The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864

The young bridegroom himself, in the record of his experience, which we quote again for another purpose, reserves the confession of any haste on his own part to enter the married state, and would seem delicately to insinuate parental influence in the case. "About eighteen years of age, being a man in stature & understanding, as my parents conceived me, I married into a family under Mr. Culverwell his ministry in Essex, &, living there sometimes, I first found ye ministry of the word come home to my heart with power (for in all before I found only light): & after that, I found ye like in ye ministry of many others: so as there began to be some change: wh. I perceived in myself, & others took notice of."

Six children were born to John Winthrop and his first wife,—three sons and three daughters. John, the eldest of these, afterwards Governor of Connecticut, was born February 22, 1606. Mary, the only one of the daughters surviving infancy, also came to this country, and married a son of Governor Thomas Dudley. In less than eleven years after her marriage, Mary Forth died, the husband being not yet twenty-eight years old, and the eldest child but nine.

The earliest record of his religious experience appears to have been made under date of 1606. Read with the allowances and abatements to which reference has already been made, all that this admirable man has left for us of this self-revelation—little dreaming that it would have such readers—is profoundly interesting and instructive, when estimated from a right point of view and with any degree of congeniality of spirit. Those who are familiar with his published New-England Journal have already recognized in him a man of a simple and humble spirit, of a grave, but not a gloomy temperament, kindly in his private estimate and generous in his public treatment of others, most unselfish, and rigidly upright. The noble native elements of his character, and the peculiar tone and style of the piety under which his religious experience was developed, mutually reacted upon each other, the result being that his natural virtues were refined and spiritualized, while the morbid and superstitious tendencies of his creed were to a degree neutralised. He seems to refer the crisis in his religious experience to a date immediately following upon his first marriage. But, as we shall see, a repeated trial in the furnace of sharp affliction deepened and enriched that experience. He tells us that during those happy years of his first marriage he had proposed to himself a change from the legal profession to the ministry. By a second marriage, December 6, 1615, to Thomasine Clopton, of a good family in the neighborhood, he had the promise of renewed joy in a condition which his warm-hearted sociability and his intense fondness for domestic relations made essential to his happiness, if not to his virtue. But one single year and one added day saw her and her infant child committed to the tomb, and made him again desolate. His biographer, not without misgivings indeed, but with a deliberation and healthfulness of judgment which most of his readers will approve as allowed to overrule them, has spread before us at length, from the most sacred privacy of the stricken mourner, heart-exercises and scenes in the death-chamber, such as engage with most painful, but still entrancing sympathy, the very soul of the reader. We know not where, in all our literature, to find matter like this, so bedewed and steeped in tenderness, so swift in its alternations between lacerating details and soothing suggestions. The author has put into print all that remains of the record of John Winthrop's "Experience," in passages written contemporaneously with its incidents,—a document distinct from the record of his "Christian Experience," written here. The account of Thomasine's death-bed exercises, as deciphered from the perishing manuscript, must, we think, stand by itself, either for criticism, or for the defiance of criticism. What we have had of similar scenes only in fragments, and as seen though veils, is here in the fulness of all that can harrow or comfort the human heart, spread before us clear of any withholding. It was the same year in which Shakspeare died, in a house built by Sir Hugh Clopton, a member of the same family-connection with Thomasine. Hour by hour, almost minute by minute, the stages of her transition are reported with infinite minuteness. Her own prayers, and those of a steady succession of religious friends, are noted; the melting intonations of her own utterances of anxiety or peace; the parting counsels or warnings addressed to her dependants; the last breathings of affection to those dearest; the occasional aberrations and cloudings of intelligence coming in the progress of her disease, which were assigned to temptations from Satan: all these are given to us. "Her feaver increased very violently upon hir, wh. the Devill made advantage of to moleste hir comforte, but she declaringe unto us with what temptations the devill did assault hir, bent hirselfe against them, prayinge with great vehemence for Gods helpe, & that he would not take away his lovinge kindnesse from hir, defyinge Satan, & spitting at him, so as we might see by hir setting of hir teethe, & fixinge her eyes, shakinge hir head & whole bodye, that she had a very greatt conflicte with the adversarye." The mourner follows this scene to its close. Having transfigured all its dreariest passages with the kindling glow of his own undismayed faith, he lets his grateful spirit crown it with a sweet peace, and then he pays a most tender tribute to the gentle loveliness, fidelity, and Christian excellence of her with whom he had shared so true, though so brief, a joy.

