♀Hester Mahieu

Hester Mahieu (about 1584 – before 18 December 1675) was the wife of the Mayflower passenger Francis Cooke^W, and came not from an English family but from the French-speaking Walloon^W Protestant refugees: she took communion in the Walloon church at Leiden in June 1603, weeks before her betrothal. She crossed to Plymouth in 1623 with three of her children and outlived her husband there. She was the tenth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her daughter Jane Cooke (1604–1640).

Leiden and Norwich

Her origins are known only from the church and city records of Leiden in Holland. On 1 June 1603 she was admitted to communion in Leiden’s Walloon church^W, the French-speaking Reformed congregation of refugees from the southern Netherlands, by confession of faith. On 30 June 1603 her betrothal to Francis Cooke, a woolcomber “from England”, was entered in the city’s betrothal register, where she is described as an unmarried young woman from Canterbury. She came with her mother and a sister, both named Jenne (Jeanne) Mahieu. The marriage itself was probably solemnised in the Walloon church, whose marriage records before September 1604 are lost.

The family came from the country around Lille, now in France: at their own betrothals in Leiden her sister Jenne was described as from Armentières and her sister Anthonette as from Houplines nearby. Marie Mahieu, the wife of Jan de Lannoy and mother of Philip Delano^W, was probably also her sister. Francis Cooke stood as a witness at that child’s baptism in November 1603, and Philip Delano was later counted with the Cooke household at Plymouth. Canterbury had a Walloon congregation of its own, but its records do not mention the family.

In August 1606 the couple left Leiden for Norwich with letters of transfer, and on New Year’s Day 1608 “Francois Cooke et Esther sa femme, de Norwich” were received back into communion at Leiden. Their son John was nonetheless baptised in the Leiden Walloon church early in 1607: the Mayflower genealogy concludes that the couple returned briefly from Norwich to have him baptised in their own congregation, with family as godparents. A child whose name is not recorded was buried in the Pieterskerk^W in May 1608, when the family lived on the Levendaal, and a daughter Elizabeth was baptised on 26 December 1611. A son, Jacob, born about 1618, was presumably baptised in the English Separatist congregation at Leiden, whose records do not survive.

Plymouth

In July 1620 her husband sailed with their son John on the Speedwell and then the Mayflower, leaving her at Leiden with the other children. She followed on the Anne, which reached Plymouth in August 1623, with three children; the land division of that year gave her husband four acres for them. Her youngest daughter, Mary, was born at Plymouth, and her daughter Hester probably was too. At the division of the colony’s cattle on 22 May 1627, the first lot fell to “ffrancis Cooke & his Companie Joyned to him his wife Hester Cooke”, with five children and six young single men, among them Philip Delano and Experience Mitchell, who married her daughter Jane soon afterwards.

The couple had seven known children, born between about 1604 and about 1626; two of them died young. When Francis Cooke died on 7 April 1663, his will left “hester my wife Dear and loveing wife” all his movable goods and cattle, the use of his lands for her life, and made her joint executor with their son John. On 8 June 1666 her four surviving children agreed on how to divide their father’s land at Rocky Nook, noting that “our mother yett liveing” could testify to what he had meant. That is the last record of her alive. A Mayflower genealogy places her death at Plymouth before 18 December 1675, and more probably soon after 1666, when she was about 82.

Notes

No record of her birth has been found; the year about 1584 is a Mayflower genealogy’s estimate from her marriage and the birth of her last child. Her father has not been identified. The same genealogy suggests he may have been the Jacques Mahieu who witnessed a sister’s betrothal at Leiden in 1611, but that rests on the name alone. The date 30 June 1603 is the entry of the betrothal, not the wedding. A descendancy chart printed in 1999 gives the marriage as 20 July 1603, a date not found in the Leiden records cited here.