Pennycook: A New England Family History

Rev. John Winge

2008-07-14T07:44:00.003-04:00

Educated at the Queen's College of Oxford University, John became a clergyman of the established Anglican church at the age of 19. Shortly after accepting a fulltime ministerial position he married Deborah Bachiler, (1025) daughter of the controversial ex-Vicar of Wherwell, Reverend Stephen Bachiler (2050). Harboring Protestant ideals, he was eventually offered and accepted the post of Reverend at the Hague Cathedral in the Netherlands and stood before Europe's most influential aristocrats and intellects of that era, including an audience of "The Queen Of Hearts" Elisabeth Of Bohemia, daughter of England's ruling Stuart King, James I (of King James Bible).

Elisabeth, her Protestant husband, Frederick V, King Of Bohemia, and two of their eight children were forced into exile in 1622 by the Holy Roman Emperor, Maximillian, as a result of losing key military battles early in the Thirty Years War between the Protestants and Catholics which ravaged much of Europe . This proximity brought Rev John Winge under the close scrutiny of the Archbishop of Canterbury William Laud and became cause for official international correspondence between the diplomats of England and Holland.

Many of England's Protestant ruling and landed gentry class, forebears of Puritanism, were in support of Frederick, King of Bohemia and his fight against the oppressive Holy Roman Empire. One such person was Theodiphilus Clinton, the Earl of Lincoln, who sought the advice of his estate steward and personal secretary, Thomas Dudley (1654), on the feasibility of sending mercenary troops into the German region to fight in support of the King. Clinton heeded the thoughtful advice of the future Governor of the colony of Massachusetts against becoming financially and politically entangled in the brutal “world war”, however he did eventally find historical prominence a few years later when, with the strong encouragement of estate assistant, John Winthrop, he underwote the sailing of a large fleet of passenger carrying ships (later known as “Winthrop’s Fleet” whose flagship, “The Lady Arabella”, was named for Clinton’s daughter) to America during the “The Great Migration” of the 1630’s.

A few of Rev John Winge's sermons, undoubtedly heard by the banished royal family, were eventually published as a set of five books considered by many as being controversial for the day. One of the books is currently held at John Adams Library of the Boston Museum. Three others are currently held by The British Museum, and the fifth, “The Crown Conjugal”, an often quoted revolutionary Puritan tract advocating the equality of women originally printed in 1620, was gratefully received from a private collector by the Wing Family Of America genealogical society during its 2008 annual National Family Reunion held in Sandwich Massachusetts.

He eventually returned to London where he soon died from undisclosed causes, however, many speculate that he died from a long illness which he often alluded to in his letters.

“…no hand but Gods should have withholden myne; but such was the infirmity of myne owne body, that for divers days I could not write at all, and such is the sorrowful distraction of a sick family, that (as yet) I am neither able to write soe advisedly of my self as I would, nor goe abroad [word marked out] to sift out…Thus your Lo[rdshi]p hath the first f…ts of my recovered frailty, I am yet but feeble, and unfit for this, and unable to doe more, till God shall give me strength to travayle; which…”

[ Letter written on Sept. 28 1624 to Britain’s Ambassador To Holland, Sir Dudley Carleton, in reply to the Ambassador’s inquiry into Rev John Winge’s knowledge of the facts concerning the “Amboyna Massacre”, a brutal mass murder perpetrated against British spice merchants by competing Dutch spice merchants in Indonesia.]

Shortly after his death in 1629, Rev John Winge’s widow, Deborah, his four sons John, Daniel, Steven, Matthew and mentor father-in-law, Rev. Stephen Bachiler, made sail to the new colonies as intended aboard the “William & Francis” just twelve years after the arrival of the Mayflower Pilgrims of 1620.

[June 5, 1632] The ‘”William & Francis“, Mr Thomas master, with about sixty passengers, whereof Mr Welde and old Mr Bachelor (being aged 71) were, with their families, and many other honest men; …They set sail, viz., the “William & Francis“, from London, March the 9th, … Mr Winslow of Plymouth came in the “William & Francis”.

[ Entry posted in “Winthrop’s Journal, 1630-1649 Volume I“, by Massachusetts Bay Colony Governor, John Winthrop ]

Praying Indians- A 1670 Letter by John Eliot

2008-03-29T18:10:00.006-04:00

To the Right Worshipful the Commissioners under his Majesties’ Great-Seal, for Propagation of the Gospel amongst the poor blind Indians in New-England

Right Worshipful and Christian Gentlemen:
THAT brief Tract of the present state of the Indian-Work in my hand, which I did the last year on the sudden present you with when you call’d for such a thing; That falling short of its end, and you calling for a renewal thereof, with opportunity of more time, I shall begin with our last great motion in that Work done this Summer, because that will lead me to begin with the state of the Indians under the hands of my Brethren Mr. Mahew and Mr. Bourn.

Upon the 17th day of the 6th month, 1670, there was a Meeting at Maktapog [Mashpee?] near Sandwich in Plimouth-Pattent, to gather a Church among the Indians: There were present six of the Magistrates, and many Elders, (all of them Messengers of the Churches within that Jurisdiction) in whose presence, in a day of Fasting and Prayer, they making confession of the Truth and Grace of Jesus Christ, did in that solemn Assembly enter into Covenant, to walk together in the Faith and Order of the Gospel; and were accepted and declared to be a Church of Jesus Christ. These Indians being of kin to our Massachuset-Indians who first prayed unto God, conversed with them, and received amongst them the light and love of the Truth; they desired me to write to Mr. Leveredge to teach them: He accepted the Motion: and performed the Work with good success; but afterwards he left that place, and went to Long-Island, and there a godly Brother, named Richard Bourne (who purposed to remove with Mr. Leveredge, but hindered by Divine Providence) undertook the teaching of those Indians, and hath continued in the work with good success to this day; him we ordained Pastor: and one of the Indians, named Jude, should have been ordained Ruling-Elder, but being sick at that time, advice was given that he should be ordained with the first opportunity, as also a Deacon to manage the present Sabbath-Day Collections, and other [4] parts of that Office in their season. The same day also were they, and such of their Children as were present, baptized.

From them we passed over to the Vineyard, where many were added to the Church both men and women, and were baptized all of them, and their Children also with them; we had the Sacrament of the Lords Supper celebrated in the Indian-Church, and many of the English-Church gladly joyned with them; for which cause it was celebrated in both languages. On a day of Fasting and Prayer, Elders were ordained, two Teaching-Elders, the one to be a Preacher of the Gospel, to do the Office of a Pastor and Teacher; the other to be a Preacher of the Gospel, to do the Office of a Teacher and Pastor, as the Lord should given them ability and opportunity; Also two Ruling-Elders, with advice to ordain Deacons also, for the Service of Christ in the Church. Things were so ordered by the Lord’s guidance, that a Foundation is laid for two Churches more; for first, these of the Vineyard dwelling at too great a distance to enjoy with comfort their Sabbath-communion in one place, Advice was given them, that after some experience of walking together in the Order and Ordinances of the Gospel, they should issue forth into another Church; and the Officers are so chosen, that when they shall do so, both Places are furnished with a Teaching and Ruling-Elder.

Also the Teacher of the Praying Indians of Nantuket, with a Brother of his were received here, who made good Confessions of Jesus Christ; and being asked, did make report unto us that there be about ninety Families who pray unto God in that Island, so effectual is the Light of the Gospel among them. Advice was given, that some of the chief Godly People should joyn to this Church, (for they frequently converse together, though the Islands be seven leagues asunder) and after some experience of walking in the Order of the Gospel, they should issue forth into Church-estate among themselves, and have Officers ordained amongst them.

The Church of the Vineyard were desirous to have chosen Mr. Mahew to be their Pastor: but he declined it, conceiving that in his present capacity he lieth under greater advantages to stand their Friend, and do them good, to save them from the hands of such as would bereave them of their Lands, &c., but they shall alwayes have his counsel, instruction and management in all their Church-affairs, as hitherto they have had; he will die in this service of Jesus Christ. The Praying-Indians of both these islands depend on him, as God’s Instrument for their good. [5] Advice also was given for the setling of Schools; every Child capable of learning, equally paying, whether he make use of it or no: Yet if any should sinfully neglect Schooling their Youth, it is a transgression liable to censure under both Orders, Civil and Ecclesiastical, the offence being against both. So we walk at Natick.

In as much as now we have ordained Indian Officers unto the Ministry of the Gospel, it is needed to add a word or two of Apology: I find it hopeless to expect English Officers in our Indian Churches; the work is full of hardship, hard labour, and chargeable also, and the Indians not yet capable to give considerable support and maintenance; and Men have bodies, and must live of the Gospel: And what comes from England is liable to hazard and uncertainties. On such grounds as these partly, but especially from the secret wise governance of Jesus Christ, the Lord of the Harvest, there is no appearance of hope for their souls feeding in that way: they must be trained up to be able to live of themselves in the ways of the Gospel of Christ; and through the riches of God’s Grace and Love, sundry of themselves who are expert in the Scriptures, are able to teach each other: An English young man raw in that language, coming to teach among our Christian-Indians, would be much to their loss; there be of themselves such as be more able, especially being advantaged that he speaketh his own language, and knoweth their manners. Such English as shall hereafter teach them, must begin with a People that begin to pray unto God, (and such opportunities we have many) and then as they grow in knowledge, he will grow (if he be diligent) in ability of speech to communicate the knowledge of Christ unto them. And seeing they must have Teachers amongst themselves, they must also be taught to be Teachers: for which cause I have begun to teach them the Art of Teaching, and I find some of them very capable. And while I live, my purpose is, (by the grace of Christ assisting) to make it one of my chief cares and labours to teach them some of the Liberal Arts and Sciences, and the way how to analize, and lay out into particulars both the Works and Word of God; and how to communicate knowledge to others methodically and skilfully, and especially the method of Divinity. There be sundry Ministers who live in an opportunity of beginning with a People, and for time to come I shall cease my importuning of others, and onely fall to perswade such unto this service of Jesus Christ, it being one part of our Ministerial Charge to preach to the World in the Name of Jesus, and from amongst them to gather Subjects to his holy Kingdom. The Bible, and the Catechism drawn [6] out of the Bible, are general helps to all parts and places about us, and are the ground-work of Community amongst all our Indian-Churches and Christians.

I find a blessing, when our Church of Natick doth send forth fit Persons unto some remoter places, to teach them the fear of the Lord. But we want maintenance for that Service; it is chargeable matter to send a Man from his Family: The Labourer is worthy of his Hire: And when they go only to the High-wayes and Hedges, it is not to be expected that they should reward them: If they believe and obey their Message, it is enough. We are determined to send forth some (if the Lord will, and that we live) this Autumn, sundry ways. I see the best way is, up and be doing: In all labour there is profit; Seek and ye shall find. We have Christ’s Example, his Promise, his Presence, his Spirit to assist; and I trust that the Lord will find a way for your encouragement.

Natick is our chief Town, where most and chief of our Rulers, and most of the Church dwells; here most of our chief Courts are kept; and the Sacraments in the Church are for the most part here administered: It is (by the Divine Providence) seated well near in the center of all our praying Indians, though Westward the Cords of Christ’s Tents are more enlarged. Here we began Civil Government in the year 1650. And here usually are kept the General-Trainings, which seven years ago looked so big that we never had one since till this year, and it was at this time but a small appearance. Here we have two Teachers, John Speen and Anthony; we have betwixt forty and fifty Communicants at the Lord’s Table, when they all appear, but now, some are dead, and some decriped with age; and one under Censure, yet making towards a recovery; one died here the last Winter of the Stone, a temperate, sober, godly man, the first Indian that ever was known to have that disease; but now another hath the same disease: Sundry more are proposed, and in way of preparation to joyn unto the Church.

Ponkipog, or Pakeunit, is our second Town, where the Sachems of the Bloud (as they term the Chief Royal-Line) had their Residence and Rights, which are mostly Alienated to the English Towns: The last Chief Man, off that Line, was last year slain by the Mauquzogs, against whom he rashly (without due Attendants and Assistance, and against Counsel) went; yet all, yea, his Enemies say, He died valiantly; they were more afraid to kill him, than we was to died; yet being de- [7] serted by all (some knowingly say through Treasoon) he stood long, and at last feel alone: Had he had but 10 Men, yea 5 in good order with him, he would have driven all his Enemies before him. His Brother was resident with us in this Town, but he is fallen into sin, and from praying to God. Our Chief Ruler is Ahauton, an old stedfast and trusty friend to the English, and loveth his Country. He is more loved than feared; the reins of his bridle are too long. Waken is sometimes necessarily called to keep Courts here, to add live and zeal in the punishment of Sinners. Their late Teacher, William, is deceased; He was a man of eminent parts, all the English acknowledge him, and he was known to many: He was of a ready wit, sound judgment, and affable; he is gone unto the Lord; And William, the Son of Ahauton, is called to be Teacher in his stead. He is a promising young-man, of a single and upright heart, a good judgment, he Prayeth and Preacheth well, he is studious and industrious, and well accounted of among the English.

Hassunnimesut is the next Town in order, dignity, and antiquity; sundry of our chief Friends in the great work of Praying to God, came from them, and there lived their Progenitors, and there lieth their Inheritance, and that is the place of their desires. It lieth upon Nichmuke River; the people were well known to the English so long as Connecticot Road lay that way, and their Religion was judged to be real by all that travelled that journey, and had occasion to lodge, especially to keep a Sabbath among them. The Ruler of the Town is Anuweekin, and his brother Tuppukkoowillin is Teacher, both sound and godly Men. This Ruler, last Winter, was overtaken with a Passion, which was so observable, that I had occasion to speak with him about it; he was very penitent; I hold him, That as to man, I, and all men were ready to forgive him. Ah! said he, I find it the greatest difficulty to forgive myself. For the encouragement of this place, and for the cherishing of a new Plantation of Praying Indians beyond them, they called Monatunkanet to be a Teacher also in that Town, and both of them to take care of the new Praying-Town beyond them. And for the like encouragement, Captain Gookins joyned Petahheg with Anuweekin. The aged Father of this Ruler and Teacher, was last year Baptized, who hath many Children that fear God. In this place we meditate ere long (if the Lord will, and that we live) to gather a Church, that so the Sabbath-Communion of our Christian Indians may be the more agree- [8] able to the Divine Institution, which we make too bold with while we live at such distance.

Ogquonikongquamesut is the next Town; where, how we have been afflicted, I may not say. The English Town called Marlborough doth border upon them, as did the lines of the Tribes of Judah and Benjamin; the English Meeting-house standeth within the line of the Indian Town, although the contiguity and co-inhabitation is not barren in producing matters of interfering; yet our godly Indians do obtain a good report of the godly English, which is an argument that bringeth light and evidence to my heart, that our Indians are really godly. I was very lately among them; they desired me to settle a stated Lecture amongst them, as it is in sundry other Praying Towns, which I did with so much the more gladness and hope of blessing in it, because through Grace the Motion did first spring from themselves. Solomon is their Teacher, whom we judge to be a serious and sound Christian; their Ruler is Owannamug, whose grave, faithful, and discreet Conversation hath procured him real respect from the English. One that was a Teacher in this place, is the man that is now under Censure in the Church; his sin was that adventitious sin which we have brought unto them, Drunkenness, which was never known to them before they knew us English. But I account it our duty, and it is much in my desire, as well to teach them Wisdom to Rule such heady Creatures, as skill to get them to be able to bridle their own appetites, when they have means and opportunity of high-spirited enticements. The Wisdom and Power of Grace is not so much seen in the beggarly want of these things, as in the bridling of our selves in the use of them. It is true Dominion, to be able to use them, and not to abuse ourselves by them.

Nashope is our next Praying Town, a place of much Affliction; it was the chief place of Residence, where Tahattawans lived, a Sachem of the Blood, a faithful and zealous Christian, a strict yet gentle Ruler; he was a Ruler of 50 in our Civil Order; and when God took him, a chief man in our Israel was taken away from us. His only Son was a while vain, but proved good, except in the Scripture, was Elected to rule in his Father’s place, but soon died, insomuch that this place is now destitute of a Ruler. The Teacher of the place is John Thomas, a godly understanding Christian, well esteemed of by the English: his Father was killed by the Mauquaogs, shot to death as he was in [9] the River doing his Eele-wyers. This place lying in the Road-way which the Mauquaogs haunted, was much molested by them, and was one year wholly deserted; but this year the People have taken courage and dwell upon it again.

In this place after the great Earthquake, there was some eruption out of the Earth, which left a great Hiatus or Cleft a great way together, and out of some Cavities under great Rocks, by a great Pond in that place, there was a great while after often heard an humming noise, as if there were frequent eruptions out of the Ground at that place: yet for Healthfulness thee place is much as other places be. For Religion, there be amongst them some Godly Christians, who are received into the Church, and baptized, and others looking that way.

Wamesut is our next Praying-Town; it lyeth at the bottom of the great Falls, on the great River Merymak, and at the falling-in of Concord River; the Sachem of this Place is named Nomphon, said to be a Prince of the Bloud, a Man of a real Noble Spirit: A Brother of his was slain by the Mauquaogs as he was upon a Rock fishing in the great River. In revenge whereof he went in the forementioned rash Expedition, but had such about him, and was so circumspect, that he came well off, though he lost one principal Man. This place is very much annoyed by the Mauquaogs, and have much ado to stand their ground.

In this Place Captain Gookins ordered a Garrison to be kept the last year, which Order while they attended they were safe; but when the Northern Sachems and Souldiers came, who stirred up ours to go with them on their unsuccessful Expedition, the Town was for the most part scatter’d and their Corn spoyled.

The Teacher of this Place is named George: they have not much esteem for Religion, but I am hopefully perswaded of sundry of them; I can go unto them but once in a year.

Panatuket is the upper part of Merimak-Falls; so called, because of the noise which the Waters make. Thither the Penagwog-Indians are come, and have built a great Fort; Their Sachems refused to pray to God, so signally and sinfully, that Captain Gookins and my self were very sensible of it, and were not without some expectation of some interposure of a Divine-Hand, which did eminently come to pass; for in the forenamed expedition they joyned with the Northern Sachems, [10] and were all of them cut off; even all that had so signally refused to pray unto God were now as signally rejected by God, and cut off. I hear not that it was ever known, that so many Sachems and Men of Note were killed in one imprudent Expedition, and that by a few scattered people; for the Mauquaogs were not imbodied to received them, nor prepared, and few at home, which did much greaten the Overthrow of so many great Men, and shews a divine over-ruling hand of God. But now, since the Penaguag-Sachems are cut off, the People (sundry of them) dwelling at Panatuket-Fort do bow the ear to hear, and submit to pray unto God; to whom Jethro, after he had confest Christ and was baptized, was sent to preach Christ to them.

Magunkukquok is another of our Praying-Towns at the remotest Westerly borders of Natick; these are gathering together os some Nipmuk Indians who left their own places, and sit together in this place, and have given up themselves to pray unto God. They have called Pomham to be their Ruler, and Simon to be their Teacher. This latter is accounted a good and lively Christian; he is the second man among the Indians that doth experience that afflicting disease of the Stone. The Ruler hath made his Preparatory Confession of Christ, and is approved of, and at the next opportunity is to be received and baptized.

