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 stone posset-pot, which is still preserved as a family heirloom. This same Adam was a typical Winthrop, a diligent inditer of letters and diaries (quaint fragments of which evince good sense and right feeling), and a great encourager of prophesying. He informs us that at Groton and the two neighbouring parishes of Boxford and Edwardston he managed within the limits of a single year to hear as many as thirty-three different preachers.

John Winthrop was admitted at Trinity College, Cambridge, on 2 Dec. 1602, but his academic course was interrupted when he was little over seventeen by his betrothal and marriage, on 16 April 1605, to Mary (1583–1615), daughter and heiress of John Forth of Great Stanbridge, Essex, in which place he settled and abode for some years. His eldest son, John, was born there on 12 Feb. 1606, and he had issue two more sons and two daughters by his first wife, with whom his sympathy appears to have been at times imperfect. She died and was buried at Groton on 26 June 1615. The religious impressions which so deeply imbued his whole life were derived by Winthrop during this period from Ezekiel Culverwell. His early piety, of the self-accusing puritanic type, was remarkable. The workings of his conscience were often curious. He was extremely fond of wild-fowl shooting with a gun, but conceiving from the fact that he was a very bad shot that the practice was sinful, he ‘covenanted with the Lord’ to give over shooting, except upon rare and secret occasions. He had no doubts as to the depraving effects of the ‘creature tobacco’ or the practice of drinking healths, and he combated both these infirmities in a more uncompromising fashion. He married, within six months of his first wife's death, Thomasine, daughter of William Clopton of Castleins Manor, near Groton (her marriage settlements are printed in ‘Evidences of the Winthrops,’ 1896, p. 22). She died on 7 Dec. 1616, just a year after marriage, and was buried in Groton church on 11 Dec. A detailed and powerful, if somewhat morbid, account of her deathbed is given by Winthrop in an autobiographical fragment (cited in Life, i. 79–89). After a period of great depression and diffidence, he married, thirdly, on 29 April 1618, at Great Maplested, Margaret (d. 1647), daughter of Sir John Tyndal, kt. Under her influence the tendency to undue religious introspection was gradually subdued, and Winthrop gained that moral ascendency among his puritan neighbours to which the depth of his character justly entitled him. A charming letter from his father to this fiancée, and a number of his love-letters to his third wife (nearly all written after marriage), are printed in the ‘Life,’ and the series was edited in 1893 by J. H. Twichell as ‘Some Old Puritan Love-letters.’ For some time past Winthrop had contemplated taking orders, but he was dissuaded from this course both by his father's advice and by his newly found married happiness. He began taking a more active part in his duties as a justice of the peace and lord of Groton Manor, and in 1626 he was appointed an attorney of the court of wards and liveries, of which Sir Robert Naunton [q. v.] had become master in 1623. He appears to have been admitted of the Inner Temple in November 1628 (Members of Inner Temple, p. 252), a fact which seems to indicate that his emigration was not the result of long previous deliberation.

John Winthrop had not joined any of the colonial companies as an adventurer, and the earliest intimation of his leaving the old world for the new is conveyed in a letter of 15 May 1629, in which he says: ‘My deare wife, I am verylye persuaded God will bring some heavye affliction upon this lande, and that speedylye … if the Lord seeth it will be good for us, he will provide a shelter and a hiding-place for us and others, as a Zoar for Lott.’ The dissolution of parliament in 1629 was the moving cause of his discontent, and his decision to cast in his lot with the emigrants was no doubt stimulated by the death of his mother and the loss of his post. He saw everything now through darkened glasses. The land seemed to him to be grown ‘weary of her inhabitants.’ The growth of luxury and extravagance, the increased expenses of education, and the difficulty of providing for children in the liberal arts and professions are all reflected upon in his correspondence at this time. ‘Evil times,’ he concluded, ‘are coming, when the church must fly to the wilderness.’ In June or July 1629 he was carefully preparing a statement of the ‘Reasons to be considered for justifyeing the undertakers of the intended Plantation in New England, and for incouraginge such whose hartes God shall move to joyne with them in it.’ In July he appears to have paid a visit to Isaac Johnson at Sempringham, and the matter was discussed in all its bearings between them. His ‘Reasons’ would seem to have been shown to Sir John Eliot and other prominent leaders of puritan feeling.

The emigration movement was greatly facilitated by the decision of the Old England proprietors to convert the Massachusetts plantation into a self-governing community, as the prospering Plymouth colony had virtually been from the commencement.