This renewed affliction is turned by the still young sufferer to uses which should assure and intensify his piety according to the best Puritan type of it. He continues his heart-record. He subjects his mode of life, his feelings, habits and aims, the material of his daily food, and the degree of his love for various goods, as they are to be measured by a true scale, to the most rigid tests. He spares himself in nothing. The Bible does him as direct a service in rebuke and guidance as if every sentence in it had been written for himself. It is interesting to note that the quotations from it are from a version that preceded our own. His rules of self-discipline and spiritual culture, while wholly free from unwholesome asceticism, nevertheless required the curbing of all desires, and the utter subjection of every natural prompting to a crucial test, before its innocent or edifying character could pass unchallenged.

Vain would be the attempt in our generation to make Puritanism lovely or attractive. Its charms were for its original and sincere disciples, and do not survive them. There is no fashion of dress or furniture which may not be revived, and, if patronized as fashion, be at least tolerated. But for Puritanism there is no restoration. Its rehabilitated relics do not produce their best influence in any attempt to attract our admiration,—which they cannot do,—but in engaging our hearts' tolerant respect and confidence towards those who actually developed its principles at first-hand, its original disciples, who brought it into discredit afterwards by the very fidelity of their loyalty to it. Puritanism is an engaging and not offensive object to use, when regarded as the characteristic of only one single generation of men and women and children. It could not pass from that one generation into another without losing much of what grace it had, and acquiring most odious and mischievous elements. Entailed Puritanism being an actual impossibility, all attempts to realize it, all assumptions of success in it, have the worst features of sham and hypocrisy. The diligent students of the history and the social life of our own colonial days know very well what an unspeakable difference there was, in all that makes and manifests characters and dispositions, between the first comers here and the first native-born generation, and how painfully that difference tells to the discredit of the latter. The tap-roots of Puritanism struck very deep, and drew the sap of life vigorously. They dried very soon; they are now cut; and whatever owed its life exclusively to them has withered and must perish. A philosophy of Nature and existence now wholly discredited underlay the fundamental views and principles of Puritanism. The early records of our General Court are thickly strown with appointments of Fast-Days that the people might discover the especial occasion of God's anger toward them, manifested in the blight of some expected harvest, or in a scourge upon the cattle in the field. Some among us who claim to hold unreduced or softened the old ancestral faith have been twice in late years convened in our State-House, by especial call, to legislate upon the potato-disease and the pleuro-pneumonia among our herds. Their joint wisdom resulted in money-appropriations to discover causes and cures. The debates held on these two occasions would have grievously shocked our ancestors. But are there any among us who could in full sincerity, with logic and faith, have stood for the old devout theory of such visitations?

