Hollis St Church - Puritan - Mather Byles Sr

274-284 Tremont St, Boston, MA 02116

As the siege of Boston ended in March 1776, about 1,100 Loyalists and their families sailed from the town with the British military forces. Otherwise, the Boston Tories had their properties confiscated, and their contributions to colonial Massachusetts denigrated. Very little is preserved of what happened to those who remained. Except Reverend Doctor Mather Byles Senior, cousin to Rev. Samuel Mather who remained under home arrest until his death.

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Byles was well-respected for his quick mind and sharp tongue. And while they groaned at his incessant puns, they delighted at tea-tables and coffee houses in sharing the latest Byles witticisms among themselves. There was a little doggerel ballad about Boston’s ministers circulated in the town and made everyone chuckle that highlighted this kidding aspect of his personality. This was true as even during his judiciary trial he was cracking jokes.

“There’s punning Byles invokes our smiles,
A man of stately parts;
He visits folks to crack his jokes,
Which never mend their hearts.
With strutting gait, and wig so great,
He walks along the streets,
And throws out wit, or what’s like it,
To every one he meets.”

In 1775 Byles was 68 and a congregationalist (Puritan) minister at the Eighth Congregational Church (called the Hollis Street Church) in Boston. He would not budge from insisting that a man could be simultaneously a dissenting Congregationalist and a loyal British subject of the king. Due to that and his firm stance on his sermons remaining politically neutral, after the war he was targeted by the other Puritan Ministers. Charles Chauncy of First Church seems to have instigated the movement to oust Byles from his position. All of Boston’s other Congregationalist ministers were in Chauncy’s camp politically, as were most of their colleagues elsewhere in New England.

By July 1777 after two trials, one religious sham and one political, he had been expelled from his ministry, convicted by the revolutionary Committee of Safety as a dangerous person, and placed under house arrest and the guard of an armed sentry. His crime: making disdainful jokes about the rebels and their cause. During the siege someone carefully recorded what he had said in passing and this was used in his trials. Some examples of these are in 1770, when the Boston Massacre place, he had famously asked a friend, “Tell me, my young friend, which is better—to be ruled by one tyrant three thousand miles away, or by three thousand tyrants not a mile away?” and he said “that the town would be inhabited by a better sort of people than those who had left it” once the colonists evacuated under the siege.

News of this dismissal on political grounds, with no council called and no theological charges brought, spread rapidly. This troubled clergymen throughout the region as it was unprecedented and improperly done. Afterwards he faced a political trial. John Eliot wrote about that trial: “The evidence was much more in favour of him than against him. All that could be proved was that he is a silly, impertinent, childish person.”

Still, he was tried and convicted, ending with him being named as one of 29 Loyalists deemed dangerous to the state in 1777. He went under house-arrest, and they posted an armed sentry at the house. As Loyalists were nicknamed Tories Byles immediately dubbed the sentry “My Observe-a-Tory.” He and his family remained stubborn Loyalists to the end.

What fruitage did these spiritual leaders produce? Mt 7:15-20. Consider John 17:16 vs Acts 20:29, 30. What would Jesus have said seeing this?

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For the Church itself, the original location is about 813 Washington St Boston. “The terrible fire of 1787 laid waste the whole of the region around Hollis Street. This fire cost the town a hundred houses, of which sixty were dwellings. The British, it is said, on their retreat from the works on the Neck left a rear-guard at Hollis Street, who had orders, if the Americans broke through the tacit convention between Washington and Howe, to fire a train laid to Hollis Street Church, which had served them as a barrack.” There is no proof of this and the fire is attributed to starting in a Malt House and exacerbated by dry and windy weather. By 1876 both Hollis St and Hanover St (Methodist) churches have had three churches erected on the same spot in Boston. Whereas the New North, Old South, Brattle Square, Bromfield Street, Bulfinch Street, West, Baldwin Place, Phillips, Maverick, and Trinity churches, Baptist Bethel, and King's Chapel, were the second edifices on the same site.

-Source Links-

http://commonplace.online/article/a-loyalist-guarded-re-guarded-and-disregarded/

https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/siege-of-boston-map.htm

For really incredible depictions of colonial personalities and what it was like to live at that time in Boston see “commonplace online” link under the heading “Father and Don under Siege: Boston, 1775-1776”

https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/public/gdcmassbookdig/oldhistoric00drake/oldhistoric00drake.pdf page 412-416

https://guides.bpl.org/bostonfires

https://www.digitalcommonwealth.org/search/commonwealth:37720m301 Hollis St old