The Apologia of Robert Keayne
1950; Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture; Volume: 7; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/1917047
ISSN1933-7698
Autores Tópico(s)American Constitutional Law and Politics
ResumoHOUGH I have undergone many censures since I came hither, wrote Robert Keayne of Boston in i653, according to mens uncharitable and various apprehentions ... I have laboured to beare it with patience and to approve my heart and wayes to God that judgeth righteously; yet these things hath made me the more willing to cleare myself in all material things in this my last testamt; though it be somewhat contrary to the nature of a will, yet I am willing to leave this upon publique record as a just defense for myself knowing that a will wilbe read and made knowne and may be p[er]used searched or coppied out by any when other writings wilbe more hid and obscured.' Three years later Robert Keayne was dead. When his executors came to open this Last Will and Testament they found not only a complicated allocation of his worldly goods but an outpouring of long suppressed indignation, a helter-skelter apologia pro vita sua and a reiterated demand that justice be done him even if only in memory. It had taken him five months to write out the document, and when the will was copied into the first volume of the probate records of Suffolk County it filled no less than I58 pages. Robert Keayne has been remembered because one Goody Sherman insisted that the unpopular merchant had made off with her sow and because the magistrates in the General Court insisted on retaining a negative vote against the more numerous representatives who sided with Mrs. Sherman. The legislature of the Bay Colony thus came to sit in two bodies, and Robert Keayne found a place in American institutional history.2
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