But if it would be equally vain and unjust to attempt to make Puritanism lovely to ourselves,—a quality which its noblest disciples did not presume to make its foremost attraction,—there is all the more reason why we should do it justice in its original and awfully real presentment in its single generation of veritable discipleship. What became drivelling and cant, presumption and bigotry, pretence and hypocrisy, as soon as a fair trial had tested it, was in the hearts, the speech, the convictions, and the habits of a considerable number of persons in one generation, the most thoroughly honest and earnest product of all the influences which had trained them. We read the heart-revelations of John Winthrop with the profoundest confidence, and even with a constraining sympathy. We venture to say that when this book shall be consulted, through all time to come, for the various uses of historical, religious, or literary illustration, not even the most trifling pen will ever turn a single sentence from its pages to purposes of levity or ridicule. Here we have Puritanism at first-hand: the original, unimitated, and transient resultant of influences which had been working to produce it, and which would continue their working so as to insure modifications of it. Winthrop notes it for a special Providence that his wife discovered a loathsome spider in the children's porridge before they had partaken of it. His religious philosophy stopped there. He did not put to himself the sort of questions which open in a train to our minds from any one observed fact, else he would have found himself asking after the special Providence which allowed the spider to fall into the porridge. His friend and successor in high-magistracy in New England, Governor John Endecott, wrote him a letter years afterward which is so characteristic of the faith of both of them that we will make free use of it. The letter is dated Salem, July 28th, 1640, and probably refers to the disaster by which the ship Mary Rose "was blown in pieces with her own powder, being 21 barrels," in Charlestown harbor, the day preceding.1

"Dearest Sir,—Hearing of ye remarkable stroake of Gods hand uppon ye shippe & shippes companie of Bristoll, as also of some Atheisticall passages & hellish profanations of ye Sabbaths & deridings of ye people & wayes of God, I thought good to desire a word or two of you of ye trueth of what you have heard. Such an extraordinary judgement would be searched into, what Gods meaninge is in it, both in respect of those whom it concernes more especiallie in England, as also in regard of ourselves. God will be honred in all dealings. We have heard of severall ungodlie carriadges in that ship, as, first, in their way overbound they wld. constantlie jeere at ye holy brethren of New England, & some of ye marineer's would in a scoffe ask when they should come to ye holie Land? 2. After they lay in the harbor Mr. Norice sent to ye shippe one of our brethren uppon busines, & hee heard them say, This is one of ye holie brethren, mockinglie & disdainefullie. 3. That when some have been with them aboard to buy necessaries, ye shippe men would usuallie say to some of them that they could not want any thinge, they were full of ye Spiritt. 4. That ye last Lords Day, or ye Lords Day before, there were many drinkings aboard with singings & musick in tymes of publique exercise. 5. That ye last fast ye master or captaine of the shippe, with most of ye companie, would not goe to ye meetinge, but read ye booke of common prayer so often over that some of ye company said hee had worne that threed-bare, with many such passages. Now if these or ye like be true, as I am persuaded some of them are, I think ye trueth heereof would be made knowen, by some faithfull hand in Bristoll or else where, for it is a very remarkable & unusuall stroake," etc., etc.

Governor Winthrop, who was a man of much milder spirit than Endecott, faithfully records this judgment, under its date in his Journal, with additional particulars. The explosion took place "about dinner time, no man knows how, & blew up all, viz. the captain, & nine or ten of his men, & some four or five strangers. There was a special providence that there were no more, for many principal men were going aboard at that time, & some were in a boat near the ship, & others were diverted by a sudden shower of rain, & others by other occasions." The good Governor makes this startling record the occasion for mentioning "other examples of like kind." Yet the especial providential significance which both he and Endecott could assign to such a calamity would need a readjustment in its interpretation, if compelled to take in two other conditions under which the mysterious ways of that Providence are manifested, namely: first, that many ships on board which there have been no such profane doings have met with similar disaster; and second, that many ships on board which there has been more heinous sinning have escaped the judgment.

But, as we have said, Puritanism was temporarily consistent with the philosophy of life and Nature for one age. It held no divided sway over John Winthrop, but filled his heart, his mind, and his spirit. If, by its influence over any one human being, regarded as an unqualified, unmodified style of piety, demanding entire allegiance, and not yielding to any mitigation through the tempering qualities of an individual,—if, of itself and by itself, Puritanism could be made lovely to us, John Winthrop might well be charged with that exacting representative office. We repeat, that we have no abatement to make of our exalted regard for him through force of a single sentence from his pen. Most profoundly are we impressed by the intensity and thoroughness of conviction, the fulness and frankness of avowal, and the delicate and fervent earnestness of self-consecration, which make these ancient oracles of a human heart fragrant with the odor of true piety. He uses no hackneyed terms, no second-hand or imitated phrases. His language, as well as his thoughts, his method, and ideal standard, are purely his own. Indeed, we might set up and sustain for him a claim of absolute individuality, if not even of originality, in the standard of godliness and righteousness which he fashioned for himself, and then with such zeal and heroism sought to attain.

