The Honorable Robert C. Winthrop, a descendant in the seventh generation from our honored First Governor, seizing upon a brief vacation-interval in the course of his high public service, made a visit to England in the summer of 1847.  He was naturally drawn towards his ancestral home at Groton, in Suffolk.  The borough itself, with its own due share of historic interest, from men of mark and their deeds, is composed of one of those clusters of villages which are sure in an English landscape to have some charm in their picturesque combinations.  The visitor had the privilege of worshipping on a Sunday in the same parish church where his ancestors, holding the right of presentation, had joined in the same form of service, to whose font they had brought their children in baptism, and at whose altar-rails they had stood for “the solemnization of matrimony,” and knelt in the office of communion.  The second entry made in the parish register, still retained in the vestry, records the death of the head of the family in 1562.  Outside the church, and close against its walls, is the tomb of the Winthrop family, which, by a happy coincidence, had just been repaired, as if ready to receive a visitor from a land where tombs are not supposed to have the justification of age for being dilapidated.  The father, the grandfather, and perhaps the great-grandfather of our John Winthrop were committed to that repository.  The family name and arms, with a Latin inscription in memory of the parents of the Governor, are legible still, “Beati sunt pacifici” is the benediction which either the choice of those who rest beneath it, or the congenial tribute of some survivor, has selected to close the epitaph.  Only traces of the cellar of the mansion-house and of its garden-plot are now visible to mark the home where the Chief Magistrates of Massachusetts and Connecticut, father and son, had lived together and had matured the “conclusions” on which they exiled themselves.

A monstrous and idle tradition, heard by the visitor, as he surveyed the outlines of his ancestral home, prompted him to that labor of love which he has so felicitously performed, and with such providential helps, in a biography.  The absurdity of the tradition, equally defiant as it is of the consistencies of character and the facts of chronology, is a warning to those who rely on these floating confoundings of fact and fiction, which, as some one has said, “are almost as misleading as history.”  Two hundred years and more had seen that manor-house deserted of its former occupants.  The neighboring residents had kept their name in remembrance, more, probably, through the help of the tomb than of the dwelling.  Speculation and romance would deal with them as an extinct or an exiled family.  The story had become current on the spot, that the Winthrops were regicides, and had fled to America, having, however, buried some precious hoard of money about their premises before their flight.  Our author suggests the altogether