Timeline of Mary Dyer’s last month

The not-very-merry month of May

© 2015 Christy K Robinson

This article is copyrighted. Copying, even to your genealogy pages, is prohibited by US and international law. You may "share" it with the URL link because it preserves the author's copyright notice and the source of the article.  
All rights reserved. This book or blog article, or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

As I was researching and writing the two novels on Mary and William Dyer (originally, I planned one book about Mary, but when I included her “other half,” I had to separate the manuscripts), I found conflicting accounts among histories that were mostly written by Quakers. They told the story for the purposes of proselytizing, for justifying the actions of their fellow believers, and some wrote short pieces as eyewitnesses, but they told Mary’s part of the story from one perspective.

Today, we have the benefits of archived materials in both Old and New England, journals and correspondence that have been scanned and transcribed for the Gutenberg Project, satellite maps, geological surveys, online art collections, and we can analyze events with more logic and science than the historians of past centuries. We can fit Mary’s and William’s puzzle pieces into the greater picture.

A small portion of my timeline for the Dyer books.
© Christy K Robinson

To clear up the conflicts in their reporting, and insert actual events and lives the Dyers interacted with, I made an Excel grid from the 1580s when Gov. John Winthrop and Anne Hutchinson were born, to 1709, when the Dyers’ youngest child died. I could figure when women were pregnant and how long sea voyages took, how many times and how long Mary Dyer was in prison (and who she was with), and where people were when earthquakes and comets and epidemics occurred. It answered many questions, and inspired story lines.

When it came to the 1650s, though, the Anglo-Dutch War broke out and Cromwell’s Protectorate ruled the British Empire, and Quaker missionaries arrived in America, the facts were terribly garbled, so I broke the 10 years into months. It helped me unravel the conflicting reports, especially about Mary’s two dates with the gallows, and to realize that there were no coincidences. The events like the Hutchinsonians making the Exodus from Boston in 1638, and Mary’s final return to Boston in 1660, were deliberate and well considered.

In May, all across New England, colonial elections were held, and courts and assemblies heard cases like incorporating towns, funding roads and bridges, and criminal cases like dealing with Quakers and Baptists, thieves, alcoholics, and adulterers. During this month, freemen (voters and jurymen) came from all over the colony to stay in town and do their civic duty, attend church services, and do trading and exports.

William Dyer was at colonial assembly in Portsmouth, Rhode Island, in late May 1660. Boston was full of thousands of people at the same time, when the annual elections returned John Endecott for another year’s term as governor. That’s precisely why Mary Dyer chose May 21 to arrive in Boston: for the greater audience to witness her civil disobedience and be forced to deal with the issues. It wasn’t a random date or a sneak-in-the-back-door entrance: she calculated the time when the Governor, deputy governors, magistrates, freemen, leading citizens and candidates—would all be in one place. If she were to be executed, she wanted everyone to know it and see it.

Not quite two years before, two Quaker men had had their ears cut off in private, and they were immediately shipped back to England. Their disobedience had a smaller effect on the Boston populace. Katherine Scott, who would become the mother-in-law of one of those men, protested that secret punishment, noting that it was against English law to punish in private (because punishment was meant to deter further crime in the community), and Endecott and the deputies were in violation of the law. For being impudent to the governors, Mrs. Scott was stripped to the waist and they gave her 10 lashes with the tri-corded whip before they imprisoned her for a while.

May 1660, Julian calendar
Sun	Mon	Tue	Wed	Thu	Fri	Sat
	1	2	3	4	5	6
7	8	9	10	11	12	13
14	15	16	17	18	19	20
21	22	23	24	25	26	27
28	29	30	31	1

From late November 1659 to May 11, 1660, Mary was staying at the northeast end of Long Island, on a smaller island called Shelter Island.

May 10-11: Lawrence and Cassandra Southwick, 62-year-olds who had been severely persecuted for Quaker beliefs and practices, died in exile on Shelter Island, where Mary Dyer had spent the winter. It’s a small island, half land and half marsh, so Mary and the Southwicks would have been in each others’ company at the Sylvester house during the extremely harsh winter. In my book, Mary Dyer: For Such a Time as This, I speculated that she saw their failing health and stayed until their deaths. Her sorrow and outrage may have helped propel her return to Boston.

