Stukely Westcott (1592-1677)
One of the Thirteen Original Proprietors of Providence
FamilySearch PID: 9HZW-SXJ
Stukely Westcott was baptized 15 October 1592 in Ilminster, Somerset, England, the son of Guy Westcott of Marwood, Devon, the family’s ancestral parish. He emigrated with his wife Juliana Marchant to Salem, Massachusetts Bay, arriving 24 June 1635.1Two and a half years later he was banished from the colony for religious dissent, the order is dated 12 March 1638, and joined Roger Williams’s Providence settlement.6 He was one of the thirteen original proprietors of Providence, and in 1642-43 helped found Warwick on the Shawomet purchase. He died 12 January 1677 at Portsmouth, Rhode Island, and was buried at Warwick, where his wife had been buried seven years before.
He is John’s tenth great-grandfather through the Westcott line that meets the Gardiner line at his great-grandson Caleb Westcott’s marriage to Hannah Gardiner of the Herodias Long descent. The two lines converge at their daughter Elizabeth Westcott (b. ~1760), through whom both Westcott and Gardiner descents flow as a single chain into the Peckham, Harrison, Winter, Swift, and Perry families.
Religious Dissent and Roger Williams
Stukely was banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for religious dissent on 12 March 1638, three years after his Salem neighbor and intellectual ally Roger Williams had been ordered out by the General Court in October 1635.6 Williams and Westcott were not co-defendants in the same proceeding; Stukely’s was its own court session, two and a half years after Williams’s, but they were banished by the same colonial authority on the same kind of charge, and for the four months in 1635 between Stukely’s arrival at Salem and Williams’s order to leave, the two were neighbors in the Salem dissenting community.
After his banishment Stukely joined the Providence colony Williams had founded two years before, and the two became co-residents in the small RI dissenting elite for the next four decades. Specific personal anecdotes of Williams and Westcott together are not in the institutional record on hand; J. Russell Bullock’s 1886 Incidents in the Life and Times of Stukeley Westcote4 is the likely place to look, and has not yet been read in full.
The 1638 Banishment Cohort
Stukely Westcott was banished from Massachusetts Bay on 12 March 1638 on religious-dissent charges. Anne Hutchinson , banished the same year in the same court for the same charge type, became the founding mother of Portsmouth, Rhode Island, and remains one of the most consequential dissenters in American colonial history. The two families connected three generations later: Stukely’s great-granddaughter married into the Hutchinson line via Capt. Edward Hutchinson’s descendants, making John a cousin-by-marriage to the Hutchinson family at gen 3.
This connection extends the Rhode Island Dissident Cohort introduced on the Herodias Long page: Roger Williams (banished 1635, Stukely’s Salem neighbor and Providence co-founder), Stukely Westcott (banished 1638), Anne Hutchinson (banished 1638, married into Stukely’s line three generations later), and Herodias Long (publicly whipped on her 1658 Boston walk). Four religious-dissident figures across the 1635-1658 founding decades of Rhode Island, all converging on the Long family tree.
Founder of Providence. One of the Original Thirteen
Stukely was one of the thirteen original proprietors of Providence, the cohort named in the first land division of the colony in 1638. The framing comes directly from the title of Roscoe L. Whitman’s 1932 History and Genealogy of the Ancestors and Some Descendants of Stukely Westcott : one of the thirteen original proprietors of Providence,2the dedicated multi-volume Westcott genealogy. The other twelve proprietors are named in standard Rhode Island historiography. Williams, William Arnold, John Smith the miller, Francis Wickes, William Harris, Thomas Angell, Joshua Verin, John Greene, William Reynolds, Richard Waterman, Ezekiel Holliman, and Thomas James, but the canonical list-of-thirteen document itself is in Bartlett’s Records of the Colony of Rhode Island(vol. 1) and Bicknell’s 1920 History of the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, neither of which is yet in the FamilySearch source set for this ancestor (see Sources).
Five years after Providence, on 12 January 1642/3, Stukely was among the purchasers of Shawomet from Miantonomi , the founding act of the town of Warwick, Rhode Island under Samuel Gorton. Warwick became his home for the rest of his life, and he was buried there in 1677.
