Holy Bee of Ephesus

“The King’s great matter” it was called back in the late 1520s, a time when the Catholic Church was still the only church in England (although the Protestant movement was already well underway on the Continent)...

Even people who aren’t history nerds know about King Henry VIII and his multiple (i.e., six) wives. He burned through his last five wives in the final fifteen years of his life, but his first marriage lasted almost 24 years. Henry VIII of England and Catherine of Aragon had a complicated relationship to say the least.

To begin with, she was Henry’s brother’s wife first. Old Henry VII had arranged a marriage between his eldest son Arthur, the heir apparent, to the Spanish princess for her 200,000-ducat dowry. The pair were married when both were 15 years old, then Arthur fell ill and croaked eight months later. Catherine of Aragon was a widow at 16, and reported to everyone within earshot that the marriage had never been consummated. (Consummation of a royal marriage was considered a matter of state and certainly open for discussion by just about anyone.) And Henry VII definitely did not want to send back that 200,000 ducats. So he kept Catherine as his “guest” for several years until his second son, young Henry, was old enough to marry — even though it was expressly forbidden by religious law for a man to marry his brother’s wife. Still, 200,000 ducats was 200,000 ducats. A special dispensation had to be finagled out of the Pope based on the non-consummation of Arthur and Catherine’s marriage, and wedding plans went ahead. 

On June 11, 1509, Catherine of Aragon, 23, married Henry, not quite 18. There was an empty chair at the ceremony as King Henry VII had died two months before. Catherine was marrying the new King of England, and the whole nation was waiting with bated breath for them to hurry the hell up and procreate already…

For the next decade or so, poor Queen Catherine produced a string of infants who were either stillborn or lived a few days or weeks at most. The lone exception was the future Queen Mary I…most decidedly not a male heir, which was what Henry believed he needed to secure the still-new Tudor dynasty’s future. 

By 1525, Catherine was nearing 40 years old, and while it was still theoretically possible she could give birth to a healthy child, the reality was her track record of problematic births combined with her age meant that she was pretty much done with the whole reproduction thing. And her younger husband was clearly and publicly infatuated with one of her ladies-in-waiting, Anne Boleyn. Henry had already scored with her sister Mary, but Anne was proving a much tougher nut to crack (so to speak), refusing to pay a visit to the royal bedchamber without being properly married.

Thus began the “King’s great matter.”

Henry set about securing an annulment of his marriage to Catherine. He either believed, or told everyone he believed, that his marriage to her was cursed (and invalid in the eyes of God) because it violated the rule from the Book of Leviticus about marrying your brother’s wife. The special dispensation that allowed the marriage in the first place was now allegedly based on a mistruth — Henry avowed that Arthur and Catherine, being typical horny teenagers, did in fact consummate the marriage, and Catherine was a lying liar. 

It was His Royal Majesty’s word against Catherine’s (who swore for the rest of her life she had never bedded down with Arthur). But even being a sovereign monarch, it would be difficult if not impossible to secure an annulment from the current Pope, Clement VII. At that time, the Pope was being held prisoner by Catherine’s nephew, Charles, who was doing double duty as King of Spain and as Holy Roman Emperor (and coping with the various infirmities and deformities caused by generations of enthusiastic in-breeding within the Habsburg dynasty). The Pope did not want to wreck his chances of release by booting his captor’s aunt out of her royal marriage, so the pleas from Henry’s messengers and letters fell on deaf ears. (If Charles had a verbal response, it likely would be incomprehensible and accompanied by a spray of saliva due to his enormous deformed lower jaw, referred to euphemistically as the “Habsburg lip.”)