Approx. May 12: Mary took a ship from Shelter Island to Providence, Rhode Island. It would have taken 12-24 hours in the best of weather, so estimate a May 13-14 arrival in Providence.

Mary attended a Quaker Meeting in Providence, and took young Patience Scott (daughter of Katherine Marbury Scott) with her on the 44-mile walk to Boston. It probably took three days to walk that distance, and sleep and eat in the forest, so they may have set out on May 17-18.

Saturday, May 20: “In the night there was a continuation of thunder and lightning, from 9 to 3 o’clock.” (Annals of Salem). The book only recorded remarkable events, not your everyday weather report, so this storm was severe and noticeable, and probably part of a system that included other parts of Massachusetts. There may even have been tornadoes.

Sunday, May 21: Mary arrested for returning to Massachusetts Bay Colony against her banishment order. Her arrival was timed for Sunday/First Day, when church attendance swelled the numbers of people in town. She was jailed for 10 days. (One historian wrote that Mary was free, ministering and preaching between the 21^st and her arraignment on the 31^st. My timeline containing all the accounts corrected that.)

Saturday, May 27: William Dyer was engaged with Assembly meetings in Portsmouth, RI, we learn from his letter of May 27. Someone needed two to three days to bring him the news that Mary was in Boston jail, meaning that she was incarcerated almost immediately on her arrival in town. And William’s letter needed 1-3 days to arrive at Boston’s General Court, even with a fast messenger. 

Wednesday, May 31: Mary Dyer arraigned at General Court, and sentenced to death based on her October 1659 trial. See related article, 1660 warrant to bring Mary Dyer to trial.

Thursday, June 1:  Thursday was Lecture Day in Massachusetts Bay Colony, with required church attendance. It was also the day when punishments and executions were carried out, because people were supposed to see the wages of wickedness and turn away from sin, and then go to church to hear a sermon tied to the events of the day. Mary Dyer was executed on Boston Neck at 9:00am, after which the 2,000 to 5,000 spectators went to church.

Christy K Robinson is author of two biographical novels on William and Mary Dyer, and a collection of her nonfiction research on the Dyers. In 1660, Mary Dyer was hanged for her civil disobedience over religious freedom, and her husband’s and friends’ efforts in that human right became a model for the United States Constitution’s Bill of Rights 130 years later. The books (and Kindle versions) are available on Amazon. CLICK HERE for the links.
And if you'd like to own or give an art-quality print of Mary Dyer's handwriting, her letter to the General Court of Massachusetts, CLICK HERE. 

*****

Christy K Robinson is author of these sites:  

• Discovering Love (inspiration)
• Rooting for Ancestors (history and genealogy)
• William and Mary Barrett Dyer (17th century culture and history of England and New England)

and of these books:

·          We Shall Be Changed (2010)
·          Mary Dyer Illuminated (2013)
·          Mary Dyer: For Such a Time as This (2014)
·          The Dyers of London, Boston, & Newport (2014)
·          Effigy Hunter (2015)
·          Anne Marbury Hutchinson: American Founding Mother (2018)

17th-century Spirits

If you’re a fuddle-cup or swill-belly, you just might SEE spirits!

Join me in welcoming author Margaret Porter to William-and-Mary-Dyer-World. From time to time, I run articles on the 17^th-century English culture that was so familiar to the Dyers and their associates, Anne Hutchinson, John Winthrop, Henry Vane, Roger Williams, John Clarke, and so many others. Margaret Porter has recently released a book that begins in 1684, the last of the reign of King Charles II, and the beginning of the reign of James II, the former Duke of York. To put this time in perspective with the Dyers, this was the adulthood of their children. Their son William Dyer was mayor of New York and a customs official, and is mentioned in the “Diary of Samuel Pepys” as assisting James, Duke of York, in investigating a scam on Long Island.