English Origins
Stukely Westcott’s English origins are not definitively documented in primary sources. He enters the record as an adult in Roger Williams’s Salem dissenting circle in the 1630s; his parentage and the source of his given name are not established by contemporary documentation.
The Maternal Descent to the Brothers
Twelve generations of the family’s maternal line connect Stukely Westcott to the living generation, four generations of Westcotts in Rhode Island down to Caleb Westcott’s mid-eighteenth-century marriage, then Elizabeth Westcott onward through the Peckham, Harrison, Winter, Swift, and Perry families to Francis Swift Perry, to his daughter Carol Perry, and, through her marriage to John Patrick Long, to John, Perry, and Patrick Long. At Caleb’s marriage the Westcott line meets the parallel Gardiner descent from Herodias Long . Caleb’s wife Hannah Gardiner (1723-1770) was Herodias’s great-granddaughter through Nicholas Gardiner, and Caleb’s own mother Hannah Gardiner (1682-1756) was Herodias’s great-granddaughter through George Gardiner II. Their daughter Elizabeth Westcott inherits both lines.
| Name | Born | PID | Relationship |
|---|---|---|---|
| ●Stukely Westcott | 15 Oct 1592 | 9HZW-SXJ | 10th great-grandfather. Founder of Providence |
| ●Juliana Marchant | before 1596 | KNC4-N1P | 10th great-grandmother. Stukely's wife, Somerset England origin |
| ●Jeremiah Westcott | 1633 | LZNS-Q16 | 9th great-grandfather. Stukely's son, b. Yeovil, Somerset |
| ●Capt. Josiah Westcott | ~1675 | LZKZ-R2T | 8th great-grandfather. Jeremiah's son, surveyor and militia captain at Warwick/Cranston RI |
| ●Caleb Westcott | 6 Dec 1716 | LCTK-QTJ | 7th great-grandfather, husband of Hannah Gardiner (1723); convergence point with the Herodias Long Path B descent (also on SwiftPage and HerodiasLongPage) |
| ●Elizabeth Westcott | ~1760 | KNWZ-LNK | 6th great-grandmother, daughter of Caleb Westcott; inherits the Westcott Stukely descent AND the Gardiner Herodias descent (also on SwiftPage and HerodiasLongPage) |
| ●Mary Peckham | 7 Aug 1792 | LR79-JWN | 5th great-grandmother via the Peckham branch (also on SwiftPage and CincinnatiPage) |
| ●Fanny P. Harrison | 25 Jan 1813 | 9F78-WDW | 4th great-grandmother. Fall River bridge generation (also on HerodiasLongPage) |
| ●Richmond Chamberlain Winter | 1839 | L4ZL-SXH | 3rd great-grandfather via the Winter branch |
| ●Fanny Harrison Winter | 1869 | 9VNZ-J6H | 2nd great-grandmother via the Winter branch (also on WinterSwiftPage) |
| ●Rachael Winter Swift | 1896 | 9JGN-43B | Great-grandmother via the Swift branch (also on SwiftPage, CincinnatiPage, PerryPage) |
| ●Francis Swift Perry | 6 Oct 1923 | L1V1-8D2 | Maternal grandfather (also on PerryPage) |
Notable Cousins via Stukely
Stukely’s descent is wide. The deepest cousinship currently documented in this archive runs through his daughter Damaris Westcott (1621-1678), who married Gov. Benedict Arnold I (1615-1678), the first Royal Governor of Rhode Island under the 1663 Charter.
Notable cousin via Stukely
Maj. Gen. Benedict Arnold V (1741-1801) . John’s fourth cousin seven times removed via the five-generation Arnold descent that begins with Gov. Benedict Arnold I’s marriage to Damaris Westcott. Eighty-eight years separate the founding-generation Royal Governor (1615) from the Revolutionary War general who chose his loyalty differently than John’s branch did (1741). Fifty-eight FamilySearch source descriptions attach to the traitor; the full Arnold dynasty treatment, including the British Army descendants exiled after 1780, is the subject of a forthcoming spotlight.5
Honest Acknowledgments
Banishment date.Roger Williams was banished from Massachusetts Bay in October 1635; Stukely’s banishment is sometimes conflated with the same year. The FamilySearch record and Salem town records both date Stukely’s banishment to 12 March 1638, two and a half years after Williams. This page uses 1638.
