First Founders: American Puritans and Puritanism in an Atlantic World

John Winthrop and the Struggle to Lead a Godly Life

John Winthrop and the struGGle to Lead a Godly LiFe Before there could be a godly society, there needed to be godly men and women. The seeds of puritan success were planted in the hearts of individuals . As related by John Bunyan in The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), the struggle toward godliness was an uneven one, filled with temptations. Having been transformed by God’s grace, the saint then sought to bring his family and friends into a godly community by word and example. The effort to accept God’s rule in his own life, and to extend the message of the gospel to include family, friends, and the general society can be traced no more effectively than by an examination of the spiritual life of John Winthrop. Winthrop is best known as the preeminent figure in the founding of New England. But before he was a governor he was a man struggling to understand his relationship with God. His story helps us to understand what made someone a puritan, the social dimensions of that faith, and what made New England puritan. J ohn winthrop was born in the stour Valley of eastern England, in the village of Edwardstone, in the Armada year of 1588. Edwardstone was one of three closely related communities that included Groton and Boxford. The family had a record of commitment to the further reform of the Church of England. John’s grandfather Adam had risen from being an apprentice to become master of the Clothworkers , one of the twelve major London craft guilds. He had purchased the former monastic property of Groton Manor and moved there in 1553 when Mary Tudor came to the English throne. While Adam withdrew to the countryside lest his Protestant affiliation lead to arrest and imprisonment , his son William, John’s uncle, stayed in London and became 12 First Founders one of the leaders of the Protestant underground church there. William was in touch with some of the men who were executed for their faith, preserved their papers, and passed them on to John Foxe, the author of the immensely popular Book of Martyrs (1563). After Elizabeth succeeded to the throne and the Protestant Church of England was restored, William devoted time and funds to promote the more advanced reforms that became identified as puritanism. John’s father, named Adam after his own father, had studied at Cambridge University, where he formed friendships with some of the clergy who would become leaders of the effort to reform religion in the stour Valley. Leaving the university without a degree, Adam studied law at the Inns of Court and was admitted as a barrister of the Inner Temple. But he came back to suffolk, managing modest landholdings of his own in the towns of Boxford, Edwardstone, and Groton, and acting as steward The statue of John Winthrop in front of the First Church in Boston Photo by Barbara A. Bremer John Winthrop 13 of Groton Manor for his older brother John, who had inherited the estate . Like his brother William, Adam became identified as a strong promoter of reform, and the Winthrop household frequently hosted puritan clergy who discussed over dinner the state of the church with their host and his family. John’s mother, Anne, was an active participant in these discussions and played a key role in the upbringing of her children. The daughter of a clergyman, she possessed and used a religious library that included a French Bible and a work in Latin by the German reformer Philip Melanchton . When Adam was away from Groton on legal business, or auditing the books of Trinity College, she taught John and his three sisters their lessons and led the family exercises of prayer and scripture reading. John Winthrop’s character was shaped in this godly household. There he, along with his sisters, learned to read and write—perhaps when they were as young as four years old. And the children were taught their catechism. A notebook of Adam Winthrop’s survives in which he copied out parts of a catechism with which he could instruct his children. Even before he could read, John listened to the stories of the Marian martyrs, and he would have perused the vivid woodcuts illustrating Foxe’s classic. These tales and others like them were also woven into his everyday life. From the fields around his home he could see the tower of the...