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They saw America as a place where they could live out their beliefs, purify and fully reform the church, and advance the Christian Gospel. In his well-known 1630 Model of Christian Charity sermon, Winthrop further explains the Puritans’ civil motives for migration.
- Overview
- Background and early life
- Journey to America
John Winthrop (born January 22 [January 12, Old Style], 1588, Edwardstone, Suffolk, England—died 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.
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.”
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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).
As Winthrop sailed west on the Arbella in 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, with “the eyes of all people” on them:
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If we deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a byword throughout the world; we shall open the mouths of enemies to speak evil of the ways of God and all believers in God; we shall shame the faces of many of God’s worthy servants and cause their prayers to be turned into curses upon us, till we are forced out of the new land where we are going.
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.
Puritans went chiefly to New England, but small numbers went to other English colonies up and down the Atlantic. [1] Puritans played the leading roles in establishing the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1629, the Saybrook Colony in 1635, the Connecticut Colony in 1636, and the New Haven Colony in 1638.
Mar 1, 2015 · The Puritans knew the Plymouth Colony experiment worked, and decided to replicate it. The Great Migration began to take off in 1630 when John Winthrop led a fleet of 11 ships to Massachusetts. Winthrop brought 800 people with him to New England; 20,000 followed him over the next 10 years.
Site of the "Great House" near the corner of New Rutherford Avenue and Chelsea Avenue, Charlestown, Massachusetts. This was the home of John Winthrop and also served as the first seat of government in the colony.
Oct 11, 2010 · John Winthrop. In the year 1588, the British Royal Navy inflicted a decisive and devastating defeat upon the Spanish Armada. Henceforth Protestant Britain would rule the seas; Catholic Spain was...
Sep 5, 2023 · John Winthrop (1588–1649) was a Puritan religious and political leader who played an important role in the establishment, growth, and governance of Massachusetts Bay Colony. He was born into a wealthy English family, became a Puritan, and worked as a lawyer in the English Courts.