I obtained of the General-Court a Grant of a Tract of Land, for the settlement and encouragement of this People; which though as yet it be by some obstructed, yet I hope we shall find some way to accomplish the same.

Quanatusset is the last of our Praying-Towns, whose beginnings have received too much discouragement; but yet the Seed is alive: they are frequently with me; the work is at the birth, there doth only want strength to bring forth. The care of this People is committed joyntly to Monatunkanit, and Tuppunkkoowillin, the Teachers of Hassunemeesut, as is abovesaid; and I hope if the Lord continue my life, I shall have a good account to give of that People.

Thus I have briefly touched some of the chiefest of our present Affairs, and commit them to your Prudence, to do [11] with them what you please; committing your Selves, and all your weighty Affairs unto the Guidance and Blessing of the Lord, I rest,

Your Worships to serve you in the Service of our Lord Jesus

JOHN ELLIOT.
Roxbury, this 20th of the 7th month, 1670.

Thomas Dudley (1576-1653)

2007-12-25T09:18:00.002-05:00

Gov Thomas Dudley-Dorothy York

Thomas Dudley

Samuel Dudley-Mary Winthrop (Daughter of Gov John Winthrop)

Ann Dudley-Gov Simon Bradstreet

Patience Dudley-Maj Gen. Daniel Denison

Sarah Dudley-Benjamin Keayne

Mercy Dudley-Rev John Woodbridge

Written by Bill Kauffman

Thomas Dudley, the only son of Capt. Roger Dudley and Susanna Thorne, was
born in 1576 at Northampton, England. On March 14, 1590, when he was fourteen
years old, his father was killed at the Battle of Ivery, leaving Thomas and his
sister orphans, as their mother had died previously.
Thomas inherited 500 pounds from his father and was raised as a page in the family of Lord Compton, Earl of Northampton. Afterwards, he became a clerk to his maternal kinsman, Judge Nichols, thus obtaining some knowledge of the law, which proved to be ofgreat service to him in his later life. Also, while still in his minority, he
was trained in Latin by a "Mrs. Purefoy", who was probably his maternal
grandmother, Mary Purefoy. All in all, he gained a competent education and was
able to understand any Latin author as well as most educated people of his time.
In 1596, at the age of twenty, Thomas received a Captain's commission in the
army. According to Cotton Mather, "the young sparks about Northampton were none of them willing to enter into the service until a commission was given to our
young Dudley to be their Captain, and thus presently there were four-score that
listed under him." Thomas and his company of volunteers went to France and
fought on the side of Henry IV, King of France, at the siege of Amiens in 1597.
On the conclusion of peace in 1597, Thomas returned to England, settled at
Northampton and became acquainted with Dod, Hildersham and other Puritan leaders and himself became a Puritan. In 1603, he married Dorothy Yorke, daughter of Edmonde Yorke, yeoman, of Cotton End, Northamptonshire. She was described by Cotton Mather as "a gentlewoman both of good estate and good extraction." By her he had five children. During the period from about 1600 to 1630, Thomas was
steward (manager of estates) to Theophilus, Earl of Lincoln, who had been deep
in debt prior to Thomas' stewardship. After only a few years of management by
Thomas, however, the Earl was out of debt and was prospering. Also, during this
period, Thomas became acquainted with John Cotton, renowned minister of Boston,
Lincolnshire (and later of Boston, MA). The Puritans were considered by many
political leaders and by the Church of England to be a threat and were subjected
to substantial persecution. During the 1620's, relations between the Church of
England and the Puritans worsened. Continuing pressure led to a decision by a
large group of Puritans to emigrate to New England.
In 1629, Thomas Dudley was one of the signers of the agreement to form the Massachusetts Bay Company. On Oct. 20, 1629, in the city of London, he was chosen one of the five officers to come to America with the Royal Charter. TheMassachusetts Bay Company was essentially similar to any other trading company of the time, except that its members had managed to obtain possession of the company charter, or patent, and thus could take it with them to the New World. With possession of the patent that established their rights and privileges, they could control their own government and elect their own magistrates. The group elected John Winthrop governor and Thomas Dudley deputy governor in October 1629.
It is difficult to understand Thomas Dudley's decision to leave England for the unknown shores of North America. In England he had friends, position and prosperity. But he decided to leave all this behind. Apparently, the pressures of persecution were so great that he was virtually forced to leave England or give up his religious convictions.
In 1630, Thomas and his wife and children sailed to New England with the Winthrop Fleet, a group of eleven vessels carrying 700 passengers. The Dudley family was on the flagship, the Arbella. The Fleet left England in the Spring and arrived in Salem in June. Not approving of Salem as the capital, John Winthrop ordered the fleet south along the coast to Charlestown, ultimately settling at Newtown. Before leaving England, Winthrop had been elected governor and Thomas Dudley deputy-governor. Many of those who came with Winthrop separated and founded Roxbury, Lynn, Medford, Cambridge and Watertown.
According to Thomas Dudley, about 200 of the emigrants died the first year in New England. A somewhat violent disagreement between Dudley and Winthrop, the first of many owing to Dudley's touchy and over-bearing temper, occurred when Winthrop abandoned the chosen settlement and moved to Boston. Dudley subsequently moved to Ipswich but after a short time, in order to be nearer the seat of government, settled at Roxbury. He built on the west side of Smelt Brook, just across the watering place, at the foot of the hill where the road that runs up to the First Church joins the Town Street.

Although Thomas Dudley was 54 years of age when he landed in New England, he still had a long public career ahead of him. Throughout the rest of his life, he was almost constantly in public office. He was four times elected governor and thirteen times made deputy-governor. When not occupying either of these offices, he was usually to be found in the House as an Assistant. When the Standing Council with the idea of forming a body of members for life, Dudley was one of the three first chosen. When the New England Federation was formed in 1643, Dudley was one of the two commissioners chosen by Massachusetts to confer with those of the other colonies. There is hardly an event in the life of the colony during his own in which he did not act a part. Thomas Dudley and Simon Bradstreet (both future governors) founded Cambridge in 1631. Thomas, however, lived for many years in Roxbury (now part of Boston).
In 1636, he was one of twelve men appointed by the General Court to consider the
matter of a college at Newtown (Cambridge) and was one to report favorably on
the project. In 1650, as governor, Thomas signed the original charter of the new
college, named Harvard College. Thomas was a strict Puritan and clashed
several times with other leaders of the colony. He was known to be very
inflexible in his views. Cotton Mather wrote that if Thomas Dudley had been
alive at the time of the witchcraft trouble, New England would never have been
disgraced by the bloodshed of innocent persons. He was one of the principal
founders of the First Church at Boston and in the church now standing at Berkley
and Marlborough streets is a tablet with the following inscription:
THOMAS DUDLEY. FOR SEVENTEEN YEARS GOVERNOR OR DEPUTY GOVERNOR OF THE MASSACHUSETTS BAY COLONY. AS GOVERNOR HE SIGNED THE CHARTER OF HARVARD COLLEGE.
BORN IN ENGLAND 1576. DIED IN ROXBURY 1653. A MAN OF APPROVED WISDOM AND OF MUCH GOOD SERVICE TO THE STATE.
Thomas was evidently as strong in body as he was unyielding in temper and unbreakable in will. Dorothy Dudley died in 1643 and Thomas remarried to
Catherine Dighton. By her he had three children, the most noted being Joseph
Dudley (1647) the future royal governor of Massachusetts, who was born when the
old man was 70 years of age. Dudley was an able man with marked executive
and business ability. His integrity was unimpeachable. His eye, though somewhat
religiously jaundiced, was single to the public interest as he saw it. He was
something of a scholar and wrote poetry, read in his day, but unreadable in
ours. In him, New England Puritanism took on some of its harshest and least
pleasant aspects. He often won approval, but never affection. He was positive,
dogmatic, austere, prejudiced, unlovable. He dominated by sheer strength of will
as a leader in his community. Like many of the others, he was no friend to
popular government and a strong believer in autocracy. Opposed to the clergy in
one respect, he believed that the state should control even the church and
enforce conformity as the superior, and not the handmaid, of the ecclesiastical
organization.

Thomas was a thrifty man, who became one of the largest landowners in Roxbury, He was a "trading, money-getting man" and was said to be somewhat hard and "prone to usury." When he died, his property was valued at £1,560 and included bandoleers, corselets, some Latin books, some on law, some that indicate a taste for literature, and many on the doctrines of religion.
On July 31, 1653, Thomas Dudley died at the age of 77 at Roxbury, Massachusetts. There was a great funeral, with the most distinguished citizens as pall bearers. the clergy were present in large numbers. Military units were present with muffled drums and reversed arms. He was buried at Roxbury, near his home, where his tomb may be seen on the highest point of land.

The Life and Work of Thomas Dudley, the Second Governor of Massachusetts

by Augustine Jones

1630: A Year in a Letter (Thomas Dudley)

2007-12-17T07:55:00.000-05:00

The opening of a very poignant letter written by Gov Thomas Dudley to Lady Bridget, the wife of Theodophilus Clinton, the Earl of Lincoln, regarding the sufferings of the first year following the arrival of the Puritans at Boston Bay in 1630.

Excerpted from the book, "The Life and Work of Thomas Dudley, the Second Governor of Massachusetts" By Augustine Jones

Download/Read the PDF copy of his letter.

The Charges of "Antinomian Heresy"

2007-12-17T07:28:00.000-05:00

Believing the notion of true religious freedom could be enjoyed in New`World, Anne Hutchinson followed her pastor Rev John Cotton and her brother-in-law Rev John Wheelwright from England to the colony in 1636 aboard the "Griffin", but was soon brought before the Court for propagating her intellectual and religious beliefs during informal discussions held at her home where she and, initially, other women, discussed religious and political topics of the day. Garnering interest from the men of the colony, she quickly caught the attention of the Governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony, Sir Henry Vane. His interest in her opinions and eventual participation in the discussions were soon noticed by John Winthrop, who was making a bid for the Governorship. With strong support and encouragement of the pastor of Boston's Church, Rev John Wilson, and politically influential Rev. Thomas Welde of Roxbury as the trial's chief inquisitor, she and her friends were brought to court on charges of the heresy of Antinomianism, thereby eliminating for Winthrop any future political threat from Sir Henry Vane by discrediting him.

This book lists and explains the finer points of the theological contention levied by John Winthrop and the Magistrates against Ann Hutchinson

