Hannah Feake

Quaker minister, wife of John Bowne of Flushing, and grandmother of Hannah (Prior) Frost. She was a daughter of Lieut. Robert Feake of Watertown and Greenwich and of Elizabeth Fones, niece and daughter-in-law of Governor John Winthrop. After her father went to England in 1647 and lost his reason, she and the other children went with their mother and William Hallett to New London and then, in 1649, to Long Island; the Cock genealogy says she “came to Flushing, with her mother, brothers and sisters, before 1649” (source, p. 282).

Her brother-in-law to be, Capt. John Underhill, wrote to her mother’s cousin John Winthrop Jr. in April 1656: “I ware lateli at Flushing. Hannah Feke is to be married to a verie gentiele young man of good abilitie of a loveli fetture and good behayiour” (source, p. 114). She married John Bowne on 7 May 1656. “As Hannah had made the acquaintance of some of the Friends who were holding meetings for worship in the woods, she soon became a member” and brought her husband to them; their house became the Quakers’ meeting place, and in 1662 he was arrested and banished to Holland for it (source, p. 282). His letters to her from Amsterdam survive.

“Hannah, wife of John Bowne, became more and more zealous in religious devotion and having ‘received a gift in the ministry,’ she, in the earlier part of the year 1675, left her home to pay a religious visit to Friends in Great Britain” (source, p. 284). She sailed from New York on the 24th of the 3rd month (May) 1675; her husband joined her in London in January 1676/7, and went with her through England and Holland (source, p. 113). He wrote to her while she was away: “Dear heart, to particularize all that desire to be remembered to thee would be exceedingly large, but this I may say for all Friends in general, relations and neighbors, and people, the like largeness of love for one particular person I have seldom found amongst them, as it is for thee.” Back in London at the beginning of winter in 1677 she fell sick with a fever and died there in January 1677/8, about forty years old (source, p. 284); “Her husband delivered a most touching discourse at her funeral” (Field, p. 113).

Her children: John (1656-1673); Elizabeth (1658), who married John Prior and then Samuel Titus; Mary (1660), Abigail (1662), Hannah (1665), Samuel (1667), Dorothy (1669) and Martha Johanna (1673) (source, p. 285).

Research: research/mcmillan/Frost_Underhill_Bowne_Feake.md.