Bezaliel

A story from my recent book Harvardinates still resonates with me and is something I'd like to explore. It's partly because the main character (1664) grew up two years younger than his older brother John Leverett (1662) who attended Harvard and went on to become its president. That is a direct similarity to my own life, but the times were entirely different.

Bezaliel was named after his mother's father, and his name was a little more common back then. He was widely thought to have died young, but I found a court entry in which he, at age 10 (in 1674) was being reprimanded by the court for stealing some ribbon from a neighbor. It's this story that I'd like to focus on as it delves us directly into the world of 1674 Boston and the possibilities of how he actually died or in fact if he could have lived.

In 1674 his grandfather was ascendant; when John the Governor was elected, annually and throughout the war, he never lost an election. But his mother Sarah was sick, and his father Hudson was beginning to lose it. In 1673 father was arrested for "dangerous" yelling and screaming in public, and was thrown in jail but later released, apparently by Governor John, who of course didn't want to be embarrassed. His older brother John stuck rigorously to his studies so that he could graduate from Boston Latin School....

It is unclear when exactly the mother died, but it's suspected that she was sick for a while before it happened, and in fact during this time 1672-1675, he was probably getting very little parenting, and his sister died, although that's unclear too. I have no idea what Hudson's dangerous yelling was about but I suspect alcohol. Hudson also was being sued for non-payment of a shipment of tobacco, as if he had gone into tobacco dealing. It's possible that his father's tobacco dealing was being done in his name, and that goes for the alcohol too: the Madiera, the rum, all kinds of things were coming in on his father's ships and Hudson was no doubt consuming quite a bit of it. Meanwhile Bezaliel, and John and Sarah for that matter, were going unattended. John was doing well in school, but was less adept at controlling his younger siblings.

The war broke out suddenly in 1675. It didn't affect downtown Boston proper, i.e. the villages were attacked, the city was not, but effects were felt far and wide almost immediately. Money dried up. People went to fight. Everyone panicked. Things looked bad for the settlers for about a year.

It's very possible that it was then that Bezaliel disappeared, or died. He would have been eleven at the outbreak of the war. I can't imagine his being an actual soldier, being the grandson of the governor, but he could have been kidnapped, or simply run away; he also could have been sent back to England for his own safety, and died in passage or afterward. He was never heard from again. If he lived, it would have been with another name.

A book would explore the possibilities. I can't imagine the conclusion; it would have to write itself, and we'd have to see how it turned out.