Anne Bradstreet and Her Time | Page 2

CHAPTER III.
THE VOYAGE

CHAPTER IV.
BEGINNINGS

CHAPTER V.
OLD FRIENDS AND NEW

CHAPTER VI.
A THEOLOGICAL TRAGEDY

CHAPTER VII.
COLONIAL LITERARY DEVELOPMENT IN THE
SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

CHAPTER VIII.
SOME PHASES OF EARLY COLONIAL LIFE

CHAPTER IX.
ANDOVER

CHAPTER X.
VILLAGE LIFE IN 1650

CHAPTER XI

A FIRST EDITION

CHAPTER XII.
MISCELLANEOUS POEMS

CHAPTER XIII.
CHANCES AND CHANGES

CHAPTER XIV.
A LEGACY

CHAPTER XV.
THE PURITAN REIGN OF TERROR

CHAPTER XVI.
HOME AND ABROAD

CHAPTER XVII.
THE END

ANNE BRADSTREET AND HER TIME.

CHAPTER I.
THE OLD HOME.
The birthday of the baby, Anne Dudley, has no record; her birthplace
even is not absolutely certain, although there is little doubt that it was at
Northhampton in England, the home of her father's family. She opened
her eyes upon a time so filled with crowding and conflicting interests

that there need be no wonder that the individual was more or less
ignored, and personal history lost in the general. To what branch of the
Dudley family she belonged is also uncertain. Moore, in his "Lives of
the Governors of New Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay," writes:
"There is a tradition among the descendants of Governor Dudley in the
eldest branch of the family, that he was descended from John Dudley,
Duke of Northumberland, who was beheaded 22 February, 1553." Such
belief was held for a time, but was afterward disallowed by Anne
Bradstreet. In her "Elegy upon Sir Philip Sidney," whose mother, the
Lady Mary, was the eldest daughter of that Duke of Northumberland,
she wrote:
"Let, then, none disallow of these my straines, Which have the
self-same blood yet in my veines."
With the second edition of her poems, however, her faith had changed.
This may have been due to a growing indifference to worldly
distinctions, or, perhaps, to some knowledge of the dispute as to the
ancestry of Robert Dudley, son of the Duke, who was described by one
side as a nobleman, by another as a carpenter, and by a third as "a noble
timber merchant"; while a wicked wit wrote that "he was the son of a
duke, the brother of a king, the grandson of an esquire, and the
great-grandson of a carpenter; that the carpenter was the only honest
man in the family and the only one who died in his bed." Whatever the
cause may have been she renounced all claim to relationship, and the
lines were made to read as they at present stand:
"Then let none disallow of these my straines Whilst English blood yet
runs within my veines."
In any case, her father, Thomas Dudley, was of gentle blood and
training, being the only son of Captain Roger Dudley, who was killed
in battle about the year 1577, when the child was hardly nine years old.
Of his mother there is little record, as also of the sister from whom he
was soon separated, though we know that Mrs. Dudley died shortly
after her husband. Her maiden name is unknown; she was a relative of
Sir Augustine Nicolls, of Paxton, Kent, one of His Majesty's Justices of
his Court of Common Pleas, and keeper of the Great Seal to Prince

Charles.
The special friend who took charge of Thomas Dudley through
childhood is said to have been "a Miss Purefoy," and if so, she was the
sister of Judge Nicolls, who married a Leicestershire squire, named
William Purefoy. Five hundred pounds was left in trust for him, and
delivered to him when he came of age; a sum equivalent to almost as
many thousand to-day. At the school to which he was sent he gained a
fair knowledge of Latin, but he was soon taken from it to become a
page in the family of William Lord Compton, afterward the Earl of
Northumberland.
His studies were continued, and in time he became a clerk of his
kinsman, "Judge Nicholls," whose name appears in letters, and who
was a sergeant-at-law. Such legal knowledge as came to him here was
of service through all his later life, but law gave place to arms, the
natural bias of most Englishmen at that date, and he became captain of
eighty volunteers "raised in and about Northhampton, and forming part
of the force collected by order of Queen Elizabeth to assist Henry IV.
of France, in the war against Philip II. of Spain," He was at the siege of
Amiens in 1597, and returned home when it ended, having, though
barely of age, already gained distinction as a soldier, and acquired the
courtesy of manner which distinguished him till later life, and the
blandness of which often blinded unfamiliar acquaintances to the
penetration and acumen, the honesty and courage that were the
foundations