One of my ancestors was hanged in chains at West Point, Virginia, in March 1677, for his part in Bacon’s Rebellion. For a while our family tree also gave him a respectable English father — a Gloucestershire clergyman who, it turns out, never existed in that role. This is a story about both men: the rebel the records prove, and the parson they refute.
A woman named Ann Cotton, writing to a friend about the aftermath of the rebellion, put it in one breath: “Anthony Arnall the same that did live at your house hanged in chaines at West Point.” That sentence, preserved in Peter Force’s tracts, is as close as we get to hearing a neighbor say his name.
Anthony Arnold was a planter in New Kent County, Virginia — his land turns up in the patent books of the 1660s along Black Creek and the Mattaponi River, next to an Indian field called Rockahockaw. Where he came from, nobody knows; a county historian who worked these records confessed flatly that “what his old-world background [was], is not known.” In 1676 he joined Nathaniel Bacon’s rising against Governor Berkeley — the largest rebellion in the American colonies before the Revolution, and not a simple story: the same movement that defied a royal governor also demanded a freer hand for war against Virginia’s Native people. I don’t get to pick which half my ancestor signed up for. He was, one county record says, “an enthusiastic follower of Nathaniel Bacon and a member of his army.”
The crown noticed him specifically. The King’s commissioners advised “the hanging in chains in his own county of one Arnold, a horrible resolved rebel and traitor” — chains being the extra step, reserved for men whose bodies were meant to stay visible as a warning. The court record in Hening’s Statutes at Large is almost gentle by comparison: convicted of “divers rebellions, treasons and misdemeanors” on the 9th of March, 1677; “Sentance of death therefore past upon him according to forme.— 15th Instant.” He was executed on March 15th with the other condemned rebels, and for years afterward the assembly kept writing his name into its acts of pardon — as one of the men excepted from them, “wholly excepted and foreprized,” his estate forfeit to the King.
Which brings us to the document this whole branch of the family hangs from. In the Calendar of State Papers for 1677 there is an entry, one page long, that reads in full:
“Petition of the four poor distressed orphans of Anthony Arnold to the
Commissioners for Virginia. For restitution of their father’s small estate, who
was executed for being concerned in Bacon’s rebellion.”
Four orphans. The petition does not name a single one of them.
Eleven years later, in 1688, a Benjamin Arnold was granted 1,754 acres in New Kent County on the north side of the Mattaponi — land the patent itself describes as “formerly granted to Major Taylor and sold to Anthony Arnold, dec’d.” The traitor’s land, back in Arnold hands. By 1691 Benjamin is solid enough that the Chickahominy Indians petition the House of Burgesses “that they may continue on the Land of Mr Ben. Arnold” — a sentence worth sitting with, because it means the restored plantation was ground the Chickahominy still lived on, and now they had to ask.
Here is the honest part, and I want it on the record the way I want all our weak joints on the record: no surviving document says Benjamin was Anthony’s son. The historian Elizabeth Hawes Ryland, who knew these files as well as anyone, wrote that the confiscated lands were restored to Benjamin “though nowhere is he actually stated to have been a son of the condemned man.” A teenager at the time of the hanging — born about 1661, by the tree’s reckoning — getting the attainted man’s own acres back is about as strong as inference gets, and every historian of the county has accepted it. But it is an inference, and our tree grades it as one. (The family histories, meanwhile, preserve a competing tradition that Benjamin was “a German,” which Ryland reports with an almost audible sigh: “I know of no authority for the statement.”)
Now for the counterfeit parson.
For years our tree gave Anthony a father: the Rev. Thomas Arnold of Westbury-on-Severn, Gloucestershire, born 1599 — a tidy English clergyman to stand at the head of the line. When we audited the branch, the first verdict was dramatic: the profile was flagged as sitting inside a named Victorian forgery — the fake Arnold pedigree that Horatio Gates Somerby compiled in 1870 for a rich New York merchant, running the family back to Ynir, King of Gwentland, a twelfth-century Welsh prince. Somerby is the most notorious pedigree-faker of his century, and the demolition of that particular fake is a genealogical classic: Edson Salisbury Jones got custody of Somerby’s original manuscript and more than a hundred of his English search books, found “no proof” anywhere in them, and in 1902 personally traveled to Northover in Somerset — because the “Northover, co. Dorset” in Somerby’s pedigree does not appear on any map of England.
