♂Francis Cooke

Francis Cooke (about 1583 – 7 April 1663) was an English woolcomber who sailed on the Mayflower in 1620 and spent the last forty years of his life as a farmer and townsman of Plymouth. He had married at Leiden in Holland in 1603, six years before the Pilgrim congregation settled there, into a family of French-speaking Protestant refugees, and he and his wife belonged first to the Walloon church^W of that city rather than to the English exiles. He was the tenth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his daughter Jane Cooke (1604–1640).

Leiden and Norwich

Nothing is known of his birth, his parents or his youth. He was probably born in England; his name on the Plymouth list of men able to bear arms in August 1643, which took in those aged sixteen to sixty, places his birth after August 1582. He first appears in the Leiden records in April 1603, as a witness to another woolcomber’s betrothal. On 30 June 1603 “Franchoijs Couck”, a bachelor from England and a woolcomber, was betrothed at Leiden to Hester Mahieu (1584–1675), described as a young unmarried woman from Canterbury; she came to the betrothal with her mother and a sister. Hester had been admitted to communion in the Walloon church a month before. The Dutch churches’ registers do not record the wedding, and a Mayflower genealogy concludes it was probably held in the Walloon church, whose marriage registers before September 1604 are lost.

In November 1603 he stood witness at the Walloon church for the baptism of Philippe, son of Jan de Lannoy and Marie Mahieu, the child who became the ancestor of the Delano family in America and was probably Hester’s nephew. In August 1606 the couple left Leiden for Norwich in England with letters of transfer, and on New Year’s Day 1608 they were readmitted to communion at Leiden as “Francois Cooke et Esther sa femme, de Norwich”, having lived meanwhile among the Walloon community there. Their son John was nonetheless baptized in the Leiden Walloon church early in 1607; the Mayflower genealogy concludes that the couple came back briefly from Norwich, between the quarterly communions they missed, to have him baptized in their own congregation with family as godparents. A daughter Elizabeth followed in December 1611, and an unnamed Cooke child was buried in the Pieterskerk in May 1608, when the family was living on the Levendaal canal. Their eldest daughter Jane was probably born about 1604, and a son Jacob about 1618.

The Mayflower and Plymouth

In July 1620 he and his son John embarked on the Speedwell^W at Delfshaven^W, leaving Hester and the other children in Holland, and moved to the Mayflower in England. William Bradford’s list of the passengers reads: “Francis Cooke, and his sone John. But his wife & other children came afterwards.” He was one of the men who signed the Mayflower Compact^W at Cape Cod on 11 November 1620, and both father and son survived the first winter. In February 1621, while he and Captain Myles Standish were at work in the woods, an alarm at the approach of Native men called them back; the tools they left behind were carried off, and returned a month later.

Hester followed with three of the children on the Anne in the summer of 1623, and in the land division of that year Francis received two acres for himself and John as Mayflower passengers and four more for the rest of the family. In the division of the colony’s cattle on 22 May 1627 the first lot fell to him, his wife, their sons John and Jacob and their daughters Jane, Hester and Mary, together with six single men grouped with the household. One of them was Philip Delano; another was Experience Mitchell (1602–1689), who married Jane soon afterwards.

At Plymouth he became one of the “Purchasers” who in 1627 bought out the London investors, and he was on the lists of freemen from 1633 to 1658. He helped lay out the twenty-acre grants of 1627 and served repeatedly on committees to lay out land and highways, as surveyor of highways, on petty and grand juries, and as an arbitrator. In 1636 he took a London boy, John Harmon, as an apprentice for seven years, and the next year he won damages from John Browne and several of his men for abusing his cattle so badly that a cow cast her calf. Bradford, writing early in 1651, recorded that “Francis Cooke is still living, a very olde man, and hath seene his children’s children have children”.

Death

He made his will on 7 December 1659, “weake and Infeirme in body yett in pfect memory”, leaving his “Dear and loveing wife” Hester all his goods and cattle and the use of his lands for her life, and naming her and his son John as executors; John Alden and John Howland witnessed it. He died at Plymouth on 7 April 1663. His goods, apart from house and land, were appraised on 1 May 1663 at £86 11s 1d, among them a great Bible and four old books, a woollen wheel, a pair of cards for wool, two mares, sixteen sheep and an old musket. Hester survived him by at least three years. A Mayflower genealogy counts seven children, of whom John, Jacob, Hester and Mary were living in 1666; Jane had died before her father.

Notes

The date of his death, and the statement that he was “above 80”, come from a marginal note in an unknown hand on Bradford’s list of passengers; the same hand added dates for the deaths of Bradford and Standish that are wrong. The will was proved on 5 June 1663, which agrees with a death that spring.

His English origin and his parents are not known. Several ancestries published for him are unproven, and some are fabrications; none is followed here.

The line from him to Nancy Jane Blanchard passes through his granddaughter Elizabeth Mitchell (1629–1684), who married John Washburn. The Mayflower genealogy describes the evidence that she was Jane’s daughter, rather than a child of Experience Mitchell’s second marriage, as circumstantial: it rests chiefly on Bradford’s remark of 1651, since Elizabeth was the only grandchild of Francis Cooke with children of her own by that date.