The New International Encyclopædia/Wheelwright, John

WHEEL′WRIGHT, John (1592-1679). A New England clergyman. He was born in Lincolnshire, England, graduated at Cambridge in 1614, and was vicar of Bilsby (1623-31); suspended by Laud for nonconformity, he came to America in 1636, and became pastor at Braintree, Mass. His adoption of the religious views of his sister-in-law, Anne Hutchinson (q.v.), alienated Wilson, pastor of the Boston church; this and a sermon in her defense, considered seditious, caused his banishment from the colony by the General Court (1638). He went to New Hampshire, founded the town of Exeter, and organized a church; in 1643 he removed with a part of the church to Wells, Maine. His sentence of banishment having been revoked on his declaration that he had erred, at least in part, he returned to Massachusetts and was minister at Hampton, 1646-54; went to England in 1657 and was well received by Oliver Cromwell, who had been his classmate; he returned in 1660 and became minister at Salisbury, N. H. (1662). The sermon alluded to above is in the Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, ed. by C. Deane (Boston, 1867). Wheelwright's writings with memoirs by Bell were published by the Prince Society (Boston, 1876). The chief are Mercurius Americanus (1645), a reply to Thomas Welde's Rise, Reign and Ruin by the Familists . . . in New England, and his Vindication (1654).