The highest-ranking church official in England was (and remains) the Archbishop of Canterbury, who at the time was Thomas Cranmer, a Boleyn family friend and very recently an employee of the royal government, as England’s ambassador to none other than the aforementioned Charles. (One hopes he carried a good supply of handkerchiefs with him.) Henry pivoted to the Archbishop instead of the Pope to settle his great matter, and Cranmer took about ten seconds to review the case and said “Yup, your current marriage is invalid.” That was enough for Henry to marry Anne Boleyn in a secret ceremony in 1532. Catherine was stripped of her title of queen, and “banished” to a country life in retirement as “princess dowager” (based on her marriage to Arthur) with an ample allowance and a small army of servants, still loudly insisting she was Henry’s lawfully wedded wife. A more comfortable “banishment” cannot be fathomed, but I see her point. From this point on, when he mentioned her at all, Henry referred to Catherine as his beloved older “sister.” Anne Boleyn gave birth to the future Queen Elizabeth I in 1533, but no son.

Seeing that he had defied the Pope and not been struck down by a bolt of lightning, Henry spent the next year pushing a series of acts through Parliament that cut ties with the Catholic Church in Rome and established the independent “Church of England,” or Anglican Church.

Theologically, this was part of the Protestant Reformation that swept through Europe in the 1500s, setting up a variety of non-Catholic Christian churches, but the Anglican Church in Henry’s time still bore a striking resemblance to the Catholic Church. The only substantial difference was the king was in charge instead of the Pope. An entirely “new” religion was created pretty much out of pure spite, which may not be the stupidest reason to create a religion (it may not even be in the top five — see Scientology and its space aliens).

We won’t go into the fate of Anne Boleyn and the subsequent four wives here. All we need to know for our purposes is that the third wife, Jane Seymour, succeeded in producing a male heir. Edward VI became king when his father died in 1547, grossly overweight and riddled with ulcerated sores. The sickly Edward ruled only for six years, from age 9 to 15, before his own death, but during his reign his royal advisors worked hard to bring the Anglican Church more in line with other Protestant churches, who believed that all of the elaborate pomp and ceremony of the Catholic Church was inherently corrupt and blocked a worshiper’s direct connection to God. All the ornate vestments, gilded accessories, burning incense, red velvet, jabbering in Latin, and so on was considered entirely unnecessary and probably even sinful according to the Protestants.

Anglican church walls were whitewashed and stained glass was removed throughout the country in order to exude a more humble appearance. Liturgies in Latin were replaced by the Book of Common Prayer (written in English by Thomas Cranmer). Belief in transubstantiation, purgatory, praying to saints, rosary beads, and mandatory confession were all dumped. They kept the leadership structure of archbishops, bishops, and priests (referred to more as “vicars” as time went on) and a few other traditions.  

Some bumps in the road aside (Queen Mary reversed England into Catholicism again in 1553, and her half-sister Queen Elizabeth switched it back to Anglicism in 1558, giving the whole country a case of ecclesiastical whiplash), the Church of England had firmly established itself as the 1500s ended.

But for some — your typical “small but vocal” minority — the Church of England’s practices were still too closely aligned with the Catholic Church, and not following the spirit of true Protestant reform as embodied by the ideas of Martin Luther and particularly John Calvin. The only way for the Church of England to provide a true path to salvation was to purge all similarities to the Catholics. To “purify” itself, as it were.

They were referred to as Puritans.

They practiced a form of “Reformed Christianity” called Congregationalism. They were technically still holding on to an Anglican identity by half a fingernail, but the reality was that the version of Christianity they established for themselves was very different from anything identifiable as Anglican. (More on Congregationalism when we get to the Salem Witch Trials. Stay tuned.)

For a still smaller minority of Congregationalists, this was not enough. To them, there was no hope to purify the Church of England. They wanted to separate from it entirely. Even the Puritans considered these guys to be overly-hardcore and unreasonable, and that’s saying something.

They were referred to as Separatists.

The Puritans and Separatists were isolated from mainstream English society, partly by choice and partly because they were just difficult to co-exist with. And if they got too outspoken with their criticism of the Church of England in a public forum (and many of them did), they could be fined or imprisoned. 

The first to leave England to seek “religious freedom” were the Separatists, who began a slow trickle over to the Netherlands just before 1600. A specific group of about 300 of them, from the wonderfully-named village of “Scrooby” in Nottinghamshire, settled in Leiden in 1608. After resisting any attempt to assimilate, and terrified of their children turning away from their Separatist indoctrination and learning a more tolerant and open-minded worldview from the free-thinking Dutch (the whole reason the Separatists were welcome there in the first place), a portion of the Leiden Separatist community decided they would rather risk everyone’s lives and take a very dangerous chance on England’s brand new colonial territory in the North American wilderness.

