♀Mary Beane

Mary Beane (baptised 2 January 1624/25) was a Londoner who became the wife of Daniel Clark (died about 1690), an early settler and tavern-keeper of Topsfield, in the Massachusetts Bay Colony^W, and the mother of eleven children born there between 1645 and 1668. She was the ninth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her daughter Sarah Clark (1651–1717). In a fight that broke out in the Clarks’ house in 1660, a neighbour heard her cry out “O my Husband” while a drinker held him by the throat and railed at her that she “was a deuelish woman”.

London

She was probably the daughter of Thomas Beane of London, one of fourteen of his children baptized at the church of St Katherine Coleman^W, where her own baptism fell on 2 January 1624/25. On 2 March 1639/40 her father took out a licence for her to marry Daniel Clark, a carpenter and bachelor of the parish of St Botolph Bishopsgate. The licence gave his age as 26 and hers as 17, although she was only fifteen. They were married at St Katherine Coleman the next day, 3 March 1639/40.

Topsfield

By 1645 the couple had crossed to New England and settled at New Meadows, a part of Ipswich that became the town of Topsfield in 1650. Their first child, Mary, was born on 1 November 1645, and ten more followed, the last, Humphrey, in 1668. Daniel Clark farmed and kept servants, and by 1660 the house was also an inn, where the town meeting is said to have been held that year.

The trouble came after one such evening, when some of the company stayed on to drink. Francis Urselton and Edmund Bridges fell on the Clarks’ servant Evan Morris and on Daniel Clark himself, and the quarrel lasted three hours. Sarah Urselton swore at the Ipswich court in September 1660 that Goodwife^W Clarke had let Morris have three more gills of liquor and a pint of wine, and that her husband told her she had made him drunk. Goodwife Bates, a neighbor who came running at the noise, swore that she heard Goodwife Clarke “cry out O my Husband” while Urselton had him by the throat, and that Urselton railed at her that she “was a deuelish woman, And the diuell was in her and would haue her”. The court fined Daniel Clark and, for the disorders in his house, barred him from keeping an ordinary; he was licensed again in 1669.

Later years

Her ties to London held. In April 1670 Humphrey Beane wrote from London to his “Brother and Sister Clarke”, in a letter carried by a Topsfield neighbor, sending cloth, a kettle and a barrel of powder, and added: “I keep your son Samuel at school”. Their son Samuel Clark, born in 1663, was then six years old. He was still in England almost twenty years later, when his father’s will left ten shillings “To my son Samuel Clarke in England”.

In 1672 the household’s servant John Davis died and left ten pounds to “his dame Clarke”. Mary died before her husband, at a date that is not known. When Daniel Clark made his will on 10 January 1688/89, he left “my late wife’s wearing-clothes” to be divided among his daughters.

Notes

Her identity

The London part of her life rests on Walter Goodwin Davis’s The Ancestry of Dudley Wildes (1959), which identifies Daniel Clark’s wife with the Mary Beane of St Katherine Coleman from the marriage licence allegation (Bishop of London, Allegations for Marriage Licenses, Book 22 f.50), from the 1670 letter of Humphrey Beane to his “Brother and Sister Clarke”, and from her age of about forty when she gave evidence in a lawsuit in 1667. Torrey’s New England Marriages Prior to 1700 enters the couple as Daniel Clark and [Mary] Beane, married 3 March 1639/40. A 2005 article in The American Genealogist by Leslie Mahler carries her father’s family back a further generation. The same work by Davis is the source for the settlement at New Meadows, the inn and its town meeting of 1660, and his licence of 1669; the depositions about the quarrel and the court’s sentence are printed in the records of the Essex County quarterly courts.

The name Newbury

A genealogy of the Wildes family published by the Topsfield Historical Society calls her Mary (Newbury) Clark, without giving a source. A history of Topsfield published in 1940 holds that Daniel Clark of Topsfield could not have been the Daniel Clark who married Mary Newberry of Dorchester in 1644 and settled at Windsor, in Connecticut.

Her death

No record of her death or burial is known. Her husband’s will of 10 January 1688/89 calls her his late wife, and he married a second wife, Damaris, at Topsfield on 29 May 1689, after the last of Mary’s children was born.