John Winthrop

Born to landowning merchant parents in Suffolk, England, John Winthrop spent much of his life torn between his deep spiritual interests and his calling as a lawyer and Lord of the family home in Groton. Trained at Trinity College, Cambridge, where his father was an administrator, Winthrop showed a precocious understanding of theology. But he never pursued a life in the established church, instead preferring rather rebellious Puritanical views. He married the first of his three wives at age 18, with children soon to follow. Like all Christians who were hostile to Catholicism, Winthrop was deeply skeptical of Charles I’s (r. 1625) anti-Reformation attitudes. In 1628, Winthrop was elected by the newly formed Massachusetts Bay Company to take a group of colonists to Massachusetts, and in 1630, he led over 700 colonists in a convoy. Aboard the Arabella, as a lay (i.e., unlicensed) preacher, he may have delivered his famous sermon, “A Model of Christian Charity.” He was so popular a leader that he was elected Governor of that colony 18 times before his death in 1649. As a writer, though, he was famous only after his death. He kept an extremely detailed journal of his years in Massachusetts, which was later published as a valuable glimpse into colonial America. His “A Model of Christian Charity” came out posthumously, over 200 years later, and has since become one of the founding documents in the history of America, quoted by presidents from Kennedy to Reagan to Obama.