He knew how to conquer hearts by kindness. One hard winter, complaint was made to him that a man stole regularly to his woodpile and abstracted fuel. “Does he?” asked Winthrop; “send him to me; I’ll cure him.” The quaking wretch was brought in and expected to hear a rigorous sentence. “Friend,” said he, “it is a cold winter, and I fear you are but poorly provided with wood to meet it. You are welcome to supply yourself at my pile till winter is over.”[1039]
Winthrop’s “religion shone out through all his life, and gave a higher lustre to his character. He was zealous for truth and righteousness. Often he bore witness to the minister in the midst of the congregation; and frequently he visited the neighboring towns to prophesy, as it was called, or as we say, exhort. He had admirers not only in America, but in England and at court. ‘’Tis a pity,’ remarked Charles I., ‘that such a worthy gentleman should have banished himself to the hardships of a wilderness life.’”[1040]
In Massachusetts the colonists believed in rotation in office; consequently, Winthrop was often displaced from the gubernatorial chair, and then replaced again. He always filled the post with dignity and with untarnished honor; so that on his death at sixty, worn out by toil and care, he might have torn his books of account, as Scipio Africanus did, and said: “A flourishing colony has been led out and settled under my direction. I have spent my fortune and myself in its service. Waste no more time in harangues, but give thanks to God.”[1041]
Winthrop’s great rival in influence and position was stern Thomas Dudley. His views corresponded far more completely with the theocratic formulas than did those of his mild and somewhat pliant friend. Dudley was bold, aggressive, and dogmatic; and he frequently quarrelled with Winthrop, because that statesman would not hack dissenters with his harsh hatchet, but was cautious, and temporizing, and conciliatory, alike from temperament and from discipline. He was always chosen deputy when Winthrop was elected governor; and on several occasions he held the chief office himself. “He was a man of sound sense, sterling integrity, and uncompromising faith. He was rigid in his religious opinions, and urged the strictest enforcement of the sedition laws. He considered that the various opinions that were struggling to manifest themselves from time to time tended to licentiousness; and he was desirous that his epitaph should be—‘I died no libertine.’”[1042] To paint him in a word, Dudley was an upright and downright man—a “piece of living justice.”
Sir Harry Vane did not tarry long in New England; arriving in 1635, he went home in 1637 to lend his name and brains to the dawning revolution, and to carve his spirit on the marble of the ages. But short as was his sojourn on the west of the Atlantic, he stayed long enough to achieve wide honor and to leave plain traces of his genius. He, too, was a Pilgrim, and “it is a singular fact in the history of New England, that, among her pioneers, were such men as Vane, well born, well bred, and able to command a splendid career at home.”[1043]
“Sir Henry Vane the younger,” remarks Bancroft, “was a man of the purest mind, and a statesman of the rarest integrity, whose name the progress of intelligence and liberty will erase from the rubric of fanatics and traitors, and insert high among the aspirants after truth and the martyrs for liberty. Almost in his boyhood he had valued the ‘obedience of the gospel’ more than the successful career of English diplomacy, and he cheerfully ‘forsook the preferments of the court of Charles for the ordinances of religion in their purity in New England.’”[1044]
While here he was the warm friend of Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson; and when he went home he carried back with him the same ardor for Christian truth which had impelled him to grasp hands with Winthrop in the wilderness. He had a heart, and “he was happy in the possession of an admirable genius, though naturally more inclined to contemplative excellence than to action. He was happy, too, in the eulogist of his virtues; for Milton, ever parsimonious of praise, reserving the majesty of his verse to celebrate the glories and vindicate the providence of God, was lavish of his encomiums on the youthful friend of religious liberty. But Vane was still more happy in attaining early in life a firmly-settled theory of morals, and in possessing an energetic will, which made all his conduct to the very last conform to the doctrines he had espoused, turning his dying hour into a seal of witness, which his life had ever borne with noble consistency to the freedom of conscience and the people. ‘If he were not superior to Hampden,’ says Clarendon, ‘he was inferior to no other man;’ ‘his whole life made good the imagination that there was in him something extraordinary.’”[1045]
Bluff John Endicott was another of the famous characters whose names and fame are impressed on the vellum of colonial history. He is said to have been perhaps the finest specimen of the genuine Puritan character to be found among the early governors. “He was quick of temper, with strong religious feelings; resolute to uphold with the sword what he had received as gospel truth; and feared no enemy so much as a gainsaying spirit. He tore the cross out of the English flag, cut down the May-pole at Merry-Mount, rakish Morton’s sometime den, published his detestation of long hair in a formal proclamation, and set dissenters in the pillory. Inferior to Winthrop in learning—in comprehension to Vane—in tolerance even to Dudley—he excelled them all in the keen eye to discern the fit moment for action, in the quick resolve to profit by it, and in the hand always ready to strike.”[1046]