Dorchester Illustration of the Day no. 1964
Seventeenth-century military hero Humphrey Atherton met an ignominious death when his horse stumbled over a cow.
The following inscription can be found on Humphrey Atherton’s tomb in Dorchester Old North Burying Ground:
Hear lyes our Captaine, & MAJOR of Suffolk was withall, A godley Magistrate was he, and MAJOR GENERALL Two Troops of Hors with him here Came, Such worth his love did Crave; Ten Companyes of Foot also Mourning Marcht to his grave. Let all that read be sure to keep the faith as he has don, With Christ he lives now crown’d, His name was HUMPHREY ATHERTON He dyed the 16 of September 1661.
Although Dorchester resident Humphrey Atherton is known partly because he achieved the highest military rank in the colony, he was also known for his harsh treatment of Indians and his opposition to Quakers. On returning home one evening, his horse stumbled over a cow at the south end of Boston (or perhaps shied away from the cow). His Quaker critics believed his horrible death to be God’s visitation of wrath. A century later a Quaker imaginatively described Atherton’s death in a way to please any school boy:
“‘Humfray Adderton … having been, on a certain day, exercising his men with much pomp and ostentation, he was returning home in the evening, near the place where they usually loosed the Quakers from the cart, after they had whipped them, his horse, suddenly affrighted, threw him with such violence, that he instantly died; his eyes being dashed out of his head, and his brains coming out of his nose, his tongue hanging out at his mouth, and the blood running out at his ears: Being taken up and brought into the Courthouse, the place where he had been active in sentencing the innocent to death, his blood ran through the floor, exhibiting to the spectators a shocking instance of the Divine vengeance against a daring and hardened persecutor; that made a fearful example of that divine judgment, which, when forewarned of, he had openly despised, and treated with disdain.’ ”
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