British colonial governor of Massachusetts, born in Northampton, England, in 1576, a member of the elder branch of the family to the younger branch of which Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester, belonged. He was the son of a country gentleman of some means and high standing, was captain of an English company in the French expedition of 1597, serving under Henry of Navarre, and eventually became the steward of the earl of Lincoln’s estates, which he managed with great success for many years. Having been converted to Puritanism, he became a strict advocate of its strictest tenets. About 1627 he associated himself with other Lincolnshire gentlemen who in 1629 entered into an agreement to settle in New England provided they were allowed to take the charter with them. This proposal the general court of the Plymouth Company agreed to, and in April 1630 Dudley sailed to America in the same ship with John Winthrop, the newly appointed governor, Dudley himself at the last moment being chosen deputy-governor in place of John Humphrey (or Humfrey), the earl of Lincoln’s son-in-law, whose departure was delayed. Dudley was for many years the most influential man in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, save Winthrop, with whose policy he was more often opposed than in agreement. He was deputy-governor in 1629–1634, in 1637–1640, in 1646–1650 and in 1651–1653, and was governor four times, in 1634, 1640, 1645 and 1650. Soon after his arrival in the colony he settled at Newton (Cambridge), of which he was one of the founders; he was also one of the earliest promoters of the plan for the establishment of Harvard College. Winthrop’s decision to make Boston the capital instead of Newton precipitated the first of the many quarrels between the two, Dudley’s sterner and harsher Puritanism, being in strong contrast to Winthrop’s more tolerant and liberal views. He was an earnest and persistent heresy-hunter—not only the Antinomians, but even such a good Puritan as John Cotton, against whom he brought charges, feeling the weight of his stern and remorseless hand. His position he himself best expressed in the following brief verse found among his papers:

  “Let men of God in courts and churches watch
O’er such as do a Toleration hatch,
Lest that ill egg bring forth a Cockatrice
To poison all with heresy and vice.”

1

  He died at Roxbury, MA, on the 31st of July 1653.

2

  See Augustine Jones, Life and Work of Thomas Dudley, the Second Governor of Massachusetts (Boston, 1899); and the Life of Mr. Thomas Dudley, several times Governor of the Colony of Massachusetts, written as is supposed by Cotton Mather, edited by Charles Deane (Cambridge, 1870). Dudley’s interesting and valuable “Letter to the Countess of Lincoln,” is reprinted in Alexander Young’s Chronicles of the Planters of the Colony of Massachusetts Bay (Boston, 1846), and in the New Hampshire Historical Society Collections, vol. iv. (1834).

3