Puritan Wives: Margaret Tyndal Winthrop and her extraordinary love letters
By Elizabeth Prata
Any regular reader of this space knows I love the Puritans. I loved them at first historically, then after conversion, spiritually. They were an interesting group. It should be noted that God preserved a majority of their writings for us from which we are still benefiting.
The Puritans are often portrayed in secular culture as dour, joyless, strict men who suppressed their wives spiritually and emotionally. The wives in turn were usually portrayed as overtired, harried, and overworked from having so many children. Puritan wives are seen as scraggly haired, harried, burdened women with so many children the Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe had nothing on them, with children sleeping in nooks and cupboards and an endless conveyor belt of household tasks that drove them into an early grave.
But it isn’t universally true. People are people, of course, so here and there were a few sour notes, just like in any generation. But the Puritans were an earnest group, dedicated to the ideals held in the Bible and when their efforts to purify the Church of England were met with persecution, they bravely set out to establish a society more closely aligned with God’s standards, in the New World.
Let’s take a look at one Puritan marriage, John Winthrop and his wife Margaret Tyndal Winthrop.
John Winthrop lived from 1588 to 1649. He was an English lawyer and a leading figure in the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630. This was the settlement that followed the original founding of the Plymouth Colony by the Pilgrims in 1620. He then served as the settlement’s governor for 12 of the first 20 years. If you are familiar with the phrase “city upon a hill” that was John Winthrop’s vision for the colony, captured in his preserved writings. He delivered that sermon aboard the sailing ship Arbella, and it’s one of America’s most famous sermons.
John Winthrop married Margaret Tyndal in 1618. She was 27 years old. (John was 30, Margaret was his 3rd wife, the previous 2 had died). Margaret was an educated young lady who knew how to read and write. Her family was a leading Puritan family of the time, and Margaret had been raised in Puritan Christian fashion.
John was working as a lawyer in London, which was about 100 miles away, so after marriage she moved to John’s father’s estate at Groton Manor to help him manage the Manor during the work-periods John was away. She was exceptionally capable to do this.
They communicated frequently through letters, many of which were preserved. John’s letters to Margaret were mostly absent of local news, they expressed mundane household items to each other, discussed the children’s sicknesses and recoveries, servant issues, and the like. They also expressed warm endearments to each other, belying the joyless Puritan marriage so often depicted in secular media.
Here is one example of John to Margaret, with modernized spelling:
“And now, my sweet love, let me a while solace myself in the remembrance of our love, of which this springtime of our acquaintance can put forth as yet no more but the leaves and blossoms whilst the fruit lies wrapped up in the tender bud of hope. … Let it be our care and labor to preserve these hopeful buds from the beasts of the field, and from frosts and other injuries of the air, lest our fruit fall off ere it be ripe, or lose aught in the beauty and pleasantness of it.”
And Margaret to John:
What can be more pleasing to a wife, than to hear of the welfare of her best beloved, and how he is pleased with her poor endeavors. I blush to hear myself commended, knowing my own wants; but it is your love that conceives the best and makes all things seem better than they are. I wish that I may be always pleasing to thee, and that those comforts we have in each other may be daily increased as far as they be pleasing to God.
Margaret constantly prayed for her husband, unfailingly encouraged him, and always looked to her family and also the needy around her. She expressed many times how grateful she was for her husband’s counsel, and likewise John was appreciative to receive her genuine support and encouragement.
At one point, John had been taken very ill in London. He had advised Margaret not to come because winter travel was dangerous and harsh. Nevertheless, though Margaret was an obedient wife, signing her letters thus and her husband affirming it, she flew to him in haste anyway. After her return, she wrote a encouraging note to him (I modernized the spelling), reminding him of their mutual devotion to their great God:
I desire in this and all other things to submit unto his holy will; it is the Lord, let him do what seemeth good in his own eyes. He will do nothing but that shall be for our good if we had hearts to trust in him , & all shall be for the best what so ever it shall please him to exercise us withall. He wounds & he can heal. He hath never failed to do us good, & now he will not shake us off, but continue the same God still that he hath been heretofore.
Margaret’s faith was founded upon the Rock, and thus, so was her marriage.
Husband and wife continued to write constantly and with the same amount of dignity and respect for each other for the next 12 years. But then came the Puritan persecutions. John lost his position at court. He saw the handwriting on the wall. He wrote: “My dear wife, I am verily persuaded God will bring some heavy affliction upon this land, and that speedily.“
John decided to strike out for the New World. With John so often in London, Margaret had been competently handling the affairs at the manor with all it entailed: accounting and records, managing people, raising the family.
Emigrating to the New World with all its newness, dangers, and lack of comforts must have put Margaret into a tailspin. The Pilgrims had only landed there less than 10 years prior. But she handled it with godly aplomb.
On her saying she will ‘cheerfully’ leave Groton Manor, John replied, “My comfort is that thou art willing to be my companion in what place or condition soever, in weal or woe.”
Within one year of John’s losing his position at court, he’d gathered a willing group to emigrate with him, supplies, ships, and had sailed for nearly unknown shores.
Margaret stayed behind to handle the increasing pressures at Groton Manor. The Manor’s tenants knew the Master had gone and became reluctant payers of rent, and she was also pregnant, and looking after the younger children who did not go with their father to the new world. Also during this time Margaret prepared for their own journey to leave England for Massachusetts Bay Colony. With the help of John’s eldest son who stayed behind to chaperone Margaret when the time came, she arranged to sell Groton Manor.
Yet they both agreed though they will be separated, they would set aside Monday and Friday at 5 pm to spend an hour in spiritual communion with each other, praying for each other and meditating on their godly marriage.
The pair were separated a year. Margaret had given birth shortly after John departed but sadly on the way over the baby died. She was buried at sea.
LOL, when Margaret arrived John had arranged to have a military cannon salute and a ship parade around the bay as she was rowed in.
Once reunited, to their mutual joy, Margaret set about helping the needy, raising the family, and supporting her husband, now Governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony.
In 1647 Margaret succumbed to an epidemic sickness raging among the colonists and she died at age 56, an aged person for that time.
John wrote that Margaret, “left this world for a better, being about fifty-six years of age, a woman of singular virtue, prudence, modesty, and piety, and specially beloved and honored of all the country.”
The couple set their love of God as primary in life, even before their love of each other. Their marriage was one of love, mutual devotion, dignity, and godliness. If you, dear sister, are looking for a historical model of a good and godly wife, look to Margaret Tyndal Winthrop. The inscription in the book of her published letters reads,
In memory of the name she is privileged to bear, which will ever be associated with all that constitutes the grace of CHRISTIAN WOMANHOOD.
Epilogue: Margaret and John were close Boston neighbors with Anne Bradstreet & husband Simon, and Anne Hutchinson & husband William, which whom they all shared a well. I’ll re-post about Anne Hutchinson and write about Anne Bradstreet in my ‘Puritan Wives series’.
Here are some resources:
A Model of Christian Charity, sermon by John Winthrop
Some old Puritan love-letters: John and Margaret Winthrop, 1618-1638; ed. by Joseph Hopkins Twichell