The Examination of Mrs Anne Hutchinson at the Court at Newton. 1637

[The General Court, highest in authority in Massachusetts Bay Colony, consisted
of the Governor as Chair of the Court, the Deputy Governor, 5 assistants, and 5
deputies. Several other ministers were in attendance including Rev. John Cotton,
Mrs. Hutchinson's minister, and the person who inspired her basic theological
position. Anne Hutchinson appears as the accused in this trial].
Mr. [John]
Winthrop, Governor: Mrs Hutchinson, you are called here as one of those that
have troubled the peace of the commonwealth and the churches here; you are known
to be a woman that hath had a great share in the promoting and divulging of
those opinions that are the cause of this trouble, and to be nearly joined not
only in affinity and affection with some of those the court had taken notice of
and passed censure upon, but you have spoken divers things, as we have been
informed, very prejudicial to the honour of the churches and ministers thereof,
and you have maintained a meeting and an assembly in your house that hath been
condemned by the general assembly as a thing not tolerable nor comely in the
sight of God nor fitting for your sex, and notwithstanding that was cried down
you have continued the same. Therefore we have thought good to send for you to
understand how things are, that if you be in an erroneous way we may reduce you
that so you may become a profitable member here among us. Otherwise if you be
obstinate in your course that then the court may take such course that you may
trouble us no further. Therefore I would intreat you to express whether you do
assent and hold in practice to those opinions and factions that have been
handled in court already, that is to say, whether you do not justify Mr.
Wheelwright's sermon and the petition.
Mrs. Hutchinson: I am called here to
answer before you but I hear no things laid to my charge.
Gov.: I have told
you some already and more I can tell you.
Mrs. H.: Name one, Sir.
Gov.:
Have I not named some already?
Mrs. H.: What have I said or done?
Gov.:
Why for your doings, this you did harbor and countenance those that are parties
in this faction that you have heard of.
Mrs. H.: That's matter of
conscience, Sir.
Gov.: Your conscience you must keep, or it must be kept for
you.
Mrs. H.: Must not I then entertain the saints because I must keep my
conscience.
Gov.: Say that one brother should commit felony or treason and
come to his brother's house, if he knows him guilty and conceals him he is
guilty of the same. It is his conscience to entertain him, but if his conscience
comes into act in giving countenance and entertainment to him that hath broken
the law he is guilty too. So if you do countenance those that are transgressors
of the law you are in the same fact.
Mrs. H.: What law do they transgress?
Gov.: The law of God and of the state.
Mrs. H.: In what particular?
Gov.: Why in this among the rest, whereas the Lord doth say honour thy
father and thy mother.
Mrs. H.: Ey Sir in the Lord.
Gov.: This honour
you have broke in giving countenance to them.
Mrs. H.: In entertaining those
did I entertain them against any act (for there is the thing) or what God has
appointed?
Gov.: You knew that Mr. Wheelwright did preach this sermon and
those that countenance him in this do break a law.
Mrs. H.: What law have I
broken?
Gov.: Why the fifth commandment.
Mrs. H.: I deny that for he
[Mr. Wheelwright] saith in the Lord.
Gov.: You have joined with them in the
faction.
Mrs. H.: In what faction have I joined with them?
Gov.: In
presenting the petition.
Mrs. H.: Suppose I had set my hand to the petition.
What then?
Gov.: You saw that case tried before.
Mrs. H.: But I had not
my hand to [not signed] the petition.
Gov.: You have councelled them.
Mrs. H.: Wherein?
Gov.: Why in entertaining them.
Mrs. H.: What
breach of law is that, Sir?
Gov.: Why dishonouring the commonwealth.
Mrs. H.: But put the case, Sir, that I do fear the Lord and my parents. May
not I entertain them that fear the Lord because my parents will not give me
leave?
Gov.: If they be the fathers of the commonwealth, and they of another
religion, if you entertain them then you dishonour your parents and are justly
punishable.
Mrs. H.: If I entertain them, as they have dishonoured their
parents I do.
Gov.: No but you by countenancing them above others put honor
upon them.
Mrs. H.: I may put honor upon them as the children of God and as
they do honor the Lord.
Gov.: We do not mean to discourse with those of your
sex but only this: you so adhere unto them and do endeavor to set forward this
faction and so you do dishonour us.
Mrs. H.: I do acknowledge no such thing.
Neither do I think that I ever put any dishonour upon you.
Gov.: Why do you
keep such a meeting at your house as you do every week upon a set day?
Mrs.
H.: It is lawful for me to do so, as it is all your practices, and can you find
a warrant for yourself and condemn me for the same thing? The ground of my
taking it up was, when I first came to this land because I did not go to such
meetings as those were, it was presently reported that I did not allow of such
meetings but held them unlawful and therefore in that regard they said I was
proud and did despise all ordinances. Upon that a friend came unto me and told
me of it and I to prevent such aspersions took it up, but it was in practice
before I came. Therefore I was not the first.
Gov.: ...By what warrant do
you continue such a course?
Mrs. H.: I conceive there lies a clear rule in
Titus that the elder women should instruct the younger and then I must have a
time wherein I must do it.
Gov.: All this I grant you, I grant you a time
for it, but what is this to the purpose that you Mrs. Hutchinson must call a
company together from their callings to come to be taught of you?...
Mrs.
H.: If you look upon the rule in Titus it is a rule to me. If you convince me
that it is no rule I shall yield.
Gov.: You know that there is no rule that
crosses another, but this rule crosses that in the Corinthians. But you must
take it in this sense that elder women must instruct the younger about their
business and to love their husbands and not to make them to clash....
Mrs.
H.: Will it please you to answer me this and to give me a rule for then I will
willingly submit to any truth. If any come to my house to be instructed in the
ways of God what rule have I to put them away?.... Do you think it not lawful
for me to teach women and why do you call me to teach the court?
Gov.: We do
not call you to teach the court but to lay open yourself....
[They continue
to argue over what rule she had broken]
Gov.: Your course is not to be
suffered for. Besides that we find such a course as this to be greatly
prejudicial to the state. Besides the occasion that it is to seduce many honest
persons that are called to those meetings and your opinions and your opinions
being known to be different from the word of God may seduce many simple souls
that resort unto you. Besides that the occasion which hath come of late hath
come from none but such as have frequented your meetings, so that now they are
flown off from magistrates and ministers and since they have come to you. And
besides that it will not well stand with the commonwealth that families should
be neglected for so many neighbors and dames and so much time spent. We see no
rule of God for this. We see not that any should have authority to set up any
other exercises besides what authority hath already set up and so what hurt
comes of this you will be guilty of and we for suffering you.
Mrs. H.: Sir,
I do not believe that to be so.
Gov.: Well, we see how it is. We must
therefore put it away from you or restrain you from maintaining this course.
Mrs H. If you have a rule for it from God's word you may.
Gov.: We are
your judges, and not you ours and we must compel you to it.
Mrs. H.: If it
please you by authority to put it down I will freely let you for I am subject to
your authority.... Deputy Governor, Thomas Dudley: I would go a little
higher with Mrs. Hutchinson. About three years ago we were all in peace. Mrs
Hutchinson, from that time she came hath made a disturbance, and some that came
over with her in the ship did inform me what she was as soon as she was landed.
I being then in place dealt with the pastor and teacher of Boston and desired
them to enquire of her, and then I was satisfied that she held nothing different
from us. But within half a year after, she had vented divers of her strange
opinions and had made parties in the country, and at length it comes that Mr.
Cotton and Mr. Vane were of her judgment, but Mr. Cotton had cleared himself
that he was not of that mind. But now it appears by this woman's meeting that
Mrs. Hutchinson hath so forestalled the minds of many by their resort to her
meeting that now she hath a potent party in the country. Now if all these things
have endangered us as from that foundation and if she in particular hath
disparaged all our ministers in the land that they have preached a covenant of
works, and only Mr. Cotton a covenant of grace, why this is not to be suffered,
and therefore being driven to the foundation and it being found that Mrs.
Hutchinson is she that hath depraved all the ministers and hath been the cause
of what is fallen out, why we must take away the foundation and the building
will fall.
Mrs. H.: I pray, Sir, prove it that I said they preached nothing
but a covenant of works.
Dep. Gov.: Nothing but a covenant of works. Why a
Jesuit may preach truth sometimes.
Mrs. H.: Did I ever say they preached a
covenant of works then?
Dep. Gov.: If they do not preach a covenant of grace
clearly, then they preach a covenant of works.
Mrs. H.: No, Sir. One may
preach a covenant of grace more clearly than another, so I said....
Dep.
Gov.: When they do preach a covenant of works do they preach truth?
Mrs. H.:
Yes, Sir. But when they preach a covenant of works for salvation, that is not
truth.
Dep. Gov.: I do but ask you this: when the ministers do preach a
covenant of works do they preach a way of salvation?
Mrs. H.: I did not come
hither to answer questions of that sort.
Dep. Gov.: Because you will deny
the thing.
Mrs. H.: Ey, but that is to be proved first.
Dep. Gov.: I
will make it plain that you did say that the ministers did preach a covenant of
works.
Mrs. H.: I deny that.
Dep. Gov.: And that you said they were not
able ministers of the New Testament, but Mr. Cotton only.
Mrs. H.: If ever I
spake that I proved it by God's word.
Court: Very well, very well.
Mrs.
H.: If one shall come unto me in private, and desire me seriously to tell them
what I thought of such an one, I must either speak false or true in my answer.
Dep. Gov.: Likewise I will prove this that you said the gospel in the letter
and words holds forth nothing but a covenant of works and that all that do not
hold as you do are in a covenant of works.
Mrs. H.: I deny this for if I
should so say I should speak against my own judgment....
Mr. Hugh
Peters: That which concerns us to speak unto, as yet we are sparing in,
unless the court command us to speak, then we shall answer to Mrs. Hutchinson
notwithstanding our brethren are very unwilling to answer.
[The Governor
says to do so. Six minsters then testify to the particular charges and that she
was "not only difficult in her opinions, but also of an intemperate spirit"]
Mr Hugh Peters:.... [I asked her] What difference do you conceive to be
between your teacher and us?... Briefly, she told me there was a wide and broad
difference.... He preaches the covenant of grace and you the covenant of works,
and that you are not able ministers of the New Testament and know no more than
the apostles did before the resurrection of Christ. I did then put it to her,
What do you conceive of such a brother? She answered he had not the seal of the
spirit.
Mrs. H.: If our pastor would shew his writings you should see what I
said, and that many things are not so as is reported.
Mr. Wilson:...what is
written [here now] I will avouch.
Mr. Weld: [agrees that Peters related
Hutchinson's words accurately]
Mr. Phillips: [agrees that Peters related
Hutchinson's words accurately and added] Then I asked her of myself (being she
spake rashly of them all) because she never heard me at all. She likewise said
that we were not able ministers of the New Testament and her reason was because
we were not sealed.
Mr. Simmes: Agrees that Peters related Hutchinson's
words accurately
Mr. Shephard: Also to Same.
Mr. Eliot: [agrees that
Peters related Hutchinson's words accurately]
Dep. Gov.: I called these
witnesses and you deny them. You see they have proved this and you deny this,
but it is clear. You say they preached a covenant of works and that they were
not able ministers of the New Testament; now there are two other things that you
did affirm which were that the scriptures in the letter of them held forth
nothing but a covenant of works and likewise that those that were under a
covenant of works cannot be saved.
Mrs. H.: Prove that I said so.
Gov.:
Did you say so?
Mrs. H.: No, Sir, it is your conclusion.
Dep. Gov.: What
do I do charging of you if you deny what is so fully proved?
Gov.: Here are
six undeniable ministers who say it is true and yet you deny that you did say
that they preach a covenant of works and that they were not able ministers of
the gospel, and it appears plainly that you have spoken it, and whereas you say
that it was drawn from you in a way of friendship, you did profess then that it
was out of conscience that you spake....
Mrs. H.:....They thought that I did
conceive there was a difference between them and Mr. Cotton.... I might say they
might preach a covenant of works as did the apostles, but to preach a covenant
of works and to be under a covenant of works is another business.
Dep. Gov.:
There have been six witnesses to prove this and yet you deny it. [and then he
mentions a seventh, Mr. Nathaniel Ward]
Mrs. H.: I acknowledge using the
words of the apostle to the Corinthians unto him, [Mr. Ward] that they that were
ministers of the letter and not the spirit did preach a covenant of works.
Gov.: Mrs. Hutchinson, the court you see hath laboured to bring you to
acknowledge the error of your way that so you might be reduced, the time grows
late, we shall therefore give you a little more time to consider of it and
therefore desire that you attend the court again in the morning. . [The next
morning]
Gov.: We proceeded... as far as we could... There were divers
things laid to her charge: her ordinary meetings about religious exercises, her
speeches in derogation of the ministers among us, and the weakening of the hands
and hearts of the people towards them. Here was sufficient proof made of that
which she was accused of, in that point concerning the ministers and their
ministry, as that they did preach a covenant of works when others did preach a
covenant of grace, and that they were not able ministers of the New Testament,
and that they had not the seal of the spirit, and this was spoken not as was
pretended out of private conference, but out of conscience and warrant from
scripture alleged the fear of man is a snare and seeing God had given her a
calling to it she would freely speak. Some other speeches she used, as that the
letter of the scripture held forth a covenant of works, and this is offered to
be proved by probable grounds....
Controversy--should the witnesses should
be recalled and made swear an oath, as Mrs. Hutchinson desired, is resolved
against doing so
Gov.: I see no necessity of an oath in this thing seeing it
is true and the substance of the matter confirmed by divers, yet that all may be
satisfied, if the elders will take an oath they shall have it given them....
Mrs. H.: After that they have taken an oath I will make good what I say.
Gov.: Let us state the case, and then we may know what to do. That which is
laid to Mrs. Hutchinson charge is that, that she hath traduced the magistrates
and ministers of this jurisdiction, that she hath said the ministers preached a
covenant of works and Mr. Cotton a covenant of grace, and that they were not
able ministers of the gospel, and she excuses it that she made it a private
conference and with a promise of secrecy, &c. Now this is charged upon her,
and they therefore sent for her seeing she made it her table talk, and then she
said the fear of man was a snare and therefore she would not be affeared of
them....
Dep. Gov.: Let her witnesses be called.
Gov.: Who be they?
Mrs. H.: Mr. Leveret and our teacher and Mr. Coggeshall.
Gov.: Mr.
Coggeshall was not present.
Mr. Coggeshall: Yes, but I was. Only I desired
to be silent till I should be called.
Gov.: Will you, Mr. Coggeshall, say
that she did not say so?
Mr. Coggeshall: Yes, I dare say that she did not
say all that which they lay against her.
Mr. Peters: How dare you look into
the court to say such a word?
Mr. Coggeshall: Mr. Peters takes upon him to
forbid me. I shall be silent.
Mr. Stoughton [assistant of the Court]: Ey,
but she intended this that they say.
Gov.: Well, Mr. Leveret, what were the
words? I pray, speak.
Mr. Leveret: To my best remembrance when the elders
did send for her, Mr. Peters did with much vehemency and intreaty urge her to
tell what difference there was between Mr. Cotton and them, and upon his urging
of her she said "The fear of man is a snare, but they that trust upon the Lord
shall be safe." And being asked wherein the difference was, she answered that
they did not preach a covenant of grace so clearly as Mr. Cotton did, and she
gave this reason of it: because that as the apostles were for a time without the
spirit so until they had received the witness of the spirit they could not
preach a covenant of grace so clearly.
Gov.: Don't you remember that she
said they were not able ministers of the New Testament?
Mrs. H.: Mr. Weld
and I had an hour's discourse at the window and then I spake that, if I spake
it....
Gov.: Mr Cotton, the court desires that you declare what you do
remember of the conference which was at the time and is now in question.
Mr.
Cotton: I did not think I should be called to bear witness in this cause and
therefore did not labor to call to remembrance what was done; but the greatest
passage that took impression upon me was to this purpose. The elders spake that
they had heard that she had spoken some condemning words of their ministry, and
among other things they did first pray her to answer wherein she thought their
ministry did differ from mine. How the comparison sprang I am ignorant, but
sorry I was that any comparison should be between me and my brethren and
uncomfortable it was. She told them to this purpose that they did not hold forth
a covenant of grace as I did. But wherein did we differ? Why she said that they
did not hold forth the seal of the spirit as he doth. Where is the difference
there? Say they, why saith she, speaking to one or other of them, I know not to
whom. You preach of the seal of the spirit upon a work and he upon free grace
without a work or without respect to a work; he preaches the seal of the spirit
upon free grace and you upon a work. I told her I was very sorry that she put
comparisons between my ministry and theirs, for she had said more than I could
myself, and rather I had that she had put us in fellowship with them and not
have made that discrepancy. She said, she found the difference....
This was
the sum of the difference, nor did it seem to be so ill taken as it is and our
brethren did say also that they would not so easily believe reports as they had
done and withal mentioned that they would speak no more of it, some of them did;
and afterwards some of them did say they were less satisfied than before. And I
must say that I did not find her saying that they were under a covenant of
works, nor that she said they did preach a covenant of works.
[more back and
forth between Rev. John Cotton, trying to defend Mrs. Hutchinson, and Mr.
Peters, about exactly what Mrs. Hutchinson said]
Mrs. H.: If you please to
give me leave I shall give you the ground of what I know to be true. Being much
troubled to see the falseness of the constitution of the Church of England, I
had like to have turned Separatist. Whereupon I kept a day of solemn humiliation
and pondering of the thing; this scripture was brought unto me--he that denies
Jesus Christ to be come in the flesh is antichrist. This I considered of and in
considering found that the papists did not deny him to be come in the flesh, nor
we did not deny him--who then was antichrist? Was the Turk antichrist only? The
Lord knows that I could not open scripture; he must by his prophetical office
open it unto me. So after that being unsatisfied in the thing, the Lord was
pleased to bring this scripture out of the Hebrews. he that denies the testament
denies the testator, and in this did open unto me and give me to see that those
which did not teach the new covenant had the spirit of antichrist, and upon this
he did discover the ministry unto me; and ever since, I bless the Lord, he hath
let me see which was the clear ministry and which the wrong. Since that time I
confess I have been more choice and he hath left me to distinguish between the
voice of my beloved and the voice of Moses, the voice of John the Baptist and
the voice of antichrist, for all those voices are spoken of in scripture. Now if
you do condemn me for speaking what in my conscience I know to be truth I must
commit myself unto the Lord.
Mr. Nowel [assistant to the Court]: How do you
know that was the spirit?
Mrs. H.: How did Abraham know that it was God that
bid him offer his son, being a breach of the sixth commandment?
Dep. Gov.:
By an immediate voice.
Mrs. H.: So to me by an immediate revelation.
Dep. Gov.: How! an immediate revelation.
Mrs. H.: By the voice of his
own spirit to my soul. I will give you another scripture, Jer[emiah] 46:
27-28--out of which the Lord showed me what he would do for me and the rest of
his servants. But after he was pleased to reveal himself to me I did presently,
like Abraham, run to Hagar. And after that he did let me see the atheism of my
own heart, for which I begged of the Lord that it might not remain in my heart,
and being thus, he did show me this (a twelvemonth after) which I told you of
before.... Therefore, I desire you to look to it, for you see this scripture
fulfilled this day and therefore I desire you as you tender the Lord and the
church and commonwealth to consider and look what you do. You have power over my
body but the Lord Jesus hath power over my body and soul; and assure yourselves
thus much, you do as much as in you lies to put the Lord Jesus Christ from you,
and if you go on in this course you begin, you will bring a curse upon you and
your posterity, and the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it.
Dep. Gov.: What is
the scripture she brings?
Mr. Stoughton [assistant to the Court]: Behold I
turn away from you.
Mrs. H.: But now having seen him which is invisible I
fear not what man can do unto me.
Gov.: Daniel was delivered by miracle; do
you think to be deliver'd so too?
Mrs. H.: I do here speak it before the
court. I look that the Lord should deliver me by his providence.... [because God
had said to her] though I should meet with affliction, yet I am the same God
that delivered Daniel out of the lion's den, I will also deliver thee.
Mr.
Harlakenden [assistant to the Court]: I may read scripture and the most glorious
hypocrite may read them and yet go down to hell.
Mrs. H.: It may be so....
Gov.: I am persuaded that the revelation she brings forth is delusion.
[The trial text here reads:] All the court but some two or three ministers
cry out, we all believe it--we all believe it. [Mrs. Hutchinson was found
guilty]
Gov.: The court hath already declared themselves satisfied
concerning the things you hear, and concerning the troublesomeness of her spirit
and the danger of her course amongst us, which is not to be suffered. Therefore
if it be the mind of the court that Mrs. Hutchinson for these things that appear
before us is unfit for our society, and if it be the mind of the court that she
shall be banished out of our liberties and imprisoned till she be sent away, let
them hold up their hands.
[All but three did so]
Gov.: Mrs. Hutchinson,
the sentence of the court you hear is that you are banished from out of our
jurisdiction as being a woman not fit for our society, and are to be imprisoned
till the court shall send you away.
Mrs. H.: I desire to know wherefore I am
banished?
Gov.: Say no more. The court knows wherefore and is
satisfied.

Through its own logical reasoning, Antinomianism was a transcendental philosophy which, in its most literal definition, ascertained that God, as is similarly believed in enduring Eastern philosophies, is without attributes and, as Ms Hutchinson declared in court, does not require direct mediation through the clergy to be attained for personal salvation. It was this facet above all else that the Puritan authorities were most offended and therefore directed the most contention, for such beliefs would deny them the authority afforded them through the poorly disquised church-state . Contrary to antinomianism and despite the Puritan's arguments, however, Anne Hutchinson never claimed that she was not bound by "Christian Moral Law".

"I doe cast you out and in the name of Christ I doe deliver you up to Satan, that you may learne no more to blaspheme, to seduce, and to lye."
Rev. John Wilson

Her once beloved pastor, Rev John Cotton, who up to this point was at the very least tolerant of the "delusional" woman "not fit for our society", and had even aided her and Sir Henry Vane's attempt in having her brother-in-law replace John Wilson as Pastor of Boston, was now only too quick to distance and disassociate himself from her and soon became her nemesis by joining Wilson's chorus in attacking her meetings as a "promiscuous and filthie coming together of men and women without Distinction of Relation of Marriage," whose "opinions frett like a Gangrene and spread like a Leprosie, and will eate out the very Bowells of Religion." Banished from Massachusetts, she relocated with her husband and 14 children to Rhode Island, welcomed by Gov Roger Williams, where they founded the town of Pocasset. A few years later, she and all but one of her children were killed in attack by the Narragansett Indians. Her compassionate brother-in-law, Rev John Wheelwright, was subsequently banished from Massachusetts, and after purchasing land from the Indians beyond the reaches of the Massachusetts Colony within just 14 days of the Court's rulings, founded a church in the northern frontier town of Exeter in 1638.

Equally notable among the congregation of Rev. John Wilson's church in Boston was Mary Dyer, a close friend and supporter of her midwife, Anne Hutchinson. Mary Dyer and her husband William were disenfranchised from the church as supporters of both Rev Wheelwright and Ms Hutchinson and her "Antinomian" philosophy in 1637, and eventually relocated to Rhode Island where they remained until 1652, when William and Mary Dyer accompanied Roger Williams and John Clark to England. While William returned to Rhode Island in 1653, Mary remained in England until 1657 studying George Fox's theology which has come to be known as the Quaker religion. Upon her return to America, she made a stop-over in the Massachusetts Bay Colony on her journey home to Rhode Island. By this time, the courts of Massachusetts Bay Colony had implemented a series harsh laws against those who had become members of "The Religious Society of Friends", or held sympathies towards them, and upon landing in Massachusetts, Mary Dyer was subsequently arrested as an undesired missionary of the outlawed religion. In 1660, at the conclusion of her third arrest and subsequent trial in Massachusetts, she was hung to her death for defying the Courts rulings regarding the spread of the Quaker Religion .

Google Earth - Rumford Center, Maine

2007-12-16T10:44:00.000-05:00

This GoogleEarth image is of Rumford Center, Maine. It is oriented looking westward along US Rte. 2, similar to the 1910 photo.

To what end?

2007-12-09T08:19:00.000-05:00

Ive been "chomping at the bit" for some time now, anxious to introduce a few more shared family lines seemingly more pertinent to the eventual settlement of Rumford Maine, and to explore the cause and effects of the events of 17th century that greatly affected the course of their lives, (such as the "Anne Hutchinson-Antinomian Heresy" charges, the persecution of Quakers, the "King Philips War", the "Witchcraft Delusion",) and the eventual passage into the 18th century. However, to understand these, it becomes necessary to gain a semblance of understanding of the conficts between the prevailing attitudes and philosophies of both the early colonial leaders and the common settler-citizens.

Doubtless, the framework of this infant society was constructed on Religious underpinnings in an era of an amazing philosophical awakening within England and Europe that, still not firmly set, reverberated in magnified echoes across the sea.

America quickly became an experimental laboratory of unproven concepts, where the force of faith collided with physics of will. There can be no judgements of "good" or "evil" regarding the inevitable explosion of passionate action; one can only sift thru the fallout and determine the nature of its residue...knowing the proof is "in the pudding"...and learn the lessons so as not relive the painful consequences. This is the tack I must follow as I research and post, for there exists a fine line where empathy and understanding of their lives can easily blur into a personal self-identity...a realm where emotions such as pride or disdain can taint.

So the next question arises, the answer of which requires me to determine. In researching the alchemy, should I simply identify the ingredients, or delve deep into their chemical composition? I ask myself this now, for in the act of research one can easily find themselves deep in a quagmire of factual minutia, to be tossed about in the tumoult of trivia which may or may not prove themselves relevant in the final outcome.

Does it matter that the benefactor of "Winthrop's Fleet" was Theodiphilus, the Earl of Lincoln, a descendant of Henry IV and William The Conqueror, and that a majority of America's early Puritan principal's, founders, and leaders, had, in some degree or another, a personal or professional association with him?

Is it necessary to understand that while the early Puritans were of English families of the moderately wealthy and highly educated "landed" Gentry class , the Separatists (the "Pilgrims") who preceded them consisted mostly of merchants, craftsmen and soldiers? Or that while Puritans were essentially self-sufficient in aquiring the monies, land-grants, and governmental influence to grow in empirical fashion, the Separatists relied heavily on corporate sponsorship and contractual loan repayment agreements and were fated to eventually fold up and incorporate themselves into the Massachussets Bay Colony?

Is there any benefit in knowing that the earliest hardy settlers of the Maine Coast (who preceded both the Puritans and the Separatists), were, first and foremost, dregs of European society; escaped convicts, political refugees, lawless drunkards or banished ill-reputes? Or that their exploitive presence upon the formidable landscape had nothing to do with pursuing religious liberty or establishing a new nation, but simply to meagerly live in search of relative personal security?

I think so.

They are our ancestors...our fathers and mothers...and their lives, regardless of the external influences of their ideas and their resulting actions, have great affect in determining who we, both individually and communally, percieve ourselves to be and of the intimate power we command.

Mitt Romney's Speech, "Faith In America"

2007-12-08T20:05:00.000-05:00

2008 Republican Party Presidential Candidate and descendant of Daniel Wing, Mitt Romney, speaks of Faith, Leadership, and the continued need for the "Separation Of Church & State".

Mitt Romney's "Faith in America" speech, as prepared for delivery.

