John Wheelwright

Who was John Wheelwright?

John Wheelwright, was a Puritan clergyman in England and America, and was most noted for being banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony during the Antinomian Controversy, and for subsequently establishing the town of Exeter, New Hampshire. Born in Lincolnshire, England, he was raised in a family with substantial means, and received both a B.A. and M.A. at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge where he was a noted athlete and where Oliver Cromwell was a college mate of his. Ordained in 1619, he became the vicar of the church in Bilsby, Lincolnshire, and held this position for ten years until removed for simony.

Leaving for New England in 1636, he was warmly welcomed in Boston, where his brother-in-law's wife, Anne Hutchinson, was beginning to attract negative attention for her religious outspokenness. Soon he and Hutchinson, as adherents of Reverend John Cotton's "covenant of grace" theology, accused the majority of the colony's ministers and magistrates of espousing a "covenant of works". As the pitch of this controversy reached a peak, both Hutchinson and Wheelwright were banished from the colony.