# Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Winthrop, John (1588-1649)

​WINTHROP, JOHN (1588–1649), governor of Massachusetts, was born at Edwardston, Suffolk, on 12 Jan. 1587–8. His grandfather, Adam Winthrop (1498–1562) of Lavenham in Suffolk, a substantial clothier, who founded the fortunes of the family, was granted the freedom of the city of London in 1526, and was inscribed ‘armiger’ in 1548. He obtained by a grant of 1544 the manor of Groton, Suffolk, formerly belonging to the monastery of Bury St. Edmunds. He died on 9 Nov. 1562, aged 64, and was buried in Groton church (his will is in P. C. C. Chayre 2). A fine contemporary portrait of the worthy merchant and reformer is preserved in New York, and has been engraved by Jackman (Life of Winthrop, 1864, i. 20). By his wives Alice (Hunne) and Agnes (Sharpe) he left seven children. His third son, Adam Winthrop (1548–1623), the eventual owner of Groton Manor, was trained to the law, and was from 1594 to 1609 auditor of St. John's and Trinity colleges at Cambridge. He married, first, on 16 Dec. 1574, Alice (d. 1577), daughter of William Still of Grantham, and sister of Bishop John Still [q. v.] He married, secondly, on 20 Feb. 1579, Anne (d. 1629), daughter of Henry Browne of Edwardston, clothier, and by her had, with four daughters (one of whom married Emmanuel Downing, and was mother of Sir George Downing (1623?–1684) [q. v.]), an only son John, the future ‘Moses of New England.’ Some verses by Adam to his sister, ‘the Lady Mildmay at the birth of her son Henery,’ are preserved in a manuscript songbook of the sixteenth century (Harl. MS. 1598; they are printed by Joseph Hunter in Mass. Hist. Coll. 3rd ser. x. 152–4). Lady Mildmay gave her brother a serviceable ​stone posset-pot, which is still preserved as a family heirloom. This same Adam was a typical Winthrop, a diligent inditer of letters and diaries (quaint fragments of which evince good sense and right feeling), and a great encourager of prophesying. He informs us that at Groton and the two neighbouring parishes of Boxford and Edwardston he managed within the limits of a single year to hear as many as thirty-three different preachers.
John Winthrop was admitted at Trinity College, Cambridge, on 2 Dec. 1602, but his academic course was interrupted when he was little over seventeen by his betrothal and marriage, on 16 April 1605, to Mary (1583–1615), daughter and heiress of John Forth of Great Stanbridge, Essex, in which place he settled and abode for some years. His eldest son, John, was born there on 12 Feb. 1606, and he had issue two more sons and two daughters by his first wife, with whom his sympathy appears to have been at times imperfect. She died and was buried at Groton on 26 June 1615. The religious impressions which so deeply imbued his whole life were derived by Winthrop during this period from Ezekiel Culverwell. His early piety, of the self-accusing puritanic type, was remarkable. The workings of his conscience were often curious. He was extremely fond of wild-fowl shooting with a gun, but conceiving from the fact that he was a very bad shot that the practice was sinful, he ‘covenanted with the Lord’ to give over shooting, except upon rare and secret occasions. He had no doubts as to the depraving effects of the ‘creature tobacco’ or the practice of drinking healths, and he combated both these infirmities in a more uncompromising fashion. He married, within six months of his first wife's death, Thomasine, daughter of William Clopton of Castleins Manor, near Groton (her marriage settlements are printed in ‘Evidences of the Winthrops,’ 1896, p. 22). She died on 7 Dec. 1616, just a year after marriage, and was buried in Groton church on 11 Dec. A detailed and powerful, if somewhat morbid, account of her deathbed is given by Winthrop in an autobiographical fragment (cited in Life, i. 79–89). After a period of great depression and diffidence, he married, thirdly, on 29 April 1618, at Great Maplested, Margaret (d. 1647), daughter of Sir John Tyndal, kt. Under her influence the tendency to undue religious introspection was gradually subdued, and Winthrop gained that moral ascendency among his puritan neighbours to which the depth of his character justly entitled him. A charming letter from his father to this fiancée, and a number of his love-letters to his third wife (nearly all written after marriage), are printed in the ‘Life,’ and the series was edited in 1893 by J. H. Twichell as ‘Some Old Puritan Love-letters.’ For some time past Winthrop had contemplated taking orders, but he was dissuaded from this course both by his father's advice and by his newly found married happiness. He began taking a more active part in his duties as a justice of the peace and lord of Groton Manor, and in 1626 he was appointed an attorney of the court of wards and liveries, of which Sir Robert Naunton [q. v.] had become master in 1623. He appears to have been admitted of the Inner Temple in November 1628 (Members of Inner Temple, p. 252), a fact which seems to indicate that his emigration was not the result of long previous deliberation.