Entering a third time the married state, John Winthrop, in April, 1618, took to wife Margaret, daughter of Sir John Tyndal. The clouds, which had gathered so deeply in repeated bereavement and gloom over his earlier years of domestic life, yielded now, and left alike the sky and the horizon of his prospects, to give place soon to the anxieties of grave enterprises, which animated while they burdened his spirit. This excellent and brave-hearted lady, as she opens her soul, and almost reveals what must have been a sweet and winning countenance, to the reader of her own letters in these pages, will henceforward be one of the enshrined saints of the New-England calendar. Little did she dream at her marriage what a destiny was before her. There was in store for her husband nearly thirty years of the truest heart-love and the closest sympathy in religious trust and consecration with her. We may anticipate our narrative at this point, to say that her situation did not allow her to accompany him on his own removal to this side of the ocean, but she followed him a year and a half afterwards, arriving in November, 1631, with his eldest son and others of his children, having lost on the voyage an infant whom he had probably never seen. Her death, in a prevailing sickness, June 14, 1647, drew from her husband this tribute to her:—"In this sickness the Governour's wife, daughter of Sir John Tindal, Knight, left this world for a better, being about fifty-six years of age: a woman of singular virtue, prudence, modesty, & piety & specially beloved & honored of all the country." Though in the December of the same year we find the Governor again married, now to the Widow Martha Coytemore, we refer the incident to wilderness-straits and the exactions of necessity or expediency in domestic life.

But we must return to Margaret, the bride. It seems that there was some objection offered to Winthrop's suit by the lady's relatives. In one of the two charming letters which are preserved as written during his courtship to her, he refers to some "unequall conflicte" which she had to bear. These two letters, with one addressed to the lady by Father Adam, are unique as specimens of Puritan love-making. Solomon's Song is here put to the best use for which it is adapted, its only safe use.

The family-letters, which now increase in number, and vastly in their cheerfulness and radiance of spirit, and the birth of more children, present to us the most captivating glimpses of the English life of our first Chief Magistrate. From a will which he made in Groton in 1620, of course superseded after his change of country, it appears that he had then five sons and one daughter. The Lordship of Groton had been assigned to him by his father. This was the year of the hegira of the Plymouth Pilgrims, but we have as yet no intimation that Winthrop was looking in this direction.

For more than a decade of years the family-history now passes on, for the most part placidly, interspersed with those incidents and anxieties which give alike the charm and the import to the routine of existence to any closely knit fellowships sharing it together. Enough of the fragrant old material, in fast decaying papers, has come to light and been transcribed for security against all future risks, to preserve to us a fair restoration of the lights and shades of that domestic experience. Time has dealt kindly in sparing a variety of specimens, so as to give to that restoration a kaleidoscopic character. Winthrop's frequent visits to London, on his professional errands, gave occasion to constant correspondence between him and his wife, and so we have epistles burdened with the intensities and refinements of the purest affection. An occasional reference to church affairs by the Patron of Groton, with extracts from the record of his religious experience, continue for us the evidence that Winthrop was growing and deepening in the roots of his noble style of life. His piety evidently ripened and mellowed into the richest fruitage which any form of theological or devotional faith can produce. A severe and wellnigh fatal illness in London, which he concealed from his wife at Groton till its crisis was past, was made by him the occasion, as of many other good resolutions, so also of a renouncement of the use of tobacco, in which, by his own account, he, like many men as well as women at that time, had gone to excess. His good wife, though positively enjoined by him not to venture upon the winter's journey, in the letter which communicated to her the first tidings of his illness, immediately went to him in the great city, attended only by a female servant. In a previous malady from which he had suffered severely in one of his hands while at home, his son John, in London, had consulted in his behalf one of the helpful female practitioners of the time, and the correspondence relating to her advice, her ointments, and their efficacy, gives us some curiously illustrative matter in the history of the healing art. The good woman was sure that she could at once cure her patient, if he could be beneath her hands. She would receive no compensation.

