Dorothy Talby

I’m starting out Women’s History Month with a Salem tragedy of the seventeenth century, and gratitude that this story popped into my mind at this time, better late than never. I wrote about Hugh Peter, the fourth pastor of Salem’s First Church and later Oliver Cromwell’s chaplain and thus a doomed regicide in England, for our forthcoming book and I tried to give him a comprehensive, current, and critical treatment even though my piece is one of our shorter “interludes.” I included his slave-holding, documented in Harvard’s recent Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery report, and did a deep dive into the recent historiography of the English Revolution. I thought I had Peter all buttoned up, but then I woke up in the middle of the night last week and thought “Dorothy Talby!” Dorothy became the first entry of a social media series on lesser-known women in Salem’s history on this past Friday and I researched her all weekend, so I could tell her story here and in my revised piece on Peter, once it comes back from peer review.

I don’t know what Dorothy Talby looked like: I’m making “silhouettes” from contemporary sources to depict the women I’m featuring on social media this month and I’m sure several will end up here. There’s a real picture problem with pre-modern women: either they are not pictured at all or they are pictured by romanticized images from the last century or so. I used one of Wenceslaus Hollar’s wonderful images from the collection at the University of Toronto for Dorothy’s “silhouette”.

Like everyone in Salem in the 1630s, Dorothy Talby was an emigré. She and her family arrived from Puritan-centric Lincolnshire in 1635, apparently following the popular pastor John Cotton. The Talbys (spelled Taulbee earlier and in variations in Massachusetts), including Dorothy, her husband John, and their five children, arrived in Salem at a rather anxious time, as several settlers—mostly women—were quite vocal in their support of the expelled Roger Williams and and critical of his replacement by Peter. And down in Boston, there was another woman stirring up schism: Anne Hutchinson and her Antimonian challenge. There’s a happy reference to Dorothy in October of 1636 when her sixth child, a daughter named Difficulty, was baptized, but after that it’s all trouble. She fell in and out of troublesome states when she was violent towards her husband, for which she received public admonishments, whipping, and eventually a sentence of being bound and tied to a stake on one of Salem’s main streets. Judge William Hathorne’s summary order used language a bit less condemning than that in his judgements against Salem’s Quakers several decades later:

Whereas Dorethy the wyfe of John Talbie not only broak that peach & love wch ought to have beene both betwixt them, but also hath violentlie broke the kings peace, by frequent Laying hands upon hir husband to the danger of his Life, & Contemned Authority, not coming before them upon command, It is therefore ordered that for her misdemeaner passed & for prvention of future evills that are feared wilbe committed by hir if shee be Lefte att hir Libertie. That she shall be bound & chained to some post where shee shall be restrained of hir libertye to goe abroad or comminge to hir husband till shee manefest some change of hir course….Only it is pmitted that she shall come to the place of gods worshipp, to enjoy his ordenances.

Dorothy’s course stilled for a spell or two, but it did not change: she strayed intently towards “future evils” as she seeemed to believe that it was her duty to remove her entire family from their earthly misery. In December of 1638, she strangled her youngest child, Difficulty, and confessed to the crime after being threatened with peine forte et dure. She was executed days later in Boston, requesting beheading but denied, stuffing the mask given to her into her collar, swinging her legs towards the ladder until she died. We don’t hear the word “revelation” from Dorothy herself, but we do from John Winthrop’s journel entry (a “revelation from heaven”) as well as from Peter, her pastor, who cautioned the attendees of her execution not to lean into “imaginery revelations”. Both men seem to be throwing Dorothy in with Anne Hutchinson and her immediate revelations, then threatening their church. Winthrop does use the m[elancholy] word; Peter does not. Melencholy was an ancient term, experiencing a revival in early modern health manuals and most especially Robert Burton’s popular Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), yet there was little effort to apply any of its old/new theories to Dorothy Talby; she was in the hands of God only in New England.

A more radical intervention of the age: itinerant surgeon extracting stones from a woman’s head; symbolising the removal of her ‘folly’ (insanity). Line engraving after N. Weydtmans after himself, 17th century. Wellcome Collection.

Centuries later, Dorothy Talby was a useful anecdote for those who wanted to shade the Puritan past, or recount “cruel and unusual punishments of bygone days.” Nathaniel Hawthorne, always ready to mine his family’s past for his own benefit, pictured Dorothy in his Main-Street:”chained to a post at the corner of Prison Lane, with the hot sun blazing on her matronly face, and all for no other offence than lifting her hand against her husband, while Oliver Wendell Holmes judged her “mad as Ophelia.” It’s so easy to diagnose the dead!