Capt. Josiah Westcott’s rank.The “Captain” rank is documented in two independent published genealogies (Whitman 1932 and Coates 1941) but no primary commission record has been located. Coates speculates the rank came from service in the “early Indian Wars,” most likely King William’s War (1689-97) or Queen Anne’s War (1702-13). No specific militia unit or engagement has been identified. The rank is shipping-safe as a descriptor; Society of Colonial Warseligibility from Josiah is not yet shipping-ready and would need a primary commission record from Rhode Island Colony archives or Chapin’s 1918 Lists of Soldiers of the Colony of Rhode Island.
English origins and relatives.Stukely’s English parentage and family connections are not established by contemporary documentation, and whether any English relatives also emigrated to New England remains an open question. The canonical institutional sources that might resolve his origins are Vivian’s 1895 Visitations of the County of Devon and the full Anderson 1995 Great Migration Begins entry for Stukely; neither has been read end-to-end for this draft.
Providence-13 and Warwick founder lists.The framing “one of the thirteen original proprietors of Providence” is verbatim from Whitman 1932’s subtitle (Source #2). The specific list of the other twelve, and the eleven-or-twelve Shawomet purchasers of Warwick, are drawn from standard Rhode Island historiography but the primary list documents, in Bartlett’s Records of the Colony of Rhode Island and Bicknell 1920, are not yet in the FamilySearch source set for this ancestor and are flagged below as retrieval gaps.
Sources
- Robert Charles Anderson, The Great Migration Begins, 1620-1635 (New England Historic Genealogical Society, 1995). Stukely Westcott entry. The institutional gold standard for the immigration generation; cited in the FamilySearch source set for Stukely as Source #15. Anchors the 1592 birth, 1635 Salem arrival, 1638 banishment, and Providence founding facts.
- Roscoe L. Whitman, History and Genealogy of the Ancestors and Some Descendants of Stukely Westcott : one of the thirteen original proprietors of Providence(1932), the dedicated multi-volume Westcott genealogy. Source for the “thirteen original proprietors” framing (verbatim from the subtitle) and for Capt. Josiah Westcott’s rank attestation (vol. 1, p. 181).
- John Osborne Austin, Genealogical Dictionary of Rhode Island(1887), pp. 416-419, the canonical Rhode Island genealogical reference. Source for the institutional recounting of the banishment proceeding and Stukely’s RI settlement.
- J. Russell Bullock, Incidents in the Life and Times of Stukeley Westcote, with some of his descendants (1886, 250 pp.), the earliest published biography. Likely source for personal-association anecdotes with Roger Williams; full archive.org text not yet read.
- E. Stephen Arnold, The Arnold Memorial: William Arnold of Providence and Pawtuxet, 1587-(1935; Stukely Westcott entry, hosted babel.hathitrust.org). Source for the Arnold-line descent through Damaris Westcott and the Gov. Benedict Arnold I → Maj. Gen. Benedict Arnold V chain.
- Town Records of Salem, Massachusetts (FamilySearch legacy NFS Source #21), institutional anchor for the 12 March 1638 banishment date. The proceeding itself is recorded in the Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England (Shurtleff ed., 5 vols., 1853-54), which has not been retrieved for this draft.
- Society of Stukely Westcott Descendents of America (SSWDA), sswda.com, lineage society institutional recognition (FamilySearch Source #12). Find A Grave Index entry for Stukely Westcott’s 1677 Warwick burial (FamilySearch Source #7).
Retrieval gaps flagged for future enrichment. Bicknell’s 1920 History of the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations(3 vols.) is the canonical source for the Providence-13 and Warwick founder lists but is absent from this PID’s FamilySearch source set. Bartlett (ed.), Records of the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations (10 vols., 1856-65) would provide the primary state-record citation for the banishment proceeding, the Providence Compact, and the Shawomet purchase. Both are Phase-2 enrichment targets.