From Blackwood's Magazine. LIFE AND LETTERS OF GOVERNOR WIN- 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 hab 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 sec-its: they longed for a freer range and tion 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 heart-burnings 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. 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, 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 The early settlements on the coast of from England as "Governor" with a small New England were planted by men who body of new emigrants, they had made up termed themselves, very justly, nothing their minds to return, not to New Plymmore than "adventurers;" they professed outh, but to England, in the teeth of no higher object than trading and fishing, Prelacy and its persecutions. But friends and all of them resulted more or less in and sympathisers in the old country ralfailure. They were like the habitations lied round them, persuaded them to hold of the foolish" (says an old Puritan chron- on a while, and obtained from the King, icler, quoting Job), "cursed before they not without cost and trouble, the first charhad taken root." The leading spirits ter 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 66 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. emigrants set sail in six armed vessels for | John Winthrop, whose remarkable "Life 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 themselves free, they said, of those bestial, yea diabolical sort," who had already ruined so many hopeful plantations. Some of the disappointed as pirants 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. 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 body 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 and Letters," 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 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 sub - 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. stitute 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 Thom- More than once in his after-life, he set as Savage of Melford, a place still so famous himself to record his religious thoughts and for the quality of its venison, that the pres- feelings, the struggles of his conscience, and ent French Emperor sent for some of the his spiritual progress and decline. His bibreed to stock one of his own parks. ographer says of these memoranda what is These Winthrops were connected by mar- most probably true enough, that they were riage with the Lord Burnell (of Acton Bur-" plainly intended for no eye but his own." nell), 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 noteworthy 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 different 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, how ever, 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." 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. ... "His language must undoubtedly be taken with some grains of allowance for the peculiar In this old manor-house of Groton, John phraseology and forms of expression which beWinthrop was born in January 1587 (8); and also for that spirit of unsparing self-exam, longed to the times in which it was written, His education was liberal. We do not ination and self-accusation which was characlearn where he was at school; but at the teristic of all the Puritan leaders. . . age of fourteen he was entered at Trinity Col- his mature manhood, in his wilderness retreat, As, in lege, Cambridge. He left after two years and from that lofty eminence of personal purity of residence, taking no degree. Whether and piety on which he had now planted himself, this premature removal was the consequence he looked back over the course of his life, and of a serious illness which he had while at found so little to reproach himself with except college, or whether it was in contemplation the follies and frailties of childhood, he seems of some other responsibilities which, as we ful peccadillo to the full measure of a deadly to have been impelled to magnify every youthshall presently see, he was about to take up- sin, in order that there might be something on on himself thus early, is not clear. But which to exercise the cherished graces of confeshis university training was by no means sion, humiliation, and self-abasement. It may wasted. It is plain from his subsequent | 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 highlycoloured 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. inge 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." paynes 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 " in that way was "most commonly nothing at all," than the peculiar form of piety which However, when he was little more than makes "a covenant with the Lorde" to seventeen, John Winthrop, with the full follow a profane and unedifying sport" very consent of his friends, was married to an secreatly." But such was the distorted heiress, the daughter of John Forth, of spiritual vision of the men of that peculiar Great Stambridge, in Essex a fact suffici- school; we may afford to smile at their ent to account for his short stay at Cam-weaknesses, as they might at some of ours; bridge. At eighteen he was a father, and, but to refuse on that account to recognise what may seem more remarkable, a justice their many noble qualities, would be to of the peace. After the simple and patri- show a narrow-mindedness on our own part archal fashion of the time, he continued to far less excusable than theirs. reside partly in the manor-house — his faWinthrop soon married again. ther resigning to him much of the manage- second wife was Thomasine Clopton, one ment of the family estate, and even the of the famous Cloptons of Castleins, a counlordship of the manor - and partly with try-house near Groton. In a year and a his wife's father at Stambridge. At twenty- day after their marriage she died in childeight he was a widower, with four surviving bed, and left him again a widower. He has children. Of his life during these left an account of her last hours, which, there is little record; but an entry among though disfigured in many places (as we his Experiences' shows us that, like most venture to think) by the peculiar phraseolEnglish country gentlemen, he was fond of ogy of his religious school, is yet full of field-sports, but had some scruples of con- simple earnestness and pathos. The conscience about indulgence in them. cluding passage, in which he sums up her character, is