Ancestors

William Vassall

William Vassall was born and baptized at Stepney, east of London, on 27 August 1592. He was the youngest son of John Vassall, a mariner and shipowner of Ratcliff who had fitted out and commanded two of his own ships against the Spanish Armada in 1588, and of his second wife, Anna Russell. His mother died on 5 May 1593, when he was eight months old. His father married again the next spring. William's elder brother Samuel became a London merchant and Member of Parliament, and was also named in the Massachusetts charter, but Savage says he was "too rich, and much absorb. in the line of his traffic at London, to come to the ld. of the Pilgrims."

On 9 June 1613 he was licensed to marry. The licence describes him as "William Vassall of Eastwood, Essex, yeoman, bachelor, aged about 20, son of John Vassall of the same parish gent, with his said father's consent." The bride was Anne King of Cold Norton, about twenty, the daughter of George King, a yeoman who came in person to give his consent. They married at Cold Norton. Their first child, Anne, was born on 6 September 1614 and died at Cold Norton on 22 September. Later the family lived at Rayleigh in Essex, where twins, Samuel and Mary, were born on 22 June 1624. Samuel died at Rayleigh that November, and Mary and a son William died young.

In 1625 he lost his father and his father-in-law within three months of each other. His father was buried at Stepney on 13 September and left him "my plain white silver salt," the wainscot and fittings of the family house in Ratcliffe, and "the great table of walnut tree now standing in my great parlor." William was one of the overseers of that will. George King made his will that October and named William his sole executor. He left him "all my instruments and tools for the measuring and plotting of lands and the suit of silver buttons the which he hath of mine and my gown."

In March 1629 King Charles I granted the charter of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay. It named William Vassall one of the Assistants, the council that governed the company and its colony alongside the governor. At a meeting of the Governor and Company in July 1629 he was one of those appointed "to go over." He sailed in 1630 in the fleet that brought John Winthrop and the charter over. He went home in the Lion within a month of landing.

He came again in 1635, in the Blessing, aged forty two. With him were his wife Anne, also forty two, and their children Judith, sixteen; Frances, twelve; John, ten; Ann, six; Margaret, two; and Mary, one. They stopped a short time at Roxbury, where the minister John Eliot entered his wife among the church members: "Mrs. Anna Vassaile, the wife of Mr. Willia Vassaile, her husband five children to this land, Judith, Frances, John, Margaret, Mary." Then they went to Scituate, in the separate colony of Plymouth. He joined John Lothrop's church there.

In 1635 the court laid out a tract of land for him on a neck on the North River. He named the plantation "West Newland", the house he built that year "Belle house", the neck "Belle house neck", and a field on its north side "Brook hall field." Deane's History of Scituate says the house was not remembered as magnificent. It stood about a century and was taken down in 1742. The whole neck held no more than two hundred acres, which he shared with Samuel Fuller, Resolved White and Elder King.

In front of the house was the New harbour ferry. Just below it, in 1639, he planted an oyster bank in the river and had the right to it secured to him by law. He also bought John Lothrop's farm east of Colman's hills when Lothrop moved to Barnstable in 1639. Deane counts him one of the wealthiest settlers in Plymouth Colony, even before his West Indian estates.

While he lived at Scituate he was employed in all the town's public offices. He was foreman of the first jury for laying out highways and served as one of the colony's Counsellors of War. He held no other colonial office. Deane thought it might be the suspicion that rested on him of "inclining to the Bishops," or his own choice.

The suspicion came from his religion. In 1642 Charles Chauncy became pastor of the Scituate church. Vassall quarrelled with him over baptism and over communion with members of the Church of England. John Winthrop called him "a man of busy and factious spirit." Those who stood against Chauncy formed a second church at Scituate, and in 1645 it ordained William Witherell as its minister in the face of Chauncy's opposition.

In 1646 he sailed for England to support Dr. Child's petition "for redress of wrongs and grievances in the Government", a petition for the rights of men in Massachusetts who were not church members. Edward Winslow, in London as agent for the United Colonies, answered with a pamphlet called New England's Salamander Discovered. The salamander was Vassall, "a man never at rest (as his enemy says) but when in the fire of contention."

Winthrop recorded the end of it: "finding no entertainment for his Petitions, he went to Barbadoes." He settled in the parish of St. Michael on Barbados and died there in 1655. Nicholas Ware, the husband of one of his daughters, was executor of his will on the island.

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Cite: Heirology, "William Vassall (1592-1655)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/william-vassall-1592-1655-2d73b5.