II

JOHN WINTHROP AND MARGARET, HIS WIFE

FROM every point of view that was a remarkable group of men who boldly declared at Cambridge their resolution to found a state in the new world. Sir Richard Saltonstall was descended from a former lord mayor of London and occupied a place of no little importance in the England of his time; the ancestors of Thomas Dudley had all been men honoured in English history; John Nowell was related to the dean of St. Paul's in the reign of Elizabeth; John Humfrey married a daughter of the Earl of Lincoln; William Vassall was endowed with a positive genius for trade; William Pynchon possessed unusual learning and piety; Isaac Johnson was a man of very large wealth and another son-in-law of the Earl of Lincoln, and Thomas Sharpe, Michael West, Killam Browne and William Colbron were all English country gentlemen of no inconsiderable fortune and of university breeding. But the greatest

man of the group was, of course, John Winthrop, who had been chosen to be its head. And his peer in every womanly respect was Margaret, his noble wife.

As a lad Winthrop had received a good eduIcation and had been admitted in 1602 into Trinity College, Cambridge. An early lovematch prevented him from staying to take his degree, however, and when only a youth of eighteen, we find him living at Great Stambridge in the County of Essex with his first wife's family, - very wealthy people for that day and of high standing in the community. Six children were born to the happy young pair and then, when the husband and father was only twenty-five, he was left a widower. Within a year he was married again, according to the customs of that period. Then, in another year, this wife and her infant child were also committed to the grave. Up to this time Winthrop's profession had been that of a lawyer but these successive and severe bereavements made him full of misgivings as to his religious condition and he seriously contemplated the abandonment of the law with a view to taking orders as a clergyman. His introspection at this stage of his development is recorded in a manuscript of "Religious Experiences" which

covers a period of three years and makes intensely interesting reading.

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To understand these Religious Experiences" and the subsequent life of the man who wrote them it is necessary to appreciate the fact that Winthrop came of intensely religious parentage. Adam Winthrop, his father, was a man of deep personal piety and Anne Winthrop, his mother, could not live happily away from the daily inspiration of her Bible, as we see from a letter sent to her husband before their son was born. The mingling of love for God with ardent human affection which we shall find to be a constant trait in the letters of her son is present here also: "I have reseyved, Right deare and well-beloved," she writes her absent husband, "from you this week a letter, though short, yet very sweete, which gave me a lively tast of those sweete & comfortable wordes, whiche alwayes when you be present with me, are wont to flowe most aboundantlye from your loving hart-wherebye I perseyve that whether you be present with me or absent from me, you are ever one towardes me, & your hart remayneth allwayes with me. Wherefore layinge up this perswaision of you in my brest, I will most assuredlye, the Lord assistynge me by his grace, beare al