""Thank you, Mr. President, for your kind introduction.

"It is an honor to be here today. This is an inspiring place because of you and the First Lady and because of the film exhibited across the way in the Presidential library. For those who have not seen it, it shows the President as a young pilot, shot down during the Second World War, being rescued from his life-raft by the crew of an American submarine. It is a moving reminder that when America has faced challenge and peril, Americans rise to the occasion, willing to risk their very lives to defend freedom and preserve our nation. We are in your debt. Thank you, Mr. President.

"Mr. President, your generation rose to the occasion, first to defeat Fascism and then to vanquish the Soviet Union. You left us, your children, a free and strong America. It is why we call yours the greatest generation. It is now my generation's turn. How we respond to today's challenges will define our generation. And it will determine what kind of America we will leave our children, and theirs.

"America faces a new generation of challenges. Radical violent Islam seeks to destroy us. An emerging China endeavors to surpass our economic leadership. And we are troubled at home by government overspending, overuse of foreign oil, and the breakdown of the family.

"Over the last year, we have embarked on a national debate on how best to preserve American leadership. Today, I wish to address a topic which I believe is fundamental to America's greatness: our religious liberty. I will also offer perspectives on how my own faith would inform my Presidency, if I were elected.

"There are some who may feel that religion is not a matter to be seriously considered in the context of the weighty threats that face us. If so, they are at odds with the nation's founders, for they, when our nation faced its greatest peril, sought the blessings of the Creator. And further, they discovered the essential connection between the survival of a free land and the protection of religious freedom. In John Adams’ words: 'We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion... Our constitution was made for a moral and religious people.'

"Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom. Freedom opens the windows of the soul so that man can discover his most profound beliefs and commune with God. Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone.

"Given our grand tradition of religious tolerance and liberty, some wonder whether there are any questions regarding an aspiring candidate's religion that are appropriate. I believe there are. And I will answer them today.

"Almost 50 years ago another candidate from Massachusetts explained that he was an American running for president, not a Catholic running for president. Like him, I am an American running for president. I do not define my candidacy by my religion. A person should not be elected because of his faith nor should he be rejected because of his faith.

"Let me assure you that no authorities of my church, or of any other church for that matter, will ever exert influence on presidential decisions. Their authority is theirs, within the province of church affairs, and it ends where the affairs of the nation begin.

"As governor, I tried to do the right as best I knew it, serving the law and answering to the Constitution. I did not confuse the particular teachings of my church with the obligations of the office and of the Constitution –- and of course, I would not do so as President. I will put no doctrine of any church above the plain duties of the office and the sovereign authority of the law.

"As a young man, Lincoln described what he called America's 'political religion' – the commitment to defend the rule of law and the Constitution. When I place my hand on the Bible and take the oath of office, that oath becomes my highest promise to God. If I am fortunate to become your president, I will serve no one religion, no one group, no one cause, and no one interest. A President must serve only the common cause of the people of the United States.

"There are some for whom these commitments are not enough. They would prefer it if I would simply distance myself from my religion, say that it is more a tradition than my personal conviction, or disavow one or another of its precepts. That I will not do. I believe in my Mormon faith and I endeavor to live by it. My faith is the faith of my fathers –- I will be true to them and to my beliefs.

"Some believe that such a confession of my faith will sink my candidacy. If they are right, so be it. But I think they underestimate the American people. Americans do not respect believers of convenience. Americans tire of those who would jettison their beliefs, even to gain the world.

"There is one fundamental question about which I often am asked. What do I believe about Jesus Christ? I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and the Savior of mankind. My church's beliefs about Christ may not all be the same as those of other faiths. Each religion has its own unique doctrines and history. These are not bases for criticism but rather a test of our tolerance. Religious tolerance would be a shallow principle indeed if it were reserved only for faiths with which we agree.

"There are some who would have a presidential candidate describe and explain his church's distinctive doctrines. To do so would enable the very religious test the founders prohibited in the Constitution. No candidate should become the spokesman for his faith. For if he becomes President he will need the prayers of the people of all faiths.

"I believe that every faith I have encountered draws its adherents closer to God. And in every faith I have come to know, there are features I wish were in my own: I love the profound ceremony of the Catholic Mass, the approachability of God in the prayers of the Evangelicals, the tenderness of spirit among the Pentecostals, the confident independence of the Lutherans, the ancient traditions of the Jews, unchanged through the ages, and the commitment to frequent prayer of the Muslims. As I travel across the country and see our towns and cities, I am always moved by the many houses of worship with their steeples, all pointing to heaven, reminding us of the source of life's blessings.

"It is important to recognize that while differences in theology exist between the churches in America, we share a common creed of moral convictions. And where the affairs of our nation are concerned, it's usually a sound rule to focus on the latter – on the great moral principles that urge us all on a common course. Whether it was the cause of abolition, or civil rights, or the right to life itself, no movement of conscience can succeed in America that cannot speak to the convictions of religious people.

"We separate church and state affairs in this country, and for good reason. No religion should dictate to the state nor should the state interfere with the free practice of religion. But in recent years, the notion of the separation of church and state has been taken by some well beyond its original meaning. They seek to remove from the public domain any acknowledgment of God. Religion is seen as merely a private affair with no place in public life. It is as if they are intent on establishing a new religion in America – the religion of secularism. They are wrong.

"The founders proscribed the establishment of a state religion, but they did not countenance the elimination of religion from the public square. We are a nation 'Under God' and in God, we do indeed trust.

"We should acknowledge the Creator as did the Founders – in ceremony and word. He should remain on our currency, in our pledge, in the teaching of our history, and during the holiday season, nativity scenes and menorahs should be welcome in our public places. Our greatness would not long endure without judges who respect the foundation of faith upon which our constitution rests. I will take care to separate the affairs of government from any religion, but I will not separate us from 'the God who gave us liberty.'

"Nor would I separate us from our religious heritage. Perhaps the most important question to ask a person of faith who seeks a political office, is this: does he share these American values: the equality of human kind, the obligation to serve one another, and a steadfast commitment to liberty?

"They are not unique to any one denomination. They belong to the great moral inheritance we hold in common. They are the firm ground on which Americans of different faiths meet and stand as a nation, united.

"We believe that every single human being is a child of God – we are all part of the human family. The conviction of the inherent and inalienable worth of every life is still the most revolutionary political proposition ever advanced. John Adams put it that we are 'thrown into the world all equal and alike.'

"The consequence of our common humanity is our responsibility to one another, to our fellow Americans foremost, but also to every child of God. It is an obligation which is fulfilled by Americans every day, here and across the globe, without regard to creed or race or nationality.

"Americans acknowledge that liberty is a gift of God, not an indulgence of government. No people in the history of the world have sacrificed as much for liberty. The lives of hundreds of thousands of America's sons and daughters were laid down during the last century to preserve freedom, for us and for freedom loving people throughout the world. America took nothing from that Century's terrible wars –- no land from Germany or Japan or Korea; no treasure; no oath of fealty. America's resolve in the defense of liberty has been tested time and again. It has not been found wanting, nor must it ever be. America must never falter in holding high the banner of freedom.

"These American values, this great moral heritage, is shared and lived in my religion as it is in yours. I was taught in my home to honor God and love my neighbor. I saw my father march with Martin Luther King. I saw my parents provide compassionate care to others, in personal ways to people nearby, and in just as consequential ways in leading national volunteer movements. I am moved by the Lord's words: 'For I was an hungered, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in: naked, and ye clothed me...'

"My faith is grounded on these truths. You can witness them in Ann and my marriage and in our family. We are a long way from perfect and we have surely stumbled along the way, but our aspirations, our values, are the self-same as those from the other faiths that stand upon this common foundation. And these convictions will indeed inform my presidency.

"Today's generations of Americans have always known religious liberty. Perhaps we forget the long and arduous path our nation's forbearers took to achieve it. They came here from England to seek freedom of religion. But upon finding it for themselves, they at first denied it to others. Because of their diverse beliefs, Ann Hutchinson was exiled from Massachusetts Bay, a banished Roger Williams founded Rhode Island, and two centuries later, Brigham Young set out for the West. Americans were unable to accommodate their commitment to their own faith with an appreciation for the convictions of others to different faiths. In this, they were very much like those of the European nations they had left.

"It was in Philadelphia that our founding fathers defined a revolutionary vision of liberty, grounded on self evident truths about the equality of all, and the inalienable rights with which each is endowed by his Creator.

"We cherish these sacred rights, and secure them in our Constitutional order. Foremost do we protect religious liberty, not as a matter of policy but as a matter of right. There will be no established church, and we are guaranteed the free exercise of our religion.

"I'm not sure that we fully appreciate the profound implications of our tradition of religious liberty. I have visited many of the magnificent cathedrals in Europe. They are so inspired … so grand … so empty. Raised up over generations, long ago, so many of the cathedrals now stand as the postcard backdrop to societies just too busy or too 'enlightened' to venture inside and kneel in prayer. The establishment of state religions in Europe did no favor to Europe's churches. And though you will find many people of strong faith there, the churches themselves seem to be withering away.

"Infinitely worse is the other extreme, the creed of conversion by conquest: violent Jihad, murder as martyrdom... killing Christians, Jews, and Muslims with equal indifference. These radical Islamists do their preaching not by reason or example, but in the coercion of minds and the shedding of blood. We face no greater danger today than theocratic tyranny, and the boundless suffering these states and groups could inflict if given the chance.

"The diversity of our cultural expression, and the vibrancy of our religious dialogue, has kept America in the forefront of civilized nations even as others regard religious freedom as something to be destroyed.

"In such a world, we can be deeply thankful that we live in a land where reason and religion are friends and allies in the cause of liberty, joined against the evils and dangers of the day. And you can be certain of this: Any believer in religious freedom, any person who has knelt in prayer to the Almighty, has a friend and ally in me. And so it is for hundreds of millions of our countrymen: we do not insist on a single strain of religion – rather, we welcome our nation's symphony of faith.

"Recall the early days of the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia, during the fall of 1774. With Boston occupied by British troops, there were rumors of imminent hostilities and fears of an impending war. In this time of peril, someone suggested that they pray. But there were objections. 'They were too divided in religious sentiments', what with Episcopalians and Quakers, Anabaptists and Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and Catholics.

"Then Sam Adams rose, and said he would hear a prayer from anyone of piety and good character, as long as they were a patriot.

"And so together they prayed, and together they fought, and together, by the grace of God ... they founded this great nation.

"In that spirit, let us give thanks to the divine 'author of liberty.' And together, let us pray that this land may always be blessed, 'with freedom's holy light.'

"God bless the United States of America."

http://www.boston.com/news/politics/politicalintelligence/2007/12/text_of_romney.html

William Vassal

2007-12-03T05:38:00.001-05:00

illiam Vassal-Anna King

Judith Vassal-Resolved White

Anna White-John Hayward

Judith Hayward- Philip Goss

Thomas Goss-Abigail Wade

Salome Goss-Aaron Moore

Geneva Moore-Aaron Graham

John Graham-Susan Wood

Charles Graham-Mary Swain

Sarah Graham-Harry Wing

Arthur Wing

It is quite probable that of the many ancestors who believed in the "separation of Church & State", William Vassal may have been its earliest active advocate. Below is a well-written piece of his life and activities, by Cairril Mills.

William Vassallwas born ca. 1593 in Ratcliffe, Stepney, County Middlesex, England (just east of London). William's father John Vassall was a London alderman who served under Queen Elizabeth I and who equipped and commanded two ships in the fight against the Spanish Armada.

William's grandfather was also named John and had been sent into England by his father (yet another John) to escape persecution in France. The French Vassalls were Huguenots, and France was leading up to the horrible St Bartholomew's Day Massacre (1572), when thousands of Huguenots were killed by rioters and troops under orders of the Catholic king. Fortunately John (William's grandfather) emigrated to Protestant England from Normandy before the persecution reached fever pitch, and settled near London.

William never knew his mother, Anne Russell Vassall; she died shortly after he was born. She was 45 years old and may have died in childbirth. It wasn't until William was about 24 (and already married himself) that his father married again, this time to Anne Hewes. We don't know if there was a mother figure in William's life in the intervening years, but, as an alderman, John would have been wealthy enough to afford governesses and other servants. We also know William was well educated, which means he may have received education in a noble's house as a boy or some other opportunity for learning. William grew up with his two surviving siblings (two brothers, both named John, died before William was born), Judith and Samuel.

We don't know anything more about William until 1613, when he married Anna (or Anne) King on 09 June. They were both 20 years old and they would have 10 children together—eight of them surviving childhood. We have no death date for Anna, but as she was not mentioned in William's will, it seems likely she predeceased him. [Note: I've found numerous online pedigrees that show a death date of 01 Dec 1670 in Barbados for Anna, but they do not give their source for this date. It seems unlikely she would have been left out of William's will were she still alive.]

Anna became pregnant almost immediately, giving birth to a girl they named Anna. But the infant died within three months. William and Anna did not have another child (though there may have been unrecorded miscarriages) until ca. 1619 when daughter Judith was born. Four years later, when William and Anna were about 30, daughter Frances was born. The following year, their first son, Samuel, was born, along with twin Mary. Samuel died fewer than six months later, and Mary seems to have died either as an infant or while still a child.

The next year (1625) another son was born, John. His namesake, William's father John, died the same year at age 81. The following year, when William and Anna were 34, they had their third son, William. Another daughter, again named Anna, was born the year after (1628), but a five-year gap appears before their final child, Mary, was born (perhaps due in part to their travels to and from the Colonies).

William and his brother Samuel Vassall were among the original patentees of the Massachusetts Bay Company (1629). Samuel became very wealthy, eventually owning one-tenth of the entire Massachusetts Bay colony. His fleet of ships regularly supplied the colonists. But he was the first to refuse to pay the tax of "tonnage and poundage," a tax Parliament levied on supplies going to the Colonies. For this, he was convicted by the Star Chamber court and imprisoned for sixteen years. While Cromwell's Parliament voted him over £10,000 in compensation, it was never paid, and the family never recovered their former wealth.

As for William, he was an Assistant to Massachusetts Bay Colony governor John Winthrop. He invested in the company and held a position as a magistrate. Almost all the Adventurers (investors) were wealthy businessmen (William is referred to in one source as an "opulent West India merchant") or landed gentry from the eastern coast or southwest of England, and active in Puritan religious and political causes.

These areas had a long history of Christian reform movements and were where Cromwell raised his Puritan armies in the 1640s.

There were 127 founding investors who formed the basis of the company at the granting of the Royal Charter in 1628. In return for their investment, each received a small acreage in the colony, just enough to be able to flee to if religious and political persecution under the rule of the Stuarts made it necessary. Many of them eventually emigrated.

At a meeting of the Company 15 October 1629, William was appointed to go over to the colony. In spring 1630, William sailed with about 300 families from Yarmouth for Massachusetts Bay. Their aim was to establish "an independent church, but not a separate one." Like many of the New England colonists, William disagreed with some tenets of the state church (Church of England) but was not ready for an open break. By being geographically distant from the centers of religious and political power in England, colonists were generally able to experience greater religious freedom.

The company landed first at Salem, where they found the population decimated by disease and hunger. Of the 1,000 immigrants who came to Salem that year, one-fifth died during their first 12 months. With provisions scarce and hardly any buildings available, the new colonists dispersed into neighboring communities. The first court of the Assistants was held at Charlestown, but a polluted water source led them to move again, this time to the Shawmut peninsula where there was an abundance of clear spring water. Here they founded the colony's capital, Boston.

The people of the colony were resentful of the magistrates' power, and by May 1631 the decision was made that all officers of the government be elected annually by the freemen of the colony. While this is one of several examples of early democratic tendencies in the colonies, it must be noted that there were only about 120 freemen and they had to be in good standing with the church.

Whether because of this incident, William's differences with Governor Winthrop, or some other reason, William returned to England "a short while" after arriving in the colonies on the Lyon (I've been unable to find a date for his return).

He appears in the records again in 1635 when he and Anna (age 42) and children [Mills ancestor] Judith (16), Frances (12), John (10), Ann (6), Margaret (2), and Mary (1) board the Blessing to return to the colonies. They settled first at Roxbury in the Bay colony, where Anna joined the church*, but moved "shortly after" (by November 1636) to Scituate in Plymouth Colony, just over the border from the Bay Colony. It's possible Anna was sister to the Thomas King who also came over on the Blessing and settled at Scituate.

[*Joining the church meant entering into the covenant. It afforded responsibilities and privileges in both the religious and secular spheres.]

The Vassall house, called West Newland, was one of the first built at Scituate (1636). In November of that year, William joined the Scituate church. He expanded his land holdings in 1638 with 350 acres and gained the right to keep a ferry. In 1639 he was given the rights to have an oyster bed on the West Newland River. In exchange for these grants, William took oaths of allegiance and fidelity to the Crown. William was wealthy and well-connected, with his brother Samuel a member of Parliament and numerous friends traveling back and forth to England.

Daughter Judith Vassall joined the Scituate church in 1637 when she was 18, and seems to have sided prominently with her father in the pending division of the church. In 1640 she married Resolved White in Scituate. Around this time William seems to have considered moving back to Salem, since court records show he was looking into buying a farm in the area, but nothing came of it. Eventually Judith and Resolved had their own home on land adjoining William's estate.

In 1642 William was chosen to be on the war council after the Narragansetts threatened the colony. The following year, his name appears on a list of militia members.

In 1643, the year Judith and Resolved married, the Vassalls moved to Marshfield, where William became a town officer. Mills ancestor Susannah White Winslow lived in Marshfield with her husband Edward Winslow, who during the period of our story sometimes served as governor of Plymouth colony. The Vassalls, Whites, and Winslows were on friendly terms and lived close to one another. William would have been in close contact with Edward Winslow in their work as town magistrates.

William Vassall is best known for his role in the division of the church at Scituate 1644-5. It began, as so many schismatic movements in Christianity seem to begin, with a controversy over baptism. At the First Church of Christ in Scituate, disagreements arose as to whether baptism should be by sprinkling or by immersion. Rev John Lothrop eventually took about half the church with him in a split and moved to Barnstaple. William and daughter Judith were part of the congregation which remained at the Scituate church, and which now needed a new minister. Most of the congregation voted to call Rev Charles Chauncy of Plymouth; William, Judith, and a few others refused to call him [William Vassall, Thomas King, John Twisden, Thomas Lapham, Suza King, Judith White and Anna Stockbridge].

Chauncy had been embroiled in controversy over baptism before. He favored baptism by immersion, and while his Plymouth church congregation conceded it was probably the more theologically sound way, it was impractical for their climate. The Plymouth church consulted with ministers from other area churches, all of whom opined against Chauncy's position. Chauncy would not back down, and left the Plymouth church.

But even before this controversy, Chauncy had been involved with the persecution of non-conformists in England during the reign of Charles I, a fact William was probably well-acquainted with.

William wanted nothing to do with Chauncy and led the dissident Scituate faction. He was highly educated and could argue any point Chauncy (an Oxford graduate and no intellectual slouch) threw his way. William also supported allowing Anglican church members to partake of communion, a controversial position. He argued publicly it would allow for expansion of the church through evangelism, but his primary motivation was one of tolerance.

