SADLER, Richard (c. 1620–1675)

Richard Sadler was born in Worcester. He matriculated in 1637 at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, but never took a degree. He emigrated to New England in 1638, and settled at Lynn. It may be that he came over with his parents, and that his father, also Richard, was a proprietor at Lynn in 1638, and Reading in 1644. Sadler became a freeman of Massachusetts on 14 March 1639/40 and served the town of Lynn as clerk of writs in 1640 or 1641.

Sadler was on his way to England on 5 November 1646, when he attended John Cotton's lecture at Boston. This was at the height of the Remonstrant controversy provoked by Robert Child*, Thomas Fowle* and others. At the lecture, Cotton warned that the petition the Remonstrants were sending to England, which was critical of Massachusetts, could be a ‘Jonas’, and sink the ship. Cotton recommended anyone who found it to throw it overboard. Sadler set sail from Boston on 9 November, on the Supply, with Thomas Fowle, William Vassall* and Robert Harding*. When a storm blew up, the passengers remembered Cotton's instruction to throw the petition into the sea. ‘A godly and discreet woman’ took a copy of the petition – not the original – to Sadler and others, ‘who although they knew it was not the right Petition … yet … they judged it also to bee very bad … they cut it into peeces as they thought it deserved, and gave the said peeces to a seaman who cast them into the Sea’.