Maine
By 1644 Cleeve had become deputy governor of Lygonia, a rival province to that of Gorges' in Maine established from a resurrected Plough Patent, and asked Bachiler to be its minister at Casco. Bachiler deferred, having already received a call to be minister for the new town of Exeter. Once again Massachusetts intervened in his affairs when the General Court ordered deferral of any church at Exeter. Frustrated in his attempts at a new ministry, Bachiler left Hampton and went as missionary to Strawbery Banke (now Portsmouth, New Hampshire) probably that same year 1644. While there, he married in 1648 (as fourth wife) a young widow, Mary Beedle of Kittery, Maine. In 1651, she was indicted and sentenced for adultery with a neighbor.
Denied a divorce by the Massachusetts Court, Bachiler finally returned to England about 1653. His children who had stayed in England, were well off and able to take care of him. Bachiler died near London, and was buried at All Hallows Staining on October 31, 1656.
Perhaps the best summation of his career is in the biographical entry in Robert Charles Anderson's look at the early immigrants: "Among the many remarkable lives lived by early New Englanders, Bachiler's is the most remarkable."
Read more about this topic: Stephen Bachiler
Famous quotes containing the word maine:
“Making a logging-road in the Maine woods is called “swamping” it, and they who do the work are called “swampers.” I now perceived the fitness of the term. This was the most perfectly swamped of all the roads I ever saw. Nature must have coöperated with art here.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Those Maine woods differ essentially from ours. There you are never reminded that the wilderness which you are threading is, after all, some villager’s familiar wood-lot, some widow’s thirds, from which her ancestors have sledded fuel for generations, minutely described in some old deed which is recorded, of which the owner has got a plan, too, and old bound-marks may be found every forty rods, if you will search.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“On a late-winter evening in 1983, while driving through fog along the Maine coast, recollections of old campfires began to drift into the March mist, and I thought of the Abnaki Indians of the Algonquin tribe who dwelt near Bangor a thousand years ago.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)