Mather, Richard (1596-1669), was an important Puritan minister among the first generation of English settlers in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. He was the father of Increase Mather and the grandfather of Cotton Mather, two leading colonial religious leaders.
Mather was born in Lowtown, England, near Liverpool. He was an ordained minister in the Church of England from 1619 until he was suspended in 1633 because of his Puritan views (see Puritans ). Mather chose to move with his family to Massachusetts in 1635, and a year later he became pastor of a newly founded church in Dorchester. He held that position until his death.
Mather was active in the Massachusetts colony’s religious life and strongly urged that each congregation should control its own affairs. He wrote a series of essays on the subject and was a major figure in writing the Cambridge Platform, the Congregational Church’s official rules on discipline and government, adopted in 1648. Earlier, he had aided Puritan worship by helping to compile the hymnal called the Bay Psalm Book (1640), the first book printed in colonial America.