Chauncy then took the very curious step of trying to re-organize the church based on the people who had called him. He allowed that those who did not call him might be allowed into the covenant if he "saw cause." This is remarkable because, in the Colonies, a minister was not a minister unless he was called by a congregation. His power derived from the congregation, not from any external source. This was clearly a power play on Chauncy's part.

Chauncy accused William of being "inclined to the Bishops" (an allusion questioning William's Protestant credentials). Chauncy then asked the entire Vassall faction (which had grown to about half of the Scituate congregation) to refrain from communion, effectively kicking them out and depriving them of members' rights and privileges.

William's faction, including a Thomas and Suzanna King (related to Anna King Vassall?), renewed their covenant as a gathered church on 2 February 1642. They called themselves the First Church of Scituate, believing that Chauncy had effectively established a new church by re-writing the rules of the covenant. Chauncy and his followers insisted they were the First Church. The matter ended up in court, partly due to related issues of land ownership. The court eventually found in Chauncy's favor. Vassall's congregation became the Second Church of Scituate.

The Second Church wanted a peaceful separation and took a "live and let live" approach. They called William Witherell of Duxbury, a grammar school teacher, to be their minister, ordaining him 2 Sep 1645. He had been pastor of the Duxbury church, which refused to release him. John Cooke of Plymouth Church, and Josias Winslow of Marshfield Church (Edward and Susannah's son and Resolved White's half-brother) were sent to try to convince Witherell not to leave. [View text of a letter from William Vassall to Duxbury minister Ralph Partridge, decrying the other churches' interference.] Witherell left anyway.

Josias began attending the the Second Church of Scituate and brought his children to be baptized there, even though it was 10 miles away. Perhaps the fact that Witherell favored baptism by sprinkling or by the laying on of hands had something to do with it! Regardless, Witherell was a highly successful pastor, continuing in his position for the next 39 years until his death.

The church at South Scituate that William Vassall founded continued through the years in peace and tranquility. Samuel Deane called its doctrine “moderate Calvinism.” He wrote: “The religious character of the people, it is remarked, has been sober, modest and rational in general, not corrupted by metaphysical subtleties, nor distracted by sectarian zeal. Hospitality, charity and sociability are characteristics of the state of society.”

The feud between William and Chauncy, and the two churches, went on for thirty years, agitating both Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay colonies. Vassall left the colony in 1646, and Chauncy resigned his ministry in 1654 to become president of Harvard, which helped disperse some of the animosity. But the churches weren't able to formally reconcile until 1674-5.

While William wrestled with the controversy over the Second Church of Scituate, he was also closely involved (though not in a public manner) with controversies which arose in Hingham, a nearby town across the border in Massachusetts Bay colony. [For a more complete discussion of the Hingham issues, see William Vassall and Dissent in Early Massachusetts [pdf] by Dorothy Carpenter.]

In 1643, a confederation was formed among the Massachusetts Bay Colony and the colonies of Plymouth, New Haven, and Connecticut. (Piscataqua and Providence were left out because of religious nonconformity, and Rhode Island because it refused to become part of Plymouth.) It was clear from the star that Massachusetts Bay Colony was going to drive the confederation, seeking to impose its more drastic, Puritan, authoritarian laws on other communities in the confederation. Vassall was savvy enough to see the writing on the wall and, in the Hingham case, tried to work behind the scenes to bolster democratic and pluralistic law.

"The issues which the town of Hingham was fighting for were the same issues which Samuel Vassall had been fighting for a decade before in England—the right to petition the government, and the right to speak out against unjust taxation and fines. Here they were fighting also for the freedom of the local church from domination by a state church, as well as the right of the towns to carry on with their own elections of military officers without outside interference. Moreover, a greater battle…was being fought, too—over the rights of the freemen to share equally with the magistrates in affairs of the government."

Local citizens presented a petition to Hingham magistrates in support of their cause. The magistrates rejected the petition, saying,
"1. That the petition was false and scandalous; 2. That those that were bound over, &c. and others that were parties to the disturbance at Hingham, were all offenders, though in different degrees; 3. That they and the petitioners were to be censured; 4. That the Deputy-Governor ought to be acquit and righted."
William had advised the dissenters and was probably involved in the drafting of the petition. Because he did not make his involvement public (though it was certainly known of), he escaped the heavy fines which the dissenters were forced to pay. But he felt strongly enough about the issues at stake to consider taking the case to Parliament "in order to affirm that English law, not arbitrary colonial law (established by the magistrates alone) would be supreme in the Colonies."

During this time, William turned often to his friend, colleague, and relative (via Judith and Resolved's marriage), Edward Winslow. They had worked closely in business and government affairs. Winslow was one of the most erudite of the Plymouth colony (he was often selected by the colony to represent it in dealings back in England) and had been part of the Leyden congregation, whose pastor, John Robinson, had extolled the virtue of tolerance. Winslow must have seemed the perfect ally. And indeed, if Winslow had stood up to Massachusetts Bay governor John Winthrop and his Puritan cronies, the course of American history might have been different. But William discovered that Winslow was not interested in checking the authoritarian tendencies of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and, in fact, was sympathetic to them. In perhaps the most tragic turn of the story, Winslow became William's chief opponent in the struggles ahead.

Vassall hoped, as we have said, that Winslow would share his belief in tolerance. Winslow says of him in The Salamander, “Our Salamander [Vassall] having labored two years together to draw me to his party and finding he could no way prevail, he then casts off all his pretended love, and made it a part of his work to make mee of all men most odious, that so whatever I did or said might be the less effectual.” However, in fairness to Vassall, we must point out that by this time Winslow had elected to join the side of that enemy to tolerance, John Winthrop of Massachusetts Bay. And Vassall, at least, wrote no unpleasant words about his neighbor, nor did he manufacture a disparaging nickname for Winslow as the latter did for him.

In the summer of 1645, the Bay Colony magistrates tried to extend a law to all confederate colonies—the law banning Anabaptists (another Protestant sect). This was the catalyst for William to leave the shadows and protest openly against the government, and which led eventually to his leaving New England forever.

It was at a small meeting of the Court of Assistants in Plymouth where the act was first proposed. Governor William Bradford was present, as were Edward Winslow and two other Assistants. The act was “a recommendation to the General Courts of the Colonies, for the exclusion from membership in any of their churches, of all persons who do not hold particular tenets, and bind themselves by covenant to observe the laws and duties of the spiritual corporation; for refusing baptism to all but such members and their immediate seed; and for ‘the seasonable and due suppression of Anabaptists, Familists, Antinomians, and all other like errors, which oppose, undermine, and slight the Scriptures, &c....under the deceitful color of liberty of conscience.’”

After studying the proposal, the members decided to postpone the issue to the next General Court, where all the Assistants would be present. The next General Court turned out to be the Court of Elections, where William Vassall was in attendance as Scituate's deputy.

At the Court of Elections, the proposal caused an uproar, resulting in a "whole day's agitation." William was not the only one who objected strongly to the act. But at the end of the day, the act passed with only one dissenter: William Vassall.

The one bright spot of the new law was that it allowed any man to petition the government. William was ready to test that right, though he certainly must have known what it might cost him. He drew up a petition for religious tolerance in the colonies, "to allow and maintain full and free tolerance of religion to all men that would preserve the civil peace, and submit unto Government; and there was no limitation or exception against Turk, Jew, Papist, Arian, Socinian, Nicholaytan, Familist, or any other, &c."

Even today the scope of his view is breathtaking. As long as citizens were law-abiding, they could practice whatever religion they chose. This right to religious freedom was not fully established until the Bill of Rights was passed almost 150 years later. Pretty heady stuff in an era where Quakers and Anabaptists were hounded out of the colonies and even put to death.

William took his petition to the Plymouth General Court, presided over by Governor William Bradford and where Edward Winslow acted as magistrate. Many of the town deputies and Assistants were in favor of the petition (Plymouth had long been a bright spot of tolerance in comparison to the radicalism of the Bay Colony) and it appeared a majority would vote in support. But rather than let it come to a vote, Bradford pulled a parliamentary move to defer the petition in order to give his side (the conservatives, including Winslow) time to defeat it.

But William would not be silenced. The law, freshly inked, said every man had the right to petition the government. He was determined to exercise this right, even in the face of massive opposition from the Bay Colony. He joined forces with Boston freemen who had other grievances against the government. The resulting petition is known as "the Remonstrance of Doctor Child," after the petition's author, Richard Child. It was the last major attempt in the seventeenth century to stem the authoritarian, Puritan tide in New England.

The Child petition was presented to the Boston court under the name of Child and six others. William did not add his name to it, in order to be free to carry the petition to his brother Samuel in Parliament. He also was preserving himself from possible charges of treason.

The same Body of Liberties which gave every man the right to petition the government also listed capital offenses; one of these was sedition. In the eyes of Massachusetts magistrates, petitioning the King (in effect, going over their heads), was treason, punishable by death.
One of the more interesting points in Child's petition is the assertion that the colony was experiencing a severe economic depression due to the intolerance of the government. Immigration to New England had slowed to a trickle by this point and many felt the increasingly strict religious atmosphere was choking the life out of the colonies.

As expected, the petition was denied by the court. It was time to appeal to Parliament.

By now the conflict over liberties had reached fever pitch. The conservatives were determined to prevent William from even reaching England. He would carry not only the Child petition, but the original Hingham petition and his own petition for religious toleration. While the first two had been publicly debated in open court, William's petition had not been as widely circulated. The magistrates feared that, if William's petitions were successful, they would lose lucrative tax-free trade rights. More importantly, the Charter for the colony itself might be revoked. Since William's brother was a member of Parliament and could easily bring the petitions before the Commissioners for the Plantations, the conservatives knew the petitions were likely to receive a sympathetic hearing.

Robert Child and one John Dand were to accompany William, but ministers in the colonies called upon local law enforcement to apprehend them—and they did. The night before the Supply was set to sail, Dand's study was ransacked by the magistrates in a desperate attempt to find William's petition. Child and Dand were held as transgressors against the capital law, meaning they could be found guilty of treason and put to death.

William, somehow, was able to get aboard ship, along with his comrade Thomas Fowle. But even then he wasn't safe. As part of their propaganda campaign, the magistrates had instructed colony ministers to preach on the subject of "Jonas" before the ship sailed. In thinly veiled references, ministers throughout the colonies warned passengers that, in any stormy crossing, the "Jonas" should be found and thrown overboard in order to appease God.

Conveniently enough, a storm did blow up over the Atlantic as the Supply made her way. A woman approached William during the storm and told him they must throw the "Jonas" (meaning the petition) overboard. William cooly answered that he had no such Jonas, only a petition to Parliament that they might enjoy the liberty of English subjects, and certainly there could be no evil in that. He then suggested she go see Thomas Fowle (which makes one suspect the two had planned for this turn of events). This she did. Fowle told her innocently he had nothing but a copy of the Child petition, and even read it to her. He then mentioned that, if she "and others" thought it might be the cause of the storm, he'd be happy to hand it over so they could toss it overboard. She gladly seized on the opportunity and threw the petition to the wind, but, alas, God was not appeased and the storms did not abate for the remainder of their crossing.

Perhaps it would've helped if she'd thrown the actual petition overboard; Fowle had only given her a copy of the petition addressed to Boston, not the petition addressed to Parliament! The Parliament petition remained safely onboard, along with another copy of the Boston petition and the all-important petition which William himself had written.

Arriving in England, they found Winslow had already been distributing tracts named Hypocrisie Unmasked, a virulent diatribe against William and his position. It was Winslow who had been chosen by the conservatives to present their case to Parliament. Not to be outdone, William responded with the 22-page tract, New England's Jonas Cast Up at London,* a piece agitating for greater political freedom in the colonies.

William presumably presented his petition, although there is no record of it in Parliamentary papers. He had come back to England at a difficult and confusing time. His natural allies in Parliament, enemies of Charles I, were no longer moderate, having been caught up in the revolutionary fervor of the times. Puritans were divided into factions and extremism was on the rise. Only two years later, Charles I would be beheaded and Cromwell's Puritan Commonwealth established. It was precisely the wrong time to look for support of religious tolerance in the colonies.

The petitioners charged a lack of religious freedom in Massachusetts, and the denial of civil privileges to those who were not church members. As they were freeborn Englishmen, they asked that English law be reasserted in the colonies, rather than a separate, more repressive system under the magistrates. They noted that they were being denied their liberty in the colonies on the grounds of their religion, and were being forced to take civil oaths which conflicted with their oath of allegiance to the king. They termed colonial government "arbitrary" and complained of being subjected to extrajudicial proceedings.

Winslow represented the government's point of view to Parliament, and it was he who won the day, thanks in part to the success of Hypocrisie Unmasked. The Parliament committee summed up their view: "We encourage no appeals from your justice. We leave you with all the freedom and latitude that may, in any respect, be duly claimed by you."

In other words, "shut up." The conservatives now had full authority to govern as they chose. The end result was predictable: The hanging of Quakers, the hounding of dissidents, and the trials of so-called "witches." When we wonder how those who came to the colonies seeking religious freedom could possibly participate in such persecution of their own, we need only remember that dissent was made punishable by death, and those who escaped such harsh punishment must either remain silent, choose martyrdom, or leave the colonies forever.

[*Complete title: New-Englands Jonas cast up at London: or, A relation of the proceedings of the court at Boston in New-England against honest and godly persons, for petitioning for government in the common-wealth, according to the lawes of England ... Together with a confutation of some reports of a fained miracle upon the foresaid petition, being thrown overboard at sea; as also a brief answer to some passages in a late book (entitled Hypocrisie unmasked) set out by Mr. Winslowe, concerning the Independent churches holding communion with the Reformed churches.]

Back in the colonies, Robert Child was kept prisoner for some time and his wealth was confiscated. When freed, he moved to Ireland, and, while he tried to regain his fortune, he never did. Dand was also imprisoned, though I do not know his ultimate fate.

Edward Winslow never returned to New England. Leaving Susannah and his family behind, he stayed in England during the revolution and was appointed by Cromwell to head an expeditionary force which captured Jamaica in 1655. On the way back to England, he died at sea.

William also left family and considerable estates behind in the colonies. But it was clear by now he could not return. Besides his "problematic" political and religious convictions, he would almost certainly have been arrested and possibly hanged as a traitor. He removed to Barbados, which had a reputation for religious toleration. It was 1648, and he purchased lands in St Michael's Parish (whereabouts now unknown). We don't know if his wife Anna was still alive at this point and if she joined him. Other members of the Vassall extended family had estates in Barbados, and there are records of travel back and forth by the cousins.

In one of the ironies of the story, William probably had an estate run by slave labor. Other Vassalls in Barbados certainly did.

In another irony, Edward Winslow stopped at the island on his way to Jamaica in 1654 and the old neighbors'/adversaries' paths crossed again. "It is a curious fact that Winslow had been recommended on November 22, 1650 to be appointed governor of the island. If the recommendation had gone through, Vassall would have found Edward Winslow his governor once again on faraway Barbados! The forces of the expedition of Penn and Venables spent many months at the island, quartered in the houses of the planters, eating their food, recruiting their servants. There was obvious rejoicing when they finally left."

William died in Barbados between 1655 and 1657. He bequeathed to his son John one-third of all his estate and split the remainder among his daughters. His estate in Scituate was sold at the behest of his children in 1656. Consisting of about 120 acres with house and barn, the estate brought £120.

The Vassall family as a whole was involved with both freedom movements and the employ of slave labor in the Caribbean. Judith appears in several of the documents asserting dissenting religious views during the Scituate schism, while her husband Resolved does not. Some of Judith and Resolved's children ended up in Barbados—none stayed in Scituate. Judith's cousin John (son of Samuel) bought land in Jamaica in 1655, setting up a large plantation which flourished until emancipation. He and his cousin Henry (still in England) supported a colony in Cape Fear, promising the vote and freedom of religion. They secured some aid from the Massachusetts Bay colony but the experiment failed.

It is clear from the historical record that William Vassall was a man of vast intelligence and integrity. While Winslow castigated William in his various letters and tracts against him, William never stooped that low. He focused on the issues at hand, and, while passionate in defense of a point, he was cool-headed enough to navigate the treacherous waters he chose to swim. A dual biography of him and Winslow would make fascinating reading. I also wonder, had Winslow not been present in Plymouth Colony, if William would have been able to come to some understanding with Governor William Bradford. While conservative, Bradford was never as nasty or hardcore as Winslow or the Puritans to the north. Steeped in the tolerance of John Robinson from an early age, Bradford may have been able to find common ground with William Vassall over time.

What is also fascinating to speculate on is the impact all these doings had on the families involved, particularly Judith and Resolved White, and Resolved's mother Susannah. Susannah's son by Winslow, Josiah, joined Vassall's Scituate church, so she had family members on all sides of the issue. She also had the added challenge of raising her family without her husband, who was busy excoriating William and, later, building his position with Cromwell. Judith and Resolved's children were living in Massachusetts when the Salem "witch" trials occurred, and one can only speculate as to what their views were.

What is made clear by the story of William Vassall's life is that oppression doesn't just "happen." It grows bit by bit, and if it is not swiftly resisted, it can too easily take hold and grow. And while, at the time, it may have looked like his life's work was a failure and Winslow's was the success, America has accepted Vassall's view in the long run and it is he who comes out the hero. Like many dissenters, he took enormous risks and paid the price for an unpopular point of view. But he had the consolation of having remained true to his principles. While his views on slavery were probably indicative of his surroundings, his views on religion were far ahead of his time. And his courage, intelligence, and passion remain a light for us to be guided by
.

