Richard Waldron
Major Richard Waldron (or Richard Waldern, Richard Walderne; 1615–1689) was an English-born merchant, soldier, and government official who rose to prominence in early colonial Dover, New Hampshire. His presence spread to greater New Hampshire and neighboring Massachusetts. He was the second president of the colonial New Hampshire Royal Council after it was first separated from Massachusetts. Described as an "immensely able, forceful and ambitious" member of a well-off Puritan family, he left his English home and moved to what is now Dover, New Hampshire. He first came about 1635. He built mills on the Cochecho River, amassed local land holdings that endured in his family for over 170 years, controlled much of the local native trade, and was prominent in local politics and as deputy to the Massachusetts General Court for 25 years from 1654. He was speaker several times. When the first president of the colonial New Hampshire council, John Cutt, died suddenly, council member Walderne became the acting president or governor until Edward Cranfield arrived from England. "By the 1670s the portion of Dover known as Cochecho [village] had become something like Waldron's personal fiefdom, and citizens in the other areas of settlement rarely challenged his social authority." Birth and family Waldron (or Walderne) was born in Alcester, Warwickshire, England. One of many children of William Walderne and Catherine Raven, he was christened on 6 January 1615. Little is known of his early life. The name of his first wife is unknown. He married second Ann Scammon. He had several children. Masonian property dispute Perhaps because he was a prominent landholder, he was singled out for a lawsuit which was part of a plan seeking to overturn all land titles in colonial New Hampshire in favor of the descendants of John Mason, a colonial governor, colonizer, and admiral who was granted a land patent for the Province of New Hampshire by the British crown and planted the first British colonists there. Quaker persecution In 1662, three Quaker missionaries, Ann Coleman, Mary Tompkins and Alice Ambrose, arrived in Dover from England. Within weeks, their ministry became the subject of a public petition by the Puritan townsfolk, 'humbly craving relief against the spreading and the wicked errors of the Quakers among them'. Waldron, as the local crown magistrate, ordered them to be punished as vagabonds by being bound behind a cart and being made to walk over in a bitter winter through ten neighboring townships. Beginning in Dover, and on arrival in each township, they were to be publicly stripped to the waist and whipped ten times. Major Robert Pike stopped the torture and released them in Salisbury, the third township in which they were mistreated. There, after urgently required medical assistance from Walter Barefoote, the women left for Maine. These three Quaker women are the subject of the poem How the Women Went from Dover by the 19th-century American Quaker poet, John Greenleaf Whittier. Trickery against Native Americans At the end of King Philip's War, a number of Indians