John Winthrop, Jr., was the eldest and most noteworthy child of Massachusetts's first governor, after whom he was named. He was born on 12 February 1606 at Groton Manor, the Winthrops' modest ancestral estate in Suffolk, England. His father was only eighteen at the time and was married to Mary Forth, the first of his four wives, who bore him five more children before dying in childbirth in June 1615. The last two of these children, both named Anne, died in infancy, and two others died in early manhood, both in 1630: Henry (born 1608) drowned in a tidal creek on 2 July, only days after the Winthrop Fleet had landed some 1,000 immigrant Puritans in Massachusetts; while back in England Forth (born in late 1609 or early 1610) took ill and died suddenly in November. John Winthrop, Jr., however, lived to be seventy. He succumbed on 5 April 1676 to a respiratory ailment while on an official visit...