Thomas Dudley
Thomas Dudley was a New England colonial magistrate who served several terms as governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Dudley was the chief founder of Newtowne, later Cambridge, Massachusetts, and built the town's first home. He provided land and funds to establish the Roxbury Latin School and signed Harvard College's new charter during his 1650 term as governor. Dudley was a devout Puritan who opposed religious views not conforming with his. In this, he was more rigid than other early Massachusetts leaders like John Winthrop, but less confrontational than John Endecott.
The son of a military man who died when he was young, Dudley saw military service himself during the French Wars of Religion, and then acquired some legal training before entering the service of his likely kinsman, the Earl of Lincoln. Along with other Puritans in Lincoln's circle, Dudley helped establish the Massachusetts Bay Colony, sailing with Winthrop in 1630. Although he served only four one-year terms as governor of the colony, he was regularly in other positions of authority.
Dudley's daughter Anne Bradstreet was a prominent early American poet. One of the gates of Harvard Yard, which existed from 1915 to 1947, was named in his honor, and Harvard's Dudley House is named for the family, as is the town of Dudley, Massachusetts.
Early years
Thomas Dudley was born in Yardley Hastings, a village near Northampton, England, on 12 October 1576, to Roger and Susanna Dudley. The family has long asserted connections to the Sutton-Dudleys of Dudley Castle ; there is a similarity in their coats of arms, but association beyond probable common ancestry has not yet been conclusively demonstrated. Roger Dudley, a captain in the English army, was apparently killed in battle. It was for some time believed he was killed in the 1590 Battle of Ivry, but Susanna Dudley is known already to have been widowed by 1588. The 1586 battle of Zutphen has also been suggested as the occasion of Roger Dudley's death.Like many other young men of good birth Thomas Dudley became a page, in his case in the household of William, Baron Compton at nearby Castle Ashby. Later he raised a company of men following a call to arms by Queen Elizabeth, and served in the English army led by Sir Arthur Savage fighting with King Henry IV of France during the French Wars of Religion. He fought the Spanish at the Siege of Amiens in 1597, which in September surrendered and was the final action of the war.
After he was discharged from his military service, Dudley returned to Northamptonshire. He then entered the service of Sir Augustine Nicolls, a relative of his mother's as a clerk. Nicolls, a lawyer and later a judge, was recognized for his honesty at a time when many judges were susceptible to bribery and other misconduct. He was also sympathetic to the Puritan cause; the exposure to legal affairs and Nicolls' religious views probably had a significant influence on Dudley. After Nicolls' sudden death in 1616, Dudley took a position with Theophilus Clinton, 4th Earl of Lincoln, serving as a steward responsible for managing some of the earl's estates. Although there is a likely blood connection, the reason for the appointment may be that Dudley's soldier grandfather Henry had served under Edward Clinton, 1st Earl of Lincoln. The earl's estate in Lincolnshire was a center of Nonconformist thought, and Dudley was already recognized for his Puritan virtues by the time he entered the earl's service. According to Cotton Mather's biography of Dudley, he successfully disentangled a legacy of financial difficulties bequeathed to the earl, and the earl consequently came to depend on Dudley for financial advice. Dudley's services were not entirely pecuniary in nature: he is also said to have had an important role in securing the engagement of Clinton to Lord Saye's daughter. In 1622, Dudley acquired the assistance of Simon Bradstreet who was eventually drawn to Dudley's daughter Anne. The two were married six years later when she was 16.
Dudley was briefly out of Lincoln's service between about 1624 and 1628. During this time, he lived with his growing family in Boston, Lincolnshire, where he likely was a parishioner at St Botolph's Church, where John Cotton preached. The Dudleys were known to be back on Lincoln's estate in 1628 when his daughter Anne came down with smallpox and was treated there.
