Sidney’s graduate in America who looms largest in the early history of New England was the one of the four who returned to England only briefly, for a few years during the Commonwealth and early Restoration, and then all the more firmly transplanted himself to the New World, dying on the edge of the wilderness and leaving a family tree of many generations of descendants.57 This was John Wheelwright, the son of a Lincolnshire yeoman, born in 1594, two years before the founding of the College to which he was admitted on 28 April 1611 as a
“Pensionar[ius],”58 earning his B.A. in 1614–1615 and his M.A. in 1618, according to Venn (pt.1, IV, 381). Ordained the following year, his career was true to form: suspended from his position as vicar at Bilsby, Lincs., in 1632, for alleged simony — which may have been his bishop’s way of getting rid of a nonconformist such as Wheelwright is assumed to have been (by Venn and others) — he left Old England for Massachusetts in 1636 after a brief spell as preacher at Belleau, Lincs.59 Whatever may ultimately have triggered his emigration, it was probably not the reissue of the Book of Sports in 1633, which encouraged sports on the Sabbath and drove many Puritans to distraction, or to Massachusetts.60 For one of the most enduring Sidney anecdotes has it, as Cotton Mather reported to George Vaughan, “that […] Cromwell, with whom he had been contemporary at the University, […] declared to the gentlemen about him ‘that he could remember the time when he had been more afraid of meeting Wheelwright at football, than of meeting any army since in the field; for he was infallibly sure of being tript up by him.’”61
In Boston, where he arrived on 26 May 1636, Wheelwright was tripped up himself soon enough in the field of Puritan doctrinal tackling
57 See the afterword in John Heard, Jr., John Wheelwright, 1592–1679 (Boston, 1930). See also n. 59, below. Wheelwright’s year of birth is a matter of disagreement.
58 MR. 30, 144.
59 See Edmund M. Wheelwright, “A Frontier Family,” Publ. of the Colonial Society of Mass., I (1895), 271–272; Belleau: according to Venn; see also Charles H. Bell, Memoir of John Wheelwright (Cambridge, MA, 1876).
60 See Waterhouse, 483.
61 Jeremy Belknap, The History of New Hampshire, III (Boston, 1792), 339, https://books.
google.co.uk/books?id=rzIBAAAAQAAJ
which was just then hastening the climax of the game. While readily accepted into the Boston church and given the newly formed parish in the then somewhat outlying southern suburb of Mount Wollaston (now semi-metropolitan Braintree), this none too soft-spoken gentleman of the cloth was hardly off the boat before he got himself embroiled in the Antinomian controversy. Considering himself as Puritan as the next victim of English conformism, he nonetheless ran afoul of the Puritan orthodoxy which had, in the meantime, developed its own formula of indictable nonconformism on its virgin soil, which included Antinomianism. Leaving no hair unsplit, the Antinomians, most prominently Wheelwright’s voluble sister-in-law Ann Hutchinson, took the position that the real evidence of being “elected” by the Lord was not wealth and model civic and moral behavior, including good works, but the regenerate Christian’s spiritual certainty — something like a personal revelation of grace — which allowed the true believer to neglect sine-qua-non features of Puritan life such as church attendance and the massacre of Native Americans.62 Wheelwright came under official scrutiny in January 1637, after he preached a fast-day sermon in Boston in which he belligerently charged the ruling authorities with supporting a covenant of works rather than inner certainty of election. The General Court found him guilty of sedition and contempt of authority (right after settling a dispute about damage done by imported goats to neighbors’
crops) and later in the year disfranchised and “banished” him from the Bay Colony. He was given “14 dayes to settle his affaires,” while all those merely suspected of the Antinomian heresy were ordered to hand over “all such guns, pistols, swords, powder, shot, & match as they shal bee owners of” and one Rolfe Mousall, charged with having spoken “in approbation of Mr. Wheelwright, was dismissed from being a member of the Courte.”63
62 There is a vast body of literature on this subject. See, in particular, Emery Battis, Saints and Sectaries: Ann Hutchinson and the Antinomian Controversy in the Massachusetts Bay Colony (Chapel Hill, NC, 1962) and Ronald D. Cohen, “Church and State in Seventeenth-Century Massachusetts: Another Look at the Antinomian Controversy,” Journal of Church and State, XII (1970), 475–494.
63 Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England, ed.
Nathaniel B. Shurtleff, I (Boston, 1853), 189, 207, 211, 236, https://hdl.handle.
net/2027/uma.ark:/13960/t0gt5x713. For a contemporary account, see John Winthrop, The History of New England from 1630 to 1649 (n. 39), I, 215–246, https://
hdl.handle.net/2027/hvd.32044037979119. See also Heard, ch. 5.