John Winthrop had not joined any of the colonial companies as an adventurer, and the earliest intimation of his leaving the old world for the new is conveyed in a letter of 15 May 1629, in which he says: ‘My deare wife, I am verylye persuaded God will bring some heavye affliction upon this lande, and that speedylye … if the Lord seeth it will be good for us, he will provide a shelter and a hiding-place for us and others, as a Zoar for Lott.’ The dissolution of parliament in 1629 was the moving cause of his discontent, and his decision to cast in his lot with the emigrants was no doubt stimulated by the death of his mother and the loss of his post. He saw everything now through darkened glasses. The land seemed to him to be grown ‘weary of her inhabitants.’ The growth of luxury and extravagance, the increased expenses of education, and the difficulty of providing for children in the liberal arts and professions are all reflected upon in his correspondence at this time. ‘Evil times,’ he concluded, ‘are coming, when the church must fly to the wilderness.’ In June or July 1629 he was carefully preparing a statement of the ‘Reasons to be considered for justifyeing the undertakers of the intended Plantation in New England, and for incouraginge such whose hartes God shall move to joyne with them in it.’ In July he appears to have paid a visit to Isaac Johnson at Sempringham, and the matter was discussed in all its bearings between them. His ‘Reasons’ would seem to have been shown to Sir John Eliot and other prominent leaders of puritan feeling.
The emigration movement was greatly facilitated by the decision of the Old England proprietors to convert the Massachusetts plantation into a self-governing community, as the prospering Plymouth colony had virtually been from the commencement. ​The company of Massachusetts was originally designed to be, like that of Virginia, a corporation established in England administering the affairs of an American colony. But on 28 July 1629 Matthew Cradock, governor of the Massachusetts Company, at a meeting held at the house of the deputy-governor, Thomas Goffe, in London, read certain propositions conceived by himself, giving reason for transferring the government from the council in London to the plantation itself. The authorities at Salem, now of several years' standing, had hitherto been subordinate to those of the company at home; on 26 Aug. 1629, at a meeting held at Cambridge, John Winthrop was one of the twelve signatories (including the names of Richard Saltonstall [q. v.], Thomas Dudley [q. v.], William Vassall [q. v.], Increase Nowell [q. v.], and William Pynchon [q. v.], all of whom are separately noticed) to an agreement by which the framers pledged themselves to set sail with their families to ‘inhabit and continue in New England, provided that the whole government, together with the patent for the plantation, be first by an order of court legally transferred and established, to remain with us and others which shall inhabit upon the said plantation.’ On 20 Oct. it was announced by the court of the company that the transference of the government had been decided upon, and that same day, from among four nominees, John Winthrop was by general vote and show of hands chosen to be governor for the ensuing year.
After some five months of preparation, on 22 March 1629–30 four ships out of the eleven that the emigrants had chartered were ready to sail from Southampton, and upon that day Winthrop embarked with Saltonstall, and with Thomas Dudley, William Coddington [q. v.], and Simon Bradstreet [see under Bradstreet, Anne], upon the principal ship, the Arbella. Two of his younger children were with him, but his wife was obliged by reason of her pregnancy to postpone her departure for a little over a year. Winthrop and his comrades were delayed by contrary winds off the Isle of Wight for a fortnight, and they took the opportunity to promulgate the notable ‘letter of farewell’ to their fellow-countrymen, entitled ‘The Humble Request of his Majesty's Loyall Subjects, the Governor and the Company, late gone for New England, to the rest of their brethren in and of the Church of England, for the obtaining of their Prayers and the removal of Suspicions and misconstruction of their Intentions.’ While still at ‘the Cowes’ Winthrop also commenced that diary or journal (see below) which was continued thenceforth until the close of his career, and was destined to form the staple of all subsequent histories of the infant colony of New England. In the course of the voyage, which proved a tedious one, Winthrop further wrote a little work of edification entitled ‘Christian Charitie. A Modell hereof.’ The manuscript was presented to the New York Historical Society by Francis B. Winthrop, a lineal descendant of the author, and in 1838 it was printed by the Massachusetts Historical Society (Collections, 1838, 3rd ser. vii. 31).