This group of fanatical religious extremists are nowadays known affectionately as the “Pilgrims,” and still idealized in kindergartens across the country each November. They arrived after a tumultuous autumn crossing on the Mayflower near what was already known as Cape Cod in what would soon be known as Massachusetts in 1620. They established the Plymouth colony there.

To no one’s surprise but their own, most of the “Pilgrims” died in the first year. 

(SIDE NOTE: The handful of survivors did indeed hold a “thanksgiving feast” the following autumn with some Native Americans attending, but — guest list aside — this was not out of the ordinary. Puritans and Separatists would have a thanksgiving feast at the drop of one of their buckled hats. Someone caught an extra fish? Let’s have a thanksgiving. Someone returned from market without getting mud on their breeches? Thanksgiving! It seemed to be their only form of release. The national holiday as we know it was not established until Abraham Lincoln did so in 1863 in gratitude for recent Union victories in the Civil War. Also, there was no turkey at the original 1621 dinner. Turkey were indeed abundant in New England, but they were wily and elusive, and no one could shoot well enough to bag one. All existing sources state that venison and seafood were the main courses. Sign me up, as that sounds much better than bland, boring turkey.)

Not long after the establishment of the Plymouth colony, things got really rough for the Puritans back in England, triggering a massive wave of immigration to Congregationalist-friendly New England. The Puritans’ much bigger Massachusetts Bay Colony absorbed the Separatists’ little Plymouth. Boston was established in 1630, named after a mid-sized town on England’s eastern coast that was considered the spiritual home of the Puritan movement. John Winthrop referred to it in a speech that year “the city upon a hill” — a model city that would have the world’s eyes upon it as a shining beacon of Christian virtue.

John Hancock was likely a smuggler. But so was everyone else in his line of work. To a Boston merchant, finding creative ways to evade the Navigation Acts was just good business.

The series of Navigation Acts that began being passed in 1651 required that all shipments to and from the American colonies had to be on British-owned ships, and cargos had to pass through an English port no matter where they were coming from or where they were going so they could have import duties paid directly to the British government, along with a variety of other restrictions designed to line British pockets.

It was a policy that was outrageously unfair to colonial merchants, but almost impossible to enforce effectively, and for much of the 1700s, Britain didn’t try particularly hard. As a result, tons of “illegal” untaxed goods sailed into Boston Harbor, technically making a criminal of one of our nation’s founders long before he joined the treasonous revolutionaries. (When the British government actually tried to get tough on import duties, the result was the Boston Tea Party, more on which anon.)

John Hancock’s father and grandfather were ministers. His father baptized the newborn future president John Adams in 1735. Hancock himself was born in 1737, and seemed destined to join the family trade. Those plans were derailed in 1744 when Hancock Senior dropped dead. Little John was sent to live with his uncle, Thomas Hancock. Hancock’s birth mother quickly re-married and vanished from his life, so Thomas’ wife Lydia became his beloved maternal figure.

Two-and-a-half stories tall, the brown granite Georgian mansion sported three big dormer windows along the gambrel roof, a dozen main rooms, a dozen steps leading up to a broad front porch with a balcony above facing Beacon Street, and extensive gardens and orchards. The house had a commanding view of the city and the harbor. Thomas Hancock enjoyed his palatial estate for almost thirty years. When he died in 1764, he left all of his businesses — locks, stocks, and barrels — to nephew John. John had been working diligently for his uncle for the past decade, and had learned the import/export business inside and out. Aunt Lydia inherited Hancock Manor, but signed it over to John almost instantly with the understanding that she could continue to live there.

In one fell swoop, John Hancock was one of the wealthiest men in Massachusetts. He gave generously to the Boston community, covering the costs of the laying of paved walkways in the Common, the entire re-construction of the Brattle Street Church, and the free distribution of firewood to the poor during the winter months. His popularity gained him a place on both the town council and in the colonial assembly.

