Gorton, Samuel (1592–1677), Puritan theologian and founder of Warwick, Rhode Island, was born in Gorton, England. Little is known of his background, but his father evidently had been a merchant and guild member in London. Instructed by competent tutors, Gorton became skilled in the classics and in English law but never attended university, engaging instead in the respectable middle-class trade of a clothier. He received his religious training in the English church but by the 1630s, under the influence of Puritan preachers, decided to leave London, where he had been in business, for New England. In 1636 he arrived in Boston with his wife, Mary Maplet, his eldest son, Samuel, and one or more other children. Gorton reached Boston at the height of the Antinomian controversy instigated by ...