Is John Winthrop (1588–1649) really one of America's “Founding Fathers”? The subtitle of Francis Bremer's definitive biography of this first and frequent governor of Massachusetts gently rebukes modern U.S. publishers for their zeal for biographies about the Revolutionary generation, even as it aspires to appeal to the same audience. Beyond the book's cover, however, Bremer immediately announces that his main interest is not in Winthrop's American life, but rather in his neglected journey to middle age in England, explaining that “to understand Winthrop requires examining the Tudor world into which he was born and the world of the early Stuart monarchs in which he matured” (xvi). As the author's able research illustrates at almost every turn, Winthrop's values are very far from the values professed by the “Founding Fathers” of the late eighteenth century.

Bremer succeeds in putting Winthrop's life and times into the context of the Tudor-Stuart era through an able synthesis of its social, political, and religious historiography of the past forty years. He paints a vivid picture of the politics of the English Reformation and the social and religious history of the Stour Valley, home to the Winthrop family for three generations. By the time Winthrop is born (p. 67), the reader suspects that the eldest son of Adam and Anne Winthrop could live a dutiful life of few surprises as the heir of prosperous landowners were it not for the passion for reformed religion he feels from an early age. But, as Bremer demonstrates, that too was an important part of Winthrop's inheritance.

Bremer's biography of Winthrop is traditional in every sense, which lends it strengths as well as weaknesses. As the editor of the Winthrop Papers for the Massachusetts Historical Society for the past twenty years, Bremer is ideally poised to write a biography of Winthrop, and the book he has written is a testament both to his decades of immersion in Winthropiana and to his mastery of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English historiography. Winthrop was so prolific that he is catnip to biographers—an inveterate letter writer from boyhood, he also kept a journal of his life in America, as well as notes about his spiritual progress as a Christian throughout his life. Winthrop's logorrhea, and Bremer's admirably encyclopedic knowledge of his subject, lead Bremer into the classic biographer's trap—becoming an advocate for rather than an analyst of his subject. In Bremer's biography, all too often, he adopts Winthrop's views, cheering when Winthrop is periodically returned to the governor's office and praising him as a moderate against “the winds of extremism and … the rocks of fanaticism” (385), although Winthrop was frequently—and justifiably—suspected of arbitrary rule throughout his career in Massachusetts.

In accordance with Bremer's interest in Winthrop's life to age forty-two, and at odds with the book's subtitle, the youthful and midlife John Winthrop that appears in these pages is thoroughly a member of the English landed gentry, embroiled in various lawsuits, pursuing favor in London in the hopes of winning a seat in Parliament someday, and fiercely devoted to his God. Bremer himself makes this point with a fascinating discussion of Winthrop's most famous contribution to American literature, his sermon “A Model of Christian Charity,” which, Bremer argues, was delivered to little notice from his fellow colonists at the time: “Despite the relative abundance of source material dealing with the settlement of Massachusetts, not a single individual recorded in letter, diary, or other source having heard Winthrop deliver the sermon” (174). This classic of American letters, beloved for what modern readers see as an articulation of American exceptionalism (“We shall be as a City upon a Hill, the eyes of all people are upon us” [179]), was unremarkable to Winthrop's contemporaries because it was a rehash of ideas utterly familiar to them, especially its arguments about the organic nature of the body politic, knit together with “proper ligaments” of “love” (177), and faithful performance of one's duty in life, where “some must be rich, some poor; some high and eminent in power and dignity, others mean and in subjection,” as God has ordered it (176).

Because Winthrop always managed to be rich, high, and eminent, at least by comparison to most of his neighbors, he was a vigorous advocate for the unchallenged rule by elites in early Massachusetts. In most cases, Winthrop's political enemies (the villains in Bremer's book) are the ones who stand for American values like egalitarianism, freedom of association, liberty of speech, and liberty of conscience. For example, Samuel Gorton “advocated full fraternal equality, rejecting deferential relations between rulers and rules, masters and servants, husbands and wives” (340), values that were certainly out of step with most seventeenth-century New Englanders, but which are appealing to most Americans today. Bremer, adopting Winthrop's views, calls Gorton a “heretic” and accuses him of “stirring up trouble” (340) and of being “a divisive force wherever he went” (342). Similarly, religious “enthusiasts” like John Wheelwright and Anne Hutchinson appear authentically American in their insistence that laypeople were entitled to voice criticism of their religious leaders. By comparison, Winthrop makes for an uninspiring hero of his own story, with his morbidly self-righteous penchant for seeing God's wrath in every misfortune that befalls his enemies: for example, he glories in the news of Hutchinson's “monstrous birth” as proof of her irredeemable corruption, and he saw the burning of another enemy's barn as “a providential judgment” on him (330). Winthrop was probably utterly typical of his times—if atypical in his compulsive documentation of such thoughts. Still, he comes off like an insufferable blowhard.

Most Americans will probably resist claiming Winthrop as a “Founding Father”—he's just too authoritarian and too foreign in his dedication to extreme Calvinism for most Americans to embrace willingly. If they reject him after reading this biography, however, it will be a testament to the author's success in putting Winthrop into the context of his roots in the English Reformation and the century of sectarian fanaticism and political turmoil that followed.