Transcript:Colonial Society of Massachusetts. Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts/v10p268

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a passable road through the swamps to Plymouth, Seven years later the General Court demanded the return of that thirty shillings or the making of the road which Taunton had not made.1 Lechford, arguing that the magistrates enforced the decisions of the ministers, says, "was not . . . master Doughty forced to the Island of Aquedney;" and in a paper probably written by Doughty's son-in-law, we read that in coming to New England to escape trouble in England he "found that he had got out of the frying-pan into the fire." The same thing might possibly be said of his change from New England to New Netherland. For as Mr. Trumbull remarks, "He failed . . . 'to secure that happy home,' which (Mr. Brodhead tells us) he came, from persecutions in Massachusetts, to seek."2

I do not know how Mr. Doughty got on at Newport, Rhode Island.3 He seems to have been on the Island at least a year, and his name appears in the Newport records, which I have had no opportunity to examine. But he was not likely to be pleased, however the Rhode Islanders treated him, with that common


1 Plymouth Colony Records, ii. 17, xi. 37. 2 Lechford, Plain Dealing, p. 92 note. 3 Lechford, writing of the Islaud of Aquedney, says :

The place where the Church was, is called Newport, but that Church, I heare, is now dissolved; ... At the other end of the Island there is another town called Portsmouth, but no Church: there is a meeting of some men, who there teach one another, and call it Prophesie;

and in the Massachusetts Historical Society Manuscript quoted by Trumbull in a note:

There is Mr. Lenthall a minister out of office and imployment, and lives very poorly. Mr. Doughty also is come to this Islaud. . . . He [Lenthall] stood upon his ministrie and against the Church Covenant in the Bay, and diverse joyneing to choose him their minister at Weymouth, by subscribing to a paper for that end, he was censured in the general Court at Boston, and so were they that joyned in that election, and one of them named Britaine for words saying that some of the Ministers in the Bay were Brownists, and that they would not (sic) till it came to the swords point, was whipt, and had eleven stripes (Plain Dealing, p. 94 and note).

In fact, I take it, Doughty and Lenthall were Presbyterian Nonconformists, or inclined to that opinion, and that Doughty tried at Taunton to do very much what Lenthall succeeded in carrying somewhat further at Weymouth. Lenthall returned to England in 1642, the same year that Doughty went to Long Island, and is probably the same Robert Leynthall who was "of Oxon, cler. fil. ORIEL COLL., matric. 17 Oct., 1611, aged 14; B. A. from ALL SOULS' COLL. 8 July, 1619, rector of Aston Sandford, Bucks, 1627, and of Great Hampden, Bucks, 1643" (J. Foster, Alumni Oxonienses, iii. 902).