♀Elizabeth Tilley

Elizabeth Tilley (baptised 30 August 1607 – 21 December 1687) was a passenger on the Mayflower who lost both her parents in the first winter at Plymouth, married her fellow passenger John Howland, and lived to see the colony’s third generation. Her will, made at seventy-nine, left her daughter Lydia a book by John Robinson, the pastor the Pilgrims had left behind at Leiden. She was the ninth great-grandmother of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through her daughter Desire Howland (1625–1683).

Early life and the crossing

She was baptized at Henlow in Bedfordshire on 30 August 1607, the fifth and youngest child of John Tilley (1571–1621) and his wife Joan Hurst, a widow of Thomas Rogers when John married her at Henlow in 1596. Elizabeth Pearson White’s volume on John Howland in the Mayflower Families series describes her father as a silk-weaver. Robert Charles Anderson’s The Great Migration Begins lists four older children baptized at Henlow, of whom nothing further is recorded, and gives the family’s home before the voyage as Leiden in Holland, where the English separatists had settled.

In 1620 she sailed on the Mayflower with her parents. William Bradford’s list of the passengers names “John Tilley and his wife, and Elizabeth their daughter”; her father’s younger brother Edward Tilley^W and his wife made the crossing as well. Bradford wrote that “John Tilley and his wife both died a little after they came ashore”, and Edward and his wife died too, so that by the spring of 1621 Elizabeth, then thirteen, had no family left in the colony. Franklyn Howland’s history of the Howland families (1885) states that she was then taken into the household of Governor John Carver^W, and that after the Carvers died in the spring of 1621 the household was headed by Carver’s servant John Howland; that account is a compiler’s reconstruction, not a record.

Marriage and Plymouth

She married John Howland at Plymouth on or about 25 March 1623, the first day of the year in the reckoning then used; White notes that she was then not quite sixteen. In the division of land that year John Howland received four acres as head of a household, and in the division of cattle on 1 June 1627 the couple were listed with their first two children, Desire and John. Their first child was named, White writes, for Desire Minter, a girl who had crossed in the Carver household and lived with them before going back to England.

The couple had ten children, born between about 1625 and 1649. While John Howland ran the colony’s trading post on the Kennebec River in Maine, from about 1627 to 1633, White suggests the family may have joined him there for spells, and that two of the children may have been born there; she offers this as a possibility only. In 1638/39 John bought a house at Rocky Nook, then in Plymouth and now in Kingston, and the family lived there for the rest of his life. On 10 January 1667/68 “Mr. John Howland, Sen’, and Elizabeth, his wife” acknowledged his deed of a Barnstable farm to their eldest son John.

Widowhood and death

John Howland died at Rocky Nook on 23 February 1672/73. His will left Elizabeth the use of the Rocky Nook house and lands for her life and the residue of his whole estate, and named her his sole executrix; she presented his inventory, £157 8s 8d, to the court on 5 March 1672/73.

In her last years she lived at Swansea, then in Plymouth Colony, with her daughter Lydia and Lydia’s husband James Browne. She made her will there on 17 December 1686, describing herself as “Seventy nine yeares of Age but of good & perfect memory”. Besides bedding, pots and kettles to her children, she left her books by name: “Mr Tindale’s Workes” to her eldest son John, “Willson on ye Romanes” to her son Isaac, her great Bible to James Browne, and to Lydia her small Bible and “Mr Robinson’s Workes called ‘Observations Divine & Morrall’”. John Robinson^W was the pastor of the separatist congregation at Leiden who stayed behind with the majority when the first company sailed in 1620, and who died there without ever reaching Plymouth; his book was still being handed down in the family sixty-seven years after the crossing. She closed the will with a charge to all her children “that they walke in ye Fear of ye Lord, and in Love and peace towards each other”. She died at Swansea on 21 December 1687, aged eighty, and the will was proved on 10 January 1687/88.

Notes

The date of the marriage is not settled. White gives on or about 25 March 1623, and so does the family record followed here, but The Great Migration Begins puts it about 1625 and a Mayflower compilation of 1995 about 1624–25, observing that White gives no reason for her date.