by Winthrop's pacific demeanour. An insulting letter from Dudley is said to have been returned by Winthrop with the remark, ‘I am not willing to keep such an occasion of provocation by me.’
In 1634 the positions of Winthrop and Dudley (now reconciled) as governor and deputy were reversed. From July in this year the town records of Boston are extant as commenced in Winthrop's own hand. Their early pages record the provision of a common space and a free school for the town, and sumptuary laws against the wearing of lace and the use of tobacco in public. In May 1635 John Haynes was elected governor. Winthrop supported at this time the disciplinary banishment of Roger Williams. He was nevertheless in the following November called to account for dealing too remissly in point of justice. The ministers sided against him, and Winthrop acknowledged that he was ‘convinced that he had failed in overmuch lenity and remissness, and would endeavour (by God's assistance) to take a more strict course hereafter’ (Journal, i. 213). Articles were accordingly drawn up to the effect that there should be more strictness used in civil government and military discipline. These articles enjoined among other things that ‘trivial things should be ended in towns, &c.,’ that the magistrates should ‘in tenderness and love admonish one another, without reserving any secret grudge,’ and that the magistrates should henceforth ‘appear more solemnly in public, with attendance, apparel, and open notice of their entrance into the court’ (ib. p. 214). From this same year Winthrop abandoned as ‘superstitious’ the commonly received names of the days and months. In 1636 Sir Henry Vane was chosen governor, while Winthrop and Dudley were made councillors for life. The ferment raised by the ‘antinomian’ opinions of Anne Hutchinson came to a head in 1637. Vane championed a liberal and tolerant admission of the new opinions; Winthrop supported the ministers in their demand for a more repressive policy. The struggle was finally decided by Winthrop's election as governor in preference to Vane at a general court held at Newtown (now Cambridge) on 17 May 1637. Winthrop was in November instrumental in banishing Anne Hutchinson ‘for having impudently persisted in untruth.’ Two of her followers were disfranchised and fined, eight disfranchised, two fined, three banished, and seventy-six disarmed. In order to prevent a possible repetition of such an incident, the general court passed an order to the effect that ‘none should be allowed to inhabit at Boston but by permission of the magistrates.’ Winthrop defended the order in an elaborate paper. Vane replied in ‘A Briefe Answer’ (so called), to which Winthrop rejoined. In the meantime Vane had left for England, the governor providing for his ‘honourable dismission.’
After a two years' interval Winthrop resumed the governorship in 1642, in which year the functions of deputies and magistrates in the general court were differentiated, and the first ‘commencement’ of Harvard College in Cambridge was recorded. In 1638 Winthrop had invited out to Boston his nephew (Sir) George Downing, who was educated at the newly founded college. In this same year as governor he had shrewdly evaded the demand of the commissioners of plantations for the return of the company's charter. In 1643 the plantation was divided into the four shires of Suffolk, Norfolk, Essex, and Middlesex. Both Groton and Winthrop were commemorated by place-names. In the same year the four New England colonies of Massachusetts and Plymouth, Connecticut and New Haven, were confederated under a written agreement. In 1645 Winthrop, being then deputy-governor, was arraigned for exercising a strained and arbitrary authority, and the charge acquired some seriousness from the fact that it was supported by a minister; but he was eventually acquitted, and the minister and his followers fined. On his acquittal he made a speech famous in the annals of Massachusetts, and cited by De Tocqueville as containing a noble definition of liberty. In May 1646 Robert Child and six others addressed to the court a remonstrance, complaining that as non-church members they were excluded from the civil privileges of Englishmen. But Winthrop, now again governor, was staunch in his support of the religious oligarchy, and drew up (4 Nov.) a ‘stiff declaration.’ The petitioners declaring their intention of carrying their appeal to parliament, Child was arrested by Winthrop's order, and (with his followers) imprisoned and heavily fined. The remainder of his tenure of the chief magistracy, which terminated only with his life, was uneventful, save for the death of his faithful Margaret on 14 June 1647. She was a woman, wrote a contemporary, ‘of singular prudence, modesty, and virtue, and specially beloved and honoured of all the country’ (her life has been sketched by James Anderson in ‘Memorable Women of Puritan Times,’ 1862, and forms the subject of a separate memoir by Alice M. Earle, 1895).