After a voyage of sixty-six days the Arbella and her consorts came to an anchor in the harbour of Salem. On 17 June 1630 (O.S.) Winthrop definitely decided upon Charlestown (now the northern suburb of Boston) in preference to Salem as a residence. Here he was welcomed by John Endecott [q. v.], who made over to him the authority which he had exercised as acting governor since September 1628. The colony, which (exclusive of the Mayflower emigrants of Plymouth plantation, not incorporated in Massachusetts until 1691) numbered barely three hundred souls, was now increased at a bound to between two and three thousand. Winthrop drew up a church covenant on 30 July, and some five weeks later was driven by lack of water to quit Charlestown and to establish his headquarters upon the neighbouring peninsula of Shawmut, to which the name of Boston was given. A general court (the second) was held at Boston on 18 May 1631, when Winthrop was re-elected governor, and a most important decision was arrived at, to the effect that ‘for time to come no man shall be admitted to the freedom of the body politic but such as are members of some of the churches within the limits of the same.’ In May 1632 Winthrop was re-elected governor, and shortly after this date, in a letter from Captain Thomas Wiggin to Secretary Coke, we have a brief picture of the plantation and its chief ruler. The English there, ‘numbering about 2,000, and generally most industrious, have done more in three years than others in seven times that space, and at a tenth of the expense. They are loved and respected by the Indians, who repair to the governor for justice. He [John Winthrop] is a discreet and sober man, wearing plain apparel, assisting in any ordinary labour, and ruling with much mildness and justice’ (Cal. State Papers, Colonial, 1574–1660, p. 156). In September 1632, in his capacity as governor, Winthrop paid a ceremonious visit to the planters at Plymouth. About this same period an animated quarrel between the governor and his deputy, Thomas Dudley, was allayed ​by Winthrop's pacific demeanour. An insulting letter from Dudley is said to have been returned by Winthrop with the remark, ‘I am not willing to keep such an occasion of provocation by me.’
In 1634 the positions of Winthrop and Dudley (now reconciled) as governor and deputy were reversed. From July in this year the town records of Boston are extant as commenced in Winthrop's own hand. Their early pages record the provision of a common space and a free school for the town, and sumptuary laws against the wearing of lace and the use of tobacco in public. In May 1635 John Haynes was elected governor. Winthrop supported at this time the disciplinary banishment of Roger Williams. He was nevertheless in the following November called to account for dealing too remissly in point of justice. The ministers sided against him, and Winthrop acknowledged that he was ‘convinced that he had failed in overmuch lenity and remissness, and would endeavour (by God's assistance) to take a more strict course hereafter’ (Journal, i. 213). Articles were accordingly drawn up to the effect that there should be more strictness used in civil government and military discipline. These articles enjoined among other things that ‘trivial things should be ended in towns, &c.,’ that the magistrates should ‘in tenderness and love admonish one another, without reserving any secret grudge,’ and that the magistrates should henceforth ‘appear more solemnly in public, with attendance, apparel, and open notice of their entrance into the court’ (ib. p. 214). From this same year Winthrop abandoned as ‘superstitious’ the commonly received names of the days and months. In 1636 Sir Henry Vane was chosen governor, while Winthrop and Dudley were made councillors for life. The ferment raised by the ‘antinomian’ opinions of Anne Hutchinson came to a head in 1637. Vane championed a liberal and tolerant admission of the new opinions; Winthrop supported the ministers in their demand for a more repressive policy. The struggle was finally decided by Winthrop's election as governor in preference to Vane at a general court held at Newtown (now Cambridge) on 17 May 1637. Winthrop was in November instrumental in banishing Anne Hutchinson ‘for having impudently persisted in untruth.’ Two of her followers were disfranchised and fined, eight disfranchised, two fined, three banished, and seventy-six disarmed. In order to prevent a possible repetition of such an incident, the general court passed an order to the effect that ‘none should be allowed to inhabit at Boston but by permission of the magistrates.’ Winthrop defended the order in an elaborate paper. Vane replied in ‘A Briefe Answer’ (so called), to which Winthrop rejoined. In the meantime Vane had left for England, the governor providing for his ‘honourable dismission.’
After a two years' interval Winthrop resumed the governorship in 1642, in which year the functions of deputies and magistrates in the general court were differentiated, and the first ‘commencement’ of Harvard College in Cambridge was recorded. In 1638 Winthrop had invited out to Boston his nephew (Sir) George Downing, who was educated at the newly founded college. In this same year as governor he had shrewdly evaded the demand of the commissioners of plantations for the return of the company's charter. In 1643 the plantation was divided into the four shires of Suffolk, Norfolk, Essex, and Middlesex. Both Groton and Winthrop were commemorated by place-names. In the same year the four New England colonies of Massachusetts and Plymouth, Connecticut and New Haven, were confederated under a written agreement. In 1645 Winthrop, being then deputy-governor, was arraigned for exercising a strained and arbitrary authority, and the charge acquired some seriousness from the fact that it was supported by a minister; but he was eventually acquitted, and the minister and his followers fined. On his acquittal he made a speech famous in the annals of Massachusetts, and cited by De Tocqueville as containing a noble definition of liberty. In May 1646 Robert Child and six others addressed to the court a remonstrance, complaining that as non-church members they were excluded from the civil privileges of Englishmen. But Winthrop, now again governor, was staunch in his support of the religious oligarchy, and drew up (4 Nov.) a ‘stiff declaration.’ The petitioners declaring their intention of carrying their appeal to parliament, Child was arrested by Winthrop's order, and (with his followers) imprisoned and heavily fined. The remainder of his tenure of the chief magistracy, which terminated only with his life, was uneventful, save for the death of his faithful Margaret on 14 June 1647. She was a woman, wrote a contemporary, ‘of singular prudence, modesty, and virtue, and specially beloved and honoured of all the country’ (her life has been sketched by James Anderson in ‘Memorable Women of Puritan Times,’ 1862, and forms the subject of a separate memoir by Alice M. Earle, 1895). ​Winthrop married, as his fourth wife, early in 1648, Martha, daughter of Captain William Rainsborough, and widow of Thomas Coytmore. Her estate was a welcome relief to his necessities, for he had spent much of his substance on the colony, and through the roguery of a bailiff his estate had dwindled almost to vanishing point.