His deep pockets also funded the Sons of Liberty and their fight against British oppression. The savvy Samuel Adams took the political neophyte Hancock under his wing, knowing his local prominence as a successful businessman and his facility for using money to make more money could be very useful to the cause. 

Adams and Hancock made an odd pair. The shabby Adams could usually be found in the taverns and down at the harbor in his threadbare coat, shaking hands, gathering news, making contacts and connections. The genteel, well-dressed Hancock preferred more elevated company, and many among his business associates and social circle were conservative Tories who may not have known there was a rebel in their midst. Odd couple or not, once the situation between Britain and the colonies turned violent, it did not take the British authorities in Massachusetts too long to single out the team of Adams and Hancock as the driving force of the incipient revolution. 

In 1768, one of Hancock’s cargo ships, the Liberty (it was by now public knowledge where his political sympathies lie), was busted for smuggling. Try as they might, the British officials could not get the politically-motivated, trumped-up charges to stick, and the case was eventually dropped. But it galvanized Hancock against the British even more. To be clear, no official evidence of Hancock smuggling anything has ever come to light. But, c’mon…he was probably just really good at it…

Once I had located the former sites of the Liberty Tree and the Great Elm, it was time to begin our walk along the Freedom Trail. The Freedom Trail was conceived in 1951 by journalist William Schofield, who thought a pedestrian trail that linked important Revolutionary landmarks in the relatively compact central Boston area would be a great idea. Local civic leaders and historians agreed, and a route was established using 30 painted signs to guide the way. This system was a little befuddling for the typical tourist, so in 1958 an idiot-proof path was laid directly on the ground using red bricks. In 1972, the Trail was extended across the river into Charleston in order to include Bunker Hill and the USS Constitution. As of 2025, over four million people walk the Freedom Trail every year. 

The Freedom Trail officially consists of sixteen sites:

 1. Boston Common

 2. The Massachusetts State House

 3. Park Street Church

 4. Granary Burying Ground

 5. King’s Chapel and Burying Ground

 6. Boston Latin School

 7. Old Corner Bookstore

 8. Old South Meeting House

 9. Old State House

10. Boston Massacre Site

11. Faneuil Hall

12. Paul Revere House

13. Old North Church

14. Copp’s Hill Burying Ground

15. USS Constitution

16. Bunker Hill Monument

#1 Boston Common was already discussed in the previous entry, so we’ll move on to the second stop on the Trail, which was…

#2 The Massachusetts State House is just across Beacon Street from Boston Common. The parcel of land it was built on was mostly made up of Hancock Manor’s former cow pasture, sold off by Hancock’s wife in 1795 (Hancock himself had died two years earlier). Boston’s new young hotshot architect Charles Bulfinch was hired to design a grand new state capitol building to replace the too-small Old State House (more on that anon) where the Massachusetts assembly had been meeting since 1776. Bulfinch designed a red brick building in a Federal style, with an imposing central dome and white marble trim. It was right next door to Hancock Manor on the south slope of Beacon Hill, the summit of which rose up just behind them.

We’ll start this off in a logical fashion: by discussing two elm trees that no longer exist.

Actually, let’s back up a bit. When I last left you, I had been forced to abandon my trip to Boston in the summer of 2024 due to a mild case of passing out on a departing airliner, which was due in turn to a less-than-mild case of influenza (which I swear I had no idea I had). We got as far east from California as Gate B43 at Denver International Airport.

Since then, I got vaxxed to the gills for both COVID and flu. I always dutifully got my COVID vaccine since it was introduced because I am a good citizen and a believer in basic science, and also pretty dubious about the efficacy of location-tracking nanobots being injected into my bloodstream. My flu vaccination was always a little more hit or miss (mostly miss) because — as I figured it — “I never get the flu.” Well, lesson learned. It’s the double jab for me every autumn from now on.

And now, here I was, striding across Boston Common on an overcast morning the following summer, eager to see a couple of vanished elms. Thus began my week of, as my wife put it, “taking pictures of plaques.”

