UNDERHILL, JOHN

born c. 1597, , Kenilworth, Warwickshire, Eng. died Sept. 21, 1672, Killingworth, Oyster Bay, N.Y. British-American colonial military officer, privateer, and magistrate. John Underhill received his initial military training in Holland. He immigrated to Boston in 1630 and organized the militia of Massachusetts Bay Colony. He became a town selectman in 1634; later that year he traveled to England seeking to increase the colony's military supplies. During the Pequot War in 1637, Underhill's troops joined with Captain John Mason's Connecticut forces in destroying the Indian fort at Mystic. Underhill subsequently wrote an excellent descriptive account of the war, News from America. After the conflict, Underhill's support of the antinomian religious dissidents resulted in his banishment by the Massachusetts General Court. He fled Massachusetts Bay for Dover, N.H., where he organized a church and declared himself governor of the settlement. His actions and conduct were challenged by Massachusetts authorities, however, and in 1640 he was temporarily excluded from the church after he openly confessed to adultery before Boston's First Church. Although he was reinstated in the Congregational order and his sentence of banishment was repealed in 1641, Underhill left Massachusetts for New Haven. He became a member of that colony's legislature. From New Haven he went to New Netherlands, where he served that government as a military officer and, later, as a member of the Council for New Amsterdam. The outbreak of the Anglo-Dutch wars in 1652 obliged him to leave the colony for Providence, R.I. There he obtained a privateer's commission and campaigned against his former Dutch employers. When the English seized New Netherlands (1664), Underhill retired to his estate on Long Island and served as surveyor of customs for Long Island and as high constable and sheriff of Yorkshire. He was also a member of the Hempstead Convention that in 1665 drafted the so-called Duke of York's laws, a law code first applied to Yorkshire and eventually extended to the whole of New York province.