and
magistrate. Commanding uncommon respect and confidence from an early
age, he had moved in the circles where the highest matters of English
policy were discussed, by men who had been associates of Whitgift,
Bacon, Essex, and Cecil. Humphrey was "a gentleman of special parts, of
learning and activity, and a godly man"; in the home of his
father-in-law, Thomas, third earl of Lincoln, the head in that day of
the now ducal house of Newcastle, he had been the familiar companion of
the patriotic nobles.

Of the assistants, Isaac Johnson, esteemed the richest of the
emigrants, was another son-in-law of Lord Lincoln, and a land-holder 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