John Stoughton (priest)

John Stoughton (1593?–1639) was an English clergyman, of influential millennial views.

Life

He was baptized at Naughton, Suffolk in 1593. He was one of three sons of the clergyman Thomas Stoughton (c.1557–c.1622), who lost his living of Coggeshall, Essex in 1606 as a nonconformist, and his wife, Katherine Evelyn[1] (c.1560–c.1603); Israel Stoughton was a younger brother.[2]

He was a student at Emmanuel College, Cambridge from 1607, graduating B.A. in 1611, M.A. 1614, B.D. 1621, and D.D. 1626. A Fellow from 1616, he became rector of Aller in Somerset in 1624, and then succeeding Thomas Taylor he preached at St Mary, Aldermanbury in London from 1632.[3]

During the 1630s Stoughton came under suspicion from the authorities, and his mail was watched; his numerous correspondents included John Forbes, John Winthrop, Stephen Marshall, Samuel Ward and William Sandcroft (his old tutor).[4] In 1635 he was before William Juxon, the Bishop of London for supposed nonconformity, with John Goodwin and Sidrach Simpson.[5] In 1636 he was caught up in the investigation of John White of Dorchester, that involved also Henry Whitefield.[6] With the support of Sir Robert Harley and other patrons Stoughton managed to avoid serious problems.

At the end of his life Stoughton came into contact with Samuel Hartlib. His millennial pamphlet Felicitas ultimi saeculi was taken to Hungary in 1638 by John Tolnai, a contact of Comenius. It was intended for György Rákóczi. Two years later, after Stoughton's death, Hartlib published the pamphlet with Stoughton's covering letter.[7][8] Hugh Trevor-Roper comments on the language of inauguration of international Protestantism in this work, centred on Comenius, Francis Bacon and John Dury.[9]

Family

Dr. Stoughton's predecessor as Rector of Aller, Dr. Ralph Cudworth the elder, died in 1624 and Stoughton married his widow Mary Cudworth (born Mary Machell), who prior to her first marriage had been nurse to Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales.[10] Dr. Stoughton thereby became step-father to the New England colonist James Cudworth,[11] to Ralph Cudworth the younger (whom he educated in preparation for a place at the University of Cambridge), and to the other Cudworth children.[12][13] Mary died in 1634, and Dr. Stoughton then married Jane Browne, widow of Walter Newburgh, and daughter of John Browne of Frampton, Dorset, in 1636.[14] His brother Israel Stoughton was a co-worker with John Endicott in Massachusetts Colony, and hence William Stoughton, chief magistrate of the Salem witch trials, was John Stoughton's nephew. James Cudworth, however, who on his arrival in Scituate, Plymouth Colony, in 1634, wrote to his stepfather Dr. Stoughton expressing gratitude for the true foundations of his religious education,[15] strongly disapproved of the religious persecutions during the later 1650s, and stood out against them.[16]

References

Notes

  1. ↑ http://www.thepeerage.com/p47512.htm#i475116
  2. ↑ Thompson, Roger. "Stoughton, Israel". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/26605. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
  3. ↑ "Stoughton, John (STTN607)". A Cambridge Alumni Database. University of Cambridge.
  4. ↑ Francis J. Bremer, Congregational communion: clerical friendship in the Anglo-American Puritan community, 1610-1692 (1994), p. 31, p. 54, p. 92 and p. 99.
  5. ↑ Liu, Tai. "Simpson Sidrach". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/25592. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
  6. ↑ Bremer, Francis J. "Whitfield, Henry". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/29303. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
  7. ↑ http://www.theroundtable.ro/pages/cultural_studies/eva_petroczi_samuel_hartlib_a_man_for_all_countries_including_hungary_and_transylvania.htm
  8. ↑ p. 10.
  9. ↑ http://oll.libertyfund.org/?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=719&chapter=77053&layout=html&Itemid=27#c_lf6114_footnote_nt_330
  10. ↑ Pailin, David A. "Cudworth, Ralph". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/6864. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
  11. ↑ 'Gen. James Cudworth (salter),' in Samuel Deane, History of Scituate, Massachusetts, from its first settlement to 1831 (James Loring, Boston 1831), pp. 245-51.
  12. ↑ http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=66488
  13. ↑ Christopher Hill, Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution (1965), note p. 101.
  14. ↑ http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~fordingtondorset/Files/JohnBrowneJP1582.html
  15. ↑ 'Letter of James Cudworth of Scituate, 1634', in New England Historical and Genealogical Register 14 (1860), pp. 101-04.
  16. ↑ Cudworth told the Scituate Court which dismissed him from office that, just as he was no Quaker, so also he would be no Persecutor. Richard P. Hallowell, The Quaker Invasion of Massachusetts (Houghton, Mifflin & Co, Boston/Riverside Press, Cambridge 1883), pp. 162-172.
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