Biography
He was born in Groton, England, the son of John Winthrop, founding governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. He was educated at the Bury St Edmunds grammar school and at Trinity College, Dublin and studied law for a short time after 1624 at the Inner Temple, London. He also accompanied the ill-fated expedition of the Duke of Buckingham for the relief of the Protestants of La Rochelle, and then travelled in Italy and the Levant, returning to England in 1629.
In 1631 he followed his father to Massachusetts Bay and was one of the "assistants" of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1635, 1640 and 1641, and from 1644 to 1649. He was the chief founder of Agawam (now Ipswich, Massachusetts) in 1633, went to England in 1634, and in the following year returned as governor of the lands granted to the Lords Say and Sele and Brooke, sending out the party which built the fort at Saybrook at the mouth of the Connecticut River. He then lived for a time in Massachusetts where he devoted himself to the study of science and attempted to interest the settlers in the development of the colony's mineral resources.
He was again in England in 1641–1643, and on his return established iron works at Lynn and Braintree, Massachusetts. In 1645 he obtained a title to lands in southeastern Connecticut and founded there in 1646 what is now New London, whither he removed in 1650. In 1650 Winthrop built a grist mill in the town and was granted a monopoly on the trade for as long as he or his heirs maintained the mill. This was one of the first monopolies granted in New England. He became one of the magistrates of the Connecticut Colony in 1651; in 1657–1658 was governor of the colony; and in 1659 again became governor, being annually re-elected until his death. In 1662 he obtained in England the charter by which the colonies of Connecticut and New Haven were united. Besides being Governor of Connecticut, he was also in 1675 one of the commissioners of the United Colonies of New England. While in England he was elected to a Fellow of the newly organized Royal Society, to whose Philosophical Transactions he contributed two papers, "Some Natural Curiosities from New England," and "Description, Culture and Use of Maize." He died on 6 April 1676 in Boston, where he had gone to attend a meeting of the commissioners of the United Colonies of New England.
Winthrop married (as his second wife) Elizabeth Reade (1615-1672). A grandson by their 2nd son Waitstill, John Winthrop, F.R.S., (1681-1747) married Ann Dudley, daughter of Joseph Dudley and granddaughter of Thomas Dudley, both governors of Massachusetts, one of a number of unions between the two families. John and Ann's daughter, Katharine Winthrop, (1711-1781) married (1st) Samuel Browne of Salem and (2nd) Epes Sargent of Gloucester. Her eldest child by Sargent was revolutionary war colonel Paul Dudley Sargent. Another daughter, Mary Winthrop (1712–1776), married Gurdon Saltonstall, Jr. (1708–1785), son of Governor of Connecticut Gurdon Saltonstall (1666–1724) of the Massachusetts Nathaniel Saltonstall family. Gurdon and Mary were the parents of Dudley Saltonstall (1738–1796), a revolutionary war naval commander.
Read more about this topic: John Winthrop The Younger
Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“There never was a good biography of a good novelist. There couldn’t be. He is too many people, if he’s any good.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
“In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Just how difficult it is to write biography can be reckoned by anybody who sits down and considers just how many people know the real truth about his or her love affairs.”
—Rebecca West [Cicily Isabel Fairfield] (1892–1983)