Nicholas Noyes (1647 - 1717)

Born 22 Dec 1647 in Newbury, Essex, Massachusetts Bay

Ancestors

Died 13 Dec 1717 at age 69 in Salem, Essex, Massachusetts Bay

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Biography

Nicholas Noyes was involved in witch trials

Nicholas Noyes was born in the early winter of 1647 at Newbury, in Essex County of Massachusetts Bay, into a family steeped in the ministry. His father, also Nicholas Noyes, was a brother of Rev. James Noyes, the first minister at Lyme, and then Stonington, Connecticut; the senior Nicholas was also first cousin to Thomas Parker, another minister, who had come from England with Nicholas and James.^[1]

The younger Nicholas attended Harvard College, graduating in 1667; the following year, regarded as “improved” by his education although he may not yet have been ordained, he was preaching at Haddam, Connecticut, where he remained for more than a dozen years. In November of 1683, he was ordained at Salem, where he served in Salem Town — distinct from Salem Village (modern-day Danvers) — as the assistant or junior pastor to the well-regarded Rev. John Higginson, a son of the town’s first minister.^[2]

When the question of witchcraft arose in Salem Village — whose already-controversial minister Samuel Parris and his young daughter initiated the key accusations — it was Noyes, not the aging Higginson, who was placed in the position of religious overseer of the proceedings. A student of and deep believer in Revelations, fully prepared to accept such notions as spectral evidence, and perhaps eager to advance his own reputation, he threw himself into the grand event, even testifying against certain victims. He is probably best known to history for his exchange with the hapless Sarah Good, a woman of no station who was one of the earliest-accused; Noyes is said to have offered her one last chance to confess herself a witch, allowing her, in his view, to die with the truth on her lips. It is doubtful that he was fully prepared for her reported response: “_You_ are a liar,” she replied. “I am no more a witch than you are a wizard, and if you take away my life God will give you blood to drink.” With deep and perhaps conscious irony, Sarah Good “drew her last words from the Bible, specifically from Revelation 16:6… ‘For they shed the blood of the saints and prophets, and therefore thou hast given them blood to drink.’“^[3]

Noyes stayed on in Salem, well past the time when the witchcraft trials fell into disfavor, and his reputation did not suffer as did that of Parris, who was driven out of his ministry at Salem Village and removed to the small town of Stow, once again serving there — as he had prior to his tenure at Salem — as unpopular interim pastor.^[4] Noyes died in Salem in December of 1717, just days short of his seventieth birthday, apparently from some kind of internal hemorrhage — famously or infamously “choking on his own blood.”^[5]

There are differing claims as to whether Noyes ever had a change of mind or heart concerning his involvement in the trials. A 1906 work by George Simon Roberts made the claim — but without citing any evidence or source — that the minister “was honest enough later to acknowledge his error and to repent of it.”^[6] (A Boston obituary cited by Roberts, from an unnamed newspaper, consists of fulsome praise of Noyes’s “solid judgment”, “eminent sanctity, gravity, and virtue” and “wisdom and usefulness in human affairs”, closing a bit oddly with the note that Noyes “was born at Newbury, December 22d, 1647 and died a bachelor.”)

The more common view appears to be that Nicholas Noyes, like Nathaniel Hawthorne’s famous forebear John Hathorne, never did recant or repent. Lucien Price, writing about the witchcraft madness in The Nation in 1922, commented, “Cotton Mather, Judge Stoughton, Samuel Parris, and Nicholas Noyes never acknowledged error. In contrast to these dignitaries, the jurymen did recant and beg public forgiveness.”^[7] Perhaps a closing, grimly humorous, word might be given to the merchant Philip English, who fled Salem with his wife in fear for their lives when they were accused, and whose property was then seized — improperly — by the Salem sheriff. In his 2015 “A Storm of Witchcraft,” author Emerson Baker comments,

