Richard Warren

Mayflower passenger, 1620. Signed the Mayflower Compact, twelfth in Morton’s list. Bradford’s passenger list: “Mr. Richard Warren; but his wife and children were lefte behind, and came afterwards.” Mourt’s Relation names him as one of “three of London” in the exploring party of 6 Dec 1620, with John Tilley and John Howland, who are also ancestors of the family through Lucy (Bennett) Ellis. He was at the dawn attack of 8 Dec, when “there were foure only of vs, which had their armes there readie”; afterward “some coates which hung vp in our Baricado, were shot through and through … and called this place, The first Encounter.” The same party then sounded Plymouth harbour on Monday 11 Dec and “found divers corne fields, and little running brookes, a place very good for scituation” (Mourt 1622, Dexter ed. pp. 51-59). In the 1623 division he had land in the Mayflower list, on the north side of the town, and five acres in the Anne list, “towards the eele-riuer,” for his wife and five daughters who came on the Anne (PCR 12:4-6). In the cattle division of 22 May 1627 the ninth lot “fell to Richard Warren & his companie Joyned wth him his wife Elizabeth Warren, Nathaniell Warren, Joseph Warren, Mary Warren, Anna Warren, Sara Warren, Elizabeth Warren, Abigail Warren,” with “the smooth horned Heyfer and two shee goats.”

The family descends from him twice, through his daughter Mary (Warren) Bartlett: her daughters Rebecca and Sarah had grandchildren, William Harlow and Mercy Rider, who married each other in 1714/15.

He was one of the Purchasers, the settlers who shared in buying out the colony’s London investors. He died before his share was paid, and in 1636/7 his widow was made a Purchaser in his place, “hee dying before he had pformed the said bargaine” (PCR 1:54).

Morton, under 1628: “This Year died Mr. Richard Warren, who hath been mentioned before in this Book, and was an usefull Instrument, and during his life bare a deep share in the Difficulties and Troubles of the first Settlement of the Plantation of New-Plimouth.” The phrase “grave Richard Warren … a man of integrity, justice and uprightness,” which Mollie quotes, is not in Morton’s text. On 28 Oct 1633 “a misted that was granted formerly to Richard Warren, deceased” was forfeited “for want of building” and regranted to Ralph Fogg, who was to pay “the widow Warren” for her fence (PCR 1:18).

Rejected or unsupported claims (Mollie’s typescript pp. 30-35, where her date of his death, 1628, is right): Mollie’s “born probably in London” and “Merchant of London” (“of London” in Mourt means residence; “merchant” is Banks’s word); a descent from the Norman Earls de Warenne (no modern authority); a marriage to “widow Elizabeth (Jewett)” (a different Richard Warren, of Greenwich); the haberdasher licensed to marry Elizabeth Evans in 1592/3 (cannot be him); and the St Albans (1585), Ware (1579) and St Peter Cornhill (1579/80) baptisms, all ruled out (the St Albans and St Peter Cornhill men are shown to be others).

Male-line Y-DNA of tested descendants: E-M35, in detail E-V13 > E-Z21367 > E-FTB75387 > E-FTC19215; the nearest branch without Warren testers split off about 2,500 years ago, and no English family has matched yet (FTDNA Discover) [compiled].

The London draper. A Richard Warren was made free of the London Drapers’ Company in 1609 by servitude to Edward Dobson. Elizabeth’s brother-in-law Simon Adams was also a draper (free 1596) and was born at Great Amwell. That makes the 1609 freeman a plausible match for the passenger, but the name was common and nothing yet ties this man to Elizabeth [inferred]. London Roll shows the draper as a master with his own household in London from 1610. He took Henry Mellyn as apprentice in 1610 and Nicholas Simpkins on 3 March 1612/13, each for nine years, and took none after that. Simpkins was made free on 3 March 1623/24 with Warren named as his master; a freedom entry names the master the boy was bound to, living or dead, so it does not show whether Warren was still in London. Henry Mellyn never appears again (London Roll DRML4603, DRHT3600, DRLL1623, DRLL1624).

If the draper is the passenger, Richard Warren kept a London household with apprentices in the years his first daughters were born. Membership of the Drapers did not always mean selling cloth: by the 1620s most Drapers followed other trades (Johnson, History of the Drapers’ Company, vol. 3). Ending his apprentices after 1613 fits a man who later left London, but it fits one who died or stopped trading too [inferred]. A check of 32 printed London parish registers found no baptisms of his daughters in 1610-1619. It did find another Richard Warren, “of Aldermary,” a parish in the cloth district, who married Hanna Gathorne at St Stephen Walbrook on 1 Jan 1610/11. If that man is the draper, the draper cannot be the passenger, who had married Elizabeth Walker nine months earlier.

Open questions

• His birth and parents. Proposals not proven: a family near Therfield, Herts, and a Richard baptised there 9 Nov 1589, son of John (Caleb Johnson, 2003); a baptism at Rickmansworth, 1576 (WikiTree contributors); a baptism at Newport, Essex, 22 Sept 1583, son of Richard and Joan (Hadsley), and a Richard Warren free of the Drapers’ Company in 1609/10 (L. W. Throop, California Mayflower Quarterly, 2023-2026; source). No record connects any of them to Elizabeth Walker or to Plymouth.
• Which Richard Warren was the London draper, and was he the passenger? The Drapers’ Company’s own registers may settle it: the wording of Simpkins’s freedom, and whether Warren paid his dues after 1620.
• Is the Richard Warren of the Honourable Artillery Company roll of 1612 the same man?
• Where the case stood in October 2026 (the colonial tree’s research case, kept in research/colonial-tree/research-cases.md): about a 15% chance that he was the Drapers’ Company freeman of 1609, and most of the weight on a man not yet identified. The Drapers’ Company archive has been written to about the draper’s apprentices (Henry Mellyn, 1610; Nicholas Simpkins, 1612/13); the follow-up questions are whether he is in the Quarterage Book from 1617 and pays after 1620. Other leads: Boyd’s Inhabitants of London for a Richard Warren family unit (it may tie the draper to a marriage); the Baldock register for Warren baptisms 1570-1610, and the Great Amwell, Ware, Hertford, Therfield, Baldock and Royston registers for Richard and Elizabeth in 1610-20 (a 1699 Drapers’ record names a Richard Warren, cooper, of “Balbuck”); and Big Y tests of male-line Warrens from the Therfield and Kelshall, Newport and Saffron Walden families, where a match inside E-FTC19215 would point to an English family.