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LIFE AND LETTERS OF GOVERNOR WINTHROP.

THE story of the foundation of our American Colonies will always have a deep interest for Englishmen. Let our cousins over the water say and think of us what they will, it will never be without cordial sympathy that we in the old country trace the fortunes of those who went out from among us-our own flesh and blood; a sympathy which no subsequent quarrels or estrangements can destroy.

Even the bitter anger felt by a large section in the mother country at the rebellion of our colonists, and the unwillingness to grant them independence, had its origin in a jealous affection. We could not bear that our children should repudiate what we held to be a natural bond of allegiance. Just as many a parent now resents with jealous heartburnings the day when son or daughter, grown to mature estate, claim to think and decide for themselves, whether in the matter of marriage or of some other weighty question of life; just as they sometimes try to draw the cords of filial duty tight, till they snap on the sudden, and leave child and parent severed far apart, so it was with England and her grown-up sons over the sea. The feeling may not have been wise or reasonable in the one case more than in the other, but it was natural and genuine in both; and no one can read the records of those days fairly without confessing that it was so. Even those who hold the conduct of the mother country to have been arbitrary and unreasonable, should remember that so it is also in the case of all these family disruptions; however bitter may sometimes be the fruits, the root they spring from is not altogether evil: they are but the outgrowth of the jealousy which,

somehow or other, intertwines itself with our best natural affections.

The early settlements on the coast of New England were planted by men who termed themselves, very justly, nothing more than "adventurers;" they professed no higher object than trading and fishing, and all of them resulted more or less in failure. "They were like the habitations of the foolish" (says an old Puritan chronicler, quoting Job), "cursed before they had taken root." The leading spirits among these early pioneers were men of considerable enterprise, but little principle; they treated the native inhabitants with treachery and cruelty, and suffered themselves in return. But soon there came a new influx of colonists of a very different character. The congregation of Puritan separatists who had emigrated from the north of England to Holland eleven years before, under Johnson, Robinson, and other leaders, had found little encouragement there beyond a safe refuge and liberty of opinion. The artisan life of Amsterdam and Leyden did not suit their former habits: they longed for a freer range and more pastoral occupations. There seemed some risk, too, of that "Independent" Church, for which they had given up so much, declining in strictness of principles as well as in numbers, owing to the constant intermarriage of its younger members with the Dutch. So, in 1620, a band of some hundred and twenty (did they remember as an omen the number of the names of the disciples before Pentecost?) set sail in the Mayflower, with the parting blessing of their old pastor, Robinson-grown too old now to shift his tents again. They landed on the well-known Plymouth Rock,

'Life and Letters of John Winthrop, Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Company at their Emigration to New England.' By Robert C. Winthrop. Boston (U.S.) 1864-66.

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and founded the town of New Plymouth. Few as they were, and slow as was the increase of the colony for some time, they soon found themselves too many for unity. In less than five years one of their ministers, Blackstone, found Independency at New Plymouth by no means independent enough for his taste: he "had left England," he said, "because he could not abide the Lord Bishops, but still less could he abide the Lord Brethren." He withdrew, and settled himself at Shawmut, now known as Boston. Roger Conant, for some similar reason, separated himself also with a few followers, and planted a branch colony at Cape Anne; but so great were the sufferings of these last seceders, that, though reinforced by Endicott, who was sent out from England as Governor" with a small body of new emigrants, they had made up their minds to return, not to New Plymouth, but to England, in the teeth of Prelacy and its persecutions. But friends and sympathisers in the old country rallied round them, persuaded them to hold on a while, and obtained from the King, not without cost and trouble, the first charter of "The Company of Massachusetts Bay," with power to elect their own governor, make their own laws, and hold their own opinions. Armed with these privileges, some three hundred and fifty new emigrants set sail in six armed vessels for the new plantation, which they found in sad case; but, nothing daunted, they set to work to build two clusters of huts which they called towns, and, to show their loyalty as well as their faith, named them Charlestown and Salem.

These last emigrants came chiefly from Dorsetshire and Lincolnshire, and most of them left England for conscience' sake. Their leaders were divines of the English Church who had been "silenced" by the Court of High Commission. Some of the class of adventurers had wished to join them, but their company was declined. They would shake them

selves free, they said, of " those bestial, yea diabolical sort," who had already ruined so many hopeful plantations. Some of the disappointed aspirants used equally strong expressions on their part. Captain John Smith, a man of great energy and enterprise, who had taken an active part in the earlier settlement of Virginia, and had assumed the high-sounding titles of "Governor of Virginia and Admiral of New England," offered his services to this new expedition, as he had to the earlier voyagers in the Mayflower-but in vain; he speaks of them as an absolute crew, only of the elect,.holding all but such as themselves to be reprobate"-all ready to rule, but none to obey, and determined to be "lords and kings of themselves." There was some unpleasant truth in the accusations on both sides; but the solemn fast with which the emigrants inaugurated their voyage, the daily expositions and the Sunday catechisings which took place on board their ships, awed even the sailors into reverence for men who were so plainly in earnest.

