John Alden, Jr. was the son of John Alden, Sr. and Priscilla Mullins Alden, who settled in Plymouth Colony in 1620, arriving on the Pilgrim ship Mayflower. He was a sea captain, a merchant in Boston, and a charter member of Rev. Samuel Willard’s Old South Meeting House and Third Church in Boston, and held a military command during King William’s War. He married Elizabeth Phillips Everill and they had fourteen children. John Alden, Jr. was involved in a number of scandals and controversies. The only one to bring much modern attention, however, occurred in Salem when he stopped there on his return home from Quebec, where he had gone in February 1692 to ransom British prisoners captured in the Candlemas attack on York, Maine. He was subsequently accused of witchcraft during the Salem witch trials in May 1692. He had been inclined not to make much of the matter, but was prevailed upon by some friends and broke out of jail. He escaped to Duxbury, where he stayed with friends until, as he later said, “the public had reclaimed the use of its reason”. When he returned, he was cleared by proclamation. The authorities do not seem to have searched for him with any diligence; one of the judges, Samuel Sewall, an old friend, is known to have expressed doubts about his guilt, and attended a prayer service at Alden’s house in the hope of receiving guidance. His vivid first-hand narrative of the witchcraft trials was later published by Robert Calef in More Wonders of the Invisible World. Alden recounts how he appealed to his friend Bartholomew Gedney, one of the judges, to clear his character; Gedney replied coldly that he had always looked on Alden as an honest man, but now must alter his opinion. Alden said that he hoped in time to change Gedney’s opinion again: unlike another socially prominent eyewitness, Nathaniel Cary, he never cast doubt on the judges’ integrity, although he referred to the afflicted girls with contempt as “juggling wenches”. As he noted, much of their alleged evidence against him was simply gossip which they had presumably picked up from their parents. X
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