A mystery has attached to a certain "office" which Winthrop held in London, and to which, in one of his previously published letters, he referred as having lost it. It now appears that that office was an Attorneyship of the Court of Wards and Liveries, an honorable and responsible trust. Its duties, with other provisional engagements, separated him so much from his home at one period, that he meditated the removal of his family from Groton. His wife's letters on the subject are delightful revelations of confidences. It is still only by inference that we can assign the loss of his office, to the business of which we have many references, to any especial cause. It may have been surrendered by him because he longed for more home-life, or because the growing spirit of discontent and apprehension as to the state of public affairs, which he shared with so many of his friends, made him obnoxious to the controlling heads in civil life.

We have also some admirable specimens of his correspondence with his son John, who, after his preliminary education at the school at Bury St. Edmund's, became, in 1622, in his seventeenth year, a member of Trinity College, Dublin, near his uncle and aunt Downing, parents of the famous Sir George Downing. These are beautiful and wise and generous expressions of a father's love and advice and dealings with a son, exposed to temptation at a critical age, and giving promise of the abilities and virtues which he afterwards exhibited so nobly as Governor of Connecticut. In one of the letters, to which the father asks replies in Latin, he writes, "I will not limit your allowance less than to ye uttermost of mine own estate. So as, if £20 be too little (as I always accounted it), you shall have £30; & when that shall not suffice, you shall have more. Only hold a sober & frugal course (yet without baseness), & I will shorten myself to enlarge you." In another letter there is this fit commemoration of his father, Adam, dying at the age of seventy-five:—"I am sure, before this, you have knowledge of that wh., at the time when you wrote, you were ignorant of: viz., the departure of your grandfather (for I wrote over twice since). He hath finished his course: & is gathered to his people in peace, as the ripe corn into the barn. He thought long for ye day of his dissolution, & welcomed it most gladly. Thus is he gone before; & we must go after, in our time. This advantage he hath of us,—he shall not see ye evil wh. we may meet with ere we go hence. Happy those who stand in good terms with God & their own conscience: they shall not fear evil tidings: & in all changes they shall be ye same."

There are likewise letters to the student at Dublin from his brother Forth, who succeeded him at the school at St. Edmund's. It is curious to note in these epistles of the school-boy the indifferent success of his manifestly sincere effort to use the technical language of Puritanism and to express its aims and ardors. The youth evidently feels freer when writing of the fortunes of some of his school-mates. This same Forth Winthrop became in course a student at Cambridge, and we have letters to his father, carried by the veritable Hobson immortalized by Milton.

The younger John went, on graduating, to London, to fit himself for the law. His name is found on the books as admitted to the Inner Temple in 1624. He appears early to have cherished some matrimonial purposes which did not work felicitously. Not liking his profession, he turned his thoughts toward the sea. He obtained a secretaryship in the naval service, and joined the expedition under the Duke of Buckingham, designed to relieve the French Protestants at Rochelle, in 1627. He afterwards made an Oriental tour, of the stages of which we have some account in his letters, in 1628-9, from Leghorn, Constantinople, etc. He was thwarted in a purpose to visit Jerusalem, and returned to England, by Holland. Notwithstanding the industrious fidelity of his father as a letter-writer, the son received no tidings from home during his whole absence of nearly fifteen months. What a contrast with our times!