When Whispers Become Power
Eleanor Neale was no stranger to the sound of whispers.
By the 1660s, she’d lived two decades in a colony that punished women not just for their sins, but for their defiance. She’d endured public lashes, humiliation, and the sting of neighbors’ judgment, not because she practiced witchcraft, but because she refused to stay silent.
In The Whispers, we trace how gossip, a tool so often dismissed as petty, became a mechanism of control in colonial Virginia.
For Eleanor, the danger wasn’t just what people said. It was what their words could do.
When I think back to my own adolescence, I remember fearing the whispers, the invisible power of what people said behind your back.
It’s a universal experience for young girls: learning early that words can wound, that silence sometimes feels like safety.
But for Eleanor Neale, silence was never safety. It was surrender.
She was a woman punished for having a voice and that voice still echoes through history.
1665: The Deposition That Changed Everything
By 1665, Eleanor was a seasoned settler in her fifties, a wife, a landowner, and a woman with a reputation for speaking her mind.
That year, she appears in the Northumberland County Record Book:
ELINOR NEALE aged fifty yeares or thereabouts… heard Mr. THO: MATHEW say yt Mr. SHAW had reported yt he used to be sent for to bringe women to bedde…
Translated, it’s a deposition about a rumor: that a man named Mr. Shaw was accused of indecency.
Thomas Matthew pressed Eleanor to spread the story; she refused.
Her statement — “hath forgott ye words utterly” — was a legal shield, a way of saying: I will not repeat this.
In refusing to pass on gossip, Eleanor protected herself. But in a society built on whispers, even silence could be weaponized.
And here’s the twist:
Thomas Matthew was once her indentured servant - a man she had freed with her own signature.
Now, he was drawing her into another public scandal.
It’s a stunning example of how quickly power shifted in a small colonial world.
This story isn’t just about rumor. It’s about fear.
Fear governed colonial Virginia. Fear of women’s voices. Fear of scandal. Fear of losing control.
King James VI’s writings on witchcraft painted women as weak and susceptible to the Devil’s influence, but his real warning was to men: fear women. Because women held quiet power, in their words, their influence, their resilience.
As I say in the episode:
“Most witchcraft stories begin in women’s mouths — but end in men’s hands.”
Women whispered out of desperation, not malice. Men recorded, judged, and punished.
It’s the same pattern echoed through centuries: when women refuse silence, the system invents new ways to quiet them.
As the 1660s drew to a close, a new scandal erupted in Eleanor’s small world - this time involving Captain Edward Coles and his wife.
A man named William Thomas publicly claimed to have “swifed” Coles’s wife - a shocking, vulgar declaration that humiliated the respected planter. Whether the affair was consensual or not, it threatened both their reputations.
And when reputations are on the line, someone always pays the price.
Accusing Eleanor Neale of witchcraft offered the perfect cover story. If Coles’s wife had been “bewitched,” she wasn’t adulterous - she was a victim. Coles wasn’t weak - he was a husband defending his home. Eleanor, already labeled troublesome and defiant, was the easiest scapegoat.
Witchcraft gave them a narrative that preserved power and erased hers.
Echoes Across Centuries
This isn’t a story about villainy or victimhood.
It’s about survival in a world where silence was expected of women and fear was the currency of control.
Eleanor Neale’s defiance wasn’t loud. It was persistent.
It’s the same defiance that still exists in every woman who refuses to apologize for her voice.
“It wasn’t that women couldn’t be trusted. It was that men couldn’t trust themselves — their pride, their power, their place in a world where women quietly held the real strength.”
🎧 List now: Legacy Lore Episode 5: The Whispers
