Background
Christopher Gardiner arrived in Massachusetts about a month before the ships bringing the Puritans in June 1630. Gov. Bradford of Plymouth wrote that he brought a “servant or 2, and a comly yonge woman, whom he caled his cousin, but it was suspected, she was his concubine”. He built a house about seven miles from Boston and was unmolested for some months. Then the storm broke. His presence was a puzzle to the Puritans. He said that he was connected with the family of Stephen Gardyner, Bishop of Winchester, but no one knows yet of what family he came. He also asserted that he had traveled widely and had been made a Knight of the Holy Sepulchre. At any rate his title was recognized by officials in England.
Education
Gardiner was a man of education and apparently had a university degree or two but whence derived is unknown.
Career
Gardiner said that he had come to the colony merely to retire from the world. Presently, however, word came from Isaac Allerton, agent of the colony in London, that he had met not one but two wives of the Knight, one of whom he had deserted in Paris and the other in London, and that they were now living together, the one calling for his return and conversion, the other for his destruction.
The Massachusetts Court of Assistants then ordered that he be sent to England as a prisoner. Gardiner fled to the woods. A reward being offered for his capture, some Indians took him to Bradford at Plymouth, who shipped him to Winthrop at Boston, together with an incriminating notebook showing him to be a Papist.
While he was in jail, a packet of letters arrived for him from Maine in care of Winthrop, who opened and read them. They included one from Sir Ferdinando Gorges which proved that Gardiner was his agent. Undoubtedly he had acted as such from the beginning and his purpose in settling near Boston had been to watch the actions of the Puritans.
Winthrop prudently decided to drop the matter and Gardiner was free to go. There was now no reason for his remaining. His mistress, Mary Grove, had been arrested and questioned when he had first fled, but nothing could be got from her, and with grim Puritan humor it was ordered that she be shipped to the other two wives in Old England.
The sentence was not carried out, and a certain Thomas Purchase from Brunswick, Maine, coming to Boston, married her, and all three went back to Brunswick for the winter. Gardiner remained there with them until the following summer, consoling himself in the long winter, as transpired in a law suit nine years later, with a stolen warming pan.
By August 15, 1632, he had appeared at Bristol, England, and in the effort of Gorges to break the Massachusetts charter before the Privy Council in January 1632/3.
Personality
The Knight and his lawfully wedded wives disappear; and history records only the death, many years after, of Mary Grove, the “known harlot, ” who lived the rest of her life a respectable married woman on the Androscoggin and became “the little lady with golden hair” of Longfellow’s poem.