© 2015 Margaret Evans Porter

An English public house much like the
Dyers would have known.

For centuries, Britain’s main beverages were ale and beer—at all times of day—brewed at home or locally, in households and in the monasteries. For ale, the necessary ingredients were water, ground malt, and yeast, mixed together and left to ferment. From the fifteenth century, influenced by Continental methods, hops were added to create beer. Small ale or small beer, watered versions of the fully-brewed sort, were consumed with breakfast and given to children. There were other variations: buttered beer, derived by brewing eggs and butter, and the unpalatable-sounding cock-ale. If interested in making the latter, here are instructions:

Take eight gallons of Ale; take a Cock and boil him well; then take four pounds of raisins…two or three nutmegs…three or four flakes of mace…half a pound of dates…beat these all up in a mortar, and put to them two quarts of the best Sack; and when the Ale hath done working, put these in and stop it close six or seven days, and then bottle it, and after a month you may drink it.

Sack was a wine obtained from Spain or the Canary islands. Sherry, its fortified cousin, is the Anglicized term for Jerez (in Andalusia) where it originated, and at the start of the 17^th century it became popular in England. French wines—from Bordeaux, Burgundy, Champagne, and other regions—were traded by Dutch merchants, although in wartime such goods might be obtained via smugglers. This was equally true of brandy, sometimes referred to as Nantz or Nantes, the area where it was produced.  

 

Bristol-made vessels

The Gaelic peoples of Ireland and Scotland had long been distilling their “water of life” (uisce beatha) from malt, which by the 17^th century was Anglicized to usquebaugh and eventually to whisk(e)y. At that time there was no aging process, and the liquor was extremely potent and unrefined.

During the 17^th century, rum began to be produced in Barbados and other sugarcane islands of the Caribbean, where molasses was fermented, distilled, and exported to England. The first rum distillery in the American Colonies started in New York in the 1660s, and rum-making soon became New England’s most notable industry. The British Royal Navy had initially provided French brandy as part of a sailor’s ration, but in the mid-17^th century rum replaced it.

As well as delivering French wine and spirits to Britain, the Netherlands’ most significant contribution was gin—genever, or Hollands—made from juniper berries (often with turpentine as an additive), originating in the 16^th century. Military men drank it when serving in the Low Countries, and Prince William of Orange’s accession to his deposed father-in-law’s throne resulted in its wider availability in Britain. Unlike ale, beer, and wine, it was unlicensed and not taxed, and therefore was the cheapest of spirits—prior to the Gin Act of 1736. Gin consumption was blamed for widespread public drunkenness, crime, and degradation of the populace.

Whether in city or countryside, taverns and alehouses were hubs of social activity, a place to meet, eat, smoke tobacco, sing, dance, converse, debate, fight, and receive messages. Female publicans—married or widowed—were not uncommon; they also managed breweries.

A rich man's spirits flask

Women were also skilled in making wines and spirits and cordials for medicinal or household use, from readily available plants. They distilled wine from cowslips, dandelions, parsnips, birch, and elder-blossom. Using berries plucked from hedgerow blackthorn bushes, they made sloe gin. Cider from apples and perry from pears were widely available in regions where orchards prevailed, especially Somerset, Devon, Dorset, Gloucestershire, Worcestershire, and Herefordshire.

Wine and spirits were ingredients in many other drinks. Arrack or rack punch was composed of a specific sort of East Indian brandy, double-distilled in Goa, combined with  sugar syrup, citrus, cinnamon and other spices, and boiling water. Syllabubs were whipped using wine or cider, fresh cream, and spices. Possets often included sack, with or without milk or cream, ale, eggs and spices. Wassail was a combination of dark sugar, hot beer, sherry, cold beer, and toasted bread, often with a roasted apple added at the last. The beverage known as Bishop involved piercing an orange with cloves and roasting it, then adding it to a saucepan of heated port wine. The steaming liquid was then poured over lemon rind to steep, served warm with grated nutmeg.

