When the founders of the new Commonwealth came to these shores they brought with them of necessity the laws of the mother country, and so we shall find that the divorce laws of England, as they existed at that time, were the early laws of the colonies of Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay. The Ecclesiastical courts of England were invested with full jurisdiction of all matters of divorce, but from about the year 1601 they had steadily refused to grant an absolute divorce for any cause whatever, although they as constantly granted divorce from bed and board, allusion to which has already been made; that is, they decreed a judicial separation of man and wife, which freed the parties from the society of each other, but at the same time left upon them all the obligations of the marriage vow as to third parties. Finally, when divorce was sought for cause of adultery, resort was had to parliament, and in 1669 an absolute divorce for that cause was granted by that body for the first time. This mode of procedure was, of course, a most expensive one, and during the seventeenth century but three decrees absolute were granted, the parties in each belonging to the peerage and the cause being the same.
In cases arising in the early history of the colonies we should therefore expect to find the law as I have briefly sketched it as existing in England, and as there were then no courts exercising the functions of the Ecclesiastical Courts we might safely look for the exercise of these powers by the Court of Deputies, or General Court, which was at that time not simply a deliberative body, but also a court of most extensive and varied jurisdiction, in matters both civil and criminal. This was precisely the fact; the records show that in 1652 Mrs. Dorothy Pester presented to the General Court her petition for leave to marry again, giving as her reason the fact that her husband had sailed for England some ten years before, and had not been heard from since. The court decreed that liberty be granted her to marry, "when God in his providence shall afford her the opportunity." In 1667 the same court refused to grant a like petition, for the reason that they were not satisfied by the evidence that the husband had not been heard from for three years.