Reverend Stephen Batchelder - Scarlet Letter

9th Great-Grandfather

It has been suggested that his last wife was who the book "The Scarlet Letter" was written about.

This grandfather was known for his spitfire.  He did not like the way the Church of England treat its parishioners and was quite open with his opinions which is probably why he was always in trouble.  He eventually left England and went to Holland and then on to New England where he organized a church.  Even here he did not get along with his authorities because he found the Puritans doing the exact same thing to the New Englanders that the Puritans did not like in England.
His last wife did not live in the same end of the house as he did and yet she had a child.  Everyone knew that this child was not Stephen's.  She was brought up with  charges of adultery and was branded with an A for her punishment.
Read the links and you will find a fascinating man that is someone to be proud of.

This is taken from  http://www.cyberancestors.com/cummins/ps02/ps02_463.htm

"Shortly after his arrival in New England in 1632, Stephen Bachiler settled at Saugus (later to be called Lynn), where he immediately began to organize a church. Over the next four years Bachiler and a portion of his congregation were repeatedly at odds with the rest of the congregation and with the colony authorities, and by early 1636 Bachiler had ceased to minister at Lynn ...
... As had happened throughout his life, controversy soon arose. In 1641 Winthrop reported that Bachiler "being about 80 years of age, and having a lusty comely woman to his wife, did solicit the chastity of his neighbor's wife" , and this led to an attack on him by Dalton and a large portion of the Hampton congregation. These charges were apparently not resolved at the time, but in 1643-4, when the town of Exeter invited Bachiler to be their minister, the affair was raised again, and this was sufficient to prevent his removal to that church .
At about this time Bachiler's ministry at Hampton ceased, and he soon moved to Strawberry Bank , where he remained until his return to England.
On 9 April 1650 at a Quarterly Court held at Salisbury, "Mr. Steven Bacheller fined for not publishing his marriage according to law." At the same court it was ordered "that Mr. Bacherler and Mary his wife shall live together, as they publicly agreed to do, and if either desert the other, the marshal to take them to Boston to be kept until next quarter Court of Assistants, to consider a divorce.... In case Mary Bacheller live out of this jurisdiction without mutual consent for a time, notice of her absence to be given the magistrates at Boston" .
On 15 October 1650 at a court at York "George Rodgers & Mrs. Batcheller presented upon vehement suspicion of incontinency for living in one house together & lying in one room" . At a court at Piscataqua on 16 October 1651 the grand jury presented "George Rogers for, & Mary Batcheller the wife of Mr. Steven Bacheller minister for adultery"; George Rogers was to have forty strokes, and Mary Bachiler "for her adultery shall receive 40 strokes save one at the first town meeting held at Kittery six weeks after the delivery & be branded with the letter A" . This child born late in 1651 or early in 1652 was apparently the Mary Bachiler who later married William Richards, and even though the Dover Court on 26 March 1673 awarded him administration of the estate of Stephen Bachiler , she would not have been his daughter.
Stephen Bachiler returned to England after these events...
Among many remarkable lives lived by early New Englanders, Bachiler's is the most remarkable. From 1593, when he was cited before Star Chamber, until 1654, when he last makes a mark on New England records, this man lived a completely independent and vigorous life, never acceding to any authority when he thought he was correct. Along with Nathaniel Ward of Ipswich, Stephen Bachiler was one of the few Puritan ministers active in Elizabethan times to survive to come to New England. As such he was a man out of his times, for Puritanism in Elizabethan times was different from what it became in the following century, and this disjunction may in part account for Bachiler's stormy career in New England . But Nathaniel Ward did not have anything like as much trouble, and most of Bachiler's conflicts may be ascribed to his own unique character."

LINKS

Stephen Bachiler entry from the book "Piscataqua Pioneers : Selected Biographies of Early Settlers in Northern New England" published in 2000 by the Piscataqua Pioneers organization of the Seacoast.
"Our Fascinating Ancestor Stephen Bachiler" by Eleanor Campbell Schoen, 1999.
"Reverend Stephen Bachiler of Hampton: Some Additional Information", by George Freeman Sanborn, Jr., 1991.
"The Reverend Stephen Bachiler - Saint or Sinner?", by Philip Mason Marston, 1961.
"An Unforgiven Puritan", by Victor C. Sanborn, 1917.
"The Hard Case of the Founder of Old Hampton : Wrongs of Rev. Stephen Bachiler", by Frank B. Sanborn, 1900.
"Rev. Stephen Bachiler", an earlier article by Victor C. Sanborn, 1898.
Rev. Stephen Bachiler by Charles E. Batchelder, 1892.
"Father and Founder of the Town", from Joseph Dow's History of Hampton, 1892.
The Dalton and Batcheller Pedigree, by William H. Whitmroe, 1863.
Excerpts on the Rev. Stephen Bachiler from the History of Lynn by Alonzo Lewis, 1829.
Stephen Bachiler's Coat of Arms
A Red-hot 'A' and a Lusting Divine: Sources For The Scarlet Letter, New England Quarterly article from 1987 which examines the possibility that Bachiler's fourth wife was the inspiration for Hester Prynne in Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter.
The Sanborn Genealogy by V.C. Sanborn has a long section on Rev. Bachiler.

BOOKS

Full text of "Batchelder, Batcheller genealogy. Descendants of Rev. Stephen Bachiler, of England ... who settled the town of New Hampton, N.H., and Joseph, Henry, Joshua and John Batcheller of Essex Co., Mass"

http://archive.org/stream/batchelderbatche00pier/batchelderbatche00pier_djvu.txt