in his biography in obscurity.  In the first place, the title proves that he had, at the time of his death, no other child.  In the course of it, he tells his daughter, that, when he was fourteen years of age, his mother, then a widow, removed with him to Cambridge, and connected him with the University there.  His elder brother had been sent to Oxford for his education.  After residing eight years in Cambridge, he took his Master’s degree, and then went up to London, where he was “struck with the sense of his sinful estate by a sermon he heard under Paul’s, which was about forty years since, which text was the burden of Dumah or Idumea, and stuck fast.  This made me to go into Essex; and after being quieted by another sermon in that country, and the love and labors of Mr. Thomas Hooker, I there preached, there married with a good gentlewoman, till I went to London to ripen my studies, not intending to preach at all.”  He then relates the circumstances which subsequently led him again to engage in preaching.  He is stated to have been born in 1599:  his death was in 1660.  Putting together these dates and facts, it becomes evident that he could not have been more than twenty-two years of age when he married “Mistress Read.”  The “Last Legacy” shows, not merely in the manner in which he speaks of her,—­“a good gentlewoman,”—­but, in its express terms, that she was not the mother of the “only child” to whom it was addressed.  “Besides your mother,” he states that he had had “a godly wife before.”  There is no indication that there were children by the earlier marriage.  If there were, they died young.  He married, for his second wife, Deliverance Sheffield, at Boston, in March, 1639.

His first wife, the time of whose death is unknown, had left the children by her former husband in his hands and under his care.  He evidently cherished the memory of the “good gentlewoman of Essex” with the tenderest and most sacred affection.  She had not only been the dear wife of his youth, but her property placed him above want.  No wonder that the strongest attachment existed between him and her children.  John Winthrop, Jr., and his wife, called him father, not merely in conformity with custom, being their step-father in point of fact, but with the fondness and devotion of actual children.  It was on account of this intimate and endeared connection, and in consideration of the pecuniary benefit he had derived from his marriage to the mother of the younger Winthrop’s wife, that he made arrangements, in case he should not return to America, that his Salem property should go to her and her husband.  Having married a second wife, and there being issue of said marriage, he would not have alienated so considerable a part of his property from the legal heir without some good and sufficient reason.  The foregoing view of the case explains the whole.  The solution of the mystery which had enveloped Roger Williams’s language is complete.  Elizabeth, the daughter of the second marriage, to whom the “Last Legacy” was addressed, was baptized in the First Church at Salem, on the 8th of March, 1640.  It does not appear, that, during her subsequent life, there was any intimacy, or even acquaintance, between her and the Winthrops, as there was no ground for it, she being in no way connected with them.