Notes |
- "He was admitted pensioner at Emmanuel College, Cambridge 4 June 1613, and obtained a B.A. degree in 1616-7, and a M.A. degree in 1620. He was ordained a deacon 3 May 1621, and a priest 4 May 1621. He served as chaplain to Roger Townsend, Bart., and to Nathaniel Bacon, Knt. He served as Rector of Skirbeck, Lincolnshire, 1625-36. They immigrated to New England in 1636, where he became pastor at Lynn, Massachusetts." [Royal Ancestry]
"In early April 1636 he set sail for Massachusetts (Cotton Mather's Magnalia, 1853 ed., p. 505) with his second wife Elizabeth, his three year old son Samuel, and his daughter Dorothy. Samuel found the voyage so bad that he wrote of it, 'I would much rather have undergone six weeks' imprisonment for a good cause than six weeks of such terrible seasickness.' He landed at Boston on May 26th, and soon became pastor of Saugus, which was later re-named Lynn in his honor, for that was the name of the place in co. Norfolk, England where he spent several happy years as a young man." [John Roger Scott Whiting, citation details below]
On his decision to emigrate to New England, he "made the break complete by sacrificing his property in England and refusing to retain any part of his landed estates from which he would have received an annual income. 'I am going into the wilderness to sacrifice unto the Lord, & I will not leave a hoof behind me.'" [John Roger Scott Whiting, citation details below]
He appears to have been a genuine moderate among the Puritans, a believer in true religious liberty, and uncowed by the authoritarianism that pervaded the governance of the Bay Colony. He condemned those who wished to prohibit Episcopalians from celebrating Christmas, and also those who drove Ann Hutchinson and John Wheelwright out of Massachusetts. He refused, despite a order from Governor Endicott, to preach against the moral menace posed by (wait for it) men choosing to wear long hair. He engaged in a long legal wrangle with the county court of Ipswich over that court's declaration that "no cause is so purely ecclesiastical but the civil power may, in its way deal therein," a principle that Whiting flatly rejected. Even though his son John (d. 1689) returned to England to become an Anglican priest, joining the church hierarchy from which his father had been cast out, Samuel maintained his love and support for his son. Finally, the Rev. Samuel Whiting spoke in opposition to the early stirrings of Massachusetts witch mania.
"Samuel was appointed overseer of Harvard College in 1654, a post given to the most learned scholars in the colony. His interest in popular education was strong. He not only gave a college training to all his sons, and classical instruction to his daughters, but taught the catechism to the youth of his parish on Sundays at his house and gave gratuitous instruction in languages on week-days to all the children of the town who wanted to learn. It was his belief, which he acted upon, that the general spread of useful knowledge was essential for the making of good citizens and good Christians. Thus he made his contribution to the New England system of common schools." [John Roger Scott Whiting, citation details below]
William Whiting's Memoir of Rev. Samuel Whiting, D.D., and of His Wife, Elizabeth St. John (second edition, Boston: Rand, Avery, & Company, 1873) is a notably unreliable source. It draws heavily on the supposed diary of a certain Obadiah Turner, said to have been a parishioner of the Rev. Whiting; as noted by John Roger Scott Whiting (citation details below), this diary was in all likelihood a forgery concocted by James Robinson Newhall for an 1862 work about early Lynn, Massachusetts entitled Lin: or Jewels of the Third Plantation. Other defects of William Whiting's work include a badly flawed pedigree for the Rev. Samuel Whiting's wife, Elizabeth St. John. And notwithstanding the book's title, there is no evidence that the Rev. Samuel Whiting ever obtained a D.D.
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