♂John Coggeshall

John Coggeshall (baptized 9 December 1601 – died 27 November 1647) was a mercer of Boston who was disfranchised and disarmed by Massachusetts in the Antinomian controversy and ten years later became the first president of the colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations^W, dying six months into his term. He was the eighth great-grandfather of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through his son Joshua Coggeshall (1632–1688).

Early life

He was baptized at Halstead in Essex on 9 December 1601, the son of John and Ann (Butter) Coggeshall. His grandfather, also John Coggeshall, had been buried there eleven months earlier, and his grandmother Katherine was still living in 1608/9, when she and his father were taxed together at Halstead. His father was buried at Halstead on 4 August 1615, while the boy was still a minor, and his mother Anne later lived at Castle Hedingham. Three of the children of his marriage to Mary were baptized at Castle Hedingham between 1626 and 1630, before the family sailed for New England in 1632 on the Lyon.

Massachusetts

The couple joined the church at Roxbury and moved to Boston in 1634, where “John Coggeshall mercer and Marie his wife” were admitted to the Boston church. He was a freeman from November 1632, a Boston selectman several times, and Boston’s deputy to the General Court from 1634 to 1637.

The Antinomian controversy^W (1636–1638) was a religious and political dispute that split the Massachusetts Bay colony. Anne Hutchinson^W, who held popular meetings in her Boston home, and her brother-in-law the Rev. John Wheelwright^W taught that salvation came through God’s grace felt inwardly, the “covenant of grace”. They charged most of the colony’s ministers with preaching a “covenant of works”, which judged a person’s standing by outward behavior. Their opponents called them “Antinomians”, meaning people who reject the moral law. The dispute pitted much of the Boston church against the colony’s leadership. In 1637 the General Court banished Wheelwright and Hutchinson and ordered their leading supporters disarmed, and many of those supporters went on to found Portsmouth on Aquidneck Island.

In that controversy he stood with Wheelwright. On 2 November 1637, when he told the General Court that Wheelwright was innocent and “persecuted for the truth”, the court dismissed him as a member, disfranchised him, and later ordered him disarmed, and Boston chose another deputy. Because he had already been put out of the court, he had no vote at Anne Hutchinson’s trial there a few days later, although some modern accounts say he voted for her acquittal.

Rhode Island

On 7 March 1638 he signed the Portsmouth Compact^W, fourth of the founding settlers of Portsmouth on Aquidneck Island, and served the settlement as treasurer and elder. In April 1639 he was among the founders of Newport, and he was later an assistant of the joint government of Portsmouth and Newport. In May 1647 the first general assembly under the new charter chose him as its moderator and then as president of the colony, and the same assembly adopted the colony’s first code of laws. He died at Newport on 27 November 1647, and was probably buried there the same day.

Family

His mother, Anne Coggeshall of Castle Hedingham, made her will in 1645. She left him her house and lands at Sible Hedingham, “my son John Coggeshall, now dwelling in New England”, and a legacy to his children John, Anne, Mary, “Jos[ua]” and James. The couple’s children were John, Anne (who married Peter Easton), Mary, James, Joshua, Hananiel, Wait (who married Daniel Gould) and Bedaiah. His widow Mary lived at Newport until 1684.

Notes

The date of death

The Friends’ record of deaths at Newport gives the death on 27 November 1647 and his age as 48 years, which would put his birth about 1599. The baptism at Halstead on 9 December 1601 is followed here. A FamilySearch index of a later abstract card gives 27 September, but in the Quaker reckoning the ninth month is November. The burial date comes from Anderson’s compiled account, which cites the same Friends’ records.