St. Patrick’s Day, Bowne House, and the Role of the Irish in American history

by Rosemary S. Vietor, Vice President; Edited by Charlotte Jackson, Archivist

Happy St. Patrick’s Day to all!

Bowne House is celebrating the contributions made to America by the Irish with a series of posts about Ireland’s connections to the Bowne family and to the history of New York.

PART ONE:

St. Patrick’s Day is celebrated on March 17. It commemorates the Irish saint who is venerated (worshiped) as a saint in the Catholic and Lutheran faiths, the Church of Ireland – part of the Anglican Communion – and in the Eastern Orthodox Church. Saint Patrick was a fifth century Christian missionary who is credited with bringing Christianity to Ireland. March 17th is reputed to be the day he died, not the date of his birth, which is unknown.

According to legend, St. Patrick is responsible for driving snakes (which as serpents, were viewed as symbols of evil) from Ireland and indeed, Ireland today has no snakes. Patrick may have come from England, but he did arrive in Ireland, where he served as a bishop and preached Christianity to the native Irish population. By the 17th century, his legend was already entrenched in Irish lore.

The Bowne connection to Ireland dates to the 17th century, when both John and Hannah Bowne visited Ireland and were visited by Irish Quakers in America. Ireland had a growing Quaker presence dating from 1654, when an Englishman named William Edmundson founded the first Meeting in County Antrim. John Bowne visited Dublin during his exile, and Hannah preached at Quaker meetings throughout the country in the 1670s. There may have been multiple visits by the Bownes to Ireland. Centuries later, their descendants would live alongside the 19th-century Irish diaspora in Flushing.

PART TWO: THE BOWNES AND IRELAND IN THE 17TH CENTURY

Despite the English origins of the Society of Friends, Quakers also gained a presence in Ireland, especially among former soldiers under Oliver Cromwell who settled there following the Wars of the Three Kingdoms (1639-1653). Documents in the Bowne House Archives attest that during the 17th century both John and Hannah Bowne paid visits to their fellow Quakers in Ireland and also met with them in America. 

1663 VISIT OF JOHN BOWNE

When John Bowne was sent into exile by Director Peter Stuyvesant, somewhat surprisingly he was not brought directly to Amsterdam. Instead, he was allowed to disembark in Ireland. On the February 22, 1663 the Dutch ship Vos (The Fox) anchored at the mouth of Dublin Harbor. In his journal, Bowne records that the following day “the Skipper and I went ashore, and it was ordered that I was brought to the house of Captain Steven Rich upon Leasie Hill at Dublin, where I was kindly received and lovingly entertained by my dear Friend Rebecca his wife.” Leasie Hill refers to “Lazy Hill,” or Lazar’s Hill, named after a leper hospital that once stood there; today the English name is Townshend Street. Bowne spent a week in Dublin visiting Irish Quakers and attending Meeting there. In addition to the Rich family, Bowne visited with Robert and Elizabeth Turner, Richard and Bridget Potter, and Elizabeth Gardiner, the widow of John Gardiner, one of the most prominent Quakers in Dublin. On March 3, Bowne boarded “Robert Thomas’s bark called The Grace” and set sail for Wales.

1676/’77 VISIT OF HANNAH BOWNE

John Bowne’s wife Hannah Feake Bowne would also visit Ireland in the course of her two overseas preaching tours in the 1670s. An undated entry in Bowne’s journal records that Hannah gave birth to a stillborn son “in Dublin Scittie, Iarla[nd].” This likely happened in Fall 1676, during Hannah’s second religious visit to the British Isles. We know her whereabouts around that time from a letter she received dated December 23, 1676, in which the writer sends greetings to “Alice Sligh and her son Joseph in Dublin and the rest of Friends in those parts.” Public records show that a Joseph Sligh, a tanner by trade, died in Dublin in 1683.

