John White (colonist priest)

John White
Contemporary woodcut of White
Born	1575 England
Died	1648 Dorchester, Dorset, England
Nationality	English
Occupation	Cleric
Known for	Persuaded Charles I to grant a Royal Charter to the Massachusetts Bay Company for a new colony in North America.

John White (1575 – 21 July 1648) was the rector of a parish in Dorchester, Dorset, England. He was instrumental in obtaining charters for the New England Company, and the Massachusetts Bay Company. He took a close personal interest in the settlement of New England.

He was son of John White, who held a lease under New College, Oxford, and his wife Isabel, daughter of John Bawle of Lichfield, and was born at Stanton St. John, Oxfordshire, being baptised there on 6 January 1575. His elder brother, Josias, was rector of Hornchurch, Essex, 1614–23, and father of James White, a merchant of Boston, Massachusetts. In 1587 he entered Winchester School, and then was elected a fellow of New College in 1595. He graduated B.A. on 12 April 1597 and M.A. on 16 January 1601. He was appointed rector of Holy Trinity, Dorchester, in 1606, and for the rest of his life was identified with that place. He was a moderate conforming Puritan, concerned with reforming his parish.

John married Ann Burges, daughter of John Burges of Peterborough, Cambridgeshire. They had three known children: John; Samuel (who married first Sarah Cuttance, daughter of shipmaster Edward Cuttance; and Josiah, who married first Mary Hallett.

White himself never sailed to America. About 1623 he interested himself in sending out a colony of Dorset men to settle in Massachusetts, allowing nonconformists to enjoy liberty of conscience. The attempt by the Dorchester Company to plant a colony at Cape Ann with Thomas Gardner as Overseer, at what would become Gloucester, Massachusetts, did not prove at first successful; in the previous decade, only about 500 English colonists had established a foothold, and this Company was wound up by 1625. White then recruited emigrants from the western counties of Dorset, Somerset and Devon, who set sail a few years later as a better-supported expedition and organized church aboard the ship Mary and John.