Portal:University of Oxford/Selected biography/62

Richard Bellingham (c. 1592 – 1672) was a colonial magistrate, lawyer, and several-time governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and the last surviving signatory of the colonial charter at his death. He studied law at Brasenose College and became a wealthy lawyer in Lincolnshire prior to his departure for the New World in 1634. He was a liberal political opponent of the moderate John Winthrop, arguing for expansive views on suffrage and lawmaking, but also religiously somewhat conservative, opposing the efforts of Quakers and Baptists to settle in the colony. He was one of the architects of the Massachusetts Body of Liberties, a document embodying many sentiments also found in the U.S. Bill of Rights. Although he was generally in the minority during his early years in the colony, he served ten years as colonial governor. Bellingham notably refused a direct order from King Charles II to appear in England, an action that may have contributed to the eventual revocation of the colonial charter in 1684. Bellingham is immortalized in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's The New England Tragedies, both of which fictionalize events from colonial days. (Full article...)