John FEAKE

John married Elizabeth PRIOR/PRYER on 15 Sep 1673 in Killingworth, Oyster Bay. Elizabeth was born in Aug 1656 in England; died on 25 Jan 1701/2. [Group Sheet] [Family Chart]

1. Martha FEAKE was born on 27 Aug 1688.

Other Events and Attributes:

• Fact: Son of James Feake and Judith Thomas

Notes:

Name:
Robert had been apprenticed to his father as a goldsmith in 1615 and came to New England with the Winthrop Fleet in 1630. He was second cousin of Henry Feake.

Robert Feake became mentally unable to handle his life and spent his last thirteen years under the care of the town of Watertown, which disbursed L90 in town funds and petitioned the court for another L12 after his death for his funeral.

Robert married Elizabeth Winthrop FONES between 2 Nov 1631 and 27 Jan 1631/2 in New England. Elizabeth (daughter of Thomas FONES and Anne WINTHROP) was born on 21 Jan 1609/10 in Groton, co Suffolk, England; died on 1 Feb 1673 in Astoria, Queens County, New York; was buried in Hallett's Burying Ground,Astoria, Queens Co., New York. [Group Sheet] [Family Chart]

Notes:

Name:
Elizabeth Fones married (1) her cousin Henry Winthrop (son of Governor JOHN WINTHROP, whose sister Anne was Elizabeth's mother), 25 April 1629, who then left her to accompany his father to Massachusetts Bay, and immediately died swimming ashore there. She joined the Winthrop family in Massachusetts Bay as a very young widow with an infant.
She married 2nd Robert Feake between 2 November 1631 and 27 January 1631/2 in Boston, MA. They had five children: Elizabeth Underhill, Hannah Bowne, John, Robert, & Sarah.
George E. McCracken went into great detail on Robert Feake, and particularly on the matter of his "divorce," arguing that the couple had in fact received only a legal separation, and that Elizabeth (Fones) (Winthrop) Feake was not free to remarry. In 1966 Donald Lines Jacobus reviewed the same problem, and came to the conclusion that Robert Feake and his wife did obtain a divorce from the Dutch government, that she had married William Hallett by August 1649, and that the marriage was performed by John Winthrop Jr., her former brother-in-law.
Source: Anderson's Winthrop Fleet.

Elizabeth is buried with her 3rd husband William Hallett at Hallett's Cover in the Hallet Burying Ground on Long Island. They had two sons, William & Samuel.

Her biography by Missy Wolfe: Insubordinate Spirit: A True Story of Life and Loss in Earliest Americs, 1610-1665 (Guilford CT: gpp, 2012). See also a video "That Winthrop Woman," published by



Governor John Winthrop, after loosing his son, Henry, was faced with the prospect of having ultimately to support his widowed daughter-in-law and her child, the thrifty governor naturally looked about for suitable candidate to be her second husband, and when his eye lighted upon a young man of pious character, goodly estate, and great promise, the future Governor William Codington, he attempted to interest him in the widow. Shortly afterwards William Coddington went to England and visited the widow but he married, instead, another. Thus Elizabeth was still a widow when on Nov. 2, 131, she arrived in the Bay with her daughter as passengers on the ship "Lyon". In less than three months, however, she had found her second husband, Robert Feake, and had married him.

Elizabeth chose to come to New England and she soon remarried. Her second husband, Robert, Feake, was described as 'a man whose God-fearing heart was so absorbed with spiritual and heavenly things that he had little thought of the things of this life, and took neither heed nor care of what was tendered to his external property' and so allowed his wife to dominate him. In 1642 ' in the absence and illness of her husband' she signed the act of submission to the Dutch required in the settlement of Greenwich, Connecticut. When her husband's health declined o the point where he could not manage his own affairs, an agreement was apparently made with William Hallett to care for him. Robert's behavior was reported by his step-son-in-law Thomas Lyon, who had married Elizabeth's daughter, Martha Johanna Winthrop, as distracted and 'going away sodingly.' In 1647 Robert abruptly returned to England and although he later came back it was considered a desertion, and in April 1648 Lyon wrote to his grandfather-in-law, Gov. Winthrop of Massachusetts, that his mother-in-law was carrying on with a man (William Hallett) she claimed she had married and by whom she was pregnant. The existence and legality of the marriage was questioned, but records show that she had obtained a divorce according to Dutch law by May 1647. By July 1648 Elizabeth, William Hallett, her child by him and children by earlier husbands sought refuge in Pequot (New London) with John Winthrop the Younger, who was both her first cousin and her brother-in-law. When the Connecticut Court issued a warrant they removed to New Amsterdam, but before they left it is thought likely that John Winthrop a magistrate legally married Elizabeth and William.