The first place I was looking for was at the corner of Washington and Boylston, right where Boylston turns into Essex, on the northern edge of modern Boston’s Chinatown. There was, naturally, a Dunkin’ Donuts on the opposite corner. (What you’ve heard is true. Boston is positively infested with Dunkin’ Donuts. The next nearest one was literally 300 paces away.)

As I approached, I tried to picture what this intersection must have looked like 260 years ago. Three dirt roads known as “Frog Lane,” “Essex Street,” and “Orange Street” converged into an open space known as Hanover Square. The Chase and Speakman distillery was nearby. This was the old “South End” neighborhood, respectably middle-class. There would certainly be no Dunkin’ Donuts. Hanover Square was the site of several large elms, said to have been planted in 1646. The elms were so distinctive they were used as a landmark by people guiding newcomers into the city (eg., “turn right at the big elm trees”).

One elm, a little bigger and taller than the rest, grew in the front yard of bookbinder and church deacon John Elliott (1692-1771), who owned the house directly across the street from the distillery…

Nowadays, the streets are very paved and very busy. Orange Street eventually became Washington Street, and Frog Lane became Boylston Street. The house and distillery vanished around two centuries ago, the modern South End moved further south, and now you’re only a few yards in multiple directions from a half-decent donut and incredibly shitty coffee. It was right here that the Liberty Tree once stood, and where the first quiet rumblings of what grew into the American Revolution were heard.

1765. The British treasury had been running on fumes since the end of the Seven Years’ War (yet another installment of the British National Pastime — going to war with France) two years prior. Since a big chunk of that war was to protect their colonial holdings in North America (and by implication, the colonists themselves) from the predations of the French army and their “savage” Native American allies, King George III and his Parliament thought it only fair that the American colonists pay their proper share for their own protection, which included a force of 10,000 British soldiers stationed on American soil from Georgia to New Hampshire. So they passed the Stamp Act in March of 1765, which imposed a small tax on paper goods sold in the colonies. The proof of payment of said tax would be an inked revenue stamp. It would go into effect that November.

The colonists and the royal government did not see eye-to-eye on this matter, to say the least. The Americans couldn’t give a toss about a handful of French soldiers in ramshackle little forts hundreds of miles over the Appalachians in the Ohio River valley. No, the colonists saw this as the Parliament picking their pockets to gain funds to keep an unwelcome military force in their midst, and to do god-knows-what else across their expanding global empire. It was pointed out to them that folks in Britain had been paying the exact same tax at a much higher rate for over fifty years. The colonists retorted (in the form of letters and petitions) that at least people living in Britain had some nominal say in how the revenue was spent, via their representatives in Parliament. American colonists had no such representation. They paid the necessary taxes raised by their colonial assemblies, who saw to it that the revenue was re-invested in, and served the needs of, that colony and that colony only.

As petty and stubborn as the American response to the first direct tax levied on them by their distant parent government was (it was only a few cents, after all, and the colonists did benefit indirectly from the British victory in the Seven Years’ War), it was definitely a principled response. And people started getting riled up. In Boston, especially.

Knowing myself as not much of a boat-rocker, nor a holder of many strong opinions that don’t involve classic rock, it pains me to acknowledge that I probably would have been one of those colonists saying “C’mon, guys, let’s just pay the damn tax and get on with our lives.”

A small group of Boston businessmen – “the Loyal Nine*” — began meeting clandestinely at the office of the Boston Gazette, and more notably, at the Chase and Speakman distillery, owned or co-owned by Loyal Nine members Benjamin Edes and Thomas Chase, respectively. The goal of the Loyal Nine was to prevent the Stamp Act from taking effect. They first plastered the streets of Boston with pamphlets and handbills, then decided to take it a step further.

