Thomas Dudley - Family and Legacy

Family and Legacy

Dudley married Dorothy Yorke in 1603, and with her had five children. Samuel, the first, also came to the New World, and married Winthrop's daughter Mary in 1633, the first of several alliances of the Dudley-Winthrop family. He later served as the pastor in Exeter, New Hampshire. Daughter Anne married Simon Bradstreet, and became the first poet published in North America. The third child, Sarah, married Benjamin Keayne, a militia officer. This union was an unhappy one, and resulted in the first reported instance of divorce in the colony; Keayne returned to England and repudiated the marriage. Although no formal divorce proceedings are known, Sarah eventually married again. Patience, the fourth child, also married a colonial militia officer, and Mercy, the last of his children with Dorothy, married minister John Woodbridge. Dorothy Yorke died 27 December 1643 at 61 years of age, and was remembered by her daughter Anne in a poem:

Here lies,

A worthy matron of unspotted life,
A loving mother and obedient wife,
A friendly neighbor, pitiful to poor,

Whom oft she fed and clothed with her store;

Dudley married his second wife, the widow Katherine (Deighton) Hackburne, descendant of the noble Berkeley, Lygon and Beauchamp families, in 1644. They had three children, Deborah, Joseph, and Paul. Joseph served as governor of the Dominion of New England and of the Province of Massachusetts Bay. Paul (not to be confused with Joseph's son Paul, who served as provincial attorney general) was for a time the colony's register of probate.

In 1636 Dudley moved from Cambridge to Ipswich, and in 1639 moved to Roxbury. He died in Roxbury on 31 July 1653, and was buried in the Eliot Burying Ground there. Some of his descendants, including son Joseph and grandson Paul, are also buried there. Dudley's many famous descendants include Dudley Saltonstall, Revolutionary War naval commander, Paul Dudley Sargent, Revolutionary War military commander and privateer, John Kerry, the 2004 Democratic presidential candidate and United States Senator from Massachusetts, as well as former United States Supreme Court Justice David Souter and past political figures such as U. S. President Herbert Hoover and New Hampshire Senator Nicholas Gilman. Dudley, Massachusetts is named for his grandsons Paul and William, who were its first proprietors.

The Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation owns a parcel of land in Billerica called Governor Thomas Dudley Park. The "Two Brothers" rocks are located in the Great Meadows National Wildlife Refuge in Bedford, in an area that has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places as the Two Brothers Rocks-Dudley Road Historic District.