became one of the patentees under the royal charter (of March 4, 1629) for the Massachusetts company,* contributing £100 towards the expense of procuring the grant. He took an active share in the organization of the company. On March 5th he was named on an important committee, and on May 13th was chosen one of the Court of Assistants, or as we should say, board of directors. John Davenport was also one of those who had put money into the company, and was deeply interested in its success. These men did not all join the enterprise from the same cause. Some were actuated by religious zeal, and others by motives of commercial speculation. The former, says Johnson, in his early chronicle of New England, styled the "Wonderworking Providence," joined "themselves with merchants and others, who had an eye at a profitable plantation, who had not herein been deceived, would they have stayed their time."§ It seems probable that Eaton bought into the company from both motives; but at this time he was not contemplating a removal to New England, nor yet in favor of the project of transferring the government of the corporation there.|| On August 28, 1629, the question of this transfer was brought directly before the Court of Assistants. A committee of seven was appointed to report upon its expediency, the next morning. Four of the members, Mr. Nathaniel Wright, Mr. Eaton, Mr. Thomas Adams and Mr. Spurstowe, were to prepare arguments against it the other three, Sir Richard Saltonstall, Mr. Isaac Johnson and Captain John Venn, were to prepare arguments for it, each side being at liberty to call to their assistance such others as they pleased. It is not improbable that we have in a document by some attributed to Winthrop and by others to Rev. Francis Higginson, which has been preserved for us by Hutchinson, part of *Records of Massachusetts, I, 6. Bacon's Hist. Discourses, 82, n. Rec. of Mass., I, 30, 40, 44. § XII Mass. Hist. Soc. Coll., 64. || Magnalia, Book II, Chap. IX, § 6. ¶ See T. W. Higginson's Life of Francis Higginson, Chap. IV, in which this paper is given entire. It is entitled the arguments produced upon this occasion. "Generall considerations for the plantation in New England, with an answer to several objections," and certainly came from the hand of some one deeply interested in this project, and gifted with great powers of reasoning and expression. Its style and tone point strongly to Winthrop as its author,* and it Iwould have been natural for Sir Richard Saltonstall and Isaac Johnson to call on him for aid in stating their side of the case. Higginson had left England for Salem in the preceding spring, and the paper was not one which he would have been likely to prepare before his departure, which was a sudden affair, taking place in April, within a month after his invitation from the company to go out with the Endicott colony. To The report of the committee was presented to a General Court of the company at London, on August 29th (1629), and debated at length. The result was a vote to transfer the patent and with it the seat of government to New England. accomplish this, however, was found to require a definite agreement between the two classes of the "adventurers here at home and the planters that are to go over," and it was not till October 20th that the terms were satisfactorily arranged.† On 'that day a new set of officers was elected, headed by John Winthrop as governor. Eaton's name appears on the list of the eighteen assistants, as one of the eight last named, none of whom were, or probably ever had any intention of being, of the party of emigrants that set sail with the charter in the following spring. They were chosen, no doubt, simply to fill out the board temporarily, with no view of their qualifying by taking the required oath of office, their omission to do which would create eight vacancies to be filled by the election of suitable persons among those actually resident in Massachusetts. Eaton was, however, * It is written from the standpoint of an English gentleman of independent fortune, and speaks scornfully of the Southern plantations, already established, as in the hands of "the very scum of the land." It was in this light that Winthrop regarded the Virginians, whom he speaks of in his History of New England as "usually drunken." Sherman, Governmental History of the United States, 242, 243. the owner of a sixteenth part of the ship Eagle, which the company bought for the voyage, and re-named the Arbella, in honor of Lady Arbella Johnson, the wife of one of the assistants, who went on board of her.* He was also one of a committee of ten of the "undertakers" in the enterprise, chosen December 1, 1629, to manage the joint stock for seven years.† For some years more Eaton was to remain in London, living, as Mather assures us, as a "merchant of great credit and fashion." The son of a canon of Lincoln, and the husband of a bishop's daughter, his family connections, not less than the relations he had himself maintained with the sovereigns of two kingdoms, must have made him one of the leaders in the society of the city. About this time, his step-mother, Ann Yale, became the wife of Edward Hopkins, a prosperous Turkey merchant, § whose uncle, Sir Henry Lello of Ashdon, held the lucrative sinecure offices of Warden of the Fleet prison, and keeper of the Palace of Westminster.