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Their first winter in the new country was a terrible one. Eighty of their number died. But they bore it bravely, and sent home, as many an emigrant has since, accounts more cheering than strictly truthful. This and other causes turned the eyes of many in England to the new field of enterprise across the Atlantic. A large party at home were growing more and more dissatisfied with the arbitrary proceedings in Church and State. The Massachusetts Bay Company projected the transfer of its charter, corporation, and government to the colony itself; and a knot of men of some position and estate in the eastern counties, of a higher class than had hitherto joined the adventure, was meditating a new embarkation.

The leading spirit, in this which may be called the second Puritan emigration, was John Winthrop, whose remarkable Life and Let

ters,' recently published in America by one of his descendants, now lie before us. To him, it is evident even from the admissions of his rivals, his fellow-adventurers mainly looked for strength and counsel in their enterprise. The chief public events of his life, so far as the history of the colony is concerned, are embodied in the record which he drew up himself 'The History of New England from 1630 to 1649,'-and which was published, from the original manuscripts, early in the present century. Many of his letters have also been printed at different times. But he was a man who well deserved a special record. The details of his personal and family life have a double interest: they not only illustrate a critical period of our English history, civil and religious, but they help us to a thorough comprehension of one who must be regarded as, in a very large measure, the founder of the great American nation. He is one of the best, as he is one of the strongest, types of the men to whom New England owes her real greatness. If we are inclined to find any fault with his present biographer, it is that he has assumed somewhat too familiar an acquaintance, at least so far as his English readers are concerned, with the collateral history of the eventful times of which he writes. Eventful as they were for England, they were more vitally eventful for America; and no doubt the biography of the Pilgrim Fathers is a household tale in most homes in Boston. Yet even for readers so sympathising and well informed, we think the interest of these volumes would have been heightened by further incidental notices of those with whom Winthrop was so closely associated-whose lives, it may be said, were a part of his own. For readers on our side of the Atlantic, this biography absolutely requires such illustration; and we must take leave here to fill up the sketch, which we gladly borrow from Mr Robert Winthrop's pages, out of

some of those materials which, abundant as they are, may probably be more familiar to his countrymen than to ours.

John Winthrop was the only son of Adam Winthrop of Groton House, near Sudbury; one of the old Suffolk country squires, a justice of the peace for his county, with a moderate estate and a roomy old manor-house, where good old English hospitality was liberally but unostentatiously dispensed; where the judge and the barristers on circuit, and the brother magistrate at sessions-time, and the rector or his substitute on Sundays, sat down alike to the early dinner-dapes inemptas-where the capon or turkey and short-legged down mutton was bred on the manor farm, and the pike ("three-quarters of a yarde longe, ut puto," notes the master of the feast) came fresh from the manor pond. Occasionally a present of half a buck would come in from some grander neighbour, as Sir Thomas Savage of Melford, a place still so famous for the quality of its venison, that the present French Emperor sent for some of the breed to stock one of his own parks. These Winthrops were connected by marriage with the Lord Burnell (of Acton Burnell), the Mildmays, the Fownes, and other ancient families in their own and other counties. They were patrons also of the Rectory of Groton, and stanch friends of the Reformed Church. Both Adam Winthrop and his son John were great encouragers of preaching— the latter, indeed, could on occasion preach himself; and not content with such supply as they found at their parish church, would attend at the neighbouring churches of Boxford and Edwardston (there were Thursday preachings as well as Sunday), whenever any divine of note was to be heard there. It is a note-worthy sign of the times that Adam the father records in a curious journal which he kept, that in these three small churches he heard no less than thirty-three dif

ferent preachers (whose names he gives) within the space of one year. This constant interchange of pulpits among the Puritan divines may partly account for the inordinate length of their sermons; for it would have been almost impossible for a man to supply his own parishioners with that amount of fresh matter Sunday after Sunday. Most of these discourses, however, seem to have been written ones; for he notes, evidently as something out of the usual course, "This daye Mr Grice preached at Boxford ex improviso.'

In this old manor-house of Groton, John Winthrop was born in January 1587 (8). His education was liberal. We do not learn where he was at school; but at the age of fourteen he was entered at Trinity College, Cambridge. He left after two years of residence, taking no degree. Whether this premature removal was the consequence of a serious illness which he had while at college, or whether it was in contemplation of some other responsibilities which, as we shall presently see, he was about to take upon himself thus early, is not clear. But his university training was by no means wasted. It is plain, from his subsequent correspondence with his son, when the latter in his turn went to college, that he was no mean proficient in writing Latin; and the formal syllogisms which occur now and then in documents of his composition go far to prove that in those days the Cambridge men did not despise logic so much as their successors are reputed to do.

