In his notebook for Friday, July 13, 1838, Nathaniel Hawthorne recorded his notion to create a fiction about the destructive Judge Royall Tyler and his victim, Elizabeth Hunt Palmer:   "A political or other satire might be made by describing a show of wax-figures of the prominent public men; and, by the remarks of the showman and the spectators, their characters and public standing might be expressed.  And the incident of Judge Tyler as related by E----- might be introduced."

In The House of the Seven Gables, Nathaniel Hawthorne creates the criminal and lascivious Judge Jaffrey Pyncheon.  The real-life model for this fiction was the Brattleboro resident Chief Justice Royall Tyler.  Judge Tyler died in August 1826 in the house at the corner of Park Place and Putney Road, after a twelve-year wasting away of his face beginning in 1814  -  first the nose, then the jaw and the eye.  Knowing that Tyler was gruesomely forced to swallow his own sloughing tissues, Hawthorne made his Judge Pyncheon die of a family curse  -  "God will give him blood to drink!"

Royall Tyler (cancer lesions)

Nathaniel Hawthorne's mother-in-law Elizabeth Palmer, Mrs. Nathaniel Peabody, wrote about Royall Tyler and his relations with her sister Mary Palmer, in the November 1833 Christian Examiner article entitled "Seduction":

"We hope we deserve to be called pure, in some good degree; but to us it did not seem to be pure for a polished man of literary eminence, to enter the sanctuary of sleeping innocence, of absolute childhood, for the basest purpose. We did see it, however, and though more than forty years have since passed by, we recollect with almost incredible vividness the shudder of terror and disgust which then shook our infant frame. We have traced the career of that man. He seduced the woman, whose children he would have corrupted, caused the self-murder of a wife and mother, and afterwards married the daughter of that victim. He is dead, and the horrors of his mind, during a lingering disease, were the dreadful fruits of sin; but not of disgrace, for this man had a good standing in society."

Royall Tyler admitted to his youthfully arrogant and dissolute life, but only regretted the limitations which his seedy past placed upon his career and later ambitions. The basic allegations, never disputed or denied, include his declaring his marital intentions upon Mary first when he was twenty and she was two years old, and repeating these intentions when she was eleven, calling her then "my little wife". These intentions Tyler carried out with an aggressively connived and secret marriage in 1794, designed to avoid the personal and political embarrassment of their child conceived out of wedlock.

Before this final marriage to his "bird in a cage"  -  as he referred to Mary  -  Tyler committed repeated "youthful indiscretions". His illegitimate son Royal Morse was born in 1779 to Katharine Morse, a well-known "character", the sweeper and cleaning woman in the Harvard College buildings, the fact recorded by John Langdon Sibley, the long-time Harvard librarian and historian.

Tyler later fathered at least one daughter, Sophia, born in 1786, and possibly another daughter, Catherine, born in 1791, on Mary Palmer's mother Elizabeth Hunt, Mrs. Joseph Pearse Palmer, when her husband was absent for a considerable time.

The "self-murder" referred to by Elizabeth Palmer (Peabody) may be to an abortion of another child by Tyler. (Her reference to "the dreadful fruits of sin" may be to syphilis). Judge Tyler had excellent reasons to try to discourage biographers, saying, "I do not thank the author who pursues his hero into the recesses of domestic life, and exhibits the disgusting infirmities of our common nature."

That great friend of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, fully comprehended the secrets in The House of the Seven Gables, and so asks in Moby Dick; or, The Whale: "Who's to doom, when the judge himself is dragged to the bar?"

If the central conflict in The House of the Seven Gables is that between Hepzibah and Jaffrey Pyncheon, and if Royall Tyler is Jaffrey and Elizabeth Hunt Palmer is Hepzibah, then the historic house that inspired Hawthorne is Elizabeth Hunt Palmer's boardinghouse. What is the evidence for this?

The Salem tourist attraction which presents itself as "The House of the Seven Gables" had only three gables remaining by 1905. In the ploy to garner more tourist dollars, an architect was hired to add all the "missing" gables, including one built in the wrong place. Scholars politely but firmly looked the other way.

While Hawthorne had indeed visited his kinswoman Susannah Ingersoll at this Salem mansion built in 1668 by Captain John Turner, and learned its history from her, still, for the purposes of honest scholarship, the proposed connection between Hawthorne's romance and this Salem house remains unconvincing. This has been an academic embarrassment for over one century.

The Beacon Street Mansion in 1722, 1728, 1769 in Boston

One solution lies in the Elizabeth Hunt Palmer boardinghouse, operating in 1784 on the north side of Beacon Street. This house is pictured on several old Boston maps in 1722, 1728, and 1769, engraved for Capt. John Bonner and for William Burgess. These drawings are shown above, in detail. All three maps show the ancient house's three gables that face south  -  the remaining gables are not represented.

