They could not so remind the court, it being contrary to the will for them to give up their executorship, or to have anything to do with the court.
Late in this month of November, occurs the death of Bathsheba (Rogers) Fox.[117] She has been heroically faithful to the departure instituted in 1674, only, at the last, to see this beloved brother again in the iron clutches of ecclesiastical hatred, he who would have been among the first to hasten to her bedside. How bitter to him, in those last days of his devoted sister, must have been the cruel bonds that held him at a distance, while she went down to death.
The esteem and affection in which Bathsheba was held by her husband, Samuel Fox, may be estimated by the fact that he not only gave valuable lands to her sons by Richard Smith in her lifetime, but, although he had married again, left by will, sixteen years after her death, to her sons by the name of Smith, yet living (James and John), £40 each, and to her three daughters by Richard Smith, £10 each.
Under date of March 7th of this year, we find a deed of gift[118] of some land (adjoining Mamacock farm) from John, Sr., to John, Jr., with the statement therein that this gift is to make up to his son for the land that had been taken from the latter for a fine of £20 imposed upon himself (Part I., Chapter V.), also for a choice cow and a considerable number of sheep that had been taken from his son to satisfy like claims against himself. He states that this gift is also to stand as a testimony of his appreciation of the fact that this son who
“was taken from me in his infancy, upon the account of my differing in judgment, and ordered by the Authority to be brought up in their principles, incensing him against me his own father, and thus kept from me till he came to a young man’s estate; yet, notwithstanding, last winter now past, hath been an instrument in the hands of God, to preserve my life in an unfinished prison, with an open window facing towards the northwest, I being fined and imprisoned by two several courts without any trial of law by a jury.”
This deed must have been written in prison. It is recorded among New London land deeds.
It will be remembered that John Rogers is still in prison, awaiting the sitting of the March session of the Superior Court in New London. This now opens, March 25, at the meeting-house.