Alcoholic beverages were transported and stored in wooden hogsheads and casks of various sizes, and decanted to ceramic jars or bottles, the latter mostly manufactured in Bristol. Drinking vessels could be tankards of leather or wood or pewter, silver goblets or blown glass stemware which might be etched with a coat of arms or a device indicating political loyalties.

One of the best-known drinking songs is probably “John Barleycorn,” hundreds of years old:

 

Then they put him in the mashing-tub,

Thinking to scald his tale,

And the next thing they called Barleycorn,

They called him home-brewed ale.

Here’s the verse of another 17^th century drinking song:

Be merry, good hearts, and call for your quarts,

and let not  the liquor be lacking,

We have gold in store, we purpose to roar,

until we can set care a-packing.

Mine Hostess make haste, and let no time waste,

every man shall have his due,

To save shoes and your trouble, bring the pots double

for he that made one, makes two.

Seventeenth Century Drinking Vocabulary

Bawdy-house bottle—very small in size

Bingo—brandy

Blackjack—leathern drinking jug

The Drunkard's Cloak.
Related article:
Alcoholism and the Drunkard’s Cloak
in this Dyer blog.

Bowse—Drink

Bowsy (Boozy)—Drunk

Bristol milk—sherry

Bumper—full glass

Cut—drunk; deep cut—very drunk

Fuddle-cup—drunkard

Half-seas over—almost drunk

Hot pot—ale and brandy boiled together

Maul’d—swingingly drunk

Maudlin—weepingly drunk

Mellow—almost drunk

Muddled—half drunk

Nazy-nabs—drunken coxcombs

Nipperkin—half a pint of wine, half a quarter of brandy

Noggin—quarter pint of brandy

Pot-valiant—drunk

Romer—a drinking glass

Rot-gut—small or thin beer

Stingo—strong liquor

Stitch—very strong ale

Swill-belly—a great drinker

Tall boy—a pottle or 2-quart pot of wine

Tears of the tankard—drops of the liquor that fall beside

Tipsy—almost drunk

Tope—to drink; old toper—staunch drunkard

Top-heavy—drunk

Vent—bung-hole in a vessel

_________________________  

 MARGARET PORTER is an award-winning, bestselling novelist whose lifelong study of British history inspires her fiction and her travels. A PLEDGE OF BETTER TIMES, set in England’s late 17^th century royal court, is her 12^th novel. A former stage actress, she has also worked in film, television, and radio. Author website: www.margaretporter.com

Margaret’s book, A Pledge of Better Times, is reviewed on another of Christy’s blogs HERE. 

March exile: the Passover exodus from Massachusetts

This article is excerpted from the biography,
Anne Marbury Hutchinson: American Founding Mother
© 2018 by Christy K Robinson 

This article is copyrighted. Copying, even to your genealogy pages, is prohibited by US and international law. You may "share" it with the URL link because it preserves the author's copyright notice and the source of the article.  
All rights reserved. This book or blog article, or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

A

nne Hutchinson, at her second trial before the Massachusetts Bay Colony theocratic government, was excommunicated from the Puritan First Church of Boston on 22 March 1638. She left her six-month house arrest, heresy conviction, and excommunication behind as she and some of her followers stalked out of Boston with the Passover. 

Available in print and Kindle versions,
though you can more easily flip back and forth in
paperback for bibliography and illustrations.

The trial ran three weeks, and for everyone from magistrates to defendant to the general community, it was a foregone conclusion that Anne Hutchinson would be convicted of heresy. 

 On March 15, Anne was summoned again to trial on Lecture Day, the midweek church service in their community where attendance was required, and the day when criminals were put in stocks, whipped, or executed by hanging. (Mary Dyer was hanged on a Lecture Day.) Anne had a high enough status, as a wealthy and educated woman whose husband had been a magistrate, that she was in no danger of corporal or capital punishment.  

