Richard Mather

Rev. Richard Mather, teacher of the church at Dorchester for thirty-three years, father of Increase Mather and grandfather of Cotton Mather. The life of him that Increase published in 1670, reprinted in the Mather genealogy, is the source of most of what follows (source).

He was schooled at Winwick, and in 1611, at fifteen, was sent to keep the new school at Toxteth Park, near Liverpool, “the like seldome known, that one should be found fit to be a School master at fifteen years of Age.” After a short time at Brasenose College, Oxford, he was called back to Toxteth as its preacher and gave his first sermon on 30 Nov 1618. The Bishop of Chester, ordaining him, took him aside: “I have (saith he) an earnest Request unto you, and you must not deny me: It is that you would pray for me.” In later years he tore up his letters of orders, “because I took no pleasure in keeping a monument of my sin and folly.” On 29 Sept 1624 he married Katherine Hoult, daughter of Edmund Hoult of Bury, and bought a house at Much Woolton. Silenced for nonconformity in 1633, restored, and silenced again in 1634, he heard the visitor’s verdict when told he had preached fifteen years and never worn a surplice: “It had been better for him that he had gotten Seven Bastards.”

In April 1635 he took his wife and four sons from Warrington to Bristol and sailed for New England in the James with Mr. Maud and others, writing a journal of the voyage. Lying in King Road they visited the Angel Gabriel, bound the same way; the James came through the hurricane of August 1635 off the Isles of Shoals and reached Boston on the 17th, while the Angel Gabriel, which carried John Cogswell’s family, was wrecked at Pemaquid. Invited by Plymouth, Dorchester and Roxbury, he chose Dorchester, whose first church had moved to Windsor, and was chosen teacher of the new church gathered there on 23 Aug 1636. He kept the post until he died: “for fifty years was able to attend to his public labors every Sabbath. Never employed a physician.”

With Thomas Welde, John Eliot and others he made The Whole Booke of Psalmes Faithfully Translated into English Metre (1640), the Bay Psalm Book, “probably the first book printed in the English colonies,” and he drew up the Cambridge Platform of church discipline (source). Thomas Hooker “would say,—‘My brother Mather is a mighty man’”; and a Lancashire minister, Mr. Gellibrand, told his name, “replied nay, his name shall be matter; for believe it, this man hath good substance in him.”

Katherine died in 1655, and in 1656 he married Sarah, widow of Rev. John Cotton, whose daughter Maria married his son Increase. In his will of October 1661 he left most of his books to his minister sons and the Dorchester homestead to Timothy, the farmer, whose education had cost least, and laid on all of them “this serious and sollemne charge of a dying Father”; Hopestill Foster witnessed it and its codicil of 1664 and swore to it in 1669. Taken ill in Boston while moderating a council in April 1669, he died at home on the 22nd, still asking to be helped into his study: “is it not a lamentable thing that I should lose so much time.” John Foster, Hopestill’s son, the Boston printer, made the woodcut portrait of him that is counted among the first portraits printed in the English colonies.

His six sons, all by Katherine: Samuel (1626), Timothy (1628), Nathaniel (1630), Joseph, Eleazar and Increase (1639). All but Timothy and Joseph were ministers.

Research: research/hatten/Hatten_Philbrick_Marvin.md.