William Phips Home, Site of

William Phips was the royal governor of the Province of Massachusetts Bay for the duration of the Salem witch trials, appointed by The Crown in early 1692. As such, he played a crucial role in the events: in May, he created an emergency court, the Court of Oyer and Terminer, to hear the alarming number of witchcraft cases, and in October, he started to bring the terrible ordeal to an end when he disbanded that court. With the creation of the Supreme Court of Judicature at the end of the year, which heard the remaining cases in early 1693, spectral evidence was no longer accepted and it became almost impossible to convict those accused. At the end of January, 1693, on the eve of another hanging day to execute eight more convicted “witches,” Phips reprieved all, to the great displeasure of Chief Justice William Stoughton.

What Phips’s involvement was beyond that is hard to say. He later claimed he was absent from most of the proceedings. From the records, it seems he was more of a seafaring adventurer than a political powerhouse. Phips was a successful treasure hunter in the 1680s and, in 1690, led two expeditions to Canada, two years before the witch hysteria began.

When appointed governor, Phips was not a typical candidate for the job. It may have been Chief Justice (and Lieutenant Governor) William Stoughton was the real acting governor of Massachusetts during the trials. In two letters sent to the English government near the end of the tragic events, Phips pointed out that, after creating the Court of Oyer and Terminer, he was away, commanding the army “at the Eastern part of the Province, for the French and Indians had made an attack upon some of our Fronteer Towns.” When he returned he found many more accused, many executed, and many still in jail. He brought an end to the affair, and then defended his actions to the English authorities. Perhaps Phips had more compassion than others in power: “When I put an end to the Court, there were at least fifty persons in prison in great misery by reason of the extream cold and their poverty, most of them having only spectre evidence against them …” The fact that Governor Phips’s own wife was accused of being a witch (although never arrested) in the fall of 1692 also likely influenced his decision to bring things to an end. When the trials were over, after having made a dangerous enemy of William Stoughton, Joseph Dudley, and others (Dudley would become a future Massachusetts governor), Phips found his leadership questioned, with accusations of corruption, physical altercations, and bad manners. “Recalled to England to answer the charges of his critics,” says historian Emerson Baker, “he died of a fever in London in early 1695.” The charges were never heard. William Phips was only 44 years old.

William Phips was born in Maine’s Kennebec region in 1651. His father, a gunsmith, died when William was four but, despite his poverty and lack of education, Phips was an ambitious young man who moved from sheep-herding to ship carpentry, made his way to Boston, went to sea and rose from cabin boy to ship captain with alacrity. His dream, he told his wife Mary Spencer Hull, who he married in 1673, was to be “captain of a king’s ship and owner of a fair brick house on the Green Lane of North Boston.” He achieved both.

Phips first gained fame as a treasure hunter. On more than one occasion he discovered sunken shipwrecks. His biggest success was in 1687 when, as commander of a king’s ship, he discovered treasure from a Spanish galleon worth more than £200,000 sterling. Phips’s share was £11,000, and it earned him notoriety and a knighthood. King James also gave him the job of Provost Marshal General, or Chief Sheriff, in the new Gov. Edmund Andros regime in the Dominion of New England. When Sir Phips returned to Boston in 1688, he was celebrated by many and was well-known to people in power, among them, the Mathers, whose North Church he would one day join and have a canopied “governor’s pew.”

How did Phips gain the governorship? England had revoked the charter of Massachusetts Bay Colony, the document by which it operated, in 1684; the Mother Country thought that Massachusetts was exerting too much independence from the Mother C0untry. Edmund Andros became governor by late 1686. Although theoretically working in the new administration, Phips was not an Andros supporter. Phips and Rev. Increase Mather, and others, worked together to bring Andros down. After the Glorious Revolution in England, which installed the Protestant leadership of King William and Queen Mary, the Anglican Andros was arrested and shipped back to England. Phips, meanwhile, traveled to England to seek permission for a new expedition against Quebec while Increase Mather went to England to obtain a new charter for Massachusetts.

Mather championed Phips to be the next royal governor of the province. When the new charter was complete, it was Increase Mather and William Phips who brought it to Massachusetts in mid-May 1692, only to find the prisons overflowing with accused witches. Thus, the Court of Oyer and Terminer was created, and the Salem witch trials were underway in earnest.

Phips’s dream of living in a “fine brick house in the Green Lane of North Boston” came true after his treasure discovery, when he was wealthy enough to afford it. Says author Annie Haven Thwing in her 1920 book The Crooked and Narrow Streets of the Town of Boston 1630-1822, “In 1687 Sir William Phips bought the house … of Daniel Turell.” It was his wife Mary, who often handled her husband’s business while he was away at sea, who found and negotiated the purchase of the property. When William died in 1695, his widow Mary wed magistrate Peter Sergeant.

What was known as Green Lane in Phips’s day is today Salem Street in the North End. An illustrated map in Thwing’s book mentioned above shows Phips’s house on the westerly corner of Charter and Salem Streets.

The site is approximately at 200 Salem Street / 42 Charter Street.