 

On March 22, the day Anne was convicted, according to John Winthrop’s Journal, he

“sent a warrant to Mrs. Hutchinson to depart this jurisdiction before the last of this month, according to the order of the court, and for that end set her at liberty from her former constraint [house arrest at Roxbury], so as she was not to go forth of her own house till her departure; and upon the 28th she went by water to farm at the Mount [Wollaston, where the Hutchinsons owned a farm], where she was to take water [a ship], with Mr. Wheelwright’s wife and family, to go to Pascataquack [Dover, New Hampshire, where Rev. Wheelwright had gone into exile]; but she changed her mind, and went by land to Providence, and so to the island in the Narragansett Bay, which her husband and the rest of that sect had purchased of the Indians, and prepared with all speed to remove unto. For the court had ordered, that, except they were gone with their families by such a time, they should be summoned to the general court, etc.”

 

Anne and her family and followers left Boston at Passover, the end of March. Rather than sailing around Cape Cod to Narragansett Bay, the Massachusetts exiles walked in the freezing, hostile wilderness. They left Boston, Charlestown, Cambridge, and Roxbury like the ancient Israelites left the bondage of Egypt, shaking off their shackles and slavery to the law. This exodus from Boston was made as a strong statement to John Winthrop and the rest of the theocratic magistrates. 

The Exodus from Egypt, from the film "The Ten Commandments," 1956. I suspect
the exile and exodus of the Hutchinson party may have lacked only the majestic
musical soundtrack for comparable drama!

If the Hutchinsonians left on March 29, the Passover with the full moon, it was also Lecture Day, when hundreds more people were in town to witness it! It would have been plain in Winthrop’s eyes, surely, but the fact never made it into his books. (Winthrop himself likened Massachusetts’ crop failures, insect invasions, and severe weather to the plagues of Egypt. A month after Anne’s departure, Winthrop fell deathly ill, perhaps from the severe stress of the Hutchinson trial and losing scores of the colony’s leading businessmen to exile.)

When Anne and her followers walked all the way from Massachusetts Bay to Providence (45-60 miles), they left during what we call Holy Week, the week between Palm Sunday and Easter. (Easter was on April 4 that year.) When the Hutchinsonians, including Mary Dyer and her husband William and 27-month-old son Samuel, struck out through the forest and hills, it was still a frozen wilderness. The snow lay three feet deep in some places, and they were on foot because horses were expensive and rare. They may have had an ox to pull a sled, but it’s unlikely. They would have spent at least two nights and possibly six on the rough trail before they reached the small village of Providence, and then moved on to the north end of Aquidneck Island, where they founded the town that would be renamed Portsmouth, Rhode Island.

Short link for this article: https://bit.ly/BostonExodus1638 

*****

Christy K Robinson is author of these books:

We Shall Be Changed (2010)

Mary Dyer Illuminated Vol. 1 (2013)  

Mary Dyer: For Such a Time as This Vol. 2 (2014)

The Dyers of London, Boston, & Newport Vol. 3 (2014)  

Effigy Hunter (2015)  

Anne Marbury Hutchinson: American Founding Mother (2018)

and of these sites:  

Discovering Love (inspiration)

Rooting for Ancestors (history and genealogy)  

William and Mary Barrett Dyer (17th century culture and history of England and New England)

 

 

John Winthrop’s March 26 date with predestiny

John Winthrop in a portrait
made before 1630. It's considered
to be of the Van Dyck school.

  © 2015 Christy K Robinson

This article is copyrighted. Copying, even to your genealogy pages, is prohibited by US and international law. You may "share" it with the URL link because it preserves the author's copyright notice and the source of the article.  
All rights reserved. This book or blog article, or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

It’s not difficult to learn about the public life and accomplishments of John Winthrop, Sr., governor or deputy governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony between 1630 and 1649. There are books like John Winthrop, America’s Forgotten Founding Father by Francis Bremer, or websites galore, the Winthrop Society, and countless genealogical sites. If you’re not overly worried about accuracy, you might read Wikipedia.

