Richard Mather (1596-22 April 1669) was a Puritan minister from Boston who was the father of Increase Mather and the grandfather of Cotton Mather.
Biography[]
Richard Mather was born in Lowton, Lancashire, England in 1596, and he was ordained as an Anglican deacon in 1619. In 1633, he was suspended for nonconformity in matters of ceremony, and, on 3 June 1635, he, his wife, and his four children set sail for the New World aboard the ship James to seek religious freedom in New England. On 16 August 1635, their ship was nearly sunk by a hurricane off New Hampshire, and Mather cried out to God for deliverence; he then claimed that God used "his own immediate good hand" to guide the ship around a large rock, and the sea calmed. A fresh gale of wind then blew and allowed for the ship to anchor in Boston a day later, and Mather took God's deliverance as a charge to walk uprightly before him for the rest of his wife. He reunited with his old friend John Cotton, and Mather became a pastor of Dorchester's North Church near Boston. Mather and Cotton penned the colonies' first adult and children's books, and Mather also helped Henry Dunster in his selection as President of Harvard College in 1640. He died in 1669 at the age of 73.