HOOKER, THOMAS (1586–1647), was an English and American Puritan minister. Born in Leicestershire, Hooker took his B.A. and M.A. at Cambridge, where he was variously Dixie fellow, catechist, and lecturer in Emmanuel College. As a minister he became active in the unofficial meetings of Puritan ministers then taking place. When William Laud moved to restrict nonconforming ministers in the late 1620s, Hooker fled, first to the Netherlands, thence to New England in 1633. He and Samuel Stone organized the first church in Newtown (now Cambridge), Massachusetts. Partly because of religious and political disputes in the Bay Colony, partly because of his parishioners' dissatisfaction with their land allotments, Hooker led in 1636 a removal to Connecticut, where he and his group founded Hartford. When the General Court of Connecticut first met in May 1638 to draw up its Fundamental Orders, Hooker's sermon on the occasion described the proper relationship...