"As for others who were involved during the Salem Witch Trials of 1692, perhaps the most well known is the Rev. Nicholas Noyes, the "junior" minister of the First Church. Noyes fanned the flames of religious hysteria as a vocal persecutor of the accused during the trials. Unlike Samuel Sewall and John Higginson, he never expressed remorse for his involvement in the hysteria. It is said that he died of a curse since one of the accused witches at her execution is reported to have told him that "God will give you blood to drink." In 1717 Noyes apparently died of an unusual throat disorder during which he asphyxiated on his own blood."^[8]

“English never forgave Noyes for his role in the witchcraft crisis. In the spring of 1722, more than three years after Noyes had died, English denounced the late minister as the murderer of John Procter and Rebecca Nurse, and called Noyes’s church ‘the devil’s Church.’… According to family tradition, on his deathbed in 1736 English forgave Noyes and his enemies, though only as a matter of form, adding, ‘But if I get well, I’ll be damned if I forgive them.’“^[9]

Sources

1. ↑ ”Haddam”, Historic Towns of the Connecticut River Valley, by George Simon Roberts, Robson & Adee, 1906 - Connecticut River Valley; https://books.google.com/books?id=FunXRmE3eS0C&pg=PA77&lpg=PA77
2. ↑ ”Haddam”, Historic Towns of the Connecticut River Valley, by George Simon Roberts, as above
3. ↑ ”Satan’s Storm”, A Storm of Witchcraft: The Salem Trials and the American Experience, by Emerson W. Baker, Oxford University Press, 2015, p. 32; https://books.google.com/books?isbn=019989034X
4. ↑ “Search for a Minister”, History of Stow, by Ethel B. Childs, Tercentenary Edition 1983, Stow Historical Society Publishing Company, Stow, Massachusetts, pp. 9-10 (not available online as of June, 2019)
5. ↑ ”Satan’s Storm”, A Storm of Witchcraft: The Salem Trials and the American Experience, by Emerson W. Baker, as above, p. 33
6. ↑ Historic Towns of the Connecticut River Valley, by George Simon Roberts, Robson & Adee, 1906 - Connecticut River Valley, as above
7. ↑ “Witchcraft: Then and Now”, by Lucien Price, The Nation, Volume 115, J.H. Richards, 1922 - United States; https://books.google.com/books?id=nOk_AQAAMAAJ&pg=PA332&lpg=PA332#v=onepage&q&f=false
8. ↑ “THE LONG HISTORY.” The First Church in Salem. Accessed February 3, 2020. http://www.firstchurchinsalem.org/the-long-history.
9. ↑ ”The Accused”, A Storm of Witchcraft: The Salem Trials and the American Experience, by Emerson W. Baker, as above, p. 142

• Birth: "Massachusetts Births and Christenings, 1639-1915," database, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:FZ97-8LT : 10 February 2018), Nicholas Noyes, 22 Dec 1647; citing NEWBURY,ESSEX,MASSACHUSETTS, ; FHL microfilm 823,653.

• Death: "Massachusetts, Town Clerk, Vital and Town Records, 1626-2001," database with images, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:QG1K-68HB : 29 November 2018), Nichl Noyes, 13 Dec 1717; citing Death, Salem, Essex, Massachusetts, United States, , town clerk offices, Massachusetts; FHL microfilm .

• Death (alt. transcript): "Nicho[las], Rev., Dec. 13, 1717, a. 70 y. wanting 8 days. " -- Massachusetts: Vital Records, 1620-1850 (Online Database: AmericanAncestors.org, New England Historic Genealogical Society, 2001-2016); https://www.americanancestors.org/DB190/i/7796/96/140947561 (subscription)

• Essex Institute Historical Collections (Henry Whipple & Son, Salem, Massachusetts, 1860) Vol. 2, Page 47.

Anecdote of Rev. Nicholas Noyes, One of the early pastors of the First Church in Salem, ordained Nov. 14, 1683, died Dec. 13, 1717, aged 70 years

• Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society (Massachusetts Historical Society, 1911) Vol. 7: "Diary of Cotton Mather, 1681-1708", Page 190: see footnote

"Nicholas Noyes, son of Nicholas Noyes, of Newbury, and nephew of Rev. James Noyes, the first minister of Newbury; ordained at Salem, November 14, 1683. He died December 13, 1717."