A con man in the family tree! It was almost a prize. But this project has a rule: a provenance judgment gets checked like any other claim. So before deleting anyone we read the forgery itself and its demolition, in full. And the famous fake has zero overlap with our fake parson — wrong county, wrong parish, no clergyman, no Virginia. The word “Westbury” does not occur in Somerby’s pedigree even once. Our error turned out to be a plainer, humbler thing, catalogued in the Arnold family’s own 1935 genealogy: a real Thomas Arnold, baptised April 1599, who stayed in England his whole life and is “by many erroneously considered the Thomas Arnold who also settled in Rhode Island.” Somebody, somewhere upstream of us, borrowed that man, made him a reverend, and stood him behind a Virginia rebel he never knew existed. He has been ruled off our tree. We nearly published a conviction of a genuine con man for a forgery he didn’t commit — which is its own kind of genealogical error, and I’d rather admit it than hide it.
One last twist. Westbury-on-Severn was not invented either. The 1623 Visitation of Gloucestershire records a real Arnold family seated at Westbury, Minsterworth and Churcham — including, in the year 1623, an “Anthony Arnold of Minsterworth” who declined to claim the rank of gentleman. Our Anthony surfaces in Virginia some three decades later, origins unknown. Is there a thread between a Gloucestershire parish losing its gentry status and a Mattaponi planter who died rather than beg the King’s pardon? I have no bridging record and I am not going to pretend otherwise. But for the first time, “unknown” comes with a specific parish register worth opening. When I’ve read it, I’ll write down what it says — either way.
How this line runs down to me
- Anthony Arnold of New Kent County (executed 15 March 1677) — by strong inference, though no record states it, the father of
- Benjamin Arnold (c. 1661–1723) of “Presqu’Isle,” King William County, who recovered the forfeited land in 1688
- His daughter Ann Arnold (c. 1705–1781) married Col. Joseph Temple (1699–1749), a Bristol-born merchant — Presqu’Isle came into the Temple family with her, and Arnold’s Ferry on the Mattaponi became Temple’s Ferry
- Their son Joseph Temple (1739–1826), then his son John Temple (1771–1812) — the same John Temple who married Mary Latané of Langlee — and down the Temple line to me. Ann Arnold is my sixth-great-grandmother; the hanged man, if the inference holds, my eighth-great-grandfather.
Anthony Arnold’s own page in the family wing holds the records behind this story: owentemple.com/family/people/i538.html. The full working tree is on Ancestry — Anthony Arnold’s profile there (sign-in required; Ancestry’s rule, not mine).
Sources
- Hening, The Statutes at Large (Virginia), vol. II, pp. 370, 461, 550 — attainder, exception from pardon, and the March 1677 conviction and sentence
- Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, America and West Indies, 1677–1680, nos. 106, 143, 513 — the hanging-in-chains recommendation, the orphans’ petition, and the inventory of delinquents’ estates
- Journals of the House of Burgesses of Virginia, 1659/60–1693, pp. 246, 343 — the forfeited estate (1684) and the Chickahominy petition on Benjamin Arnold’s land (1691)
- Nugent, Cavaliers and Pioneers, vol. I — Anthony Arnold’s New Kent County land in the patent abstracts of the 1660s
- Elizabeth Hawes Ryland, King William County, Virginia, from Old Newspapers and Files (1955) — Presqu’Isle, Arnold’s Ferry, the An. Cotton letter (after Force’s Tracts), and the statement that the Anthony–Benjamin link is nowhere recorded
- Cox & Weathers, Old Houses of King and Queen County, Virginia — the 1688 patent recital
- “Mr. Somerby’s Genealogy of the Arnold Family,” NEHGR 33 (1879), pp. 432–438; Edson Salisbury Jones, “The Parentage of William Arnold and Thomas Arnold of Providence, R.I.,” NEHGR 69 (1915), pp. 64–67; The Arnold Memorial (1935), p. 43
- The Visitation of the County of Gloucester, 1623 (Harleian Society) — the Arnolds of Westbury-on-Severn, Minsterworth and Churcham
- VMHB 18 (1910), p. 89 — “Joseph m. Ann, dau. of Benjamin Arnal [Arnold]”