Our Founders' Warning. Strobe Talbott
Hutchinson and all but one of the younger members of her family who were living with her perished in a massacre aimed at terrorizing the white settlers. When word reached the Bay Colony, its leaders saw it as the “just vengeance of God.”25 Winthrop concurred.
Three hundred years later, Eleanor Roosevelt extolled Hutchinson as the first of America’s foremothers—and literally so, since she was an ancestor of Franklin D. Roosevelt and George H. W. and George W. Bush.26
John Winthrop’s health declined on the threshold of his seventh decade. When he died peacefully, still in office, he was widely mourned. The same could not be said of the Puritans’ royal nemesis. Two months before Winthrop’s death, King Charles I had been beheaded for treason. His marriage to a French Catholic princess had stirred protests among Anglicans and other Protestants, and his claim of absolute power under the divine right of kings clashed with the English and Scottish Parliaments, who were jealous of their own prerogatives.
Civil war erupted in 1642, ending with Charles’s defeat and capture. He refused demands for a constitutional monarchy, and he spent most of his last days imprisoned on the Isle of Wight, where the Arbella and its fleet had set sail nineteen years earlier. He was executed on January 30, 1649.
The principal signatory of the warrant for the king’s execution was Oliver Cromwell. As Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland, and Ireland, he was the most powerful Puritan of all time and virtual dictator of the country that Winthrop and others had left for a new life in a new land.
Crossings of the Atlantic were slower and more dangerous in winter, so when the news of the regicide arrived, many of the members of the Great Migration rejoiced. Winthrop’s son Stephen returned to England to serve in Cromwell’s government. John Endecott and Richard Bellingham, then governor and deputy governor, respectively, of the Bay Colony, wrote to Cromwell, thanking him for his “continued series of favours” to “us poor exiles, in these utmost ends of the earth.”27
The Cromwell Protectorate had lasted only six years before it collapsed, soon after Cromwell’s death in 1658. His son and successor, Richard, was ousted by the military, and the royalists returned to power. Now it was Cromwell’s turn to be convicted of treason, albeit posthumously. His body was disinterred from Westminster Abbey and hanged, by tradition, on the Tyburn gallows for the public to gawk and cheer, “Long live the King!”
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