♀Sarah Dudley

Sarah Dudley (baptized 23 July 1620 – 3 November 1659) was a daughter of Thomas Dudley, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony^W, who married first Benjamin Keayne of Boston and later a Thomas Pacy. She was the sister of Samuel Dudley (1608–1683), the eighth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), and the sister of the poet Anne Bradstreet. Everything known of her here comes from two compiled books, a genealogical dictionary of 1861 and a family history of 1886, which agree on the outline of her life.

Family and marriages

The dictionary gives her baptism at Sempringham, in Lincolnshire, on 23 July 1620, and the family history lists her as the fourth of the five children of Thomas Dudley and Dorothy Yorke: Samuel, Anne, Patience, Sarah and Mercy. Her sisters married Simon Bradstreet^W, Daniel Denison^W and the Rev. John Woodbridge.

The dictionary says she married Major Benjamin Keayne of Boston on 6 September 1648. The family history makes him a son of Captain Robert Keayne^W, a military man, and says the couple had a daughter, Anne, also called Hannah. The history says Sarah’s second husband was Thomas Pacy of Boston, and that she had no child by him. The dictionary calls him only “one Pacy”.

The repudiation

The dictionary says she married Keayne “and after his repudiat. of her, one Pacy (I suppose, only for convenience)”. The family history gives more. It says Benjamin Keayne took his wife to London, and wrote from London in March 1646 to the ministers John Cotton and John Wilson of Boston, repudiating her, and that he wrote to her father that he would never again live with her as a husband. In the letters as the history prints them, Keayne charged her with unfaithfulness and said he had spent his estate on her; he adds that he could not prove it before a court. The history takes her side. It says he never returned to New England to substantiate the charge, and that she probably obtained a divorce on the ground of his desertion. The records do not show whether she did.

The dictionary also records, under a different surname, that Nicholas Hart of Taunton, who had been excommunicated there, came to Boston and the next year or the following “was the occasion of excom. of Sarah, w. of Benjamin Keayne, d. of Gov. Thomas Dudley”. It says no more about what happened.

The dates do not fit together. The dictionary’s marriage date of 6 September 1648 falls two years after the letters of 1646, which the history dates from London. The history says that in 1647 her father hired two houses at Roxbury for her use. Neither book explains the difference.

Later life and death

Thomas Dudley’s will, made on 20 April 1652 and printed in the family history, names “my daughter Sarah Pacey”. It gives her six pounds a year for life, so long as she continued to dwell in the jurisdiction of Massachusetts, and a feather bed and other bedding. His widow was to give her board and lodging in the meantime.

The dictionary says she died on 3 November 1659. The family history places her death in that year at Roxbury. According to the dictionary, her estate, by an inventory sworn by Captain James Johnson, was worth less than 10 pounds, and the court gave it to her daughter Ann Keayne. The history says Benjamin Keayne died in London about 1661 and by a will of 16 October 1654 left his London estate to their daughter, whom it names Anna Keaine, and that the daughter married first Captain Edward Lane and then Colonel Nicholas Paige of Boston.