Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
Excerpt from The Henry Whitfield House
The history of the owners belongs to that of the house. The first. Henry Whitfield, (or Whitfeild, as he wrote it, ) was a good example of the class of gentlemen and scholars which furnished the emigrant Puritans with many of their leaders. He came of an old land-owning family, and was possibly a collateral descendant of Chaucer. He vs as a graduate of Oxford, and had been for about twenty years rector of Ockley in Surrey. A book of his, Some Helpes to Stirre up to Chris tian Duties, had reached a second edition before he came to New England. After his return he wrote, or compiled, accounts of Indian missions, a subject in which religious Englishmen of all parties were interested. A Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in New Eng land had lately been'incorporated (1649 and for many years Slipported John Eliot's work. This society undoubtedly owed something to Whitfield's efforts, and it has, as we shall see, other associations with the Whitfield House. He married Dorothy Sheaffe of Cranbrook in Kent, the daughter of a clergyman, and descended collaterally from Archbishop Grindal and first cousin of the poets Giles and Phineas Fletcher. The Sheaifes had been successful Clothiers, and manu facturers of cloth had long before become founders of great fami lies in Kent. Even then an industrial as well as a military career might be the path to high social position in England, and such a stock was well suited for transplantation to industrial Connecticut. Dorothy, eldest daughter of these parents, married Samuel Desborough, the first magistrate of Guilford, whom Cromwell afterward made Keeper of the Great Seal of Scotland. Sarah married John Higginson, and Abigail, James Fitch, two New England ministers, and through them many Americans are descendants of the first pastor of Guilford.
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