|| It was For the times Eaton might be reckoned a rich man. not a day of great fortunes in the city. That did not set in until towards the close of the century. At the accession of William and Mary there were on the London Exchange more merchants worth £10,000, than at the beginning of the Commonwealth there were those worth £1,000.¶ Eaton rated his estate in the tax-roll of the early New Haven planters at £3,000. This could not have included any of his real estate in England, and we know that he continued to be a landowner there throughout his life. It is not likely, either, that it embraced all his other property. That he had, after his removal from London, some business interests there may safely be inferred from the fact that his younger brother, Nathaniel Eaton, the first * Mather, Magnalia, Book I, Chap. V; 1 Palfrey, Hist. of N. E., 311; Atwater, Hist. of New Haven Colony, 51. Rec. of Mass. Bay Co., I, 65. § Hutchinson's Hist. of Mass. Bay, I, 82. IN. E. Hist. and Gen. Register, XXXVIII, 313. ¶ Hume, Hist. of England, IV, 477. teacher* at what afterwards grew to be Harvard College, got £100 in August, 1639, from a Boston merchant for his draft for that sum on John Hobson, a merchant in Coleman Street, London, accompanied by a letter of advice to the latter, to the effect that he would receive an order from Theophilus Eaton for its discharge. Theophilus, however, refused to give any such order, and no doubt it was a fraudulent trick of Nathaniel (who was the black sheep of the family) for borrowing on his brother's credit.† If Eaton was worth, as is probable, something like four thousand pounds when he left England, it was a fortune corresponding to one of over $100,000 at the present time, considered in relation to the purchasing power of money, the scale of living, and the general averages of mercantile capital actively employed. The houses of London, when Eaton lived there, were generally of wood and plaster. It was not till after the great fire of 1666 that they were replaced with brick and stone.‡ Tradesmen lived over their shops. A house suitable to Eaton's position could probably have been hired for £50 a year. A staircase up which two people could go abreast was deemed a large one.§ The houses were closely crowded together, so that in St. Stephen's parish there were fourteen hundred communicants. It is probable that Eaton lost rather than made money by his investments in the Massachusetts Bay Company. We next hear of him in connection with its affairs, when the Quo Warranto proceedings were brought in 1635 to vacate the charter, by an indictment against him and twenty-three others jointly as being associated under it. The usurpations charged were the trans * Timothy Farrar (as Quidem ignotus) styled him the "First President of Harvard College." A professor he certainly was. Am. Antiquarian Soc'y Proc., VI, N. S., 323, 335; N. E. Hist. and Gen. Reg., IX, 269. Lechford's Note Book, 177, 147, 123. Macaulay, Hist. of England, I, 364, 366. § Ashton, Social Life in the Reign of Queen Anne, 48. Atwater, Hist. of New Haven Colony, 32. fer of the government to New England, and the extent of the civil authority there set up, extending even to sentences of life and death. At the Michaelmas Term in that year, he appeared in the Court of King's Bench and entered a disclaimer, that is, made no claim, so far as he was concerned, that the proceedings complained of were warranted by the charter; and a judgment of ouster was rendered in favor of the crown. * In taking this course, Eaton simply bowed to the storm. There had been no parliament for six years. The monarchy seemed fast becoming an absolute one. Ship money had already been demanded from the city of London.† A patent had been issued during the preceding year to Archbishop Laud and others, giving them a broad authority over all the American colonies, which extended to directing the revocation of their charters or the removal of their governors. It was useless to try to defend charters in court, when, if the defence were maintained, they could be annulled out of court. A younger brother of Eaton, whom he had helped through Cambridge University, had taken orders, a few years before this time, and soon identified himself with the Puritan movement. In 1632 he was committed to Newgate by Archbishop Laud as a dangerous schismatic, and after procuring bail, no doubt in the person of Theophilus, had forfeited it early in the next year. England was now no safe place for him, and he naturally looked towards New England, to which one of his companions in prison, Rev. John Lathrop, had already escaped.§ No doubt his influence had something to do with determining Theophilus to join Davenport in the settlement of a new plantation here. It was certainly not long before the party was made up that Theophilus made up his mind to be one of it.|| In 1637, both brothers, and probably Nathaniel Eaton also, crossed the sea. Nathaniel, then twenty-eight years old, who *N. E. Hist. and Gen Reg., XXXVIII, 205. Entinck, Hist. and Survey of London, II, 140. See copy of this commission, dated April 28, 1634, in Proceedings of the Am. Antiquarian Society. XIII, N. S., 213. § Atwater, Hist. of New Haven Colony, 37, 38. | Mather, Magnalia, Book II, Chap. IX. TN. E. Hist. and Gen. Reg., XL, 294. |