THE FIRST CHURCH IN DOVER, AND ITS PASTOR.
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��jecture whether the humble Elder knew that he was of the same blood with that Margary Wentworth who married Sir John Seymour, and was mother of that Jane Seymour, wife of King Henry VIII., whose son reigned as King Ed- ward VI. The old Dover blood was mixed. Thus, Francis Champernown, who lived on Great Bay, had in his veins the blood of the Plantagenets. All this availed little where a sturdy yeoman's muscles were more than high blood in subduing the forests. Elder Wntworth lived simply, uprightly, manfully. He himself became ancestor of three Gover- nors of his name, who governed New Hampshire from 1717 to 1776; of the John who was President of our rebellious Legislature of 1775 ; of the John who signed the old Articles of Confederation in the Continental Congress ; of the John, now of Chicago, long in Congress: of Tappau, another Congressman. Even our present Senator, Edward H. Rollins, is a descendant of the Elder. That blood has given Colonels and Generals innu- merable; and, in literary lines, Mrs. Gore, the English novelist, and Mrs. Sigourney, the American poet, loved to trace their descent from the Elder of the Dover -First Church.
The Year 1638.
When that still visible fortification was building, the First Church was in the twenty-niuth year of its age. We go back, then, to that date, December, 163S. In that month Hanserd Knollys organized the Church which has now had an unin- terrupted life of two hundred and thirty- nine years.
The church undoubtedly, in point of
age, ranks second in New Hampshire. The church in Hampton precedes it by several months. Occasional attempts have been made to give the Exeter church also a priority, but without suc- cess. For, first, the original Exeter church was made up of members whom the records of the First Boston Church show were dismissed for that purpose only in January, 1639, or a month later than the actual organization of the Do- ver church. Secondly, that first Exeter church became extinct in 1642, when Wheelwright and his friends, who con-
��stituted that church, felt obliged to quit Exeter and take refuge in Maine, on ac- count of tl^e extension of Massachusetts authority over this territory. In 1644, some Exeter people attempted to organ- ize a new church, but Massachusetts for- bade it. There was thereafter no church in Exeter until its present First Church was organized, namely, Sept. 21, 1698 ; whose records commence thus: ,k The order of proceeding in gathering a partic- ular Church in Exeter." Yet the Con- gregational annual reports give to the present First Church in Exeter the date 1639, a date belonging to an organization dead and gone fifty-six years before this present one was gathered. History is frequently written in this way.
The ecclesiastical history of the First Parish, the successor of the town, dates still further back. Its first meeting house was erected in 1633, and it had " an able and worthy Puritan minister," Wil- liam Leverich, the first minister of New Hampshire. That appears to have been the first church edifice built in this State. George Burdett was the next succeeding minister in Dover. Then came Hanserd Knollys, founder of the Church.
Knollys was a Cambridge man in edu- cation ; had been a minister of the Church of England, but resigned his living from Puritan convictions; was harassed by imprisonment and persecution, and left England; was forbidden by the Massa- chusetts government to remain in that Colony because thought to be Autino- nian ; and at the age of forty found ref- uge on the free Piscataqua.
Here he found a settlement originated under Episcopal auspices, — Edward Hil- ton always a Churchman, — although en- larged under other influences ; a people mixed in character, but none of them emigrants for conscience 1 sake, and even the Puritan portion not of the severe Bay type ; the colony a northern refuge of liberty for men who could not endure the Massachusetts arbitrary rule, as Rhode Island was the southern refuge ; no church organized after fifteen years of colonial life; and a minister, George Bur- dett, who, a Churchman, was in corres- - pondence with Archbishop Laud, and who had succeeded in getting himself
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