Winthrop himself died on 26 March 1649. He was buried in the King's Chapel graveyard, Boston, on 3 April, when a funeral salute was fired by the Ancient and Honourable Artillery Company of Boston. A funeral ‘Elegy’ was printed by ‘Perciful Lowle.’ Winthrop gave thirty-nine books (for a list see Life, 1867, App.) to Harvard. During his last illness it is related that his old colleague Thomas Dudley waited upon Winthrop to urge him to sign an order for the banishment of a heterodox citizen, but he refused, saying he had done too much of that work already (G. Bishop, New England Judged, 1661, p. 172). By his first and third wives Winthrop had large families. His eldest son, John [q. v.], is separately noticed. His eldest son by his third wife, Stephen Winthrop (1619–1658), came to England in 1646, became a colonel in Cromwell's army, sat for Banff and Aberdeen in the assembly of 1656, but died in London two years later.
Between the ancestor worship of the majority of American historians and the reactionary views of one or two writers who protest against this tendency, it is difficult to arrive at a true delineation of Winthrop. His letters to his wife show him to have been tender and gentle, and that his disposition was one to inspire love is proved by the affection those bore him who had suffered much at his hands, Williams, Vane, and Coddington among them. ‘A great lover of the saints, especially able ministers of the gospel,’ he was the wisest champion the clergy could have had; but they drove him far and forced him into severe and even rancorous measures of discipline from which his judgment and heart alike recoiled. His tendencies in early life were liberal, but in America, especially after the rebuke for lenity in 1635, he grew narrower. His claim to eminence as a statesman must rest not upon brilliant or original intellectual qualities, but upon his good judgment, his calm unvindictive temper, and the purity of his moral character. In the hall of historical statues in the Capitol at Washington a statue of him was placed beside that of John Adams to represent Massachusetts. The commissioners responsible for this choice, in their report of February 1866, said with justice of John Winthrop: ‘His mind, more than any other, arranged the social state of Massachusetts; Massachusetts moulded the society of New England.’
In addition to this statue there is a second of Winthrop in the chapel at Mount Auburn (figured in Life, 1867, vol. ii.), and a third in bronze was unveiled at Boston on 17 Sept. 1883. Two original portraits of Winthrop are extant: one, doubtfully attributed to Van Dyck, in the senate chamber of Massachusetts state house (copies in Memorial Hall, Cambridge, Boston Athenæum, and elsewhere); a second in the hall of the American Antiquarian Society at Worcester (a replica of this is at New York). Both have been frequently engraved. The family also possess a miniature, which is, however, inferior both in quality and preservation. A vignette portrait appeared upon the covers of the early issues of the ‘Atlantic Monthly.’ A number of relics and memorials are in the hands of descendants. Winthrop's house at Boston, subsequently occupied by the historical antiquary Thomas Prince, was demolished by the British troops and used as fuel in 1775. The ‘Old South’ church at Boston now marks the site.
For over a hundred years from the date of the governor's death no mention was made of Winthrop's ‘Journal.’ Although it was largely drawn upon by Hubbard in his ‘History’ (1680) and by Cotton Mather in his ‘Magnalia,’ it was cited by neither, and was first mentioned by Thomas Prince on the cover of the first number of his ‘Annals’ (1755, vol. ii.). The manuscript journal, in three volumes, seems to have been procured from the Winthrop family. Two volumes were returned to them and edited by Noah Webster (Hartford, 1790). A third volume was subsequently discovered in the Prince Library in 1816, and all three were given to the Massachusetts Historical Society. The complete document was published in 1825–6 under the editorial care of the genealogist James Savage, under the title ‘The History of New England. By John Winthrop, first Governor of the Colony of the Massachusetts Bay.’ A second edition with few alterations appeared at Boston in 2 vols. 1853. Some severe but not altogether undeserved strictures upon the editing were passed in ‘A Review of Winthrop's “Journal,” as edited by James Savage.’ The ‘Journal,’ to give it its original and appropriate title, is an invaluable document, no less for its historical detail than as a revelation of puritan modes of thought and administration.
T. S.