Massachusetts Bay Colony
In 1628 Dudley and other Puritans decided to form the Massachusetts Bay Company, with a view toward establishing a Puritan colony in North America. Dudley's name does not appear on the land grant issued to the company that year. Still, he was almost certainly involved in the company's formative stages, whose investors and supporters included many individuals in the Earl of Lincoln's circle. The company sent a small group of colonists led by John Endecott to begin building a settlement, called Salem, on the shores of Massachusetts Bay; a second group was sent in 1629. The company acquired a royal charter in April 1629 and later that year made the critical decision to transport the charter and the company's corporate governance to the colony. The Cambridge Agreement, which enabled the emigrating shareholders to buy out those that remained behind, may have been written by Dudley. In October 1629 John Winthrop was elected governor, and John Humphrey was chosen as his deputy. However, as the fleet was preparing to sail in March 1630, Humphrey decided he would not leave England immediately, and Dudley was chosen as deputy governor in his place.Dudley and his family sailed for the New World on the Arbella, the flagship of the Winthrop Fleet, on 8 April 1630 and arrived in Salem Harbour on 12 June. Finding conditions at Salem inadequate for establishing a larger colony, Winthrop and Dudley led forays into the Charles River watershed, but were unable to immediately agree on a site for the capital. With limited time to establish themselves and concerns over rumors of potential hostile French action, the leaders decided to distribute the colonists in several places to avoid presenting a single target for hostilities. The Dudleys probably spent the winter of 1630–31 in Boston, which was where the leadership chose to stay after its first choice, Charlestown, was found to have inadequate water. A letter Dudley wrote to the Countess of Lincoln in March 1631 narrated the first year's experience of the colonists that arrived in Winthrop's fleet in an intimate tone befitting a son or suitor as much as a servant. It appeared in print for the first time in a 1696 compilation of early colonial documents by Joshua Scottow.
Founding of Cambridge
In the spring of 1631, the leadership agreed to establish the colony's capital at Newtowne, and the town was surveyed and laid out. Dudley, Simon Bradstreet, and others built their houses there, but to Dudley's anger, Winthrop decided to build in Boston. This decision caused a rift between Dudley and Winthrop; it was severe enough that in 1632 Dudley resigned his posts and considered returning to England. After the mediation of others, the two reconciled, and Dudley retracted his resignation. Winthrop reported that "ver after they kept peace and good correspondency in love and friendship." During the dispute, Dudley also harshly questioned Winthrop's authority as governor for several actions without consulting his council of assistants. Dudley's differences with Winthrop came to the fore again in January 1636, when other magistrates orchestrated a series of accusations that Winthrop had been overly lenient in his judicial decisions.In 1632 Dudley, at his own expense, erected a palisade around Newtowne that enclosed of land, principally as a defense against wild animals and Native American raids. The colony agreed to reimburse him by imposing taxes on all area communities. The meetings occasioned by this need are among the first instances of a truly representative government in North America, when each town chose two representatives to advise the governor on the subject. This principle was extended to govern the colony as a whole in 1634, the year Dudley was first elected governor. During this term, the colony established a committee to oversee military affairs and to manage the colony's munitions.
The colony came under legal threat in 1632, when Sir Ferdinando Gorges, attempting to revive an earlier claim to the territory, raised issues of the colony's charter and governance with the Privy Council of King Charles I. When the colony's governing magistrates drafted a response to the charges raised by Gorges, Dudley was alone in opposing language, referring to the king as his "sacred majesty", and to bishops of the Church of England as "Reverend Bishops". Although a quo warranto writ was issued in 1635 calling for the charter to be returned to England, the king's financial straits prevented it from being served, and the issue eventually died out.
Anne Hutchinson affair
In 1635, and for the four following years, Dudley was elected either as deputy governor or as a member of the council of assistants. The governor in 1636 was Henry Vane, and the colony was split over the actions of Anne Hutchinson. She had come to the colony in 1634 and began preaching a "covenant of grace" following her mentor, John Cotton, while most of the colony's leadership, including Dudley, Winthrop, and most of the ministers, espoused a more Legalist view. This split divided the colony since Vane and Cotton supported her. At the end of this colonial strife, called the Antinomian Controversy, Hutchinson was banished from the colony, and a number of her followers left the colony as a consequence. She settled in Rhode Island, where Roger Williams, also persona non-grata in Massachusetts over theological differences, offered her shelter. Dudley's role in the affair is unclear, but historians supportive of Hutchinson's cause argue that he was a significant force in her banishment, and that he was unhappy that the colony did not adopt a more rigid stance or ban more of her followers.Vane was turned out of office in 1637 over the Hutchinson affair and his insistence on flying the English flag over the colony's fort; many Puritans felt that the Cross of St George on the flag was a symbol of popery and was thus anathema to them. Vane was replaced by Winthrop, who served three terms. According to Winthrop, concerns over the length of his service led to Dudley's election as governor in 1640.
Although Dudley and Winthrop clashed with each other on several issues, they agreed on banning Hutchinson, and their relationship had some significant positive elements. In 1638 Dudley and Winthrop were each granted a tract of land "about six miles from Concord, northward". Reportedly, Winthrop and Dudley went to the area together to survey the land and select their parcels. Winthrop, then governor, graciously deferred to Dudley, then deputy governor, to make the first choice of land. Dudley's land became Billerica, and Winthrop's Bedford. The place where the two properties met was marked by two large stones, each carved with the owner's name; Winthrop described the spot as the "'Two Brothers', in remembrance that they were brothers by their children's marriage".