I went to Winthrop himself for what I needed to characterize him for my books, Mary Dyer Illuminated , and Mary Dyer: For Such a Time as This. I found a spiritual journal of his young adult years, called Experiencia, and made great use of the famous two-volume Journal Winthrop wrote that became a history of the founding of Massachusetts; another valuable book was the Winthrop Papers, which are correspondence between John Winthrop Sr. and Jr., their relatives, business colleagues, and others. Once you’ve studied his words and know him, you can read between the words to see what he didn’t say.

Out of his own books and papers, I’ve written several sketches of John Winthrop, including

John Winthrop’s Love Letter to his Fiance

Winthrop Fleet fights its way to New England in 1630

The tragedy of John Winthrop’s widow

Mary Dyer’s monster

How rodents carried out the will of God

The Boston snowpocalypses of 1638

and many others. I plan to write more, too. (Click the highlighted text to read the articles.)

To understand events in Winthrop’s family life that might give context to his records, I plotted events on a grid along with all the other characters in my narrative of the Dyers. He was no friend to the Dyers after the events of 1637, and he caused them much grief when he demanded the exhumation of their anencephalic stillborn girl—and then wrote letters about it and described the sensational details.

This Winthrop timeline is very light on professional accomplishments, and is more concerned with his personal life because I wanted to see what he was going through in private while he said and did such momentous things in public. The list is not biographical or historical, but it may help you to understand that Winthrop was no two-dimensional character—he was brilliant, hard-working, he struggled with lustful feelings after his second wife died and before he married Margaret, he was charitable, vengeful, self-righteous, submitted to (what he thought was) God’s will, hypocritical, educated in religion and the law, both harsh and lenient, anti-democratic and autocratic. He loved his wife and children with all his heart.

1588 John Winthrop is born.

1602 Admitted to Trinity College, Cambridge.

1605 Leaves Cambridge; marries Mary Forth. [Known children: John Jr., Henry, Mary Winthrop Dudley, Forth]

1606 Son John Winthrop Jr born

1607 Son Henry born

1609 Son Forth born

16?? Daughter Mary born, will marry Thomas Dudley’s son

1613 John studies law at Gray's Inn in London, becomes probate magistrate.

1615 Wife Mary Forth dies in June; Winthrop marries Tomasine Clopton in December.

1616 Wife Tomasine Clopton dies after childbirth; baby daughter also died. Winthrop tormented by “fleshly” (sexual) thoughts that he controls by prayer, diet, and exercise. At some unknown time, John studies medicine and dispenses remedies as a side business.

1618 Winthrop marries Margaret Tyndall in April. She bears more children for John. [Known: Stephen, Adam, Deane, Samuel, Anne, William, Sarah, miscarriage]

1619 Son Stephen born

1620 Son Adam born

1622 Son Deane born

1626-27 Son Samuel born, dies

1628 John suffers life-threatening fever.

1629 John signs on with Massachusetts Bay Company, prepares to emigrate to Salem.

1630 John sails for New England; writes first journal entry of Bay Colony; delivers his lay-sermon, "Modell of Christian Charity," aboard the Arbella. Wife and oldest son John Jr. stay to sell estate.

1630-31 Daughter Anne born in England, dies on voyage to America in 1631. Wife Margaret and several children arrive in late winter.

1632 Son William born in Boston in fall, must have died young. John is developing Ten Hills Farm and other properties.

1634 Voted out of the governorship.

1634-35 Daughter Sarah born, baptized, and buried within a few days. This is Margaret’s last baby.

1637 Reelected governor after rigging election against Henry Vane. Margaret has miscarriage Oct. 31, Anne Hutchinson is midwife. John is chief inquisitor at Hutchinson heresy trial.

1638 John is chief inquisitor/magistrate at Hutchinson’s second trial, Hutchinson party leaves for Rhode Island in April. John is extremely ill in May, but is reelected Governor.

1640 Voted out of governorship, partly because of his financial difficulties. Economic depression and famine hit American colonies as civil war begins in England.

1641 He probably wrote his book on the Hutchinson Antinomian Controversy at this time, then shipped a copy to England. (8-10 weeks at sea, then having manuscript typeset and printed.) The first edition was published in 1642. The 1644 edition contains the moralized version of Anne Hutchinson's 1643 death.