In November 1637 Wheelwright left for New Hampshire with a group of followers and became one of the founders of what is now Exeter. One of the attractions of the remote place must have been that since 1635 that colony “had been without any central government.”64 By the same token, when in 1643 Exeter came under the jurisdiction of Massachusetts, Wheelwright moved again, this time to Wells, Maine, perhaps the most outlying part of the New England wilderness. His voice, however, was heard here as he took his principal parishioners with him. Indeed, they became a sort of local aristocracy,65 if a tree-felling and log-cabin-building one. Whether it was the terminal boredom of this pioneer place or a surprising insight into his doctrinal error, we shall never know: in any case, in 1643, in two letters to Governor Winthrop, Wheelwright announced a change of heart about his Antinomianism, humbly requesting him to “pardon my boldness.”66 As a result, he had “his banishmte taken offe, & is reced in agayne as a membr of this colony,” the General Court of Massachusetts decreed the following year.67
If Wheelwright’s remorse was calculation rather than mid-life mellowing, it did not bear fruit immediately. It was not until 1647 that he was called to serve the Bay Colony again, at Hampton on the North Shore, and then only as an assistant to the pastor, as a mere “help in the worke of the Lord with […] Mr Dalton our prsent & faithfull Teacher,”
as the contract specifies, which also assured him of a house-lot, a farm, and £40 per annum.68 In 1656 or 1657 Wheelwright left for England for what turned out to be no more than an extended interlude during which he met with his erstwhile college antagonist on the football field, “with whom,” he wrote to his Hampton parishioners on 20 April 1658, “I had
64 Charles E. Clark, The Eastern Frontier: The Settlement of Northern New England, 1610–
1763 (Hanover, NH, 1983), 39.
65 See Charles H. Bell, History of the Town of Exeter (Exeter, 1888), chs. 1 and 2; Edward E.
Bourne, The History of Wells and Kennebunk from the Earliest Settlement to the Year 1820, at Which Time Kennebunk Was Set Off, and Incorporated (Portland, ME, 1875), chs. 1–5, https://archive.org/details/historyofwellske00bourrich
66 Winthrop, The History of New England, II (1826), 162–164, https://archive.org/details/
historyofnewengl02wint
67 Records of Mass. Bay, III (Boston, 1854), 6.
68 Joseph Dow, History of the Town of Hampton, New Hampshire (Salem, MA, 1893), 352.
discourse in private about the space of an hour,” arguably not limited to prowess in sports, as “all his [Cromwell’s] speeches seemed to me very orthodox and gracious.”69
So were Wheelwright’s by this time. His own church gave him a clean bill of doctrinal health. When in 1654 the pillars of Hampton saw fit to protest to the General Court that Wheelwright was being accused unfairly of heretical beliefs in Boston, they stated that he “hath for these many years approved himself a sound, orthodox, and profitable minister of the gospel,” and the General Court heartily agreed.70
After the Restoration the attraction of New England became irresistible once again. In 1662 we find Wheelwright tending a Puritan flock in Salisbury, in northern Massachusetts. Though he was at least close to retirement age by now, some of his belligerence was still virulent, or perhaps it reemerged in the form of the last-chance radicalism of the elderly. His relationship with the Magistrate of Salisbury, whom he excommunicated early on and then had to take back into the fold, was an armed truce at best. “Another argument between Pike [the Magistrate]
and Wheelwright began on a Sunday evening when Pike was on his way to Boston. It was winter and he knew it would be a long trip. Pike was a Deputy of the General Court and had to be in Boston on Monday morning. Therefore, he decided to get an early start. As soon as the sun went down he started on his journey. After crossing the river though, the sun came back out. Reverend Wheelwright had Pike arrested for working on a Sunday, which was against the law. He accused Pike of knowing it was just a cloud passing over. Pike was fined ten shillings.”71
Such was life on the religious frontier. And Wheelwright made the most of it, plodding on in the service of the Lord until he was gathered to his spiritual fathers in 1679, in his mid-eighties then, but apparently still vigorously unretired, and the Salisbury Sabbath inviolate, changeable weather notwithstanding.
69 Ibid., 363.
70 Dow, 281; Records of Mass, Bay, III, 344.
71 Carolyn Sargent, Salisbury History (Newburyport, MA, 1991), 3–4.
Summing Up
It was rather a mixed lot of pioneering bees, then, that swarmed to the end of the world from the far end of Bridge Street. What they said or did, or didn’t say or didn’t do, raised eyebrows then and adds color in retrospect. But, of course, such human shortcomings and foibles were the very foundation on which the Puritan theocracy of New England was built. Nobody this side of saintliness, not even a Cambridge-trained cleric, was excepted from that civic, moral, and doctrinal policing which such weaknesses and imperfections made so irresistibly desirable and which, in those early years, was the signal feature that distinguished New England from other British colonies. Still, though nil humani was missing in the four Sidney graduates, one thing not one of them was accused of was lax scholarship. Their alma mater need not disown them.