Download the following PDF, entitled;
"The History of William Vassal and his wife, Anna King"

By Murland Packer

The First Church of Roxbury (1630-1650)

2007-11-25T07:05:00.000-05:00

Pastors:

Rev. Thomas Welde

Rev. Samuel Danforth

Teacher:

Rev. John Eliot

Elders:

John Miller

Isaac Heath

Deacons:

George Alcock

William Parke
Philip Eliot

Giles Paison

Sextons:

John Chandler*

William Cleaves*

Founding Members:

William Pinchon, George Alcock, Thomas Lamb, Elizabeth Lamb, Thomas Rawlings, Elizabeth Rawlings, Robert Cole, Mary Cole, John Johnson, Margery Johnson, Jehu Burr, Goodwife Burr, William Chase, Mary Chase, Richard Bugby, Judith Bugby, Gregory Baxter, Griffith Crofts, Alice Crofts, William Parke, William Dennison, Margret Dennison, Samuel Wakeman, Elizabeth Wakeman, Richard Lyman, Sarah Lyman, Elizabeth Lyman, John Carmen, Florence Carmen, Thomas Goldthwaigth, Valentine Prentise, Alice Prentise, Robert Gamlin, John Perry, John Leavens, Richard Dummer, Mary Dummer, William Talmadge, Elizabeth Talmadge, Thomas Welde, Margaret Welde, Judith Welde, John Watson, Thomas Woodforde, Margery Hammond, Mary Blott, Ann Shelly, Rebekah Short, William Hills, John Coggeshall, Mary Coggeshall, William Heath, Mary Heath, William Curtis, Sarah Curtis, Thomas Offitt, Isabell Offitt, Isaac Morrill, Sarah Morrill, Daniel Brewer, Joanna Brewer, John Eliot, Ann Eliot, Abraham Pratt, Johanna Pratt, Mary Gamlin, Robert Gamlin, Elizabeth Gamlin, Samuel Basse, Ann Basse, John Tatman, Jasper Rawlings, Jeane Rawlings, William Perkins, John Moody, Sarah Moody, John Walker, Elizabeth Hinds, Elizabeth Ballard, John Porter, Margaret Porter, Nicholas Parker, Ann Parker, Margaret Huntington, Philip Sherman, Thomas Pigge, Mary Pigge, Samuel Finch, Martha Parke, Thomas Wilson, Ann Wilson, Joshua Hewes, Isaac Johnson, Elizabeth Johnson, Ralph Hemingway, Sarah Odding, Thomas Hills, Thomas Hale, Edward Riggs, John Graves, Judith Graves, John Stow, Elizabeth Stow, John Compton, William Cornwell, Joane Cornwell, Abraham Newell, Frances Newell, William Freeborn, Robert Potter, Isabel Potter, Sarah Burrell, Richard Pepper, Mary Pepper, Robert Sever, Pheobe Disborowe, Christopher Peake, Thomas Jenner, John Miller, Lidea Miller, Richard Goard, John Ruggles, Barbara Ruggles, Elizabeth Wise, Isaac Heath, John Astwood, Martha Astwood, Philip Eliot, Elizabeth Eliot, Giles Paison, Edward Payson, Nicholas Baker, Joseph Welde, Barbara Welde, Thomas Bell, William Webb, Rebecca Webb, Adam Mott, Sarah Mott, Anna Vassaile, Richard Carder, Lawrence Whittamore, Jasper Gun, Thomas Birchard, Mary Birchard, John Cheney, Martha Cheney, Mary Norrice, Elizabeth Bowis, Henry Bull, James How, Elizabeth How, John Gore, Rhoda Gore, Mary Swaine,....William Chandler, Hannah Chandler,...Thomas Dudley, Dorothy Dudley...Thomas Gardner, Lucy Gardner,...Edward Dennison,...Daniel Gookin,...Ann Brewer,...Rebecca Gardner,...

SOURCE:

History Of The First Church In Roxbury Massachusetts, (1630-1904)

ANCESTORS:

Gov Thomas Dudley-Dorothy York

Ann Dudley-Gov Simon Bradstreet

William Vassal-Anna King (Anna Vassaile)

Judith Vassal-Resolved White

Anna White-John Hayward

Judith Hayward- Philip Goss

Thomas Goss-Abigail Wade

Salome Goss-Aaron Moore

Geneva Moore-Aaron Graham

John Graham-Susan Wood

Charles Graham-Mary Swain

Sarah Graham-Harry Wing

Arthur Wing

Daniel Brewer-Joanna Morrill

Ann Brewer-Thomas Chandler
John Chandler-Hannah Abbott

John Chandler-Hannah Frye

John Chandler-Tabitha Abbott

Daniel Chandler-Sarah Merrill

Hannah Chandler-Joshua Graham

Aaron Graham-Geneva Moore

John Graham-Susan Wood

Charles Graham-Mary Swain

Sarah Graham-Harry Wing

Arthur Wing

Sarah Brewer-Thomas Webster

Mary Webster-William Swain

John Swain-Martha Tongue

John Swain-Judith (?)

John Swain-Sarah Richardson

John Swain-Rebecca Richards

Hiram Swain-Elizabeth Kneeland

Mary Swain-Charles Graham

Sarah Graham-Harry Wing

Arthur Wing

Thomas Brewer

William Chandler-Annis Bayford

Thomas Chandler-Ann Brewer
John Chandler-Hannah Abbott

John Chandler-Hannah Frye

John Chandler-Tabitha Abbott

Daniel Chandler-Sarah Merrill

Hannah Chandler-Joshua Graham

Aaron Graham-Geneva Moore

John Graham-Susan Wood

Charles Graham-Mary Swain

Sarah Graham-Harry Wing

Arthur Wing

Hannah Chandler-George Abbott

Nathaniel Abbott-Dorcas Hebert

Tabitha Abbott-John Chandler

Daniel Chandler-Sarah Merrill

Hannah Chandler-Joshua Graham

Aaron Graham-Geneva Moore

John Graham-Susan Wood

Charles Graham-Mary Swain

Sarah Graham-Harry Wing

Arthur Wing

John Chandler*

William Chandler

Sarah Chandler-William Cleaves*

Elizabeth Chandler

William Chandler

Henry Chandler

Thomas Hale-Thomasine Dowsett

Thomas Hale-Mary Hutchinson

There has been a long-standing controversy among researchers regarding the identity of the wife of William Chandler, Annis. Some well researched documents identify his wife as being Annis Bayford, while others have her identified as Annis Alcock, sister of Deacon George Alcock. While I may have her listed here as Annis Bayford, the truth is I have not uncovered any substantial evidence that would suggest one identity is more likely than the next.

Daniel Wing

2007-11-12T10:51:00.001-05:00

Daniel Wing-Ann Ewer

Bachelor Wing-Joanna Hatch

Sylvanus Wing-Hannah (?)

Elijah Wing-Amy Bucklin

Asa Wing-Jane Tilton

William Wing-Nancy Seekins

Mellen Wing-Lucy Marriner

Willis Wing-Adeline Swift

Harry Wing-Sarah Graham

Arthur Wing

Matthew Wynge

While scientific DNA testing suggests that my "WING" ancestors arrived in the British Isles from what is now either Germany (through the Anglo-Saxon Invasion of the 5th Century) or Denmark (the Viking Invasion prior to the 11th century), genealogists and historians can only trace the beginning of the modern Wing family to Banbury, Oxfordshire, England during the late 1500's. This was a particularly chaotic and violent era in British history as the monarchs, in the era of Henry VIII onward, fought to bring its people out of the last holds of the "Dark Ages" by dissolving the archaic feudal system to gain central control over its lands and resources, and by declaring its independent soveriegnty from the well established Roman Catholic Church for influence of its people. The monarchy, in their self-proclaimed divinity, declared themselves the sole mediator between their subjects and God, and as is often the case with attempts for exclusive audience with God, hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people tragically perished in war, disease, persecution and poverty over the course of the next century. While our earliest known ancestor, Matthew Wynge, a prosperous tailor within the growing influential merchant class of English society is the earliest identified Wing ancestor, it is with his son, John Winge, that the current Wing lineage is heralded.

Rev. John Winge

Educated at Queen's College (one of several colleges at Oxford University) John became a clergyman of the established (Anglican) church at the age of 19. Shortly after accepting a fulltime ministerial position he met his wife, Deborah Bachiler, daughter of the controversial ex-Vicar of Wherwell, Reverend Stephen Bachiler. John and his wife removed to The Hague, Netherlands, to escape the growing political and social tension between England and her disenfranchised poor and working class who had found their allegiances tossed about in public political and religious controversy. Despite harboring underlying Protestant ideals, he accepted the post of Reverend and stood before Europe's most influential aristocrats and intellects of that era; including an audience of "The Queen Of Hearts" Elisabeth Of Bohemia, daughter of England's ruling Stuart King, James I (of King James Bible), when she and her Protestant husband, Frederick V, King Of Bohemia, were forced into exile in 1622 by the Holy Roman Emperor, Maximillian. This brought him under close scrutiny of the Archbishop of Canterbury William Laud and became cause for official international correspondence between the diplomats of England and Holland. A few of his sermons were eventually published as a set of five books considered by many as being controversial for the day. One of the books is currently held in the Presidential library of John Adams in Boston. Three others are currently held by The British Museum and the fifth by a private collector. (Reprints of these sermons are currently available to purchase here.) He eventually returned to London where he soon died. His widow, his four sons and his father-in-law, Rev Stephen Bachiler (who secured their passage aboard the "William & Francis" ) made sail to the new colonies just twelve years after the arrival of the Mayflower Pilgrims of 1620.

Daniel Wing

In the midst of all the controversies of 1637, Daniel Wing, his mother Deborah and his brothers, Stephen, John and Matthew, travelled south from Saugus (of Massachusetts Bay Colony) to the base of the Cape Cod peninsula to help found the new town of Sandwich in the more religiously tolerant Plymouth Colony. Many family researchers suggest that the impetus for relocating to Sandwich from Saugus was most likely one of land as Saugus was becoming crowded from the influx of "The Great Migration"; however, it is quite probable that as the TIMELINE (below) seems to indicate, as children of reformation ministers they were becoming sensitive to the increasingly blatant politically motivated religious oppression experienced by like-minded friends and neighbors in nearby towns, and simply resolved to relocate once again as a pre-emptive measure of self preservation, travelling under the care and guidance of fellow "William & Francis" passenger, family friend, and future kinsman, Edward Dillingham, one of ten original land patentees of Sandwich

Ironically, the aging but ambitious family patriarch Rev Stephen Bachiler, never known to shy away from a challenge, chose not to move southward, but had removed to Ipswich two years earlier to renew his church following a political fallout with John Winthrop, and in 1638 after petitioning the Courts, became the original founder of the town now known as Hampton NH, very near the banished Rev. Wheelwright in Exeter, along the northern fringe of Massachusetts Bay Colony. Choosing to remain with Rev Bachiler were select family members of Deborah Wing's sisters, Ann Sanborne and Theodate Hussey (wife of Christopher Hussey), as well as the son of her brother Nathaniel Bachiler. While the documented history of the the town of Hampton, its church, and the early genealogy of its founder are quite extensive and need to not be repeated in its entirety at this narrative, comprehending our ancestral history would not be complete without further investigation, as their lives were very typical and reflective of 17th century colonial America .

In July of 1640, just three years after arriving in Sandwich, Daniel Wing bought his home from early settler Andrew Hallett, and then in 1641, married his first wife, Hannah Swift, which would prove to be the first of very many Wing-Swift marriages throughout the next 200 years. Between the years of 1642 and 1664, while supporting himself primarily as a fisherman along the Herring River, Daniel and Hannah would come to have nine children; and it appears that in the midst of his procreating years of the 1650's Daniel, along with his brother Stephen, embraced the principals of the Quaker religion and assumed all of the personal and political burdens that such a choice implied.

By worshipping God as a Quaker, Daniel and many other of our early ancestors, chose to follow the more esoteric, and seemingly mystical, path of seeking and adhering to the Truth of the "Inner Light" of God that dwells within man and is revealed through devout meditation and prayer. He believed, as all members of The Religious Society of Friends do, that God does not sanction the doctrines of any one particular "visible", man-made church. and that a man could CHOOSE by his own free will to become "saved", rather than as Puritans had proclaimed, that one must be CHOSEN by God.

The Puritans subscribed to traditional Judaeo-Christian philosophy and abided the "letter" of Biblical law, while the Quakers believed that Jesus' message was the conveyance of a faithful leap in personal awareness and experiential knowledge, and not the extension, expansion, or adaptation of the Hebrew faith as taught by the Roman Catholics. Quakerism, in its practice, threatened to usurp the civil authority of the General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony by virtue of their unwillingness to complete the statement, "God is...", for they understood that to do so would not only subject them to the authority of the Puritan civil and religious philosophy, but more importantly, it would wrongfully prove God to be false. Despite their subtley intimate spiritual perceptions and their strict adherence to the just laws intended for the promotion of compassionate communities and personal accountability, their "radical" departure from the practice of the traditional ritual acts of baptisms of water and swearing of Oaths became fodder for gross politically sponsored social condemnation. Quakers and any one else who willfully defied the Puritans on virtually any religious principal or tenet were publicly condemned, harassed, beaten, banished and even killed as heretics, madmen, witches and demons - the very accusations and actions once perpertrated against the Puritans themselves by both the Roman Catholic Church and the Church of England.

The Puritans were under no delusions of "separation of Church and State", so, while religiously their hands may have been tied by their own proclamations of tolerance and freedom, they were quite capable and more than willing to squash the percieved threat of quiet rebellion of Quakerism through legal and political means. John Winthrop's secessor, Governor Endecott, during the latter 1650's, essentially invoked a "war powers act" against any suspected Quaker and their sympathisers and exercised corporal punishment against the transgressors caught violating them. However, in making this informal declaration of war , the Governor and the General Court acted in ignorance to the fact that as a religion, Quakerism, unlike Puritanism, had absolutely no intent on becoming a political entity or civil authority and additionally, in a sense, took the stance that while Quakerism and religious tolerance may be acceptable in "God's Kingdom" , they were not good enough for man's.

While many of those who emigrated to America as Puritans simply sought religious and social refuge from England, hindsight seems to tragically indicate that they were manipulated through their need for religious guidance as they set out to bring into reality the grand "City upon the hill", because the expansion into the new world, from the perspective of the English ruling class, was simply a means of exploiting natural resources. Native Americans, Quakers, "Antinomians", Anabaptists, and others who happened to hinder this intent were simply deemed expendable as non-conforming burdens upon "society". There was no central American government with a system of checks and balances as of yet, nor were there any established channels independent from the church hierarchy through which the communities could communicate, therefore, control was successfully leveraged by manipulating the settlers with the fear of God's Wrath exercised through the influence of wealthy educated "ecclesiasts" and "divines" whose politically motivated religous propaganda spewed forth of the "evils" of those outside of their religion in order to justify their actions and influence the already over-stressed and desparately dependant planters.

Because of its "separatism", the Plymouth Colony wielded less political muscle in its waning autonomy than the more influential Massachusetts Bay Colony with its ties to the English Government, so as the Quaker persecution began to heat up, kinsman William Bassett was removed from his appointed duties as constable of Sandwich after only one year of service, due in part to his sympathies with Quakerism, and was replaced by an 'outsider' by the name of George Barlow, who proved himself to be a coarse and callous man who savored his position of unabated authority. With the Court's endorsement, he intentionally targeted Quakers with desirable property so that he may personally confiscate their goods for his own personal profit and gain, as well as take those with little means simply to affect the most amount of suffering. Barlow, in his greed and desire to appease the courts for official recognition, was instrumental in causing Daniel to come close to losing his house and everything he had when around 1655 he and other prominent citizens became involved in serious religious dissension, opposing the church authorities in Plymouth. So his brother John stepped in and helped him retain his property when he was fined for supporting newly arrived Quakers by invoking a nearly forgotten old English law a where man could be declared legally dead by the courts and his property made over to his heirs. Threatened with financial ruin by the repeated court appearances and exorbitant fines imposed upon him, the shrewed old Quaker, while unyielding in his religious convictions, took advantage of this law and caused his estate to be administered in his own life time, and thereby preventing any great personal loss.

His wife Hannah died in March 1664 from complications arising from the birth of Daniel II who was born ten days earlier. But at 50 years old, Daniel remarried two years later on June 2, 1666 , to 29 year old Ann Ewer, the daughter of fellow Quaker, Thomas Ewer. Together, they had three more children, including Bachelor, from whom I descend.

TIMELINE

1646
George Fox (1624-1691) had discovered what he called "truth is to be found by direct experience of the inner voice of God speaking to the soul." Without any formal religious training or background, he started preaching this belief. He was a charismatic speaker and quickly gained converts to his new faith. After several years of growth, it was decided to send believers abroad to spread the news to others.

Both Massachusetts Bay Colony and Plymouth Colony had heard the rumblings of the Quaker movement. They were both also facing rising dissatisfaction of the established church from colonists who came to the New World due to religious persecutions only to encounter more persecutions at their new home.

1652
Mary Dyer, a close friend of Anne Hutchinson (of the Antinomian controversy fame) sailed with Roger Williams on a political mission to England. While there she met and became a ardent follower of George Fox and the Quaker faith.

1656
After starting out in the Barbados, two women journeyed to Boston in 1656 to spread the word: Anne Austin and Mary Fisher. Within a week a small band of eight more Quakers arrived at Boston Harbor from London, England. In October 1656 (shortly after the arrival of the Quakers) Massachusetts Bay Colony established the following law:

"Whereas there is a cursed sect of heretics lately risen up in the world, which are commonly called Quakers..." upon entering within a jurisdiction, "shall be forthwith committed to the house of correction, and at their entrance to be severely whipped, and by the master thereof be kept constantly to work, and none suffered to speak with them..." and it is ordered "that what person or persons soever shall revile the office or person of the magistrates or ministers, as is usual with Quakers, such person or persons shall be severely whipped, or pay the sum of five pounds."

Nov 1656, Daniel's sixth child, John, was born.

1657
Upon her return to America from England, Mary Dyer, accompanied by Ann Burden, made a stop-over in the Massachusetts Bay Colony on her journey home to Rhode Island so that Ms Burden could settle the estate of her deceased husband in Boston. By this time, the Massachusetts Bay Colony had begun implementing a series of harsh laws against those who had become members of "The Religious Society of Friends", or held sympathies towards them, so Mary Dyer and Ann Burden were arrested almost immediately upon setting foot on Massachusetts soil as undesired missionaries of the outlawed religion.
Preceding Ms. Dyer's and Ms Burden's arrest by two days were the arrests of two young Quaker missionaries, Christopher Holder and John Copeland, who had disrupted a church service in Salem. A member of the church, Samuel Shattuck, was arrested along with them as a sympathizer when he attempted to come to their aid after church officials wrestled Holder and Copeland to the floor and had stuffed a glove and a handkerchief down their throats to prevent them from further speaking. Starved, beaten and whipped, the three men spent the next two and half months in jail.
Also jailed were Holder and Copeland's host, Salem church members, Lawrence and Cassandra Southwick. Though Lawrence was released, his wife remained imprisoned for seven weeks for having in her possession a paper written by their guests.
Meanwhile, Mary Dyer's husband, a man of some political influence and credibility as a Secretary for the colony of Rhode Island, successfully petitioned the release of his wife. Her travelling companion, however, was expelled from Massachusetts not for being found in a court of law as being a Friend, though, but because of her "guilt" through her association with Mary Dyer and was forcibly returned to England. Ms Burden was in fact required to pay for the expenses incurred by her expulsion with what little monies she had collected from the settlement of her husbands accounts .
Shortly after their release from jail, Christopher Holder and John Copeland first went to Martha's Vineyard but was turned away by Thomas Mayhew and then on August 20, 1657, arrived in Sandwich where they were welcomed by many families.

Oct 14 - Massachusetts Bay Colony Court Order - A fine of £100 to be charged to anyone providing a Quaker entry into jurisdiction, plus 40 shillings per hour for entertaining a Quaker. Additionally, any Quaker man presuming to enter the jurisdiction after suffering the penalty provided by the law passed a year earlier, "shall for the first offense have one ear cut off...and for the second offense shall have his other ear cut off...and every woman Quaker that hath suffered the law here, that shall presume to come into this jurisdiction, shall be severely whipped...and so also for her coming again she shall be alike used as aforesaid; and for every Quaker, he or she, that shall a third time herein again offend, they shall have their togues bored through with a hot iron..."

