member of Parliament, Lieutenant-General under Cromwell,
member of the court at King Charles' trial, and whom Macaulay named "the
most illustrious saviour of a mighty race of men, the judges of a king,
the founders of a republic."

In May, 1630, Ludlow came to Massachusetts, as one of the Assistants
under the charter of "The Governor and company of Massachusetts Bay in
New England."

His services in the Bay Colony from 1630-35 ranged from the duties of a
magistrate in the Great Charter Court to those of the high office of
Deputy Governor. The quality of that service is written in a bare
statement of his various offices--surveyor, negotiator of the Pequot
treaty, colonel ex officio, auditor of Governor Winthrop's accounts,
superintendent of fortifications, military commissioner, member of the
General Court, Deputy Governor when Thomas Dudley was Governor; and he
was always one of the foremost men in civil, political, and social
affairs, to the day of his departure to "the valley of the long
river,"--a day of good fortune for Connecticut.

When Massachusetts established church membership as the condition of
suffrage,--and radical differences of opinion on other matters
arose,--it marked the culmination of a set purpose of some of her ablest
men to remove from her jurisdiction, among whom Hooker, Ludlow, and
Haynes were the most notable. The General Court created a commission to
govern Connecticut for a year, and made Ludlow its chief. He came to the
new land of promise with the Dorchester men, and settled in Windsor in
1635-36.

What he did in the nineteen years of his residence at Windsor and
Fairfield is epitomized in a brief summary of the duties and honors to
which he was called by his fellowmen:

Chief of the Massachusetts commission and the first Governor, de facto;
organizer and chief magistrate of the first court; writer of the
earliest laws; president of the court which declared war against the
Pequots; framer of the Fundamental Orders--the Constitution of
1639--which embodied the great principles of government by the people
propounded and elucidated by the illustrious Thomas Hooker, in his
letter to Governor Winthrop, and in his famous sermon; compiler, at the
request of the General Court, of the _Body of Lawes_, the _Code of
1650_; commissioner on important state matters; commissioner for the
United Colonies; founder and defender of Fairfield; patriot, jurist,
statesman.

Ludlow left Connecticut in 1654