Of the assistants, Isaac Johnson, esteemed the richest of the emigrants, was another son-in-law of Lord Lincoln, and a landholder in three counties.  Sir Richard Saltonstall of Halifax, in Yorkshire, was rich enough to be a bountiful contributor to the company’s operations.  Thomas Dudley, with a company of volunteers which he had raised, had served, thirty years before, under Henry IV of France; since which time he had managed the estates of the Earl of Lincoln.  He was old enough to have lent a shrill voice to the huzzas at the defeat of the armada, and his military services had indoctrinated him in the lore of civil and religious freedom.  Theophilus Eaton, an eminent London merchant, was used to courts and had been minister of Charles I in Denmark.  Simon Bradstreet, the son of a Non-conformist minister in Lincolnshire, and a grandson of “a Suffolk gentleman of a fine estate,” had studied at Emanuel College, Cambridge.  William Vassall was an opulent West India proprietor.  “The principal planters of Massachusetts,” says the prejudiced Chalmers, “were English country gentlemen of no inconsiderable fortunes; of enlarged understandings, improved by liberal education; of extensive ambition, concealed under the appearance of religious humility.”

But it is not alone from what we know of the position, character, and objects of those few members of the Massachusetts Company who were proposing to emigrate at the early period now under our notice, that we are to estimate the power and the purposes of that important corporation.  It had been rapidly brought into the form which it now bore, by the political exigencies of the age.  Its members had no less in hand than a wide religious and political reform—­whether to be carried out in New England, or in Old England, or in both, it was for circumstances, as they should unfold themselves, to determine.  The leading emigrants to Massachusetts were of that brotherhood of men who, by force of social consideration as well as of the intelligence and resolute patriotism, molded the public opinion and action of England in the first half of the seventeenth century.  While the large part stayed at home to found, as it proved, the short-lived English republic, and to introduce elements into the English Constitution which had to wait another half-century for their secure reception, another part devoted themselves at once to the erection of free institutions in this distant wilderness.

In an important sense the associates of the Massachusetts Company were builders of the British, as well as of the New England, commonwealth.  Some ten or twelve of them, including Cradock, the Governor, served in the Long Parliament.  Of the four commoners of that Parliament distinguished by Lord Clarendon as first in influence, Vane had been governor of the company, and Hampden, Pym, and Fiennes—­all patentees of Connecticut—­if not members, were constantly consulted upon its affairs.  The latter statement is also true of the Earl of Warwick, the Parliament’s admiral, and of those excellent persons, Lord Say and Sele and Lord Brooke, both of whom at one time proposed to emigrate.