16 Facts About Nathaniel Eaton

Nathaniel Eaton was an Anglican clergyman who was the first Headmaster of Harvard, President designate, and builder of Harvard's first College, Yard, and Library, in 1636.

Nathaniel Eaton attended Trinity College at the University of Cambridge, where he was a contemporary and friend of John Harvard, a student at Emmanuel College at the University of Cambridge.

Nathaniel Eaton then attended the University of Franeker, where he studied under Rev William Ames.

Nathaniel Eaton later obtained a MD and PhD from the University of Padua, in Venetia.

Around the time that Nathaniel Eaton started teaching at Harvard, the Antinomian Controversy had erupted in the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

Nathaniel Eaton ordered others to hold Briscoe in place while he beat him with "200 stripes" using a walnut tree branch that Winthrop describes as "large enough to have killed a horse".

The only record of Nathaniel Eaton's own supposed confession was destroyed in a suspicious fire in the office of the historian James Savage, and the full extent of his guilt remains in doubt.

In 1640, Nathaniel Eaton moved to the Colony of Virginia, and then sent for his wife and children who left New England, except for his two year old son Benoni.

Nathaniel Eaton's only remaining child, Benoni Eaton, had been left in Cambridge under the care of Thomas Chesholm and his wife, Isobel; Thomas was steward of Harvard College from 1650 to 1660.

Nathaniel Eaton served for several years as an assistant to the Anglican curate at Accomac, Virginia before returning to England, where he was appointed vicar of Bishop's Castle, Shropshire, in 1661 and rector of Bideford, Devon, in 1668.

The intention of the footnote was to indicate that his brother had finally been repaid, and apparently Nathaniel Eaton had in part used the money to further his education.

Nathaniel Eaton left for England around 1652, where he had already been accepted back by the Church of England and honoured as a parish priest, though obviously he had his scruples, and was said to waver between devotion to his newly found home and that to his former.

Nathaniel Eaton's imprisonment coincided with the Stuart Restoration, and was likely reposted on an old list that King Charles II's father had kept concerning those of lingering or questionable indebtedness.

The subject of this article, Nathaniel Eaton, was known to have left Cambridge in the fall of 1639 and relocated to Virginia by 1640.

The Nathaniel Eaton cited in the Lamb map collection is most likely Nathaniel Heaton.

Nathaniel Eaton later married Francis Doughty as her third and final husband.