Marital drama, murder, and madness are themes that permeate a good novel. Interestingly, they also relate to the non-fiction account of Jonathan Edwards's extended family. Ava Chamberlain's The Notorious Elizabeth Tuttle: Marriage, Murder, and Madness is a meticulously researched microhistory that focuses on the paternal grandmother of Jonathan Edwards. Chamberlain seeks to rewrite the history of the Edwards family by revising the historically unfavorable depiction of Elizabeth Tuttle perpetuated by her husband Richard Edwards.
After the introduction, the first two chapters chronicle the emigration of the Tuttle and Edwards families from England to America, leading up to the wedding of Richard Edwards and Elizabeth Tuttle on November 19, 1667. Almost a year after their marriage, the couple was called before the Hartford magistrates and fined for a child born out of wedlock. Here is where the narrative heats up: Richard denied paternity of the baby, claiming that another man had impregnated his wife. Nevertheless, the court ruled that Richard was the father, and the couple was forced to uphold their marriage vows.
In chapter 3, Chamberlain tells the story of the brutal murder of Elizabeth's sister Sarah, committed by her brother Benjamin in 1676. After receiving a severe scolding from his sister one evening, Benjamin stormed out of the house, returning with an ax, which he used to bash in the skull of his sister while her four children watched in horror. Paying the price for his crime, he was hanged on June 13, 1677. Chamberlain points to this murder as the impetus for further problems in the Tuttle family.
Tragedy continues for the Tuttle family in chapter 4. One of the Tuttle boys, David, is pronounced a lunatic by the courts and another shocking murder is performed by a Tuttle. This time it is Mercy, who brutally kills her son Samuel on the morning of June 23, 1691. Mercy had performed her daily chores of starting a fire and letting the cows out to pasture before proceeding to strike her seventeen-year-old son with an ax repeatedly until her husband managed to wrestle away the weapon from her grip. Through detailed research and analysis Chamberlain posits that Mercy had been previously traumatized by the death of her brother and sister. Perhaps determining that the world looked bleak for her children, Mercy seemingly wanted to save them from growing up in such an environment. Pronounced mentally unstable, Mercy was spared from execution, but presumably spent the rest of her days incarcerated.
Chapter 5 forms the heart of the book, centering on the divorce of Richard and Elizabeth. Richard Edwards first attempted to divorce Elizabeth in 1689, after twenty years of marriage and raising five children. In his petition, Richard complained that his rebellious wife withheld sex, and admitted to him that she had sex with another man before they were married. Adding spice to this already zesty story, there is evidence that Richard sought sexual satisfaction elsewhere rather than enduring abstinence. He seems to have had an adulterous affair with a woman named Mary Talcott, who later became his second wife. Eventually, he convinced the Connecticut General Assembly to grant him a divorce in 1691, close to the time of Mercy's murder.
Chapter 6 is relatively brief, disclosing Richard Edwards's final wishes before his death in 1718. By that time he had become a prominent lawyer, married into an affluent family, and used his second wife's connections to amass a sizable estate. Meanwhile, Elizabeth Tuttle disappeared into obscurity after her divorce, with no further records of her whereabouts. For his part, Timothy Edwards chose sides with his father, lionizing him in a memorial as a near-perfect parent who overcame a “very Great and sore tryal” (the only hint that Richard Edwards had not lived an exemplary life) to become a prominent man in New England society. Timothy went on to marry Esther Stoddard in 1694, the daughter of the legendary pastor Solomon Stoddard.
In the final chapter, Chamberlain explains how the eugenics movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries reawakened an interest in Elizabeth Tuttle. For years, Jonathan Edwards's early biographers either knew nothing of Tuttle's notorious role in the Edwards family, or ignored her entirely. But in 1930, with the publication of Henry Bamford Parkes's Jonathan Edwards: The Fiery Puritan, Elizabeth Tuttle resurfaced once again as a prominent figure in the Edwards family drama. Key to this renewed interest in Tuttle is the organization of Connecticut state records. Yet despite the availability of these records, Chamberlain complains, Edwards's biographers, including Ola Elizabeth Winslow, Perry Miller, and even George Marsden, continued to propagate the myth of Edwards's crazy grandmother without properly considering her side of the story.
American religious scholars and Jonathan Edwards enthusiasts will thoroughly enjoy this book, even if the title is somewhat misleading since only one chapter is devoted to Elizabeth Tuttle. It would be more appropriate to highlight the veracity of the subtitle, which directs readers to the controversial elements that haunt the Edwards family. The main strength of this book is the extraordinary research performed by Chamberlain which is apparent throughout the monograph. The many helpful footnotes of primary and secondary sources provide substantial evidence from which Chamberlain accomplishes what many scholars would consider an impossible task: writing a story about a woman who left behind no manuscripts. Because Chamberlain does not have all the pieces to this intricate puzzle, she must fill in some substantial holes in her narrative of Elizabeth Tuttle. Yet Chamberlain's thesis, though at times based on conjecture, is plausible given the detailed court records that exist. The overall result is inspiring. At the very least, her monograph should be appreciated as a foil to the plentiful trade books that roll off the presses each year which show little or no interaction with manuscripts and primary sources, and simply repackage the same stories in a different style of prose.