John Bowne’s eulogy for Hannah at her Quaker memorial service also refers to her stay in Ireland. Bowne describes joining his wife midway through her second overseas voyage: “…I understood she was in Ireland, which place I expected I might find her, which being accomplished it lay upon her spirit to visit Friends throughout all that Nation, wherein I did accompany her willingly to a thousand miles travel and afterwards came over into England…” Unfortunately, he does not provide any further details of these extensive travels, nor name the people whom they visited. However, their surviving correspondence in the Bowne House Archives offers clues as to their circle of acquaintance there.

IRISH FRIENDS OF THE BOWNES

The records of John and Hannah Bowne contain multiple references to Quakers with ties to Ireland. 

The most prominent of these is William Penn, the founder of the Province of Pennsylvania. Penn’s English father, Admiral William Penn, served in the Commonwealth Navy during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, for which Oliver Cromwell awarded him estates in County Cork that had been confiscated from the Irish Confederates following the Rebellion of 1641. When Penn was 15, the family was briefly exiled there after Sir Penn fell out of favor; during this time, they took in an itinerant Quaker preacher called Thomas Loe. The younger Penn returned in 1666 to manage his father’s estates. He reconnected with Loe and was converted to the Society of Friends. Penn, who had previously suppressed an Irish rebellion and even contemplated a career as a soldier, adopted the Peace Testimony.

John Bowne’s future daughter-in-law, Mary Beckett, emigrated to the New World with William Penn in 1684 to join his new colony of Pennsylvania. She lived there until she married Samuel Bowne in 1691 and moved to Bowne House. However, Bowne’s acquaintance with Penn predated this marriage. In the 1680s John Bowne was granted two 500-acre tracts of land in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Bowne’s account book also records at least one shipment to William Penn in 1683, consisting of 4 barrels of boiled apple cider, 3 barrels of raw cider, and 38 bushels of “hay dust.” A family legend holds that a highboy chest at Bowne House was given by Penn’s daughter Leticia to the Bownes’ daughter Hannah as a wedding gift, and a bedroom at Bowne House was once nicknamed the “William Penn Bedroom” for an antique bed where Penn allegedly slept. However, both these claims remain unsubstantiated. 

Bowne’s letters also name William Edmundson, considered the founder of the Society of Friends in Ireland. Edmundson was an Englishman and former Parliamentary soldier who settled in County Antrim. He established a Quaker Meeting at Lurgan in County Armagh in 1654, and later formed a Quaker colony in a village called Rosenallis in County Laois. Edmundson was part of a group of Quakers who debated Rhode Island’s founder, the Reformed Baptist Roger Williams, during George Fox’s 1672 tour of the Colonies. Williams memorialized this theological exchange in his pamphlet “George Fox Smoked out of his Burrows.” In 1676 Bowne writes to his wife that Edmundson has again been in Rhode Island and is traveling eastwards, but is expected at the Friends Six-Month Meeting on Long Island. 

The Bowne family also befriended John Burnyeat, another English-born Quaker who first visited Ireland around 1658. During his time as a wandering preacher there, he was arrested several times for spreading heretical beliefs and nearly starved to death while criss-crossing areas of sparsely populated wilderness. His experience may shed light on Hannah Bowne’s later “thousand-mile” trek through Ireland. Like other 17th-century Friends, Burnyeat was highly itinerant and likely first met the Bownes during his travels through Barbados, Virginia and New England from 1664 to 1667. He was a zealous preacher and pamphleteer who joined in the 1672 debate with Roger Williams of Rhode Island, along with William Edmundson. Burnyeat settled permanently in Ireland in 1673. When John and Hannah Bowne’s daughter Elizabeth writes to her mother in July 1676, she says “…remember my love to deare G.F. {George Fox} & John Bonnyet {Burnyeat} if thou sees them & other Friends…” Burnyeat may have stayed at the Bowne House in 1672 along with George Fox, given that Elizabeth Bowne, then a child, seems to know him personally and mentions him in the same breath as Fox. 

These are some of the more prominent members of the Bowne family’s social and religious circle with ties to Ireland. We may yet discover more Colonial-era connections to the Emerald Isle as we continue to mine the Bowne Family Papers.