Thomas Hooker

Thomas Hooker 1586-1647, Puritan clergyman in the American colonies, chief founder of Hartford, Conn., b. Leicestershire, England. A clergyman, he was ordered to appear before the court of high commission for nonconformist preaching in England and fled (1630) to Holland. In 1633, Hooker immigrated to Massachusetts, where he was pastor at Newtown (now Cambridge). He had a dispute with John Cotton and apparently was discontented with the strict theological rule in Massachusetts. After a group of settlers had been sent ahead in 1635, he and many of his flock moved in 1636 to found Hartford, where he was pastor until his death. Hooker was one of the drafters of the Fundamental Orders (1639), under which Connecticut was long governed and which represent his political views. He also promoted a plan for the New England Confederation.

Bibliography: See biography by G. L. Walker (1891, repr. 1969).

Hooker, Thomas (1586–1647), English‐born Congregationalist, was forced to flee to Holland because he exhibited Puritan leanings in his religious lectures at Cambridge. After preaching in Amsterdam, Delft, and Rotterdam, he emigrated with John Cotton and Samuel Stone to Massachusetts (1633). He was pastor at Newe Towne (Cambridge) for three years, and then, because of his democratic views, took his entire congregation of some 100 families to found the Connecticut Colony. His liberal spirit shaped the character of the new community, in which authority was held with the free consent of the people. Because his ideas were so opposed to those of Winthrop and other Massachusetts leaders, it was not until 1643 that Hooker was able to persuade them to join with his colony in a New England confederation. His views were embodied in the “Fundamental Orders” (1639), which served as Connecticut's constitution, and his many published sermons reveal his dramatic oratorical power. In A Survey of the Summe of Church Discipline (1648), he defended New England Congregationalism and postulated the principle of divine absolutism, making temporal absolutism unnecessary. The sovereign will of God, he held, was represented by no ecclesiastical hierarchy, but was communicated directly to the individual believer. The people, walking together in the fellowship of faith, communicate power by voluntary subjection to the governing pastor. A second volume of this work was written by John Cotton.