, in his thirties, held his second daughter in Andover and named her Mary, he was remembering a mother he had lost as a boy, in a city he would never see again.