34 Facts About Thomas Dudley

1.

Thomas Dudley was a New England colonial magistrate who served several terms as governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

2.

Thomas Dudley provided land and funds to establish the Roxbury Latin School, and signed Harvard College's new charter during his 1650 term as governor.

3.

Thomas Dudley was a devout Puritan who was opposed to religious views not conforming with his.

4.

The son of a military man who died when he was young, Thomas Dudley saw military service himself during the French Wars of Religion, and then acquired some legal training before entering the service of his likely kinsman the Earl of Lincoln.

5.

Thomas Dudley's daughter Anne Bradstreet was a prominent early American poet.

6.

One of the gates of Harvard Yard, which existed from 1915 to 1947, was named in his honor, and Harvard's Thomas Dudley House is named for the family, as is the town of Thomas Dudley, Massachusetts.

7.

Thomas Dudley was sympathetic to the Puritan cause; the exposure to legal affairs and Nicolls' religious views probably had a significant influence on Dudley.

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8.

The earl's estate in Lincolnshire was a center of Nonconformist thought, and Thomas Dudley was already recognized for his Puritan virtues by the time he entered the earl's service.

9.

Thomas Dudley's services were not entirely pecuniary in nature: he is said to have had an important role in securing the engagement of Clinton to Lord Saye's daughter.

10.

In 1622, Thomas Dudley acquired the assistance of Simon Bradstreet who was eventually drawn to Thomas Dudley's daughter Anne.

11.

Thomas Dudley was briefly out of Lincoln's service between about 1624 and 1628.

12.

Thomas Dudley sent a small group of colonists led by John Endecott to begin building a settlement, called Salem, on the shores of Massachusetts Bay; a second group was sent in 1629.

13.

The colony came under legal threat in 1632, when Sir Ferdinando Gorges, attempting to revive an earlier claim to the territory, raised issues of the colony's charter and governance with the Privy Council of King Charles I When the colony's governing magistrates drafted a response to the charges raised by Gorges, Dudley was alone in opposing language referring to the king as his "sacred majesty", and to bishops of the Church of England as "Reverend Bishops".

14.

In 1635, and for the four following years, Thomas Dudley was elected either as deputy governor or as a member of the council of assistants.

15.

Thomas Dudley had come to the colony in 1634, and began preaching a "covenant of grace" following her mentor, John Cotton, while most of the colony's leadership, including Dudley, Winthrop, and most of the ministers, espoused a more Legalist view.

16.

Thomas Dudley settled in Rhode Island, where Roger Williams, persona non-grata in Massachusetts over theological differences, offered her shelter.

17.

Thomas Dudley's role in the affair is unclear, but historians supportive of Hutchinson's cause argue that he was a significant force in her banishment, and that he was unhappy that the colony did not adopt a more rigid stance or ban more of her followers.

18.

Reportedly, Winthrop and Thomas Dudley went to the area together to survey the land and select their parcels.

19.

Thomas Dudley presided over the acquittal of John Winthrop in a trial held that year; Winthrop had been charged with abuses of his power as a magistrate by residents of Hingham the previous year.

20.

In 1649 Thomas Dudley was appointed to serve as a commissioner and president of the New England Confederation, an umbrella organization established by most of the New England colonies to address issues of common interest; however, he was ill, and consequently unable to discharge his duties in that office.

21.

Thomas Dudley served as a magistrate in the colonial courts, and sat on committees that drafted the laws of the colony.

22.

Thomas Dudley's views were conservative, but he was not as strident in them as John Endecott.

23.

Thomas Dudley sided with the moderate faction on the issue, which believed the flag's depiction of the Cross of St George had by then been reduced to a symbol of nationalism.

24.

Thomas Dudley had a piercing judgment to discover the wolf, though clothed with a sheepskin.

25.

The college charter was first issued in 1642, and a second charter was issued in 1650, signed by then-Governor Thomas Dudley, who served for many years as one of the college's overseers.

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26.

Harvard Yard once had a Thomas Dudley Gate bearing words written by his daughter Anne; it was torn down in the 1940s to make way for construction of Lamont Library.

27.

Thomas Dudley, who was then living in Roxbury, gave significant donations of both land and money to the school, which survives to this day as the Roxbury Latin School.

28.

Thomas Dudley married Dorothy Yorke in 1603, and with her had five or six children.

29.

Thomas Dudley later served as the pastor in Exeter, New Hampshire.

30.

Thomas Dudley married his second wife, the widow Katherine Hackburne, descendant of the noble Berkeley, Lygon and Beauchamp families, in 1644.

31.

Thomas Dudley is a direct descendant of eleven of the twenty-five barons who acted as sureties for John Lackland on the Magna Carta.

32.

In 1636 Thomas Dudley moved from Cambridge to Ipswich, and in 1639 moved to Roxbury.

33.

Thomas Dudley, Massachusetts is named for his grandsons Paul and William, who were its first proprietors.

34.

Proponents of an effort to rename the square noted that Thomas Dudley was "a leading politician in 1641", when the colony became the first to legally sanction slavery.