Shortly after this court order, Plymouth Colony enacted its first anti-Quaker law. It called for the following:
Those entertaining a foreign Quaker were to be fined £5 or be whipped.
Residents seeing a Quaker were to advise the constable or be censured.
The constable was to try to apprehend the visitor and bring him to a Magistrate.
The Magistrate was to jail the visitor and assess the charges of jail and costs of transport out of the Colony.
The Quaker was to engage to leave and not return, or else to stay in jail.
Fines for meetings were forty shillings against the speaker, forty shillings against the house owner and ten shillings per hearer.
Initially there was no provision that foreign Quakers were to be whipped.

1658
Early in the year the Plymouth court ruled that certain groups of townsmen would lose their status of freemen. These included Quakers or manifest encouragers of them as well as those who refuse to take the oath of fidelity. The Quakers felt that to give an oath was blasphemous as it would put the colony above God.
The colony also reinterpreted a law enacted in 1651 which provided a ten shilling fine for anyone neglecting worship and for settup up another church service. They simply replaced the word and with or so now there would be two separate offenses (and fines), instead of one.

The Southwicks, with their son, Josiah, spent twenty weeks in jail for their religious beliefs and incurring such fines that in the following year so as to collect unpaid fees, the authorities found it justifiable to have their children, Provided and Daniel, to be sold as slaves and removed to the Barbadoes Islands. Thankfully, this was prevented, and the Southwick family scurried to New York to live.

Daniel Wing officially declared his affiliation with the Quakers who had established a Friends meeting at Spring Hill in Sandwich, the first in America, and between the months of March to December, was arrested and brought before the Courts a total of five times and fined extensively. By October of that year, he, his brother Stephen, Thomas Ewer, and six others were not only no longer legally given admittance into the town of Sandwich, but risked execution, for on the 19th of that month, the Court order was passed that "banish both resident and visiting Quakers by pain of death if they return". Ingeniously, however, by early December with the aid of his brother John, Daniel with foresight had his estate confirmed to his children in order to escape the fines levied due to his Quakerism, thereby preserving his home and personal assets, and in light of the Southwicks, his family, as his seventh child, Beulah was born just a month later.

1659
In October, Thomas Ewer, who would later become Daniel's father-in-law, was sentenced to lie "neck and heels" during their pleasure for "tumultuous and seditious carriages and speeches" in court and assured him another outburst will send him away.

In Boston, Mary Dyer, Marmaduke Stevenson and William Robinson were escorted and consoled by Rev Daniel Gould of RI, as they were to be hanged their crimes of missionary work within the Massachusets Colony. Mary got reprieve, Daniel recieved 30 lashes for his concerns, Marmaduke and William were hanged.

1660
June 1, Mary once again returned to Boston and was hanged for her efforts.
June 8 - Daniel Wing and Thomas Ewer, and several others fined £5 for refusing to take oath of allegiance
November - Daniel's eighth child, Deborah, was born

1661
May 22 - Court Order - Quakers are to "be stripped naked from the middle upwards, and tied to a cart's tail and whipped through the town;" also to "be branded with the letter R on their left shoulder," and "the constables of the several towns are empowered...to impress cart, oxen, and other assitance for the execution of this order..."

1662
Delivered before Gov Endecott by Samuel Shattuck, the Quaker persecutions ceased by the order of King Charles.

Daniel Wing article for the OWL
April 5, 2007
By: Nick Wing

New Findings on the Prosecution of Daniel Wing

A new perspective on DanielWing’s prosecution at the Plymouth General Court was discovered in GeorgeBishop’s New England Judged, 1661. Daniel dared to stand up to the colonial government in defense of the people called Quakers, during an epoch of intense religious persecution. Not only did he risk property and reputation, he riskedlife as well. The details of the Quaker persecutions would reach King Charles II himself, through Edward Burroughs and New England Judged resulting in swift diplomatic action.

The family history recounts Daniel’s shrewd legal maneuver of declaring himself deceased and conveying his colonial mansion and assets to his family, to avoid seizure by the Plymouth General Court. According to Bishop, some of Daniel’s fines included “three kine, valued at twelve pounds” for not removing his hat in court and “twenty shillings” for not swearing the Oath of Allegiance. Daniel refused to take the Oath as it was perverted from its original purpose in order to oppress the Quakers.

The loss of property from excessive fines, then called “financial sureties,” is well documented in the Wing family history, but evidence from New England Judged suggests the stakes were much more severe. Bishop writes that Daniel Wing was brought before the Court “upon pretense of felony, in breaking forcibly into another man’s house [emphasis added].” In Colonial America, the conviction of a felony, or even “censure of court,” was punishable by hanging. “But the man of the house, Nathaniel Fish, having cleared them of the pretended felony, for all the matter was, that they had come to his house to see the prisoners, Christopher Holder and John Copeland, which were in his House, the Door being open,” Bishop
explains.

The trumped-up charge was meant to send a political message, that, although no law existed to the effect, it was a capital crime to associate with the “meddlesome” and potentially seditious Quakers. This abuse was not uncommon in the American Colonies. Magistrates were at a loss for a lawful means to prosecute the Quakers. In fact, the Justices of the Peace were in frantic correspondence with Governor Winthrop on how to deal with the situation.

Until new laws were enacted, magistrates resolved to leverage their sweeping authority to menace the Quakers. Magistrates wielded near totalitarian powers in the colonies. The collection of essays from The World of John Winthrop explain that "In addition to judicial duties, Quarter Sessions also convened to conduct administrative business and issue orders to repair roads and bridges, maintain jails, supervise parish poor relief, license alehouse keepers and other traders, and review judicial orders." The abuse was only made worse by the fact that court offices “increasingly fell to those with higher social positions regardless of legal background.”

By the time the anti-Quaker laws came into effect in 1659, the magistrates were already attempting to systematically wear down the will of the Quakers and their Puritan converts. According to D.C. Parnes’ Plymouth and the Common Law, 1620 - 1775, the new established Quaker laws were prosecuted more than any other offense from 1660 - 1669, and the punishments ranged from “financial sureties” to the merciless and the bloody.

Daniel was fortunate not to have suffered physical punishment during this period of heightened religious tension. Christopher Holder and John Copeland, the Sandwich, MA visitors, were beaten and even mutilated on other occasions. Christopher Holder had his ears “cropped” off after multiple offenses at the Massachusetts Bay Colony General Court. Both he and Copeland were arrested, whipped and banished, and would return to do the offense again. It was, in essence, the original American campaign of Civil Disobedience.

The Wings were caught up in a religious non-resistance movement which became increasingly violent. In the summer of 1660, the Quaker martyr, Mary Dyer, returned to Boston Common to face the gallows after having been already
once reprieved on October 27th, 1659. Three other Quakers, Robinson, Stephenson and Leddra, were executed for returning, “on pain of death,” to Boston in violation of a court ordered banishment, between 1659 - 1661 (Braithwaite, 1955, p. 404). The political violence had reached a boiling point.

With the publishing of New England Judged, word reached England of the scandalous executions. Edward Burroughs conveyed the details of Bishop’s account to King Charles II personally. He informed the King of the spilling of “innocent blood” which could destabilize the colony. Burroughs adroitly characterized the action as an usurpation of the Crown. The King responded with a “mandamus” to the New England authorities to be delivered by the exiled Quaker Samuel Shattuck. King Charles II must have had a sense of irony and symbolic gesture to have sent an exiled Quaker as the messenger of the “mandamus.”

The diplomatic action by the King of England was a great victory for the Quakers, though non-lethal persecution would persist. Daniel’s friend Christopher Holder, whom Braithwaite called, “a well educated man of good estate,” was still being arrested for Quaker crimes as late as 1682. Despite the persistent oppression, Daniel helped to found the first official Monthly meeting of the Society of Friends in America. The act of officially forming a meeting was a great risk. Quakers were
till then meeting in secret, and keeping records in code, such as lighting "kindling" leaving it "burning," meant establishing a secret meeting, or "colonizing" and leaving the converts to continue. Today, it remains the oldest continuous Quaker meeting in America.

"A very few, as heroes, patriots,
martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men, serve the State with their
consciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part; and they are
commonly treated by it as enemies."

-Henry David Thoreau

Early Hampton NH (1640)

2007-11-11T10:35:00.001-05:00

December 24, 1639 Land Grantees

Steven Bachiler, Abraham Perkins, Timothy Dalton, Richard Swaine, Christopher Hussey, William Eastow, John Cross, Thomas Moulton, John Moulton, Robert Saunderson, William Palmer, Thomas Jones, Philemon Dalton, William Wakefleld, James Davis

June, 1640 Land Grantees

Henry Ambrose, Willium Fifield, Francis Asten, Giles Fuller, John Brabrook, William Fuller, John Brown, Samuel Greenfield, Henry Bright, Daniel Henrick, Widow Bristow, Barnabas Horton, Ambrose Carpenter, William Howard, Richard Carre, John Huggins, Aquila Chase, Widow Mary Hussey, Thomas Chase, Edmund Johnson, Arthur Clarke, Thomas King, William Cole, Richard Knight, Moses Coxe, John Legat, Timothy Dalton, jr., William Marston, James Davis, jr., Robert Marston, Daniel Morse, John Eldred, Thomas Moulton, William English, Jeffery Mingay, Robert Page, John Saunders, ___Palmer, Robert Sanderson, Widow Judith Parker, Robert Sawyer, Francis Peabody, Thomas Sleeper, John Philbrick, Thomas Smith, Walter Roper, Anthony Taylor, Robert Tuck, John Sanborn, Francis Wainwright, Stephen Sanborn, John Ward, William Sanborn, Thomas Ward, William Sargent, John Wedgwood.

ANCESTORS:
Rev Stephen Bachiler-Ann Bates

Nathaniel Bachiler

Deborah Bachiler-John Winge

Daniel Wing-Ann Ewer

Bachelor Wing-Joanna Hatch

Sylvanus Wing-Hannah (?)

Elijah Wing-Amy Bucklin

Asa Wing-Jane Tilton

William Wing-Nancy Seekins

Mellen Wing-Lucy Marriner

Willis Wing-Adeline Swift

Harry Wing-Sarah Graham

Arthur Wing
Stephen Bachiler

Samuel Bachiler

Ann Bachiler

Theodate Bachiler

William Sargent-Elizabeth Perkins

Mary Sargent

Elizabeth Sargent

Thomas Sargent-Rachel Barnes

Thomas Sargent- (?)

Christopher Sargent-Susanna Peaslee

Abigail Sargent-Ezekial Hale

Susanna Hale-Isreal Hildreth

Elizabeth Hildreth-Phineas Wood

Susan Wood-John Graham

Charles Graham-Mary Swain

Sarah Graham-Harry Wing

Arthur Wing

William Sargent

Elizabeth Sargent

Lydia Sargent

Sarah Sargent

William Moulton-Margaret Page

Joseph Moulton

Benjamin Moulton

Hannah Moulton

Mary Moulton

Sarah Moulton-Jonathan Haynes

Thomas Haynes-Hannah Harriman

Lydia Haynes-John Merrill

Sarah Merrill-Daniel Chandler

Hannah Chandler-Joshua Graham

Aaron Graham-Geneva Moore

John Graham-Susan Wood

Charles Graham-Mary Swain

Sarah Graham-Harry Wing

Arthur Wing

Ruth Moulton

Robert Moulton

William Moulton

Robert Page-Lucy Ward

Margaret Page-William Moulton

Francis Page

Susanna Page

Thomas Page

Rebecca Page

Hannah Page

Mary Page

William Marston-Sarah Goody

Thomas Marston

William Marston

Prudence Marston-William Swain
William Swain-Mary Webster

John Swain-Martha Tongue

John Swain-Judith (?)

John Swain-Sarah Richardson

John Swain-Rebecca Richards

Hiram Swain-Elizabeth Kneeland

Mary Swain-Charles Graham

Sarah Graham-Harry Wing

Arthur Wing

Thomas Webster-Sarah Brewer

Mary Webster-William Swain

Sarah Webster

Joshua Webster

Abigail Webster

Hannah Webster

Thomas Webster

Ebenezer Webster

Isaac Webster

John Webster

William Swain-Prudence Marston

Hezekiah Swain

William Swain-Mary Webster

Hannah Swain

William Swain

Prudence Swain

Noah Swain

Elizabeth Swain

SOURCES:

History of the Town of Hampton, New Hampshire: From Its Settlement in 1638 ...

Hampton, New Hampshire, Area Genealogy

Rev Stephen Bachiler

2007-11-09T14:21:00.001-05:00

STEPHEN BACHILER AND THE PLOUGH COMPANY OF 1630
BY V. 0. 8ANBORN OF KENILWOBTH, ILLINOIS

Maine Historical Society, January 2, 1903

Among the companies formed in King Charles's time for colonizing New England was one, of minor importance and small success, whose real history has never been written. The venture of the Mayflower Pilgrims in establishing Plymouth Colony turned the attention of English Puritans, of all varieties of doctrine, to New England as a fruitful field in which to plant their religious ideas. England teemed with small sects, inconsiderable in themselves, but important collectively as representing that departure from the English Church as established by the Tudors and Stuarts, which led to the Civil War and to greater independence of religious thought.

About the year 1629 there was formed, probably in London, a small body of Dissenters called the " Company of Husbandmen" or the " Company of the Plough." These names were perhaps scriptural in their allusion, for the members of the company seem to have been merchants and artisans, rather than actual husbandmen. Who were the originators of this company, or what was their special doctrine, does not appear. Their chosen pastor was Rev. Stephen Bachiler, one of the most earnest, as well as one of the most unfortunate of the Puritan ministers of his day.

Stephen Bachiler was born about 1561, and in 1585-6 took his B. A. at St. John's CoUege, Oxford. In 1587 he was presented to the living of Wherwell, Hants, by Lord La Warr,1 and for eighteen years was vicar of Wherwell. A man of strong impulse and an essential Radical, he must early have embraced the Puritan doctrines, for he was,9 in 1605, ejected from his pleasant vicarage, probably one of the first ejections resulting from King James's Hampton Court Conference of 1604, when the king declared he would "make the Puritans conform or harry them out of the kingdom."

Of Bachiler's family and early life, as of his life from 1605 to 1630, little is known. Tradition says he fled to Holland, to escape the persecution by the English bishops of which Winthrop's History speaks.3 This association with Holland may
not have been because of religious persecution, for some of Bachiler's children lived there ; and a search in the church and town records of Flushing and Mid-
delburg reveals nothing concerning the sturdy old Puritan. The children of Stephen Bachiler, as far as known, were :

1. Nathaniel, born about 1589. A merchant of Southampton ;
married Hester Mercer* of Southampton, sister of Peter, Paul and Rev. Francis Mercer, and of Jane ( Mercer ) Pryaulx, wife of Capt. Peter Pryaulx of Southampton. Nathaniel Bachiler left children: Nathaniel (who settled in Hampton, New Hampshire), Anne ( married Daniel du Cornet of Middelburg, Holland), Stephen, Francis and Benjamin.
2. Deborah, born 1591. Married Rev John Wing ( son of Matthew of Banbury, Oxon,)1 first pastor of the Puritan Church at Flushing ; afterward minister of the Puritan Church at The Hague, Holland ;* died in 1630; ancestor of the Wings, of Cape Cod.
3. Samuel, born about 1592. Minister in Sir Charles Morgan's Regiment in Holland; called to be minister in Middelburg, in 1622, but declined;" author of "Miles Christianas," published in 1625.
4. Stephen, born about 1594. Matriculated at Magdalen
College, Oxford, 1610.
5. Theodate, born 1598. Married Captain and Councillor Christopher Hussey, of Hampton, New Hampshire,— perhaps a relative of Christopher Hussey, mayor of Winchester in 1609, 1618 and 1631.
6. Anna, born 1600. Married John Samborne, probably of the Hants family of that name; a widow in 1631 living in the Strand in London; her children settled in
Hampton, New Hampshire.

It has seemed to me that Stephen Bachiler, always a loyal Hampshire man, never could have left for long that county which the associations of his early life had endeared to him. It is certain that, in 1622,4 he was living on a small property of his own in Newton Stacy, but a mile from his old parish of Wherwell: and in the State Papers of 1635 (Domestic Series) we find a petition from Sir Robert Paine, church warden of Barton Stacy, Hants, to the effect that some of his tenants " having been formerly misled by Stephen Bachelor, a notorious inconformist, had demolished a consecrated chapel at Newton Stacy," &c.

But while Bachiler was living in Hampshire and preaching the Puritan faith, the Company of Husbandmen was forming, and they conceived the idea of sending a band of settlers into New England to propagate their ideas. We may believe that, hearing
of Bachiler's fame, they asked him to become their pastor ; and, though seventy years of age, he at once seized the opportunity and cast in his lot with theirs.

His friend, John Winthrop, was then arranging for his own settlement in New England, and Bachiler doubtless dreamed of establishing there his colony of Husbandmen, in an Arcadia of religious freedom. Sir Ferdinando Gorges was the principal figure in the " Council of Plymouth," and was one of King James's grantees of vast estates in the New World. To Gorges the Plough Company turned, and on June 26, 1630, they
obtained a patent to a tract of land, the best description of which is given as follows in an abstract of title prepared in 1686, by George Turfrey, attorney for the heirs of Col. Alexander Rigby.

The Earle of Warwick and Sir Ferdinando Gorges, for themselves and the rest of the Councell of Plimouth by indents dated 26 June the 6 year of the raigne of Charles I, grant unto Bryan Binckes, John Dye, John Smith and others their associates two Islands in the River Sagedabock near the South side thereof about sixty miles from the sea, and also a tract containing forty miles in length and forty miles in breadth upon the South side of the River Sagedahock, with all Bayes, rivers, Ports, Inletts &c together with all Royalties and Privileges within the precincts thereof.

The terms of this patent were broad, and, as in other cases, infringed on later grants, causing much litigation. A literal interpretation of the Plough Patent would include a large and valuable tract in southeastern Maine, taking in the present city of Portland. Armed with this authority the company bought a small ship, equipped it with ordnance and provisions and sent its first load of colonists to the new province. Ten or twelve of the " Company of the Plough " formed this little band.

They probably reached the Sagadahoc in the winter of 1630-1, and found the land wild and sterile. Disheartened at the prospect, they made a feeble attempt at settling
there, but after a few weeks or months they gave up the idea and embarked again in their little vessel for the more fertile and prosperous settlements near Boston.

The first record of them is in Winthrop's History,
dated July 6, 1631:

" A small ship of 60 tons arrived at Natascot, Mr. Graves, master. She brought ten passengers from London. They came with a patent for Sagadahock, but, not liking the place, they came hither. Their ship drew 10 feet, and went up to Watertown ; but she ran on ground twice by the way."

