John Winthrop
John Winthrop, (b. Jan. 22 [Jan. 12, Old
Style], 1588, Edwardstone, Suffolk,
Eng.—d. April 5 [March 26], 1649,
Boston, Massachusetts Bay Colony
[U.S.]), first governor of the
Massachusetts Bay Colony, the chief
figure among the Puritan founders of New
England.
Background and early life.
Winthrop’s father was a newly risen
country gentleman whose 500-acre
(200-hectare) estate, Groton Manor, had
been bought from Henry VIII at the time
of the Reformation. Winthrop thus
belonged to a class—the gentry—that
became the dominant force in English
society between 1540 and 1640, and he
early assumed the habit of command
appropriate to a member of the ruling
class in a highly stratified society.
At age
15 he entered Trinity College,
Cambridge; at age 17 he married the
first of his four wives—Mary Forth,
daughter of an Essex squire—and the next
year the first of his 16 children was
born. Like many members of his class,
Winthrop studied law, served as justice
of the peace, and obtained a government
office; from 1627 to 1629 he was an
attorney at the Court of Wards and
Liveries. For more than 20 years
Winthrop was primarily a country squire
at Groton, with no discernible interest
in overseas colonization.
He was
an ardently religious person. From his
early teens Winthrop threw himself into
scriptural study and prayers, and
gradually he trained himself into a
full-fledged Puritan, convinced that God
had elected him to salvation, or in
Puritan terms to “sainthood.” His
religious experience reinforced his
elitist outlook, but it also made him a
social activist. Like other prominent
Puritans, Winthrop dedicated himself to
remaking, as far as possible, the wicked
world as he saw it, arguing that “the
life which is most exercised with
tryalls and temptations is the sweetest,
and will prove the safeste.”
During
the late 1620s, Winthrop felt
increasingly trapped by the economic
slump that reduced his landed income and
by Charles I’s belligerent anti-Puritan
policy, which cost him his court post in
1629. When, in 1629, the Massachusetts
Bay Company obtained a royal charter to
plant a colony in New England, Winthrop
joined the company, pledging to sell his
English estate and take his family to
Massachusetts if the company government
and charter were also transferred to
America. The other members agreed to
these terms and elected him governor
(October 20).
Journey to America.
As Winthrop sailed west on the Arbella
the spring of 1630, he composed a lay
sermon, “A Modell of Christian Charity,”
in which he pictured the Massachusetts
colonists in covenant with God and with
each other, divinely ordained to build
“a Citty upon a Hill” in New England.
Some critics have seen Winthrop as a
visionary utopian, while others have
seen him as a social reactionary; but
most obviously he was urging his fellow
colonists to adopt the combination of
group discipline and individual
responsibility that gave Massachusetts
such immediate and lasting success as a
social experiment.
For the
remaining 19 years of his life, Winthrop
lived in the New England wilderness, a
father figure among the colonists. In
the annual Massachusetts elections he
was chosen governor 12 times between
1631 and 1648, and during the
intervening years he sat on the court of
assistants or colony council. His
American career passed through three
distinct phases. On first arrival, in
the early 1630s, he did his most
creative work, guiding the colonists as
they laid out a network of tightly
organized towns, each with its church of
self-professed saints. Winthrop himself
settled at Boston, which quickly became
the capital and chief port of
Massachusetts. His new farm on the
Mystic River was much inferior to his
former estate at Groton, but Winthrop
never regretted the move because he was
free at last to build a godly
commonwealth.
Opposition against him built up after a
few years, however, as dissidents kept
challenging Winthrop’s system in the
mid- and late 1630s. He was nettled when
the freemen (voters) insisted in 1634 on
electing a representative assembly to
share in decision making. He found Roger
Williams’ criticism of church–state
relations intolerable, though he
secretly helped Williams to flee to
Rhode Island in 1636. And he took it as
a personal affront when numerous
colonists chose to migrate from
Massachusetts to Connecticut.
Conflict with Anne Hutchinson.
The greatest outrage to Winthrop by far,
however, came when Anne Hutchinson, a
mere woman, gained control of his Boston
church in 1636 and endeavoured to
convert the whole colony to a religious
position that Winthrop considered
blasphemous. It was he who led the
counterattack against her. His victory
was complete. Hutchinson was tried
before the general court—chiefly for
“traducing the ministers”—and was
sentenced to banishment. Later she was
tried before the Boston church and
formally excommunicated. She established
a settlement on Aquidneck Island (now
Rhode Island) in 1638 and four years
later, after the death of her husband,
settled on Long Island Sound. Winthrop
sanctimoniously noted her tragic
misfortunes—her deformed stillborn baby
and her murder by Indians—as proof of
God’s judgment against heretics.
By 1640
Winthrop had become the custodian of
Massachusetts orthodoxy, suspicious of
new ideas and influences and convinced
that God favoured his community above
all others. With the outbreak of the
English Civil War in 1642, many New
Englanders returned home to fight
against Charles I. Winthrop, however,
stayed on in America, and he criticized
the course of the Puritan Revolution.
His own political philosophy was best
summed up in a speech of 1645, in which
he defined the magistrates’ authority
very broadly and the people’s liberty
very narrowly. But Winthrop was never a
petty tyrant; the colonists respected
and loved him to the end. His tender
side is best revealed by the loving
letters he exchanged with his third
wife, Margaret, who was his helpmate
from 1618 to 1647. The most notable of
his sons, John Winthrop the Younger
(1606–76), was a talented scientist and
governor of Connecticut. Later
descendants have figured prominently in
American politics, science, and
business.
After
struggling six weeks with “a feverish
distemper,” he died, age 61, in the
spring of 1649. By force of character
Winthrop had persuaded the colonists to
adopt many—though by no means all—of his
pet social and political ideas. The
detailed journal that he kept during his
years in America is a prime source for
the early history of Massachusetts, and
his copious file of correspondence and
memoranda gives an exceptionally full
impression of his activities and
personality.
Richard S. Dunn
