Riches and honors Bulkeley lays aside

To please his Christ, for whom he now doth war.

Edward Johnson: Wonder-working Providence

 

 

Reverend Peter Bulkeley was not so hard pressed. He was not suspended

until 1634. He was minister in the parish church in Odell, Bedfordshire,

assistant to his father in 1610 and succeeded his father, Reverend

Edward Bulkeley, on his death in 1620. He lived in the handsome

parsonage where he had been born in 1583. He had nine sons and

two daughters by his first wife Jane Alleyn. Her nephew

Oliver St. John was at one time Lord Mayor of London. His second

wife. Grace Chetwood, was twenty years younger than he. She married

him a month before sailing, in April, 1635, and came to Massachusetts

with him and three stepchildren in the Susan and Ellen sailing in May

1635. She suffered a mysterious coma on the voyage. Both wives were

daughters of baronets. Peter Bulkeley was a graduate of St. John's

College, Cambridge, in 1605. Afterwards4ie~was a fellow and Univer-

sity preacher and was a canon of Lichfield for one year in 1609. His

oldest son Edward had come to Boston in 1634. Edward probably pre-

pared the way for his father who went immediately to live in an empty

house in Cambridge and made friends with Thomas Shepard. When

Thomas Shepard was chosen minister of the Cambridge church,

Bulkeley lent him the money to buy a-parsonage. Young Edward be-

came minister of the church in Marshfield. (Mrs. Bulkeley's "miraculous"

recovery is now explained as an incident of pregnancy.)

 

His wealth and connections with the landed gentry doubtless made

Peter Bulkeley's path easier under Laud's persecution. When he was

suspended in 1634, he confessed that he did not use the surplice nor

cross, accounting them superstitions, but his case was allowed to drag

while he liquidated his holdings.-He was able to take £6000 capital

with him to the new world. The authorities did not appoint a successor

in Odell until a month after his departure. Cotton Mather expressly

states in Magnolia Christi that the good Bishop of Lincoln connived

at his non-conformity. In spite of the restrictions about emigration,

Bulkeley left under his own name, while his wife and children joined

him at the last minute on the-Susan^and Ellen after first signing to sail

on another ship. With them they brought a carpenter, Thomas Dane,

who was to work out his passage by building a house and mill for

Peter Bulkeley in Concord.   ——