Gaulding Origins

8:2 Virginia Connections
Captain John Mason of Connecticut

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I believe Captain John Mason to be a key and pivotal character in telling the story of the earliest Goulding/Gaulding immigrants to America, and in particular to the families of John of Huntington Goulding, the son of William Goulding of Bermuda and Eleuthera and of the family and descendants of Captain Peter Goulding of Boston and Captain Roger Goulding of Rhode Island, his probable brother.  Events in the life of Captain Mason parallels many of the key events in the lives of members of the other allied families already named.  

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Captain Mason is a famous historical person.  He was born about 1600 in Ravensthorpe, Northamptonshire, England but his early life is somewhat shrouded in mystery.  His baptism is recorded in the St. Deny's church records as having taken place on October 5, 1600 and his father is listed as Richard Mason, who was married on May 23, 1600 in Ravensthorpe to Alis Burlyn, probably written down incorrectly.  Her name was probably Alice Butlyn because there was someone of that name baptized in Ravensthorpe on September 9, 1576.  John Mason may have been schooled in either England or in Holland and he enlisted in the military in 1624 and immediately went to the Netherlands to fight in the Thirty Years War.  He first saw action during the Breda Campaign and by 1629 he was a lieutenant in the Brabant Campaign.  He participated in the Siege of s'-hertogenbosch, which means "The Duke's Forest" in English and is known historically in French as Bois-le-Duc.  He served with Lord Thomas Fairfax under Sir Horace Vere in the army of Frederick Hendrik, the Prince of Orange.

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Of those, Edward Cecil and Edward Harwood are of particular interest.

1.  Edward Cecil,1st Viscount Wimbledon was the son of Thomas Cecil, 1st Earl of Exeter and the grandson of William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley by his first wife Mary Cheke.  William Cecil and both the 16th and 17th Earl of Oxford were in close alliance.  

2.  Captain Thomas Harwood was the first of his family to arrive in Virginia, and is often referred to as the "Chief of Martin's Hundred".  He is believed to have been a relative of Sir Edward Harwood, who was a member of the Virginia Company.  Sir Edward Harwood was the son of William Harwood of Thurlby by Elizabeth Greenham and he was a famous solider of the Low Countries. Thomas Goulding of Jamestown was listed as living in the household of Ellis Emerson at Martin's Hundred in 1623 and William Harwood was of Martin's Hundred as well.

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Early life in America
In 1632, John Mason joined the great Puritan exodus and sailed from England to the Massachusetts Bay Colony where he first settled in Dorchester and was promptly appointed as the captain of the local militia.  If Dr. Sherwood Anderson's story is true, and there was someone named Rev. Thomas Goulding who went to Dorchester in 1630, he might still have been there when John Mason was the Captain, but it is equally possible that he was elsewhere because I cannot find his name recorded in any of the records.  In 1633 Mason commanded the first American naval task force when he was elected to pursue the pirate Dixie Bull.  He routed him from New England waters and then he and Roger Ludlow planned and supervised the construction of the first fortifications on Castle Island, which later became known as Fort Independence.  It was located in Boston Harbor.  In 1634, he was elected to represent Dorchester in the Massachusetts General Court, where permission was granted for him to remove to the fertile Connecticut River valley. In 1635, he settled in Windsor, Connecticut at the confluence of the Farmington River and the Connecticut River; he lived there for the next twelve years and served as a civil Magistrate and military leader of the nascent Connecticut Colony. In 1640, he married Anne Peck, the daughter of Rev. Robert Peck and they had eight children. 

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The Pequot War
John Mason recounted his experiences in the Pequot War in his narrative Major Mason's Brief History of the Pequot War, originally printed in 1677 by Increase Mather and later printed by Thomas Prince in 1736. The most prominent episode in Major Mason's military career was his role as captain of the Colonial forces in the conflagration that started in the predawn hours of May 26, 1637.  The English forces led by Mason and John Underhill, along with their Indian allies, attacked one of two main fortified Pequot villages at Mystic.  Twenty soldiers breached the gates of the palisade but were quickly overwhelmed, so much so that they utilized fire to create chaos and facilitate their escape.  Eventually the Pequots were trapped and those who tried to escape were killed by the other soldiers who surrounded the fort.  Only a handful of the approximately 500 men, women and children survived what became known as the Battle of Mistick Fort.  That defeat and another broke the spirit of the tribe who then decided to retreat west to the Hudson River area.   

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In 1645 Sir Thomas Fairfax, his old friend and comrade from the campaign in the Netherlands wrote him a letter and urged him to return to England and accept a Major General's commission in the Parliamentary Army in the English Civil War. Mason decided to decline the offer and remain in Connecticut.  Fairfax was the new Lord General, with Cromwell as his Lieutenant-General and cavalry commander.  On 14 June 1645 he proved his capacity as commander in chief during the decisive Battle of Naseby where Charles I was defeated and fled to Wales.  

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In 1647 Mason assumed command of Saybrook Fort which controlled the main trade route to the upper river valley.  The fort burned but another was quickly built nearby and Mason spent the next twelve years there and served as Commissioner of the United Colonies and was occasionally called upon to negotiate the purchase of Indian lands and write treaties, which prompted the New Haven Colony to offer him a lucrative position as manager of their enterprise in relocating to the Delaware River area.  He declined the offer and remained in Connecticut, where he died at Norwich on January 30, 1672.  

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William Ripley and Rev. Robert Peck
The name Ripley is one that is associated with John Golding of Essex County, Virginia.  John Golding married Elizabeth Ripley and it is probably true that she was related to Richard Ripley, who brought John Golding to Virginia.  Anne Peck who married Major John Mason was the daughter of Rev. Robert Peck.  Rev. Peck was the second husband of Martha Woodward Bacon and he and William Ripley were both on the ship, the Diligent that sailed from Ipswich, Suffolk, England in June 1638 and arrived in Boston, Massachusetts on August 10, 1638.  They were among a larger group that left England to escape religious persecution and also to retreat from the influence of Archbishop William Laud.  

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John Mason was in New England long before either William Ripley or Rev. Peck arrived, so it is not known if they knew each other in England.  Rev. Peck returned to England in October of 1641 after the difficulties that caused him to leave his congregation there had been resolved, and Mr. Cushing the town clerk reported his wife and son Joseph returned with him but his daughter Anne stayed behind with John Mason. 

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