“William, Thomas, and Hugh Peters were brothers, and born at
Fowey in Cornwall. Their father was a merchant of large
property, and their mother was Elizabeth Treffry, daughter
of John Treffry, Esq. of a very ancient and opulent family
in that town.
“William received his education at Leyden, Thomas at Oxford,
and Hugh at Cambridge. Between the years 1610 and 1620
Thomas and Hugh became clergymen in London. William
continued a private gentleman. About the year 1628 Thomas
and Hugh having rendered themselves obnoxious by their
popularity and puritanic preaching, were silenced by the
Bishop. They then went to Holland and remained till 1633,
when they returned to London. The three brothers then sold
their landed property, and in the following year embarked
for America. Hugh settled at Salem, and soon became so
popular as to excite the jealousy of those who had
previously swayed the fanatical opinions of that place. Mr.
Hugh Peters was in a short time appointed a trustee of the
college at New Cambridge. He built a grand house, and
purchased a large tract of land. The yard before his house
he paved with flint-stones from England; and having dug a
well he paved that also with flint-stones, for the
accommodation of every inhabitant in want of water. It bears
the name of Peter’s Spring up to the present time.
“He here married a second time, and had one daughter named
Elizabeth. His renown as a zealot increasing, he received an
invitation to remove from Salem to Boston, with which he
complied, and there laid the foundation-stone of the great
meeting-house, of which the Reverend Doctor Samuel Cooper,
one of the most learned literati in America, is the pastor.
Those whose envy he had excited at Salem, ill brooked being
thus outrivalled by Mr. Peters. Yet finding him an orthodox
fanatic, and more powerful than themselves, they seemingly
bowed to his superiority, at the same time that they were
contriving a plan which ended in his destruction.
“In 1641 they conspired with the civil authorities of Boston
to convert their leading priest into a politician, by
appointing him agent to Great Britain. The plot succeeded,
and Mr. Hugh Peters assumed his agency under colour of
petitioning for some abatement of customs and excise; but
his real commission was to foment the civil discontents,
wars, and jars then prevailing between the King and the
Parliament. He did not see into the motives of these people;
and he felt a strong inclination to chastise the Court and
the Bishop of London, who had turned him out of the church
for his fanatical conduct.
“On Mr. Peters’s arrival in London, the Parliament took him
into their service. The Earls of Warwick and of Essex were
also his patrons. In 1644 the Parliament gave him Archbishop
Laud’s library, and soon afterwards made him head of the
Archbishop’s court, and gave him the estate and palace at
Lambeth; all which he kept till the Restoration.
“The people of Boston conducted themselves with ingratitude
and neglect towards Mr. Peters; they never paid him any part
of the stipend attached to his office, although he
discharged the duties of it during twenty years, and
obtained from the Protector a charter for the Society for
propagating the Gospel in New England, which, by
contributions raised in Great Britain, has supported all the
missionaries among the Indians to the present time.
“An occurrence at the melancholy close of Mr. Peters’s life
evinces his firmness of mind and self-possession.
“The sentences of our law, now barbarous in words alone,
were in those days executed with horrors so savage, as to
forbid description. The scenes of cruelty were repeated one
after the other; and in his own case Mr. Peters, either from
design or accident, remained to witness on others the
inflictions which awaited himself. At that moment an officer
whose heart must have been more obdurate than the hardest
flint, or than Marperian rock, inquired of him how he liked
the proceeding, and received for answer, ‘Friend, thou doest
ill to distress a dying man!’”
St. Mabyn measures 3,846 statute acres.
Annual value of the Real Property, as £. _s._ _d._
returned to Parliament in 1815 6051 0 0
Poor Rate in 1831 383 1 0
Population, { in 1801, | in 1811, | in 1821, | in 1831,
{ 475 | 560 | 715 | 793
giving an increase of 67 per cent. in 30 years.
Present Rector, the Rev. Granville Leveson Gower, presented by the
Earl of Falmouth, in 1818.