Hugh Peter

Hugh Peter 1598-1660, British Puritan clergyman, educated at Cambridge. He became a priest of the Established Church, but his Puritan doctrines forced him to leave England for Holland c.1629. In 1635 he went to the Massachusetts Bay colony, became pastor of the church at Salem, and was active in the colony's ecclesiastical and political affairs. He returned to England in 1641 as an agent for the colony; served (1642-49) in the civil war as chaplain with various Puritan forces, including Oliver Cromwell's; and was executed at the Restoration. See. R. P. Stearns, The Strenuous Puritan (1954).

Peter(Or Peters), Hugh (1598–1660), English Puritan clergyman, was in Massachusetts (1636–41), where he succeeded Roger Williams as pastor of the Salem church, was prominent in colonial affairs, and helped found Harvard College. He returned to England as an agent of Massachusetts Bay Colony (1641), and there, with Thomas Weld, edited and probably wrote in part New Englands First Fruits (1643). An important figure in Cromwell's revolution, he was later executed.