. 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.

The company's meetings placed Winthrop and his colleagues in relations
with nume