On the morning of August 14, 1765, local passersby noticed several effigies hanging from one of the limbs of Deacon Elliott’s huge tree, the most prominent of which was emblazoned with the initials “A.O.” This was clearly meant to represent Andrew Oliver, the official stamp tax collector of Boston. Word spread. A crowd gathered. Speeches were made. Passions were stoked. The crowd was an angry mob by sundown (possibly fueled by rum punch provided by the distillery), and marched off to ransack both Oliver’s home and office. The first protest by Americans against British “tyranny” ended with Oliver barely escaping with his life. Three days later, Oliver was practically frog-marched to the suddenly-signifigant tree in Hanover Square, and forced to publicly resign his position in front of a cheering crowd.

The elm was referred to as the “Tree of Liberty” in a Boston newspaper the following month, and went by variations of that name for the next decade. It was the staging area for all Boston protests for the duration of the Stamp Act crisis. It was frequently covered with notes, flags, and streamers. A flagpole was installed next to it to summon meetings of the Sons of Liberty. How complicit the elderly Deacon Elliott was with the use of his tree for these purposes is unknown. He has no known association with the Loyal Nine or the later Sons of Liberty. Some of its massive branches may have simply overhung a public pathway. But the fact that it was used as a meeting place so frequently, and was often heavily decorated (and Elliott was known to rub shoulders publicly with local anti-royalists — “whigs**”), serve as indicators that Elliott probably sympathized with the cause.

By the start of 1766, the Loyal Nine were folded into the much larger and better organized colonial protest group called the Sons of Liberty, and the term “loyal” was co-opted by supporters of the crown (“Loyalists”). The Sons of Liberty originated in New York, but soon had chapters throughout the colonies. The Boston chapter was established mainly by a newly-elected member of the Massachusetts colonial assembly, Samuel Adams. Adams had left a string of failed businesses in his wake, including the brewery that would (much) later be revived under his name. In the mid-1760s, he finally discovered his true talent: political agitation. Adams was a first-class pot-stirrer, and quite good at getting people on his side. A close associate of the Loyal Nine, but never an official member, it has been widely theorized that Adams was the mastermind behind all of their actions. There is no credible proof of this, other than the fact that the Loyal Nine were often viewed by later historians as run-of-the-mill merchants and artisans (and one ship captain) with little imagination, no previously demonstrated flair for inflammatory writing, nor any real skill at political organization. Still, never underestimate wealthy businessmen pissed off about paying taxes.

Under pressure from British merchants who were feeling the pinch from colonial boycotts of their goods, Parliament repealed the Stamp Act in February of 1766. It had never really been enforced. The Sons of Liberty called it a major victory, but before long there was more to be pissed off about (Townshend Acts, etc.), and meetings under the Liberty Tree continued.

Lots of stuff happened in Boston and around the Liberty Tree between 1766 and 1775, much of it none too pretty. The Quartering Act, the Boston Massacre, the Boston Tea Party and subsequent Intolerable Acts all served to further alienate the colonists from the mother country. In January 1774, an angry mob pulled a customs officer, John Malcolm, from his home in Boston’s North End. He was beaten with sticks, stripped of his clothes, and tarred and feathered. Tarring and feathering was the painfully humiliating ritual of coating a victim’s bare flesh with hot tar (causing second- or third-degree burns), then dumping chicken feathers over the sticky surface. It was a punishment more talked about than actually performed, but it did happen from time to time, perhaps no instance more horrific than this one. Malcolm was paraded in a cart to the Liberty Tree, forced to denounce the royal governor (which he refused to do), then had tea dumped down his throat in a lengthy series of sardonic “toasts” to every British politician the mob leaders could think of. Severely beaten, burned, hypothermic (Boston Harbor had completely frozen solid that week), probably vomiting tea and blood, Malcolm was paraded for several more laps around the city before he broke down and denounced the British government. At which point, he was dumped in front of his house, barely alive, with a long recovery ahead of him. (To be fair, Malcolm was well-known as the North End’s resident asshole — every neighborhood seems to have one — and this whole incident stemmed from him loudly threatening to beat a child sledding in front of his house with his walking stick, but still…) (And who brought all the tea? It reminds me of the hood scene in Django Unchained. Someone’s wife spent a whole afternoon brewing up gallons of tea for this awful purpose.)