[16] William, Thomas, and Hugh Peters were brothers, and born in Fowery, in Cornwall, in Old England. Their father was a merchant of great property, and their mother was Elizabeth Treffry, daughter of John Treffry, Esq., of a very ancient and opulent family in Fowery. William was educated at Leyden, Thomas at Oxford, and Hugh at Cambridge Universities. About the year 1610 and 1620, Thomas and Hugh were clergymen in London, and William was a private gentleman. About 1628 Thomas and Hugh, rendered obnoxious by their popularity and Puritanism, were silenced by the Bishop of London. They then went to Holland, and remained there till 1633, when they returned to London. The three brothers sold their landed property, and went to New-England in 1634. Hugh settled at Salem, and became too popular for Mather and Cotton. He was soon appointed one of the Trustees 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 round with flint-stones also, for the accommodation of every inhabitant in want of water. It bears the name of Peters’s Spring to this day.--He married a second wife, by whom he had one daughter named Elizabeth. The renown of this zealot increasing, he received an invitation to remove from Salem to Boston, and, complying with it, he there laid the foundation-stone of the great Meeting-House, of which the Rev. Dr. Samuel Cooper, one of the most learned of the Literati in America, is the present minister. Mather and Cotton ill brooked being out-rivalled by Hugh; yet, finding him an orthodox fanatic, and more perfect than themselves, they seemingly bowed to his superiority, at the same time that they laid a snare for his destruction. In 1641 those envious pastors conspired with the Court at Boston to convert their Bishop Hugh into a Politician, and appoint him agent to Great Britain.--The Plot succeeded; and Hugh assumed his agency under colour of petitioning for some abatement of customs and excise; but his real commission was to foment the civil discontents, jars, and wars, then prevailing between the King and Parliament.--Hugh did not see into the policy of Mather and Cotton; and he had a strong inclination to chastise the Bishops and Court, who had turned him out of the Church for his fanatical conduct. On his arrival in London, the Parliament took him into their service.--The Earls of Warwick and Essex were also his patrons.--In 1644, the Parliament gave him Archbishop Laud’s library; and soon after made him Head of the Archbishop’s Court, and gave him his estate and palace at Lambeth:--all of which Hugh kept till the Restoration, when he paid for his