Estate / Collection: The Victor Gulotta Collection

ATHERTON, HUMPHREY

Document signed as Justice of the Peace relating to the attempted divorce of Martha and William Clements. Boston: 15 March 1656. One page manuscript testimony in ink signed by John Thorne (possibly Trane) and likely prepared in his hand. The document also signed and inscribed at foot “Taken upon oath this 15 (3) 1656 before me Humphrey Atherton” by Atherton in his role as Justice of the Peace. 6 1/4 x 7 1/4 inches (16 x 19 cm); framed. Light spotting and one puncture touching two words, clean overall, dark and legible, not examined out of frame.

A rare manuscript testimony relating to an attempted divorce, one of the more infrequently heard cases in colonial New England. This document provides "The testimony of John Thorne aged 46 years testifieth that he heard the wife of William Clements of Cambridge say in the presence of Mr. Wintroyd Mr. Bellinger and Mr. Howell that she never loved the said Mr. Clements, her husband, and never had societie with him nor never the desire to have and that she loved one that went out of Salem better than her husband, and that to my knowledge the said Clements her husband hath(?) ... lovingly towards his said wife… "

Of all 17th-century documents issued by New England courts, papers relating to marital disputes are particularly scarce. Roger Thompson in Sex in Middlesex reports “that there were seventeen cases involving marital problems, other than adultery or adulterous carriages, in the county court between 1649 and 1699.” The current document is testimony on behalf of William Clements, who petitioned the General Court in 1656 “craving a divorce from his wife, who for several years refused marriage fellowship with him.” Other testimony in the case indicated that Clement’s wife, Martha (misrecorded in some places as Susan) said that “her heart died within her when her husband would have kissed her” and described the marriage as “forced business.” Unfortunately, the court took a full year to respond and in June 1657 the divorce petition was refused. The court ordered the Clements to “treat each other according to their Marriage Covenant & that upon Complaint made by such party as shall be found faulty shall be severely punished.” Such a harsh ruling likely discouraged future attempts at divorce and there is much to research in the language of the present document.

Humphrey Atherton (1607-1661) was an early settler of Dorchester arriving on the ship James in August 1635. He is best remembered for achieving the rank of Major-General, the highest in colonial New England, and formed the first militia in Dorchester. From 1654, he served as a magistrate in the judiciary of the colonial government, a selectman, and a Justice of the Peace, in which he “solemnized many marriages" including the wedding of Myles Standish, Jr. and Sarah Winslow in Boston in 1660.

A tough enforcer, Atherton is associated with the persecutions of the period and believed in witches. As written in Epitaphs from the Old Burying Ground in Dorchester, Atherton "felt it to be a duty which he owed to God and to his Country to mete out to the poor creatures, against whom accusations were brought, the punishment, which, in his opinion, they so richly merited.” Atherton was instrumental in bringing about the execution of Mrs. Ann Hibbins for witchcraft in June 1656, just months after this document was signed but decades before the hysteria that overtook Salem. Humphrey Atherton was also instrumental in the 1660 execution of the Quaker woman associated with Anne Hutchinson, Mary Dyer, of which he insultingly said, "She hangs there like a flag for others to take example by." Some Quakers believed that Atherton’s death from a fall off a horse a year later was God’s wrath upon him for these actions.

An unusual 17th century divorce document signed by a harsh enforcer of 1650s Boston.

See: Thompson, Roger. Sex in Middlesex: Popular Mores in a Massachusetts County, 1649-1699. Amherst: University of Massachusetts, 1989 edition, p. 115; Woodward, Harlow Elliot. Epitaphs from the Old Burying Ground in Dorchester. Boston, 1869. p. 6.

Provenance: PBA Galleries, 1 July 2010 in Books, Manuscripts & Ephemera from the Library of Calvin P. Otto, lot 86.

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