John Humphrey

John Humphrey (also spelled Humfrey or Humfry, c. 1597–1661) was an English Puritan and an early funder of the English colonisation of North America. He was the treasurer of the Dorchester Company, which established an unsuccessful settlement on Massachusetts Bay in the 1620s, and was deputy governor of the Massachusetts Bay Company from 1629 to 1630. He came to Massachusetts in 1634, where he served as a magistrate and was the first sergeant major general of the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company. He became involved in English attempts to settle Providencia Island in the late 1630s, and returned to England in 1641 after financial reverses and probable religious differences with other members of the Massachusetts ruling elite. He then became involved in an attempt to settle The Bahamas in the late 1640s, and had some involvement in the politics of the English Civil War. Children that Humphrey and his wife left in Massachusetts had an unhappy fate, and the Humphreys were criticised at the time for leaving them. Three daughters were subjected to physical and sexual abuse, and only one of them survived to adulthood. The Massachusetts leadership did little to prosecute offenders, and some saw this mistreatment as a form a divine punishment of the Humphreys for their actions in abandoning the Massachusetts colony. Early life and family John Humphrey was born in the mid-1590s, probably in the English County of Dorset. The exact date of his birth is uncertain: no histories give precise dates, and estimated dates differ, but are roughly clustered around 1595. His father, Michael Humphrey, was steward at an estate in Dorset. Humphrey was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, and studied law at Lincoln's Inn in 1615. He settled in Dorchester, Dorset, where he was a member of John White's church.