Twelve of the most important people from southeast Lincolnshire are celebrated in the precincts of the St. Botolph Church in Boston, England. Anne Hutchinson, America’s first campaigner for women’s rights and Anne Bradstreet. America’s first published poet, are the two most famous women in early colonial American history. Thomas Dudley, Richard Bellingham, John Leverett, and Simon Bradstreet dominated the governance of the colony to the end of the 17th century. Between them they served as governor or deputy governor of Massachusetts for all but 4 of its first 56 years, to be followed by Dudley’s son, Joseph in the first decade of the 18th. John Cotton was the spiritual leader of the colony. Thomas Leverett, Cotton’s right-hand-man in both Bostons, became Boston’s, Ruling Elder. The noble couple, Isaac and Arbella had made the supreme sacrifice, leaving a life of great luxury for the mortal perils of the wilderness. Atherton Hough, prominent as mayor and churchwarden of Boston, and William Coddington, a young but wealthy promoter of the colony, both became ruling magistrates in Massachusetts but both sacrificed their careers in the new Boston in support of Anne Hutchinson during the Antinomian controversy, which so divided the colony. Coddington became one of the founding governors of Rhode Island.
