Portrait of Matthew Cradock, M.P. (c. 1590-1641), first Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Company, three-quarter-length

This is the only known portrait of Matthew Cradock, who was the first Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Company and in 1639 pledged money to the newly-founded college which was named after John Harvard whose benefaction was received in that year.

The original inscription and the coat-of-arms establish that this portrait is of one of two first cousins, both named Matthew Cradock, who owed their Christian name to Sir Matthew Cradock (1468-1531), a prominent official in South Wales, whose daughter was the mother of William Herbert, 1st Earl of Pembroke. The elder of the cousins and head of the family, Matthew Cradock, M.P. (1584-1636), of Caverswell Castle near Stafford, was elected to several parliaments, the last of which was that of 1628-9. Evidently a puritan, he was in serious trouble for vandalising the chancel of a church by November 1635 and was ill when he drew up his will on 30 March 1636, dying on the following day. As the New Year was then calculated from 25 March, there were only a few days period during which a portrait of him could have been painted in 1636, and had he been dead by the time this was finished it is reasonable to assume that the inscription would have stated this. It is thus evident that the sitter was his cousin, Matthew Cradock, M.P. (c. 1590-1641), who was entitled to bear the same arms and purchased the wardship of his namesake’s son, George, presumably to preserve his inheritance from predators.

While the older Matthew Cradock was a prosperous merchant, his cousin also made his way in business. Apprenticed to a prominent member of the Skinners Company of which he would become Warden in 1640, he had interests in the Baltic, in the Merchant Adventurers Eastland and in the Russia Company and held stock in the East India Company. Like his cousin, who presumably had been trying to sabotage alterations introduced by order of Archbishop Laud, Cradock must have had radical views. By the late 1620s he knew Robert Rich, 2nd Earl of Warwick (1587-1658), who through his second marriage had strong city connections and was actively involved in many colonial ventures. In March 1628 he was granted land in Massachusetts and established the New England Company to which a number of the earl’s city friends belonged, many drawn in by the radical Hugh Peter (1598-1660), the future regicide who would be executed in 1660. The unincorporated New England Company was incorporated as the Massachusetts Bay Company and granted its charter on 4 March 1629: Cradock was selected as its first governor, remaining in London but placing the husband of a cousin, John Endicott as his representative in America. Cradock took ‘primary responsibility for mediating between the colonising aristocrats [Warwick and lords Saye and Brooke], who were especially needed to defend the project against royal repression, and the company’s small-trader, small gentry leadership’ (see, J. Adamson, The Noble Revolt, the Overthrow of Charles I, London, 2007, p. 103, note, quoting Robert Brenner). The fear of royal intervention must have led him—and no doubt Warwick--to advocate the transfer of the company to New England and the succession as governor of John Winthrop, to whose custody its seal was sent from London.
This precaution proved helpful when the Privy Council investigated the company in 1633 on charges that it sought independence from the crown. A ship of colonists was stopped from sailing in February 1633-4 until the charter was submitted to the council, but Cradock secured its release by undertaking its delivery. The colonial council and the colony’s General Court stalled and began to fortify the harbour at Boston against a possible attack, which did not, however, materialise. The Plymouth Charter of New England was, however, revoked, and perhaps because of their association with known enemies of the crown, Cradock and others were prosecuted: he was acquitted of most charges but convicted of usurpation of authority and banned from acting for the company.

Cradock himself was certainly alert to the commercial opportunities of North America. He secured a plantation at Medford on the Mystic River outside Boston and continued to be interested in the company, advising Winthrop from London and facilitating the passage to Boston of the younger Sir Henry Vane, who in 1635 succeeded Winthrop as Governor of the company. By then the Privy Council in London was taking a close interest in the company’s attempt to escape from the jurisdiction of the Crown: Cradock and others were arraigned on criminal charges on most of which he was acquitted.

Cradock’s ownership of land must have encouraged his continuing interest in Massachusetts. The ship of 100 tons built for him on the Mystic River in 1632 was apparently the first to be launched in the American colonies. In 1637-8 he seems to have been a partner in a ship, the ‘Rebecca’ and he was also involved with two other ships. He had built up a substantial position in the Virginian and West Indian tobacco and provisioning trades. He also owned mills and a toll bridge, Cradock Bridge, on the approach to Boston from the north. Although he had not attended university he clearly recognised the importance of education. On 27 February 1639 he wrote to Winthrop. He understood that there was were ‘voluntary contribucions towards a Colledge in Cambridge], which I must confess is a worthy worke’: Winthrop was asked to ‘moove the Court to cleere the debt dewe to [Cradock] … out of which money I ame content and doe freely geeve fyftey pounds to the sayd Colledge’, the future Harvard University (Medford Historical Society Papers, 9). The Company clearly had not settled its debt to Cradock at the time he drew up the will by which he left the £50 that he was owed and a further £10 ‘towards the erecting of a free schoole in New England if anie such work be done’ (P.C.C.2, Campbell (Reg. 45.161)). His heirs, his second wife and the surviving daughter of a his first marriage, would sell Cradock’s plantation in 1652.

Cradock’s influence in the city ensured his election to both the Short Parliament and the Long Parliament. His last significant role was in the trial of Thomas Wentworth, 1st Earl of Strafford in which Warwick had a key part. On 11 November 1640 Cradock alerted the Commons to preparations for the defence of the Tower of London (Adamson, p. 103), an intervention that led to the decision to try the earl for High Treason, an intervention which Adamson (p. 114) suggests was coordinated in advance, no doubt with Warwick and Saye who with Lord Bedford were the key movers against Strafford. If Cradock hadn’t died in 1641 his position as one of the most effective of the city radicals might have given him a greater prominence in parliamentary affairs; and his long interest in Massachussets might have meant that he had a key role in the relationship between the Parliament and the American colonies in the turbulent period that led to the Civil War.

This portrait is by a painter under the strong influence of Cornelis Jonson, who presumably worked in London, where puritan sentiment encouraged a style of presentation very different than that of the court painter, van Dyck. It may in this respect be compared with the Sir John Buckhouse of 1637 (London, National Portrait Gallery, no. 2183) initialled ‘VM’, by an as yet unidentified Dutch or Flemish immigrant, who was one of several inadequately studied painters active in the city who worked in a similar mode.