We can trace nothing of Hooker to his birthplace, a little hamlet in Leicestershire, except that the imagery of his discourses in after life sometimes reflected the processes of husbandry he had known in childhood. But that he passed through Emmanuel College, Cambridge, while Chaderton was master, is more significant, for Emmanuel was the cradle of Puritan divines, the hatching-place of Puritan crotchets, the college whose chapel stood north and south that it might have no sacred east end, a chapel in which "riming psalms" were sung instead of the hymns, and where lessons different from those appointed in the calendar were read. Hooker was presented to the living of Chelmsford, in Essex. Here his eloquence attracted wide attention, and unhappily attracted at the same time the notice of his diocesan Laud, then Bishop of London, who drove the preacher from his pulpit. Hooker engaged in teaching a school four miles from Chelmsford, where Eliot, afterward the Indian apostle, became his usher and disciple. But Laud had marked him as one to be brought low. He was cited before the Court of High Commission, whose penalties he escaped by fleeing to Holland. Thus early in his career Laud unwittingly put in train events that resulted in the founding of a second Puritan colony in New England. III. [Sidenote: Hooker's company.] [Sidenote: Walker's First Church in Hartford, 40.] [Sidenote: Dudley's Letter to Countess of Lincoln, Young's Chron. of Mass., 320.] [Sidenote: Mass. Records, 14 June, 1631, and 3 February, 1632.] [Sidenote: Holmes's Hist. Cambridge, 1st Mass. Hist. Coll., vii, 6-8.] The persecution of Hooker made a great commotion in Essex, dividing attention with the political struggle between the king and the people about tonnage and poundage. While Hooker was an exile in Holland a company of people from Braintree and other parts of Essex, near his old parish of Chelmsford, emigrated to New England, chiefly, one may suppose, for the sake of good gospel, since they came hoping to tempt Hooker to become their pastor. This company settled at Newtown, now Cambridge, which had been projected for a fortified capital of the colony, that should be defensible against Indians and out of reach if a sea force should be sent from England to overthrow the government. Newtown was palisaded and otherwise improved at the expense of the whole colony. Hooker's company were perhaps ordered to settle there because no place was appropriate to the great divine but the new metropolis. IV. [Sidenote: Failure of Newtown as a metropolis.] [Sidenote: Savage's Winthrop, i, 98, 99. 1632.]