John Winthrop First Governor of the Masschusetts Colony

THE COMING MAN 23
employments and happenings in those years, from
1604 to 1629, we are now touching upon. They
brought him many changes, domestic and other.
With Mary Forth, the wife of his youth, dimly
shadowed to us as a woman of still ways, ever
dutiful as modest, Winthrop lived eleven happy
years, till she was parted from him by her death
in 16 15.
He was shortly married again, to Thomasine Clop-
ton, of a neighbouring family
of distinction in Suf-
folk, to which belonged that Sir Hugh Clopton of
Stratford-upon-Avon, the appalling
fate of whose
daughter, entombed alive there in the Great Plague,
Shakspeare
" Romeo and Juliet."
The term of this union was sadly brief. Just after
is surmised to have turned to account in
the close of its first year the new wife died in child-
bed, and her child with her, leaving Winthrop, not
yet twenty-nine years old, the second time a widower.
Nothing that he ever wrote is to this day more mov-
ing to read than the long, broken-hearted rehearsal,
in his " Experiencia," of her last sickness, in which,
.with many exquisite touches of pathos, he describes its
alternations of hope and fear, the sweet, submissive
patience with which its sufferings — aggravated, poor
thing ! by the horrible medical practice of the time —
were endured, and the tender outgoings of affection
in which her gentle spirit passed away. A bitter,
desolating stroke this was to him, quite turning earth
to emptiness for a while, driving him more than ever
to thoughts of religion.