Elizabeth Fones

The “Winthrop woman”: niece of Governor John Winthrop, widow of his son Henry, wife of Lieut. Robert Feake and then of William Hallett, and twice an ancestor of the Frosts, through her son John Feke and her daughter Hannah (Feake) Bowne. She is the heroine of Anya Seton’s novel The Winthrop Woman (1958).

Henry Winthrop. She was the daughter of Thomas Fones, a London apothecary, and Anne Winthrop, the governor’s sister. On 25 April 1629 she married her cousin Henry Winthrop (source, p. 348). When he followed his father to New England in April 1630 he “left her at Groton to come over subsequently with his stepmother, both then on the verge of maternity” (source, p. 286). Her daughter Martha Johanna Winthrop was born at Groton on 9 May 1630. Henry landed at Salem from the Talbot on 1 July and was drowned the next day; the governor wrote in his journal, “My son Henry Winthrop was drowned at Salem,” and to his wife on 16 July: “My son Henry! my son Henry! ah, poor child! Yet it grieves me much more for my dear daughter. The Lord strengthen and comfort her heart, to bear this cross patiently. I know thou wilt not be wanting to her in this distress” (source, 1:29 and appendix).

Robert Feake. She came over with the governor’s wife and family on the Lyon, which reached Nantasket on 2 November 1631 (source, 1:69-70), and by 27 January following had married Robert Feake, “who had married the governor’s daughter-in-law” (1:73). At Greenwich, which Feake and Daniel Patrick bought in 1640, “a parcel of land, some time called, ‘Elizabeth Neck’ … [was] declared in the Indian deed to be her ‘peticaler perchase,’” and in April 1642, with her husband sick, she was commissioned to act for him (source, p. 286).

William Hallett. After Feake sailed for England in 1647 and lost his reason, she lived with William Hallett, to whom the property had been entrusted. Theophilus Eaton wrote from New Haven on 21 July 1648: “It is possible that William Hallet and she that was mr. Feakes his wife are maryed, though not onely the lawfulnes and validitie of such a mariage, but the reallity and truth is by some questioned, because themselves and Toby Feakes some times denye it.” They had, “in a secret underhand way, … taken the children, two Cowes, all the houshold goods … and by water were gone away” to John Winthrop Jr.’s new plantation at New London, and “the children went (if not naked) very vnsatisfyingly apparraled” (source, 5:237-239). In May 1649 Governor Haynes of Connecticut told John Winthrop Jr. that “one that was the wife sometimes of Mr. Feake and who it seemes did confesse her selfe an Adulteresse, (which is vppon record at the Dutch) and now pretends marriadge with another man” had been summoned to answer; the trial never took place, for the Halletts left New London (5:345 and note). She wrote to her cousin from the boat, and he endorsed the letter “Sister Feakes” (5:348). From New Netherland she wrote again: “Deare Brother, All the loue and servis and thankefullnes I am able to express is next unto god dew vnto your selfe as the Instrument of my present well being … the dutch gouernour comends his loue to you” (5:358-359).

Long Island. Hallett bought land at Hell Gate in 1652, and the family lived there and at Flushing and Newtown, where several of her children became Quakers (source, p. 287). She was dead by April 1674. Her children: by Henry Winthrop, Martha Johanna (1630), who married Thomas Lyon of Stamford and died in 1668 without surviving children; by Robert Feake, Elizabeth (who married Capt. John Underhill), Hannah (who married John Bowne), John, Robert and Sarah. John Winthrop the Younger was twice her brother-in-law, as Henry’s brother and as the husband of her sister Martha Fones.

Research: research/mcmillan/Frost_Underhill_Bowne_Feake.md.

Open questions

• Her death date and place; the Winthrop Papers, vol. 2, for her marriage in 1629 and the letters after Henry’s death.
• Any children by William Hallett (the Cock genealogy gives none for her).