Mary Palmer, the widow of Judge Royall Tyler, recalled her grandmother Palmer's boardinghouse:  "We lived in a house which made the corner of School Street and Beacon Street, opposite the splendid dwellings of Mr. Samuel Phillips and Gov. Bowdoin." She points out that School Street "in the eighteenth century, ran as far as the present Somerset St., not laid out until 1801."    Mary also knew that her mother resented Royall Tyler's securing a financial interest in her boardinghouse by paying her debts.

The owner of this Beacon Street land was Robert Turner, the owner of the Blue Anchor tavern on Washington Street  -  Robert Turner, the father of that same Captain John Turner who built the Salem mansion in 1668.

Robert Turner owned eight acres of pasture land on Beacon Hill, formerly Sentry Hill, which he divided into three lots willed to his sons, Captain John Turner and Ephraim Turner, and to his son-in-law, John Fayerweather, the husband to Sarah Turner. It appears from this will (see below) that the house of John Fayerweather had been built by 1664. This is the gabled house engraved on the eighteenth-century maps of Boston.

During his years of courting Sophia Amelia Peabody  -  the granddaughter of Elizabeth Hunt Palmer  -  Nathaniel Hawthorne lived in two places within one city block of this ancient gabled house  -  at the Tremont House in the summer of 1838 and at No. 3 Somerset Court from March to autumn 1839. Hawthorne walked along Beacon Street daily, on his way to work at the Boston Custom House, and back to Somerset Court, which is now the east end of Ashburton Place.

Nathaniel Hawthorne must have been curious about the history of this gabled house from his first sight. He probably knew from Susannah Ingersoll that the Turner family had owned the land. Did he learn that Captain John Turner visited his sister Sarah in this house? It is possible that John Turner also had a hand in building this Boston gabled house, before building his own Salem mansion in 1668.

Certainly Hawthorne had heard the account of the destructive Judge Royall Tyler from his wife's mother, Elizabeth Palmer (Peabody), by this time. Elizabeth Hunt Palmer died on January 8, 1838, in Brattleboro, Vermont, six months before the author referred in his notebook for July 13, 1838, to the "incident" about "Judge Tyler." The Palmer-Peabody families were in mourning through the early months of Hawthorne's courtship.

The gravestone for Elizabeth Hunt Palmer in the Prospect Hill Cemetery in Brattleboro, Vermont, has been faded by acid rain almost to illegibility:

Elizabeth
Relict of
Joseph P. Palmer
died
Jan. 8 1838

This neglected boardinghouse keeper's more fitting memorial is as Hepzibah Pyncheon in The House of the Seven Gables, in the Beacon Street, "Half-way down a by-street in one of our New England towns. . . . "

Hawthorne may be describing the specific architectural ornamentation of the Palmer boardinghouse:  "Its whole visible exterior was ornamented with quaint figures, conceived in the grotesqueness of a Gothic fancy, and drawn or stamped in the glittering plaster, composed of lime, pebbles, and bits of glass, with which the wood-work of the walls was overspread." and with "On the triangular portion of the gable that fronted next the street, was a dial . . . on which the sun was still marking the passage of the first bright hour in a history. . . . "

The Hepzibah Pyncheon character is also based, in a minor way, on another Hawthorne kinswoman named Hepzibah Clarke, Mrs. James Swan. James Swan had spent twenty-two years in a Paris prison for debt, and when he was finally released, he died shortly therafter. With his penchant for the "moral picturesque," Hawthorne may have associated Swan with his Clifford Pyncheon.

Hepzibah Clarke  -  the granddaughter and daughter of Hepzibah Williams and Hepzibah Barrett, and the mother of Hepzibah Swan  -  was noted for her distinctive black lace-trimmed turban. The outdated turban is characteristic of the proprietress of the Seven Gables. Both Hepzibah Clark and Hawthorne's mother, Elizabeth Clarke Manning, shared the common ancestor Thomas Clarke of Ipswich.

Hawthorne's landlady at the boardinghouse, known widely as "Clarke's Place" at No. 3 Somerset Court, was Rebecca Parker Hull, the widow of Samuel Clarke Jr. Rebecca's deceased husband was the nephew of Hepzibah Clarke (see family chart below).   Hawthorne almost certainly first heard about Hepzibah Clarke from the notoriously gossip-loving raconteur Rebecca. As a youngster, Samuel Clarke, Jr., with his widowed mother, visited the Palmer family in Germantown and later boarded with them in Boston.