These were the company called the Husbandmen and their ship called the Plough. Thus
far the original entry in Winthrop's journal; but a later hand (perhaps his own in after years), added this opprobrium, " Most of them proved familists and vanished away." That they were " familists " in the offensive German sense, we have no proof except this entry, but perhaps this term may give a clue to the special religious organization which should have bound the Husbandmen together, but did not. Their
small ship, the Plough, after visiting Watertown, dropped back to Charlestown, started thence for the West Indies, but returned after three weeks, " so broke," Winthrop says, " she could not return home."

Thus the summer of 1631 found the first colonists of the Plough in the Massachusetts Bay, their ship worthless and their ideas of settlement abandoned. In the meantime the company in London, imagining that all had gone well with their brethren in New
England, went on vigorously with the work. Stephen Bachiler threw all his influence into the scale, and enlisted some of his Hampshire parishioners and adherents as possible members of the company. His efforts at this time may have produced the grant of arms referred to in Silvanus Morgan's "Sphere of Gentry," of 1661, one of the most rare and fantastic of early heraldic works. This author says that the arms,— Vert, a plough in feese : in base the sun rising, "appertain to Stephen
Bachelor, the first pastor of the Church of Ligonia in New England ; which bearing was answerable to his profession in plowing up the fallow ground of their hearts, and the Sun, appearing in that part of the World, symbolically alluded to his motto, 'Sol Justitice Exoritur.' "

It is worth noting that Morgan, in the same volume, devotes some space to a handsome
plate of the arms of the London Pryaulx family, Bachiler's connections. Among the prospective members of the Plough Company, probably brought in by Bachiler, was a near kinsman, Richard Dummer, of Bishopstoke, Hants, son of John Pyldrin, als
Dummer of Swathling, Hants, who was a wealthy yeoman or gentleman. A man of substance, Dummier's name gave strength to the Plough Company. For some unexplained reason the company in London had not heard by March, 1632, of the failure of their
first colony, and we find them pushing the work and straining their narrow fortunes to make it a success.

Bachiler had sold his lands in Newton Stacy and invested the proceeds in his new venture. Early in March the second party of colonists left England, part in the Whale, which reached Boston, May 26, 1632, bringing Richard Dummer, Nathaniel Harris, John Smith (son of Francis Smith, a miller), Anthony Jupe, Ann Smith ( wife of John Smith who came in the Plough), and her daughter, and Nathaniel Merriman, son of George Merriman, of London. The William and Francis, which left London, March 9, 1632, and reached Boston, June 5, 1632, brought among its sixty passengers, Stephen
Bachiler and his wife, his grandchild, Nathaniel Bachiler, his three Samborne grandchildren, and several of his Hampshire adherents. He also brought a shipment of company goods, as will appear later, and two more company men, Thomas Payne, of Sandwich, and John Banister, a Yorkshire man.

Continue Reading The Archives

History of the Town of Hampton, New Hampshire: From Its Settlement in 1638 ... By Joseph Dow

He went immediately to Lynn, where his son-in-law, Christopher Hussey, was already resident. There he began his ministry in New England, his church, organized in Holland, uniting with others, previously at Lynn, without asking permission, and without ceremony. Now it must be premised, that many of the Puritans, persecuted in England, fled to these western shores, where they became in turn persecutors, as intolerant as their enemies aeross the sea. The ministers and magistrates formed a religious aristocracy, bigoted and domineering. Mr. Bachiler, a liberal Puritan, zealous for popular rights, and possibly too independent in maintaining them, soon became odious to this persecuting power. They sought a quarrel against him, and found it in the manner of establishing Ins church. And now the magistrates of the colony required him "to forbeare exercising his guifts as a pastr or teacher publiquely," in Massachusetts, "unless it be those hee brought with him ; for his contempt of authority, & till some sentidles be removed."

The term scandal has been wrongly supposed to imply immoral conduct in Mr. Bachiler. It was probably nothing more than petty quarrels, growing partly out of his partiality, in baptizing his own grandson before another child, born a week earlier. This injunction was openly and strongly condemned by the liberal party, which was no inconsiderable one in the colony, and, five months later, the magistrates felt compelled to rescind it, though it does not appear that the victim had, in the meantime, made any acknowledgment of faults, to prepare the way for such an act. Mr. Bachiler remained pastor of the church at Lynn till about the close of 1635. The church at that time had been considerably enlarged, and a controversy had arisen between him and a majority of the members. The grounds of this controversy are not stated; but as Mr. Bnchiler was an old man, it is possible that his church may have been desirous of obtaining a younger or a more popular minister.

The account given by Governor Winthrop seems to afford some ground for ihis supposition. Mr. Bachiler asked a dismission for himself, and his first members, six or seven in number, who had come from England with him ; and the church granted it, supposing that they would leave the town, for so, it was reported, Mr. Bachiler had intimated. On being dismissed, however, he and his brethren immediately renewed their old covenant, intending to raise another church there. At this "the most and chief of the town" were offended, for, as Governor Winthrop says, "it would eross their intentions of calling Mr. Peter or some other minister."

They then complained to the magistrates, by whom he was forbidden "to proceed in any such church way until the canse were considered by the other ministers, etc." But Mr. Bachiler refused to desist, probably regarding the course of the magistrates as an unjustifiable interference with his affairs ; and this independence, both in thinking and acting, may give a clew to the difficulties that arose from time to time between him and the government. In this case, the magistrates "sent for him, and upon his delay, day after day, the marshal was sent" to convey him to Boston. Being thus taken into custody, he submitted to the civil anthority and gave
a "promise to remove out of the town within three months." He was thereupon discharged. This account of Mr. Bachiler's connection with the church and people of Lynn is given, partly for the purpose of showing that some of the charges made against him may not have been well founded, having originated in the enmity of those who made them ; and partly, he- canse here, i11 the renewal of the church covenant at Lynn, near the close of the year 1635, we findnd the organization of the Hampton church.

From Lynn, Mr. Bachiler removed to Ipswich. In 1637, he and his company undertook to form a settlement at Mattakcese [Yarmouth] on Cape Cad. Governor Winthrop says that he was then "about seventy-six years of age; yet he went thither on foot in a very hard season," the distance from Ipswich being nearly one hundred miles. This enterprise was relinquished on account of the poverty of the company, and the difficulties that they had to encounter. In 1638, Mr. Bachiler and some or all of his company were at Ncwbury, and in the fall of that year settled at Winnacunnet.
According to tradition, a Meeting-house was built by those who formed the settlement, as soon as they had provided log-cabins for themselves. Like their houses, it was undoubtedly made of logs, but of its form and dimensions, we have no knowledge. It was built on the Green—near where the Academy afterwards stood —a site occupied by a succession of meeting-houses, till the early part of the present century. The people were called together for public worship, by the ringing of a bell,1 as appears from the following vote, passed at the second town-meeting, November 27, 1639 :
"W" Sambornc (wth his consent) is appointed to ring the bell before the meetings on the Lord's dayes & other dayes, for which he is to have 6'1 pr lott of eury one having a lott within the town."
The bell, which was a present from the pastor, was probably hung on a frame in the open air, or suspended from some tree, till another house was built, which was furnished with a tower. In the spring of 1639, Mr. Timothy Dalton was associated with Mr. Bachiler in the work of the ministry, the latter holding the officec of PASTOR, and the former, that of TEACHER.' The great age of the pastor was probably the reason for employing another minister. But the connection was not an harmonious one. Both of the ministers were orthodox in sentiment, but they differed widely in practice, Mr. Bachiler being open and independent, and Mr. Dalton, in accord with the magistrates and elders. Mr. Bachiler was charged with immorality, but whether justly or unjustly is "not proven." He was excommunicated in 1641, and restored to the church in 1643, but not to the pastoral office. That he committed some imprudences is admitted; but as to anything worse, it is likelier that the old persecutions followed him. He himself, in the letter before mentioned, to the church-in Boston, complains bitterly of Mr. Dalton,in the following words:

"I see not how I can depart hence till I have (or (I mean) God for me) cleared and vindicated the cause and wrongs I have suffered of the church live yet in : that is from the Teacher (indeed) who hath don all und ben the cause; of nil the dishonour that hath accrew'd to God, shame to my selfe and griefe to all God's people, by his irregular proceedings and abuse of the power of the church in his hand, by the maior parte cleaveing to him, being his countrymen and acquaintance in old England The Teacher's act of his excommunicating me would prove the foulest matter, both for the cause alleged, of that excommunication, and the impulsive canse (even wrath and revenge) and also the manner of all his proceeding throughout to the very end ; and lastly his keeping me still under bonds."

Probably there was much hot temper on both sides. Each minister had partisans and friends in the town and in the church ; but the larger number favored the teacher. Mr. Bachiler still remained in Hampton, and the dilliculties and distractions among the inhabitants appear to have inereased. Petitions and remonstrances in relation to these difficulties were sent to the General Court at the Млу session, in 1644. The Court appointed a committee with full power to hear and determine all matters in dispute among the people, but the action of the committee is not known.

About this time some of the people of Exeter proposed to form a new church and invite Mr. Bachiler to become their pastor, though he was then more than four-score years of age. For this purpose, they appointed a day, and gave notice thereof to the magistrates and churches. At this juncture, the General Court interfered :

"Whereas it appears to this Crt, that some of the inhabitants of Excetter do intend shortly to gather a church & call Mr.' Bachiler to be their minister, & forasmuch as the divisions & contentions which are amonge the inhabitants there are Judged by this Cort to bee such as for the present they cannot comfortably & with approbation proceed in so weighty & sacred affaires, it is therefore ordered, that direction shall be forthwth sent to the said inhabitants to deferr the gathering of any church, or other such proceding uutill this Cort"or the Cort at Ipswich (upon further satisfaction of their reconciliation & fitnes) shall give alowance thereunto."

To this order, the people of Exeter submitted, and did not proceed to gather a church. Had the charges affecting the moral and christian character of Mr. Bachiler been substantiatcd, we can hardly suppose, that the people of Exeter, a town adjoining Hampton, should be unacquainted with the fact, or that, knowing the fact, they would still invite him to become their minister. It is also worthy of notice, that in the order of the court, not the slightest allusion is made to any unfitness for the sacred office, on the part of Mr. Bachiler. The order is based entirely on the divisions among the people of Exeter.

Mr. Bachiler did not much longer remain in Hampton. His house and most of the contents having been destroyed by lire, he removed to Strawberry Bank (Portsmouth) whore he lived from 16-17 to 1650, and probably somewhat later. During this time he sued the town of Hampton for 'wages" due for his services, and obtained a verdict in bis favor ; for it appears from the Records of the Norfolk Courts that the town sent a petition to the General Court ''concerning Mr. Bachiler's execution. Concerning Mr. Bachiler's domestic relations in all these years, we know absolutely nothing. His wife, Helena, died, whether before or after his removal from Hampton is not certain ; and he married, probably about 1648, his third wife, Mary, a widow (with children), who from mercenary motives, inveigled him into the marriage, in bis extreme old age. But she proved to be a disreputable woman, and he separated from her. His old enemy, the civil power, ordered him to live with her, and lined him for not publishing his intention of marriage. Weary and disheartened, he could endure no more ; and (probably in 1655), escorted by his grandson, Stephen Sanborn, returned to England. Not even yet was the tongue of calumny silenced ; for his bad wife sued for a divorce, in 1657, in order that she might be free to marry again, should opportnnity ojftir, alleging that she was "eredibly informed" that he hnd married a fourth wife in England. On no stronger testimony does this assertion rest.

The ancient Stephen Bachiler, of Hampton, New Hampshire, died at Hackney, a Village and Parish in Middlesex, two miles from London, in 1660, in the one hundredth year of his age. It is diflleult to form a just estimate of Mr. Bachiler's character. Much of our information concerning him comes through the records of the acts of the magistrates and the General Court, or the writings of Governor Winthrop, with whom he was no favorite. His refusal to bow to unreasonnble mandates made him enemies in high places, and his misfortunes followed us a natural sequence. But that he was a good and useful man, there can be no reasonable doubt.

(Pg 343)

Early Colonization

2007-11-04T17:48:00.000-05:00

Popular mythology would have one believing that the Mayflower pilgrims and other early English "planters" arrived blindly and boldly into the New World, however, explorers funded by private investor groups and endorsed by the respective monarchies of England, France, Holland and Spain had been treading the soil and waters of the North American continent extensively for nearly 120 years by the time of the arrival of the Mayflower, oftentimes crossing paths within days of one another. This exploration, with a few noted exceptions, was less about colonization and more concerned with increased capital gains, as the nations of Europe sought means to replenish their treasuries depleted by battles conducted against each other by exploiting the natural resources of coastal North America of its fish, fur, and medicinal plants. Sassafras, for example, which aided in the treatment of the symptoms of syphyllis and gonorhea that was running rampant throughout northern Europe, was found in abundance and extracted extensively from the peninsula of Cape Cod decades before the arrival of the Mayflower. Hindsight shows that the unwillingness on the part of these nations to cooperate and share valuable information of their discoveries contributed to much of the early tragedy and suffering experienced throughout the explorations and early attempts to colonize. True plans for establishing permanent English settlements on the mainland of America were not even seriously and thoughtfully considered as a means to expand the British Empire until the growing Protestant movement of England began to erode the influence of its monarchs. It was only then that King Charles I, son of James I, frustrated by the political conflicts stemming from the social changes of his country, realized the advantage of exporting the source of his country's cultural and social upheaval, the Protestants, who would in turn as repayment for their newfound religious freedom, export to England the fruit of their labor.

"Protestant"is an umbrella term that refers to Bible-based Christianity which had developed from Martin Luther 's "95 Thesis" that challenged the authority of the Roman Catholic Papacy. By early 17th century, the Protestant movement had started to "splinter", taking on distinct forms within England, two of which were The Puritans and The Separatists. By the 1650's, two more significant variations had developed, The Quakers and The Baptists; each with its own distinction that often brought strife and contention from the others. The Puritans accepted ecclesiastic authority of the Church of England but desired to "purify" it of its corruption from within. The Separatists (otherwise known as the "Pilgrims"), on the other hand, were deemed radical by the mainstream English population for they sought to create an entirely separate Christian Church as an alternative to both the King's Church of England and the Roman Catholic Church. It was within these two Christian perspectives many of the early English immigrants adhered.

These two groups began arriving in the Americas with the aid of different investors and Royal land charters and patents. These charters were intended as legal binding contracts agreed upon by the investor group, the King, and the "Planters", which dictated the financial terms, the geographical boundaries of their particular proposed settlement and established ground rules of governance. In 1620, after landing briefly at Monhegan Island off the coast of Maine to assess the prospects of establishing a fish harvesting and processing community at their intended destination of northern Virginia, the Pilgrims, led by William Bradford chose to settle upon the Cape Cod peninsula in defiance of their original charter for the purpose of religious freedom and economic prosperity. While off the shores of Cape Cod, they realized the original patent and its trade agreements would no longer apply, so they illegally drafted a social contract that would be later referred to as the beginning of Democracy in America, "The Mayflower Compact", which was agreed upon and signed by the more prominent men aboard ship.

In 1630, the Massachusetts Bay Company (later Colony) after much political and legal wrangling in both England and the New World, settled the Boston Bay area as a corporation for religious freedom for the Puritans, led by John Winthrop, whose utopian idealogy propelled him to attempt to create a "heavenly" kingdom on earth. With political, legal and financial supporters still in England, the corporation quickly and masterfully organized and began defying their King with the implementation of many new laws, agencies and trade arrangements, so that by the 1650's the Massachusetts Bay Colony became a completely successful self governing entity. There were of course other settlements such as the already mentioned outpost fishing and trading villages along the coast of Maine, and colonies elsewhere within modern day New England, Mid-Atlantic, and Southern regions, but these two are our primary concern at this time with regard to our ancestry.

The bulk of passengers of any given journey, oftentimes members of a particular Church or community from within England, had very limited influence in the decision making processes regarding political, legal or economic issues. Any influence at all, aside from the civil and ecclesiastic duties of the Church leaders, was permitted only at the personal discretion of the corporate shareholders. Wisely foreseeing the need for labor and specialized craft and trade skills for the building of their new home, these community-based immigrants and their investors permitted additional passage for select people not of the particular community or Church in exchange for basic but essential services needed to secure the success of the venture and the community. For those who had the means, investing hard-earned currency in stock of such very high risk business ventures were in effect purchasing entitlements that they may not have enjoyed in England once landing upon dry land. The arrangements were such that the stock essentially converted into very basic civil rights in an otherwise intentionally designed religion base closed society. The drafting of the Mayflower Compact, though, essentially made its "stock" worthless as its implied intent was "one person - one vote" in most matters, regardless of how much money one had invested. But those who ventured to the new world under the auspices of the Massachusetts Bay Company, however, strictly adhered to the authority of its biggest investor and Puritan idealist, John Winthrop.

"Wee must Consider that wee shall be as a Citty upon a Hill, the eies of all
people are uppon us; soe that if wee shall deale falsely with our god in this
worke wee have undertaken and soe cause him to withdrawe his present help from us, wee shall be made a story and a byword through the world, wee shall open the mouthes of enemeies to speake evill of the wayes of god and all professours for God sake."
John Winthrop

There were less than a dozen such "Freemen", stockholders from primarily the old English gentry class, with political and legal authority to administer to the affairs of the common settlers within the earliest days of the founding of Massachusetts, so rules were eventually implemented to slowly phase in and admit select segments of the general male population to become a "Freeman". Initially, in 1630, only the most pious of Puritan men who not already members of the clergy were admitted as a Free Man. He was required to swear an oath of fidelity towards God, the Puritanical Philosophy, and to the governing authority of the growing Massachusetts Bay Colony as well. This oath entitled members to the right to file legal suits, conduct business transactions on behalf of their communities and legally buy and sell property but also obligated them to many political, legal and administrative responsibilities. These responsibilities often deterred otherwise perfect candidates from becoming a "Freeman". Therefore, a second phase was implemented in response to the demands of a growing population, and included the "oath of allegiance", which was opened to Church men proven to be of good social standing and personal character. Essentially, Puritanical thought dictated that the only way a "Planter" could enjoy basic civil rights was to first prove before a jury of "saintly men" that he, the "planter", was called upon as one of "God's Elect" and was, therefore, "saved", or, "free" of sin (a freeman). They must be determined to be beyond reproach, deemed virtuous before God to become a leader among mere men.

From the perspective of the impoverished laboring lay colonial planter, the "Free Man" system afforded inroads to priviledged opportunities of legal justice and civil liberties not otherwise available to the common working-class. Many, however, foresaw the inevitable perils of a closed society based solely by religious doctrine or Biblical interpretation and struggled early to implement change and others, like the Quakers, believed that to partake in such an opportunity not only required the taking of an oath critical to virtually every aspect of financial, social, civil, legal and religious prominence within early Puritan America was contrary to Jesus' message, but also, obligated them to other responsibilities both known and unforeseen that would require them to answer to an authority other than that of God; so in true Christian nature, they simply and respectfully declined the opportunity and was happy to continue laboring in service to what they percieved as God's Glory.