1642 Reelected governor.

1644 Mary Winthrop Dudley’s four-year-old son dies of a fever, and Mary follows him in a few days.

1645 John stands trial, having been accused of overstepping authority. Acquitted.

1646 Reelected governor and serves until his death.

1647 Wife Margaret Tyndall dies in June during yellow fever epidemic. In December, Winthrop marries a young widow, Martha Rainsborough Coytmore.

1648 In autumn, John is very ill. Martha bears son Joshua in December.

1649 Winthrop dies in Boston on 26 March, aged 61.

Winthrop's book about the Antinomian
Controversy, including an introduction by
Rev. Thomas Weld that trashed Anne
Hutchinson and Mary Dyer.

How did John Winthrop die? We don’t know what he died of, but at the end, he was bedridden with a cough. It may have started with a disease like malaria or yellow fever, and progressed to pneumonia, or it could have been a miserable cold. As a chemist and dispenser of medicines like mercury and other 17^th-century killer substances, he might have had lung cancer at the end, but that’s speculation. We just don’t know.

His biographer, Francis Bremer, wrote that Winthrop had become very ill in the autumn of 1648. (Reference point: Mary and William Dyer, in Newport, Rhode Island, had recently increased their family with the births of Henry and Mary, and William was appointed General Recorder for the Assembly.) Winthrop had been married to his fourth wife Martha for about eight to ten months, and she was pregnant with their son Joshua.

The baby Joshua was baptized near Christmas (which Puritans did not celebrate) of 1648. Winthrop must have been quite ill during the harsh winter, for there are few words written by him. On March 1, 1649 (by our reckoning), Deputy Governor John Endecott wrote a letter inquiring after Winthrop’s health and indicated that he knew Winthrop’s life was in danger.

At the middle of March, his son Adam wrote to John Winthrop Jr. in Hartford, saying that their father had been very ill for a month. “He hath kept his bed almost all the time. He hath still upon him a feverish distemper and a cough, and is brought very low, weaker than I ever knew him.” The father desired that Adam tell John Jr. of his love, so the father knew this was close to the end.

In the meantime, Gov. Thomas Dudley, who had known Winthrop for decades, came to visit, and urged Winthrop, who was still in office as governor, to banish a heretic. Winthrop declined, saying he’d “done too much of that work already.” Here, Winthrop was surely remembering, and possibly regretting, the banishment of the Hutchinsons, Dyers, and many others who had founded the colony of Rhode Island. Anne Hutchinson's sister, Katherine Marbury Scott, certainly believed that the elder Winthrop regretted his harshness, when she mentioned it in a letter to John Winthrop Jr. nearly a decade later.

This memorial marker was made in the 20th century,
as you see by the final dates.

On the first day of what they considered the New Year, March 26, 1649, John Winthrop passed away at his Boston home. Puritans did not have funerals for their dead, considering that if the deceased was saved, they were in heaven already; if they were lost, they were in hell. When John’s wife Margaret had died, there was no funeral. But John had been governor and co-founder of the colony, and the officials gave him a memorable funeral, with booming ordnance, on April 3. He was laid to rest with his beloved Margaret and his friend Izaak Johnson. When Rev. John Cotton and John Wilson died a few years later, they were placed near Winthrop at the King’s Chapel Burying Ground in Boston. All of them believed in resurrection to eternal life for those who were predestined to salvation and had lived a life of good works.

*****

Christy K Robinson is author of these sites:  

• Discovering Love (inspiration)
• Rooting for Ancestors (history and genealogy)
• William and Mary Barrett Dyer (17th century culture and history of England and New England)

and of these books:

·          We Shall Be Changed (2010)
·          Mary Dyer Illuminated (2013)
·          Mary Dyer: For Such a Time as This (2014)
·          The Dyers of London, Boston, & Newport (2014)
·          Effigy Hunter (2015)
·          Anne Marbury Hutchinson: American Founding Mother (2018)