Peter, Hugh

Peter or Peters, Hugh, 1598–1660, British Puritan clergyman, educated at Cambridge. He became a priest of the Established Church, but his Puritan doctrines forced him to leave England for Holland c.1629. In 1635 he went to the Massachusetts Bay colony, became pastor of the church at Salem, and was active in the colony's ecclesiastical and political affairs. He returned to England in 1641 as an agent for the colony; served (1642–49) in the civil war as chaplain with various Puritan forces, including Oliver Cromwell's; and was executed at the Restoration. See. R. P. Stearns, The Strenuous Puritan (1954).