William Stickney

There is record of a John de Stickney, a gentleman who, with 130 others, paid his taxes in Boston of Lincolnshire, England, during the reign of King Edward III (1327-1377); John paid £1, which was a large sum in those days. The parish of Stickney in Lincolnshire has a chantry founded in 1362, containing the Stickney coat of arms and an old moat house. After John we lose track of the Stickneys for a few generations.

The village of Frampton is some 3 miles south of Boston in Lincolnshire, about 4 miles west of the southwest corner of the Wash, where the River Welland empties into it. This was Puritan country during Elizabethan times. Many Stickneys were baptized, married, and buried there between 1558 and 1609, when our ancestor Samuel (?) Stickney and his family, including our ancestor, 17-year-old William, presumably moved to Kingston upon Hull in Yorkshire.

During the 1630s persecution of Puritans and other dissenters from the Established Church of England became markedly worse. The Archbishop of Canterbury William Laud and his lieutenant Bishops hounded dissenters: Parishioners were fined for nonattendance at Sunday service. The altar was railed off, the gulf widened between clergy and congregation, and ritualistic "popish" ceremony was emphasized. Sermons must not be too radically Protestant; in fact, they had to be shorter, and no "readers" were allowed to supplement the Anglican preaching. Private Puritan chapels were closed, and Puritan meetings were outlawed. Some dissenters were pilloried or mutilated.

Archbishop Laud commanded that the late King James I's Declaration of Sports, advocating Sunday afternoon game playing (in violation of the strict Puritan Sabbath), be read from the pulpit. English Puritans were aghast that Catholics in England were enjoying more toleration (because of the favor of Queen Henrietta Maria), and every Catholic victory in the continental wars made them more anxious. Many in the Puritan underground in the countryside were making plans to emigrate to the New World. Between 1637 and 1640, William Stickney and his wife, Elizabeth, migrated with their children Samuel, Amos, and Mary to Massachusetts Bay Colony; they were among the original settlers of Rowley (later called Bradford) in Essex County, Massachusetts.

William was part of the puritanical, idealistic Righteous Generation. His first eight children were part of the reactive, nomadic Cavalier Generation, and his two young twin daughters, Mercy and Adding, were part of the heroic, civic-minded Glorious Generation.