house,” but the consequences of his disobedience had not yet concluded. Captured first by the French and then by the Spanish, marched in chains without food or water, sickened by fever, ague, and smallpox, the prisoner faced a threat of hard labor in the mines unless he became a papist.
Taken aboard a Spanish galleon, where he was bled by the ship’s doctor, the runaway youth from Lyme then “lay for dead.” The Spanish captain, having no son of his own, offered kindness and assistance if the young Protestant would accept baptism into the Catholic faith, but even when close to death, the disobedient son resisted temptation and “put his trust in the providence of God.” Surmounting additional challenges and aided by the charity of strangers, he eventually returned home in gravely ill health after a five-year absence. Three weeks later, having manifested true penitence, Matthew Griswold 3rd, age twenty-two, died in his father’s house.
The elaborate tale sent to Cotton Mather resembles a shorter account of misfortunes at sea that Richard Ely’s eldest son William Ely (1647–1717) allegedly encountered on a voyage from Barbados to Lyme. That story, related at an Ely family reunion in 1878, described a brigantine dismasted in a furious gale with William the “only soul on board” to survive after “the ill-fated vessel sank to rise no more.” Floating on a yardarm and “lashed in fury by the raging storm,” William was picked up on the third day by a Spanish cruiser exploring the shores of New England. He later landed “on the coast not far distant from the mouth of the Connecticut River,” where “he sought and soon found the rude hamlet of his father.” Richard Ely “with joy unspeakable” then “embraced his son, who related the story of “his voyage, his rescue, and his escape from a watery grave.”
The Ely shipwreck story, said to describe an incident in Richard Ely’s life some twenty-four months after he moved from Boston to Lyme, concludes with the father and son offering up prayer and thanksgiving “for this Divine interposition.” It adds that Mr. Ely ascended daily for weeks and months “to the height of a neighboring hill and there alone, with outstretched arms, poured forth his gratitude to the Divine Master for the preservation of his child.” Whether Moses Noyes contributed to the shorter narrative about trials at sea, said to demonstrate the religious feeling that imbued Richard Ely’s soul and to “illustrate the fervency of his devotion and piety,” cannot be determined, but the families had close ties. In 1713, a year after the death of Matthew Griswold 3rd, Moses Noyes Jr. married Richard Ely’s granddaughter.
A note from “your sincere Friend & Servt Cotton Mather” acknowledged the receipt of Matthew Griswold’s letter. The Boston minister noted in his diary his “inclination” to publish a sermon based on the letter he had “received from a gentleman in Connecticut, concerning the remarkable circumstances of his own prodigal and repenting son.” Such a sermon was “urgently called for,” he added, and would “prove of manifold use.” When his sermon Repeated Warnings: Another essay to warn young people against rebellions that must be repented of appeared in print in Boston in 1712, it included the letter from Lyme.
In a simple string-bound diary kept between 1681 and 1724, Rev. Cotton Mather recorded observations about his sermons and ministerial duties, comments about current events like the witchcraft trials in Salem, and news of his family and friends.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Finding a Successor
The shocking dismissal of Yale’s rector and senior tutor in 1722 disrupted Lyme’s search for a minister to assist the elderly Moses Noyes.
It was an awful stroke of Providence in taking away Mr. Pierpont, in whose assistance I promised myself much benefit to the place, & much ease & comfort to myself, & it is the more afflictive, because our young men are feared to be infected with Arminian & Prelateral notions; so that it is difficult to supply his place. It was a wrong step when the Trustees, by the assistance of great men, removed the College from Saybrook, and a worse when they put in Mr. Cutler for rector…. Had Mr. Pierpont lived, I hoped this summer to have liberty to come into the Bay.”
Moses Noyes’s letter to Samuel Sewall in 1723 has a melancholy tone. The minister’s acquaintance with the Boston judge stretched back to their youth when Sewall had prepared for college in the Noyes family home in Newbury. Decades later Noyes voiced to his friend a sharp sense of loss after the sudden death of his young assistant. Concern about the influence at Yale of “Arminian” notions, both Anglican tendencies and other departures from strict Calvinism, compounded his sense of personal affliction.
Thirty years had passed since the establishment of Lyme’s church, and Noyes could no longer fully perform the work of the ministry or preach the gospel to those who lived far from the meetinghouse. By the time he drafted a will in August 1719 stating his readiness to leave “this contentious and quarrelsome world,” the town had attempted to secure a successor. The initial choice was Samuel Russell Jr. (1693–1746), age twenty-four, a former tutor at the Collegiate School and son of a founding trustee. In February 1717/8 a Lyme town meeting decided “to go and treat with Mr. Russell, Jr., to come and assist Mr. Noyes in the work of the ministry.” To attract the young candidate, it approved £70 in bills of credit, along with the future use of the parsonage farm and the sale of “one hundred pounds worth of land for the settling of Mr. Russell.” A year later, in October 1719, a town meeting authorized “Mr. Noyes and Mr. Russell, the ministers of this town,” to preach on the Sabbath to those living in Lyme’s north section and “to proportion time as they see fit.”
John Smibert’s portrait of Samuel Sewall captures Rev. Moses Noyes’s childhood friend from Newbury, who unlike his colleagues refused to wear a periwig, just months before the esteemed Boston judge died in 1729. Photograph ©2019 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Mr. Russell’s assistance ended abruptly a month later. The town paid the young minister a full year’s salary and “acquitted” him from the £200 provided for his settlement, then voted to hire a replacement “for three months on probation.” It also directed a committee to “advise with Mr. Noyes concerning another minister.” Two weeks later, after a majority vote at a town meeting chose Yale’s senior tutor Daniel Browne (1698–1723), after Lieutenant Richard Lord (1647–1727) traveled to New Haven to “treat with Mr. Daniel Browne concerning his coming to Lyme to preach in said Lyme.” No further mention of the second candidate appears in town records. Mr. Browne may have declined, or Moses Noyes may have raised doubts about the Yale scholar’s theological views.
The search had spread over three years when the town reiterated its readiness to hire “another minister to help and assist Mr. Noyes in the work of the ministry.” Inhabitants then agreed in January 1720/1 that “Mr. Samuel Pierpont (1700–1723) shall be hired to assist Mr. Noyes in the work of the ministry for half a year.” To assure the third candidate’s acceptance, the town appointed a committee to “go to Mr. Noyes and get his advice.” Financial entanglements complicated the arrangements. Samuel Russell had used the £200 previously provided for his settlement to purchase land, and the town argued its right to dispose of that land as “a settlement for another minister.” In June 1722 it granted the land to Mr. Pierpont, “the now assisting minister in the town society, if he lives to be ordained in said town society.”
An ongoing dispute about the “use and improvement of the parsonage lot”
