Thomas Dudley was a colonial magistrate who served several terms as governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
Background
Thomas Dudley was born in Yardley Hastings, a village near Northampton, England, on 12 October 1576, to Roger and Susanna (Thorne) Dudley. His father, a captain in the English army, was apparently killed in battle. Little is known about his formative years except that he was an orphan and was befriended by people who saw that he was educated and placed in service to the English nobility.
Education
Little is known about his formative years except that he was an orphan and was befriended by people who saw that he was educated and placed in service to the English nobility.
Career
He rose to the post of steward to the Earl of Lincoln and took pride for having recouped the earl's diminishing fortune by raising tenant rents.
The former steward was now one of the "first magistrates of the Bay Company. " Persecuted in the Old World, perhaps Dudley, more than the other oligarchs, became righteous and narrow in the New. "In Calvinism, " historian Bernard Bailyn notes, men like Dudley "found doctrines that might be applied to every aspect of life. " For Dudley, at least, this proved all too true.
He hoarded corn and lent it to his neighbors with the understanding that he would receive 10 bushels for every 7 1/2 lent; John Winthrop considered Dudley's practices usurious. Historian Edmund Morgan notes that "Dudley was a rigid, literal minded type, ready to exact his pound of flesh whenever he thought it due him. " Yet, Dudley had his place in the development of the colony. He was 13 times deputy governor and was elected governor on 4 different occasions.
As might be expected, Dudley was no less rigid and fanatical in religious matters than in matters political and economic. The notorious expulsion of Roger Williams in 1635 was Dudley's most celebrated effort to thwart what he considered to be Winthrop's leniency in religious matters. Dudley also figured prominently in the persecution of Anne Hutchinson, who followed Williams into exile largely because of Dudley's allegations of her heresy.
A strong believer in the political power of the oligarchy, and to his dying day (July 31, 1653) almost paranoid on the question of religious heresy, he was nevertheless a remarkable man, part of that first generation of New World Puritans who alone were able to keep the faith.
Achievements
Religion
Dudley, converted to the Puritan belief by John Cotton, his pastor in England, came into contact with other emergent Puritans.
Connections
Dudley married Dorothy Yorke in 1603, and with her had five children. Samuel, the first, also came to the New World, and married Winthrop's daughter Mary in 1633, the first of several alliances of the Dudley-Winthrop family.
Dudley married his second wife, the widow Katherine (Deighton) Hackburne, descendant of the noble Berkeley, Lygon and Beauchamp families, in 1644. She is also a direct descendant of eleven of the twenty-five barons who acted as sureties for John Lackland on the Magna Carta. They had three children, Deborah, Joseph, and Paul.