Robert Coles (settler)

Robert Coles (c. 1600 – 1655) was a 17th-century New England colonist who is known for the scarlet-letter punishment he received in the Massachusetts Bay Colony and his role in establishing the Providence Plantations, now the state of Rhode Island.

He left Massachusetts Bay to join Roger Williams at Providence where he was one of the new colony's 13 original proprietors and a founding member of the First Baptist Church in America.

Three of his sons founded the city of Glen Cove, New York, while three of his daughters married into the Townsend family who engaged in civil disobedience to promote the separation of church and state.

[3][4][5][6][7][8] In 1633, Coles was in the first company, led by John Winthrop the Younger, that went to Agawam where he was granted a large home lot on the Ipswich River at present-day East and Cogswell Streets and 200 acres—a property now called Greenwood Farm—on the neck of land north of town.

[9][10][11][12] He moved to Salem in 1635 where he received a home lot in town and 300 acres of farmland south of Felton Hill "in the place where his cattle are by Brooksby.

[16] Coles's fellow carousers—who were not pious Puritans—included Edward Gibbons, a former polytheist "who chose rather to Dance about a May pole...than to hear a good Sermon"[17] and Samuel Maverick, a wealthy Anglican "very ready to entertain strangers.

Coles was also sentenced "to stand with a whte sheete of pap on his back wherein a drunkard shalbe written in great letters, & stand therewith soe longe as the Court thinks meete...."[21] He was charged a fourth time in 1634, this time in Roxbury, and the court responded with more severe penalties: he was forced to wear a red letter "D" (for drunkenness) for a year and was disenfranchised (deprived of voting rights).

[24][23] However, his wife, Mary, was accused of intemperance in the Roxbury church records, where it was noted that "after her husband's excommunication and falls, she did too much favor his ways...."[25][b] The sanctions against Coles are referenced in historical fiction.

[26] He appears as a minor character in Jackie French Koller's 1995 historical novel, Primrose Way, in which the author notes he "was indeed 'a known tippler' and was arrested for drunkenness and sentenced to wear a sign about his neck...."[27] Some scholars argue that Coles's red-letter punishment was among those Nathaniel Hawthorne had in mind when he wrote the 1850 novel, The Scarlet Letter, which chronicles the struggles of a fictional woman sentenced to wear a red letter for adultery.

[28][29][30] Melissa McFarland Pennell, a University of Massachusetts English professor, recounts Coles's punishment in her book The historian's Scarlet letter: reading Nathaniel Hawthorne's masterpiece as social and cultural history (2018).

[31] In Henry Augustin Beers's Initial Studies in American Letters (1895), the late Yale University literary historian wrote: The reader of Winthrop's Journal comes everywhere upon hints which the imagination has since shaped into poetry and romance.

The germs of many of Longfellow's "New England Tragedies," of Hawthorne's "Maypole of Merrymount," and Endicott's "Red Cross," and of Whittier's "John Underbill" and "The Familists' Hymn" are all to be found in some dry, brief entry of the old Puritan diarist.

[39][40] Roger Williams sold land north of the Pawtuxet River to Coles and twelve others on August 8, 1638, with full payment confirmed on October 3.

[46] By 1648—the year Shawomet was renamed to honor the Earl of Warwick—Coles was listed as a townsman of Warwick, where he was a mill proprietor and resided for the remainder of his life.

[47][48][49] Wee, Robert Coles, Chad Browne, William Harris, and John Warner, being freely chosen by the consent of our loving friends and neighbors the Inhabitants of this Towne of Providence, having many differences amongst us, they being freely willing and also bound themselves to stand to our Arbitration in all differences amongst us to rest contented in our determination, being so betrusted we have seriously and carefully indeavoured to weigh and consider all those differences, being desirous to bringe to unity and peace, although our abilities are farr short in the due examination of such weighty things, yet so farre as we conceive in laying all things together we have gone the fairest and the equallest way to produce our peace.

[61] The trouble began when the Providence arbitrators voted to settle a dispute by seizing some cattle owned by a Gortonite named Francis Weston.

[64] The Gortonites moved south to Shawomet, out of the jurisdiction of the justices and Massachusetts Bay, where they purchased 90 square miles from the sachem Miantonomi.

[65] Benedict Arnold convinced Socononoco and Pomham, the sachems of Pawtuxet and Shawomet, to complain to Massachusetts Bay that they did not agree to the sale.

[77][76][e] After Robert Coles's death, Mary Hawxhurst married Matthias Harvey and moved to Oyster Bay on Long Island.