wholly admirable. years "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 more of a man's estate by the penaltye of it then a man would willingly parte with: 8. It brings a man of worth and godliness into some contempt lastly, For mine owne parte, I have ever binne crost in usinge it, for when I have gone about it, not without some woundes of conscience, and have taken muche paynes and hazarded my healthe, I have gotten sometimes a very little, but most commonlye nothing at all, towards my cost and laboure: "Therefore I have resolved and covenanted with the Lorde to give over alltogither shoot His She was a woman wise, modest, loving, and patient of injuries; but her innocent and harmless life was of most observation. She was truly religious, and industrious therein; plain-hearted, and free from guile, and very humble minded; never so addicted to any outward things (to my judgment) but that she could bring her affections to stoop to God's will in them. She was sparing in outward show of zeal, &c., but her constant love to good Christians, and the best things, with her reverent and careful attendance of God's ordinances, both public and private, with her care for avoiding of evil herself and reproving it in others, did plainly show that truth and the love of God did lie at the heart. Her loving and tender regard of my children was such as might well become a natural mother: for her carriage towards myself, it was so amiable and observant as I am not able to express; it had this only inconvenience, that it made me delight too much in her to enjoy her long." term, he will use you well. Send me half a pound of Virginia." 66 A blank space in his little volume of memoranda, in which no entry seems to have been made for some weeks at least, marks the void in his life made by this Indeed he confesses that he had "fallen second bereavement. He fell for a while into a bondage" to this seductive weed; into a state of apathy and despondency. and a year later, in consequence of a danBut he was too energetic and too conscien- gerous illness from malignant fever, he tious to allow the blow to break him down" gave it clean over." The prevalence of utterly. After two years he married a the habit of smoking was a snare to the third time-Margaret, daughter of Sir John consciences of these excellent Puritans both Tindal of Maplestead, who had not long in Old and New England. By the early before been assassinated by a man who was laws of Massachusetts, tobacco was strictly disappointed by one of his decisions as a prohibited; but the habit was too strong Master in Chancery. It seems to have for law, and the most respectable magisbeen a wise and prudent choice; and there trates and ministers continued to enjoy was no disparity of age, for Margaret Tindal their pipes: most of them, like Winthrop was but four years younger than her hus- with his gun, very secreatly," yet not so band. The courtship was after the grave secretly but that great scandal was caused and formal fashion of the times; but their to the Church thereby. Heretics, Quakers, affection was mutual and sincere, and seem- and witches, they had made short work with; ed to grow with their married years. but tobacco beat them: it was too strong a measure, even under that strong government, to hang a man for smoking- not to say that it would have been inconvenient for a rising colony to hang half their community. So, after much grave and anxious debating of the question, a resolution was passed, in their quaint-wording, that "tobacco should be set at liberty;" and any one who has chanced to observe a modern New Englander's habits in the use of it, will admit that this "liberty" is at present very considerable. Winthrop was at this time practising the law, and attending the courts both in London and on circuit. He had chambers in the Temple, was employed occasionally in the drafts of bills for Parliament, and had a considerable practice amongst clients of some distinction. A few years afterwards he obtained the office of "Attorney to the Court of Wards and Liveries " an institution of Henry VIII, the jurisdiction of which extended over widows, wards, and lunatics. His residence in London separated him a good deal from his wife, but their But we must return to John Winthrop correspondence was regular and affection- and his wife Margaret The deep love and ate. She was continually sending him up affection they bore each other is very pleascountry delicacies from the manor tur-ant to read of. The stern gravity which keys, capons, runlets of cider, and cheeses, marked the writer from his earliest years often with deprecatory apologies for their melts into tender playfulness when he takes not being so excellent as she could wish; his pen in hand for her. She received her and he in return chooses silk and "trym-love-letters — real love-letters- after marminge" for her dress, and sends presents riage, a privilege which few wives enjoy. of oranges for herself, and a little tobacco The husband's letters from his London for her mother, Lady Tindal. Tobacco chambers are very different productions was one of the indulgences (possibly one of from those which the suitor wrote "to his the sins) to which John Winthrop himself dearest friend Mrs Margaret Tyndal." If confessed; and no doubt he and his ex-it is fair to judge from the two specimens cellent mother-in-law smoked many a pipe of it together by the hall fireside at Groton Manor, though it was rather an expensive luxury. Here is a letter of his from the country to his eldest son, now keeping his law terms at the Inner Temple : "We want a little tobacco. I had very good, for seven shillings a-pound, at a grocer's by Holborn Bridge. There be two shops together. It was at that which is farthest from the bridge, towards the Conduit. If you tell him it is for him that bought half a pound of Verina and a pound of Virginia of him last which have been preserved, these were of the most discreet and coldest pattern. Admirable advice—especially in the delicate matter of dress; solemn hints that, though he "will meddle with no particulars," he hopes his future wife will content" him by dressing plainly; but as for the "love" they contain, they might (but for a passing adaptation of Solomon's Songs) have been read aloud to a company of the most inveterate spinsters. His letters, indeed, have always a religious tone: it was the abiding habit of his mind, sometimes overwrought, but always earnest and sincere; but they |