♂John Cooke

John Cooke (baptised January–March 1607 – 23 November 1695) was a Mayflower passenger who crossed in 1620 at about thirteen with his father, Francis Cooke (1583–1663), and lived for three quarters of a century in Plymouth Colony^W, ending his days at Dartmouth^W on Buzzards Bay. A Mayflower genealogy identifies him, with some reserve, as the Plymouth church deacon who “fell into the error of Anabaptistry” and was cast out of the church. He was the younger brother of Jane Cooke (1604–1640), the ninth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006).

Leiden and the crossing

He was born probably late in 1606 and baptised in the Walloon church at Leiden in Holland between 1 January and 31 March 1607, the son of Francis Cooke and Hester Mahieu (1584–1675). In July 1620 he and his father left Leiden on the Speedwell and went on to Plymouth on the Mayflower, leaving his mother, his sister Jane and the younger children to follow three years later. The Mayflower genealogy stresses that John was a passenger in his own right. Both father and son survived the first winter, and in the land division of 1623 Francis Cooke was given an acre each for himself and John as passengers of the first ship.

Plymouth

He married at Plymouth on 28 March 1634 Sarah Warren, born probably in England about 1614, a daughter of the Mayflower passenger Richard Warren^W and his wife Elizabeth; Sarah had come over on the Anne in August 1623. On 7 February 1637 her widowed mother, “Mrs. Elizabeth Warren of the Eele Riuer”, acknowledged the marriage “already solemnized betwixt John Cooke the yeonger of the Rocky Noocke and Sarah her daughter” in a deed.

Another John Cooke, who came to Plymouth in 1633 and is not known to have been related, lived in the town at the same time, so the records call the son of Francis “John Cooke Junior” or “the younger”. He was taxed 9s. on the Plymouth list of 27 March 1634, and was very likely the John Cooke made a freeman on 1 January 1633/34. On 5 July 1636 Samuel Eaton was apprenticed to him. He sat on juries in 1636, on the grand jury in 1637 and 1638, and in 1639 on a committee added to the governor and council to draw up laws; in 1654 he was chosen a deputy. On the 1643 list of men able to bear arms he appears as “John Cooke, Jur, his boy”, and between 1639 and 1650 he bought and sold several parcels of land.

A John Cooke was a deacon of the Plymouth church in 1634. The church’s own record says that a former deacon “fell into the error of Anabaptistry”, and that “This John Cooke although a Shallow man became a Cause of trouble and decension in our Church and Gaue Just occation of theire Casting of him out”; in 1669 John Cooke set down his own account of the affair in a letter to Nathaniel Morton, the colony’s secretary. Anabaptistry was the name then given to the rejection of infant baptism, the belief of the early Baptists. The Mayflower genealogy takes this man to be the son of Francis Cooke because he was still alive in 1669, when the other John Cooke had not been heard of since 1653, while noting that a newly married man of twenty-seven was young for a deacon. In 1659 the court allowed “John Cooke of Plymouth”, with three others, to attend Quaker^W meetings in the hope of drawing the Quakers from their errors.

Dartmouth

He had moved to Dartmouth by March 1668/69, when several men there won fifty shillings from “John Cooke, of Dartmouth”, for having summoned them twice to court as delinquents without proving anything against them. His dealings with the new town ran into a “longe continued difference” with many of its inhabitants and purchasers, which the colony court settled in July 1672: the town was to pay him eleven pounds of debt and three pounds for his trouble, and he was to have forever a little island called Ram Island, given him by the town “for former seruice”, in return for handing over the deeds and acquittances he held for the town’s lands. In the same month he traded his shares of their father’s land at Rocky Nook in Plymouth to his brother Jacob for Jacob’s share in the Dartmouth lands. Six years earlier, on 8 June 1666, he had joined his brother and sisters in dividing that Rocky Nook land by agreement, as “the elder brother” taking a double portion.

John and Sarah had five daughters, born at Plymouth between about 1635 and about 1657, all of whom married. He gave land at Dartmouth to three of their husbands by deeds of 1672 to 1674.

Death

He made his will at Dartmouth on 9 November 1694, “weake of Body but of sound and Perfect memory”. He left his land by the burying place to his daughter Sarah and her husband Arthur Hathaway, his house and orchards, after his wife’s death, to his daughter Mercy and her husband Stephen West, and Ram Island and “my Gun & sword” to his grandson Thomas Taber; everything else went to his “Loveing wife Sarah”, whom he made executrix. He died at Dartmouth on 23 November 1695. His estate was valued at £299 19s., two hundred pounds of it in houses and land, and included two Bibles and six other books and twenty-five pounds in silver money. Sarah, called “a very Antient woman and unable to travile far”, swore to the inventory at home in April 1696, and on 15 July 1696 she gave bond as executrix, signing with her mark. That is the last record of her.

Notes

The records of the two John Cookes at Plymouth are often hard to tell apart, and the identification of the Anabaptist deacon with the son of Francis Cooke is the Mayflower genealogy’s judgment, not something a record states. The inventory is dated 7 December 1696 in the probate register, which the same genealogy takes to be the clerk’s error for 1695, since the widow swore to it in April 1696.

When John Howland died in 1673, the colony’s secretary called him “the last man that was left of those that Came over in the shipp Called the May Flower that lived in Plymouth”. John Cooke was still alive at the time, but living at Dartmouth; he outlived Howland by more than twenty years.