Rebecca Parker Hull (Clarke) had accepted Nathaniel Hawthorne as her boarder, although it had been several years since she had closed regular business operations. Her "Clarke's Place" had been famous as a major Boston Transcendental intellectual meeting place, hosting the "Conversations" of Margaret Fuller. Amongst her former tenants had been two of the future sisters-in-law for Nathaniel  -  Elizabeth Peabody and Mary Peabody, later Mrs. Horace Mann.

Rebecca Parker Hull was the daughter of Gen. William Hull, the Revolutionary War hero who had narrowly escaped hanging for the "treason" of surrendering the fort at Detroit during the War of 1812. Rebecca's children were the Rev. James Freeman Clarke and the artist Sarah Freeman Clarke. James Clarke married Nathaniel and Sophia in 1842 and delivered Hawthorne's funeral tribute in Concord in 1864. When James Freeman Clarke built a new chapel for his Church of the Disciples on Freeman Place in 1848, it was on land first owned by Robert Turner.

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The Last Will and Testament of Robert Turner
9^th   5^mo   :   1664

To my sonne, Joseph, I giue my barne beyond Dauid Tilchburnes house; also, a parcell of Ground upon the Hill, to be in breadth at the Front [          ] 3 rods and Lye next to my sonne Johns Diuision, and to Runne through up to M^r Houchyes. Also I Confirme & Bequeathe unto my sonne, Faireweather, the house and land upon the Hill Formerlye Deliuered into his possession. I doe adde unto my s^d sonne, Faireweather, a strippe of Ground about 3 Rod in breadth adjoyning unto M^r Lynes; also my will is, my sonne, Ephraim, shall haue a share of Land upon Center hill next my sonne Fairweather, to be four Rod Broade at the grout & Runne through with the other Diusions. Also to my sonne, John Turner, a portion of the s^d land next to my sonne, Ephraim, to be three rods Broad Equall with my sonne, Joseph.

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John Fayerweather was also a substantial landowner in Boston. In 1681, through inheritance from his father-in-law, Robert Turner, and purchase from his brother-in-law, Ephraim Turner, he owned a house on Beacon Hill with a plot of land 260 feet wide fronting on Beacon Street and extending back 490 feet. The inheritance included also a strip of ground three rods in breadth adjoining Mr. Lynde's. He and his wife Sarah also took over from her father's estate another piece of land between the Bowdoin estate and the State House, measuring 190 feet on Beacon Street, 490 feet on the east line, 140 feet in the rear, and westerly 571 feet on the highway leading to the monument, a total of 2¾ acres. He sold some of the land in 1703; and when he died in 1712, the Beacon Street frontage was described as extending back to Freeman Street, about 300 feet deep.

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Source:

Elizabeth Palmer Peabody; A Reformer on Her Own Terms by Bruce A. Ronda (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Harvard University Press, 1999), pages 11-29.   There is an invaluable exposition here of Nathaniel Cranch Peabody's attempts, after his elder sister Sophia's death in London, to bring some light to these family concerns. Admirable research.

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Royall Tyler's political fame rests on his persecution of the ruined, fugitive farmers of Daniel Shay's Rebellion. Tyler's literary fame rests on "The Contrast" (1787), sometimes said to be "the first American play"  -  influenced by Richard Sheridan's The School for Scandal, and by the repulsive ideas and specious arguments of Bernard de Mandeville, especially in "The Fable of the Bees; or Private Vices, Publick Benefits".

Royall Tyler's social fame rests on his failed and eccentric courtship of Abigail "Nabby" Adams, the daughter of the then-future President John Adams and his wife Abigail. Adams family biographers detail Tyler's emotional excesses and his manipulative, hypocritical, and ugly temper tantrums.

Following the same pattern of courting both mother and daughter with the husband/father absent, that he would use later with more success against the Palmer family, Royall Tyler raised John Adams' resentment. The future President wrote to his wife Abigail, "I don't like this method of courting Mothers. There is something too fantastical and affected in this Business for me. It is not nature, modest virtuous noble nature."

Royall Tyler's father was Royall "Pug Sly" Tyler, Sr., a successful politician well acquainted with the hypocrisies needed to gain public acclaim. Pug Sly had sent John Adams a copy of Mandeville's "The Fable of the Bees", with the comment that Mandeville "understood human nature and mankind better than any man that ever lived . . .   Every man in public life ought to read that book to make him jealous and suspicious, &c."

The Royall Tyler house stands at the corner of Park Street and Putney Road. Sophia Peabody visited here in 1828. Her sister Elizabeth Palmer Peabody visited during the week of July 14, 1854. Henry David Thoreau probably met Mary Palmer Tyler here in 1856. Mrs. Tyler died in 1866. Una Hawthorne very likely recognized this house in 1868.