Robert Feake

Lieutenant of Watertown, co-founder of Greenwich, Connecticut, and twice an ancestor of the Frosts: through his daughter Hannah, wife of John Bowne, and his son John Feke. “ROBERT FEAKE … came to Mass. Bay in the fleet with Governor Winthrop in 1630” (source, p. 285).

Watertown. He married Elizabeth (Fones) Winthrop, the governor’s niece and the widow of his son Henry, within weeks of her arrival in November 1631. On 27 January 1631/2 the governor’s party, going up the Charles above Watertown, named a “high pointed rock … Mount Feake, from one Robert Feake, who had married the governor’s daughter-in-law” (source, 1:73). He was made a freeman in May 1631 and was lieutenant to Capt. Daniel Patrick at Watertown from September 1632 to March 1636, a selectman, deputy to the General Court in 1634, 1635 and 1636, and on 3 September 1634 one of those, with Captain Underhill and Patrick, appointed to fix the site of the fort on Castle Island (source, p. 286). Mount Feake, in Waltham, still bears his name (source, p. 341).

Greenwich. He followed Patrick to Connecticut, and in July 1640 they bought from the Indians the lands that became Greenwich; “a parcel of land, some time called, ‘Elizabeth Neck’ in honor of the wife of Robert Feake, being declared in the Indian deed to be her ‘peticaler perchase.’” Warned off by the Dutch, they at last put themselves under New Netherland in April 1642, Feake being sick and his wife acting for him. “Patrick, who had been Underhill’s early companion in arms, was ignominiously assassinated by a Dutch soldier at Robert Feake’s house in January, 1644. His death undoubtedly proved a serious loss to his co-proprietor in the Greenwich lands, and not unlikely precipitated the malady which a few years afterward terminated in his ‘loss of reason’” (source, p. 286).

England, and the dark years. In October 1647 he was at Boston about to sail for England. He wrote to Stamford on 6 October “that he reserved the whole propriety of his estate, till he saw how God would deale with him in England, and desired he and the children might not be wronged” (source, 5:238). His wife and William Hallett, to whom he had entrusted the Greenwich property, took the children to New London and then to Long Island. “The succeeding years of the life of Mr. Feake were to him a blank. The darkness which first overshadowed his mental faculties at Greenwich never passed until death came to his relief” (source, p. 287). He died at Samuel Thatcher’s house in Watertown in February 1661/2; Thatcher “disposed of his estate to defray expenses” (source, p. 341).

His children, by the Cock genealogy (pp. 287-288): Elizabeth (c. 1633), who married Capt. John Underhill; Hannah (c. 1637), who married John Bowne; John (c. 1638/9), who married Elizabeth Prior; Robert, baptized in the Dutch church in 1642, whose widow Sarah had administration on 19 June 1669; and Sarah, baptized in the Dutch church in 1647. Eaton in 1648 speaks of four children.

His parents are not known. Henry F. Waters thought there “can be but little question” that he belonged to the family of William Feake, goldsmith of London (will 1595), and Robert joined in a letter of attorney of the goldsmith James Feake’s children, Judith Palmer and Tobias Feake (source, pp. 285-286); the Winthrop Papers’ editors call Tobias “a nephew of Robert Feke” (5:348). Tobias was the schout of Flushing who delivered the Flushing Remonstrance to Stuyvesant in 1657 and was arrested for it (record, pp. 403-404). Henry Feake, one of the ten men of Saugus who settled Sandwich in 1637 (source, PCR 1:57), is said to have been a kinsman.

Research: research/mcmillan/Frost_Underhill_Bowne_Feake.md.

Open questions

• His parents (Anderson’s Great Migration Begins sketch, and the Feake will cited in NYGBR 86:209).
• Whether he returned from England, and when.