404 witchcraft Beset with a large family to provide for, troubled by the widespread corruption of the Court of Wards, and deeply disturbed by the government’s religious and political practices, he threw in his lot with the fledgling Massachusetts Bay Company When the company agreed to turn control of itself over to the residents of the colony it was about to establish, Winthrop agreed to be one of those residents, and the company elected him governor He sailed in April 1630, leaving many of his family in England Winthrop set the character of early Massachusetts in a sermon preached on board the Arabella In that sermon, he argued that the colony would be created as a covenant with God with civil and ecclesiastical power consolidated in the hands of the colony’s leaders He devoted his political life, both in and out of office, to that principle He also maintained that Massachusetts should be “a city upon a hill,” chosen by God to serve as an example to England of what God intended for his people Despite his best efforts, Massachusetts was not the docile, benign autocracy Winthrop had envisioned The individualistic Roger Williams, with his separatism and his attacks on both the colony’s ownership of its land and its claim to enforce religious conformity, was a sore trial for Winthrop Although Winthrop liked Williams personally, he understood that Williams’s continued residence in Massachusetts was detrimental to the future of the colony and supported his banishment in 1635 No sooner than the Williams affair had been settled, Winthrop had to deal with a similarly destructive issue in the antinomian crisis surrounding Anne Hutchinson Hutchinson’s view that salvation was gained only through God’s grace, and not through the performance of works, challenged clerical leadership and church discipline and had unacceptable implications for social order and the authority of the established government Perhaps because she was a woman, he showed far less consideration for her than he had for Williams when she was banished from the colony and later excommunicated from her church In both cases, Winthrop certainly showed no sympathy toward those who had challenged the colony’s mission, but his goal was the survival of the colony, and in this he did what he believed to be necessary He remained active in the life of the colony after these confrontations, serving as governor, deputy governor, magistrate, and diplomat in negotiating the formation of the United Colonies in 1644 He was its first president His History of New England, 1630–1649 is a major source for the early history of both Massachusetts and New England It reveals little about Winthrop’s personal life, but it does show a man who put the greater good of his colony’s survival above all else Further reading: Bremer, Francis John Winthrop: America’s Forgotten Founding Father New York: Oxford University Press, 2003; Morgan, Edmund S The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop Boston: Little, Brown, 1958; Rutman, Darrett Winthrop’s Boston: A Portrait of a Puritan Town New York: W W Norton, 1972 H Roger King witchcraft Since early medieval times there had been persecution of women deemed to be witches throughout Europe, but the period from 1450 until 1750 perhaps saw the greatest number of people identified as witches being killed With the fear of witchcraft beginning about 1450, many countries started enacting laws against witches These involved targeting older women who uttered curses, lived with black cats, or embarked on “strange” practices The persecution took place all over Europe, both in heavily Roman Catholic areas such as Spain and southern Germany, and in Protestant England and Denmark As witches were deemed to be heretics, their penalty was to be burned at the stake, usually after confessions had been extracted under torture If the women confessed their sins, in some places they were garroted before their body was burned In most cases the women suffocated from the smoke long before being burned In 1577, it was recorded that 400 witches were burned in the French city of Toulouse alone In 1487, two Dominican monks, Jacob Sprenger and Heinrich Kramer, wrote the Malleus maleficarum or The Witches’ Hammer, which was initially submitted to the Faculty of Theology at the University of Cologne This book was an attempt to have a “scientific” method of identifying witches, as the authors both were inquisitors The book went through 29 editions until the printing of the Lyon edition of 1669, with the Spanish Inquisition, in 1538, cautioning people that not everything in the book was true King James VI of Scotland (later King James I of England) also became interested in witches after a visit to Denmark In 1597, he wrote about them in his book Daemonologie He