Winthrop married, as his fourth wife, early in 1648, Martha, daughter of Captain William Rainsborough, and widow of Thomas Coytmore. Her estate was a welcome relief to his necessities, for he had spent much of his substance on the colony, and through the roguery of a bailiff his estate had dwindled almost to vanishing point.
Winthrop himself died on 26 March 1649. He was buried in the King's Chapel graveyard, Boston, on 3 April, when a funeral salute was fired by the Ancient and Honourable Artillery Company of Boston. A funeral ‘Elegy’ was printed by ‘Perciful Lowle.’ Winthrop gave thirty-nine books (for a list see Life, 1867, App.) to Harvard. During his last illness it is related that his old colleague Thomas Dudley waited upon Winthrop to urge him to sign an order for the banishment of a heterodox citizen, but he refused, saying he had done too much of that work already (G. Bishop, New England Judged, 1661, p. 172). By his first and third wives Winthrop had large families. His eldest son, John [q. v.], is separately noticed. His eldest son by his third wife, Stephen Winthrop (1619–1658), came to England in 1646, became a colonel in Cromwell's army, sat for Banff and Aberdeen in the assembly of 1656, but died in London two years later.
Between the ancestor worship of the majority of American historians and the reactionary views of one or two writers who protest against this tendency, it is difficult to arrive at a true delineation of Winthrop. His letters to his wife show him to have been tender and gentle, and that his disposition was one to inspire love is proved by the affection those bore him who had suffered much at his hands, Williams, Vane, and Coddington among them. ‘A great lover of the saints, especially able ministers of the gospel,’ he was the wisest champion the clergy could have had; but they drove him far and forced him into severe and even rancorous measures of discipline from which his judgment and heart alike recoiled. His tendencies in early life were liberal, but in America, especially after the rebuke for lenity in 1635, he grew narrower. His claim to eminence as a statesman must rest not upon brilliant or original intellectual qualities, but upon his good judgment, his calm unvindictive temper, and the purity of his moral character. In the hall of historical statues in the Capitol at Washington a statue of him was placed beside that of John Adams to represent Massachusetts. The commissioners responsible for this choice, in their report of February 1866, said with justice of John Winthrop: ‘His mind, more than any other, arranged the social state of Massachusetts; Massachusetts moulded the society of New England.’
In addition to this statue there is a second of Winthrop in the chapel at Mount Auburn (figured in Life, 1867, vol. ii.), and a third in bronze was unveiled at Boston on 17 Sept. 1883. Two original portraits of Winthrop are extant: one, doubtfully attributed to Van Dyck, in the senate chamber of Massachusetts state house (copies in Memorial Hall, Cambridge, Boston Athenæum, and elsewhere); a second in the hall of the American Antiquarian Society at Worcester (a replica of this is at New York). Both have been frequently engraved. The family also possess a miniature, which is, however, inferior both in quality and preservation. A vignette portrait appeared upon the covers of the early issues of the ‘Atlantic Monthly.’ A number of relics and memorials are in the hands of descendants. Winthrop's house at Boston, subsequently occupied by the historical antiquary Thomas Prince, was demolished by the British troops and used as fuel in 1775. The ‘Old South’ church at Boston now marks the site.
For over a hundred years from the date of the governor's death no mention was made of Winthrop's ‘Journal.’ Although it was largely drawn upon by Hubbard in his ‘History’ (1680) and by Cotton Mather in his ‘Magnalia,’ it was cited by neither, and was first mentioned by Thomas Prince on the cover of the first number of his ‘Annals’ (1755, vol. ii.). The manuscript journal, in three volumes, seems to have been procured from the Winthrop family. Two volumes were returned to them and edited by Noah Webster (Hartford, 1790). A third volume was subsequently discovered in the Prince Library in 1816, and all three were given to the Massachusetts Historical Society. The complete document was published in 1825–6 under the editorial care of the genealogist James Savage, under the title ‘The History of New England. By John Winthrop, first Governor of the Colony of the Massachusetts Bay.’ A second edition with few alterations appeared at Boston in 2 vols. 1853. Some severe but not altogether undeserved strictures upon the editing were passed in ‘A Review of Winthrop's “Journal,” as edited by James Savage.’ The ‘Journal,’ to give it its original and appropriate title, is an invaluable document, no less for its historical detail than as a revelation of puritan modes of thought and administration.
