Early Life
William Stoughton was born in 1631 to Israel Stoughton and Elizabeth Knight Stoughton. The exact location of his birth is uncertain, because there is no known birth or baptismal record for him, and the date when his parents migrated from England to the Massachusetts Bay Colony is not known with precision. What is known is that by 1632 the Stoughtons were in the colony, where they were early settlers of Dorchester, Massachusetts.
Stoughton graduated from Harvard College in 1650 with a degree in theology. He intended to become a Puritan minister and traveled to England, where he continued his studies in New College, Oxford. He graduated with an M.A. in theology in 1653. Stoughton was a pious preacher who believed in the "Lord's promise and expectations of great things." England was at the time under Puritan Commonwealth Rule, although 1653 was the year Oliver Cromwell dissolved Parliament, beginning The Protectorate. Stoughton preached in Sussex, and after Charles II was restored to the throne in 1660, Stoughton lost his position in the crackdown on religious dissenters that followed.
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“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
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