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| The famous Windmill of Pakenham, England. |
In 1455 Thomas Spring II married Margaret Appleton who was born about 1434 in Waldingfield, Suffolk, England. Margaret was the daughter of John Appleton and Margaret Welling.
Margaret's brother Thomas Welling, had a son named Thomas Welling, Jr. who became the parson of Lavenham.The Adam Winthrop family were neighbors to the Spring and Appelton families in Lavenham. Thomas Welling, Jr.,would eventually baptize Adam's son Adam Winthrop, Jr. who would later become the father of John Winthrop, the first Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in New England and leader of the Winthrop Expedition. The Winthrop and the Spring families would become close friends through through Puritan movement through the years.
John Winthrop (January 12th, 1587 – March 26th, 1649) was a wealthy English Puritan lawyer and one of the leading figures in the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the first major settlement in New England after Plymouth Colony. Winthrop led the first large wave of migrants from England in 1630, and served as governor for 12 of the colony's first 20 years of existence. His writings and vision of the colony as a Puritan "city upon a hill" dominated New England colonial development, influencing the government and religion of neighboring colonies.
Born into a wealthy landowning and merchant family, Winthrop was trained in the law, and became Lord of the Manor at Groton in Suffolk. Although he was not involved in the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Company in 1628, he became involved in 1629 when the anti-Puritan King Charles I began a crackdown on Nonconformist religious thought. In October 1629 he was elected governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and in April 1630 he led a group of colonists to the New World, founding a number of communities on the shores of Massachusetts Bay and the Charles River.
Between 1629 and his death in 1649, he served 12 annual terms as governor, and was a force of comparative moderation in the religiously conservative colony, clashing with the more conservative Thomas Dudley and the more liberal Roger Williams and Henry Vane. Although Winthrop was a respected political figure, his attitude toward governance was somewhat authoritarian: he resisted attempts to widen voting and other civil rights beyond a narrow class of religiously approved individuals, opposed attempts to codify a body of laws that the colonial magistrates would be bound by, and also opposed unconstrained democracy, calling it "the meanest and worst of all forms of government". The authoritarian and religiously conservative nature of Massachusetts rule was influential in the formation of neighboring colonies, which were in some instances formed by individuals and groups opposed to the rule of the Massachusetts elders.
Sir William Spring (b.1588 d.1638) was the oldest son of John Spring of Pakenham and Mary Trelawny, daughter of John Trelawny of Poole, Menheniot, Cornwall.
Sir William Spring owned property in 130 places and in 1523 bequeathed the considerable sum of £200 to complete the magnificent tower of his parish church, adorned with 32 shields carrying his recently acquired coat of arms. Spring himself was raised as a puritan by his stepfather Sir Robert Gardener. A local sewer commissioner, Spring was summoned to attend the Privy Council concerning the drainage of the fens in March 1620. He was chosen as High Sheriff of Suffolk later in the year, and as the returning officer at the next general election he presided over the defeat of Sir Lionel Tollemache at the hands of Thomas Clench, whose eldest son had married Gardener’s niece.
In 1624 Spring was elected for Suffolk, becoming the first of his family to sit. He kept a detailed and informative diary of the fourth Jacobean Parliament, covering the dates February 19th to May 27th, 1624. The surviving manuscript was written up after rather than during debates. Unfortunately one chunk, covering the period April 16th to May 22nd is now missing; Spring noted that ‘for what wants of the days past between the last and this following see part of it in a book of notes hastily taken in the House, and another part in another like it and so taken’, neither of which is extant. He was named to nine committees, including a drunkenness bill (February 26th) an estate bill of his Cornish kinsman John Mohun (March 16th), and another private bill concerning Prees manor in Lancashire (April14th); his attendance was recorded at one of two meetings of the latter committee. He made just one speech, the only record of which appears in his own diary. When John Glanville moved that a bill against depopulation might be committed to all the lawyers of the House that would attend during the Easter recess, Spring warned on March 24th, that the measure was ‘dangerous to the country for which I serve, and I suppose no less to all other champion countries [i.e. with open fields, unenclosed land] ... in regard that the usage and customs of tillage in those places and of sheep feeding should by the observance of this law be altogether changed, and in many places utterly taken away’. He therefore moved that not only lawyers but also ‘a convenient number of the gentlemen of the champion countries’ should be appointed to the committee. This proposal was accepted, and the committee list begins with the names of Sir Edward Coke (from the neighboring open-field county of Norfolk), Glanville, and himself. Coke took charge of the bill, and the first meeting of the committee was deferred until after Easter. On April 27th, Spring presented two Suffolk residents as recusants, and he was appointed to the commission of inquiry into popish schoolmasters (April 28th). His final appointment was to prepare for a conference on the Arminian leanings of Bishop Harsnett of Norwich (May 15th). At the next election Spring was returned for Bury St. Edmunds, five miles from his home. He played no known part in the proceedings in 1625, though he was given leave on August 4th to come into the House despite having failed to take communion.
Spring chose not to run in the next two general elections.
In 1628 he was ‘generally thought very wise, godly, and able for the place’ by the Suffolk electorate, but he deliberately absented himself from the county court, and his close friend Sir Nathaniel Barnardiston was returned with Coke. A subsequent twinge of conscience drove him to explain his conduct to his friend and regular correspondent, Sir Simonds D’Ewes, protesting that ‘an absolute desire of freedom from public employment, together with the regard of my health and estate ... wrought me not only to an unwillingness but to an earnest labour [in] which I desired of my loving countrymen and friends to put their eyes upon some more deserving man’. Nevertheless, when Coke opted to sit for Buckinghamshire, ‘the justices and gentlemen all ... pitched’ on Spring, who abandoned his ‘violent course of contradiction’ and was returned. He had taken his seat by May 5th,1628, when he heard the king’s message, which he reported to D’Ewes as a threat of dissolution. He was added to the committee of inquiry into the Cornish election (May 9th), and made his only recorded speech on the same subject four days later, when he endeavored to excuse the conduct of his cousin John Trelawny, who was accused of conspiring to rig the election in favor of an unsuccessful candidate, John Mohun. Spring’s other four appointments included a bill committee concerning the neglect of preaching and catechizing (May 12th). He left no trace on the records of the brief 1629 session.
During the 1630s Spring founded two lectureships, but these were not welcomed by Harsnett’s successor, Bishop Matthew Wren. Writing to his close friend John Winthrop in New England in 1636 Spring declared that he dared not tell him ‘what I think and would you know’ about the state of affairs. After ‘a great sickness that hath much wasted his body’, he died intestate on March 2nd,1638, at Ridenhall and was buried at Pakenham.
William Spring's son and heir, William, married Elizabeth L'Estrange, the daughter of Sir Hamon L’Estrange shortly before his fathers death, sat for Bury St. Edmunds as a recruiter to the Long Parliament and for Suffolk under the Protectorate and would be made a baronet by King Charles I. John Winthrop's son, John, was one of the founders of the Connecticut Colony, and Winthrop himself wrote one of the leading historical accounts of the early colonial period. The Springs and the Winthrops have a long list of descendants that includes famous Americans, and their writings continue to be an influence on politicians today..