More than once, in his after-life, he set himself to record his religious thoughts and feelings, the struggles of his conscience, and his spiritual progress and decline. His biographer says of these memoranda what is most probably true enough, that they were "plainly intended for no eye but his own."

The

same is said, and perhaps with equal truth, of all such religious diaries. But, whatever the wish or

intentions of the writer, they are usually frustrated, if he be a person of any mark, by the inevitable course of events; and unless he has the strength of mind to destroy them before his death, they fall into the hands of friends whose love and admiration are sometimes greater than their judgment, and so find their way inevitably into the pages of a printed memoir, where it is presumed their author would least have wished to see them. In a private record of this character, which he calls his 'Experiencia,' jotted down at a somewhat later period of his life, John Winthrop speaks of himself as having been, in his early youth, "very lewdly disposed, inclining unto and attempting (so far as my heart enabled me) all kinds of wickedness except swearing and scorning religion, which I had no temptation unto in regard of my education." So again, a little farther on, he describes himself as "still very wild and dissolute." The interpretation which his present biographer puts upon these and some similar expressions is almost certainly the true one.

taken with some grains of allowance for "His language must undoubtedly be the peculiar phraseology and forms of expression which belonged to the times in which it was written, and also for that spirit of unsparing self-examina

tion and self-accusation which was characteristic of all the Puritan leaders.

As, in his mature manhood, in his wilderness retreat, and from that lofty eminence of personal purity and piety on which he had now planted himself, he looked back over the course of his

life, and found so little to reproach himself with except the follies and frailties of childhood, he seems to have been impelled to magnify every youthful peccadillo to the full measure of a deadly sin, in order that there might be something on which to exercise the cherished graces of confession, humiliation, and self-abasement. It may be, however, that he really was as wild a lad as his words would seem to imply, and that the corruptions of his youth weighed heavily upon his conscience in later years."

We make bold to acquit John Winthrop of any such charge, in spite of the highly-coloured evidence which he has borne here against himself. A'Catalogue of Sinnes,' which he makes at another period, is happily locked up in a cipher said to be unintelligible, and which we trust may remain so;

and we could have been well content-in spite of one or two striking passages-if the whole of his religious experience had been left in the same concealment. These morbid self-dissections are repulsive to most minds, and can be healthful to none.

However, when he was little more than seventeen, John Winthrop, with the full consent of his friends, was married to an heiress, the daughter of John Forth, of Great Stambridge, in Essex-a fact sufficient to account for his short stay at Cambridge. At eighteen he was a father, and, what may seem more remarkable, a justice of the peace. After the simple and patriarchal fashion of the time, he continued to reside partly in the manor-house-his father resigning to him much of the management of the family estate, and even the lordship of the manor-and partly with his wife's father at Stambridge. At twenty-eight he was a widower, with four surviving children. Of his life during these years there is little record; but an entry among his 'Experiences shows us that, like most English country gentlemen, he was fond of field-sports, but had some scruples of conscience about indulgence in them.

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"1611, Dec. 15.-Findinge by muche examination that ordinary shootinge in a gunne, etc., could not stande with a good conscience in myselfe, as first, For that it is simply prohibited by the lawe of the lande, uppon this grounde amongst others, that it spoiles more of the creatures then it getts: 2. It procures offence unto manye: 3. It wastes great store of tyme: 4. It toyles a man's bodye over muche: 5. It endangers a man's life, etc. 6. It brings no profite, all things considered: 7. It hazards

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"Therefore I have resolved and cove.

nanted with the Lorde to give over alltogither shootinge at the creeke; and for killing of birds, etc., either to leave that altogither, or els to use it bothe verye seldome and very secreatly. God (if He please) can give me fowle by some other meanes; but if He will not, yet, in that it is His will who loves me, it is sufficient to uphould my resolution."

John Winthrop was an excellent man, though a bad shot, and we have no intention of judging him by these odd scruples of conscience. It is easier to appreciate the honesty with which he clinches his arguments against shooting, by the consideration that the result of his "paynes" in that way was "most commonly nothing at all," than the peculiar form of piety which makes " a covenant with the Lorde" to follow a profane and unedifying sport "very secreatly." But such was the distorted spiritual vision of the men of that peculiar school; we may afford to smile at their weaknesses, as they might at some of ours; but to refuse on that account to recognise their many noble qualities, would be to show a narrow-mindedness on our own part far less excusable than theirs.

Winthrop soon married again. His second wife was Thomasine Clopton, one of the famous Cloptons of Castleins, a country-house near Groton. In a year and a day after their marriage she died in childbed, and left him again a widower. He has left an account of her last hours, which, though disfigured in many places (as we venture to think) by the peculiar phraseology of his religious school, is yet full of simple earnestness and pathos. The concluding pas

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