Stephen Bachiler

Stephen Bachiler (About 1561 – 28 October 1656) was an English clergyman who was an early proponent of the separation of church and state in the American Colonies.

John Bates (who succeeded Bachiler as Vicar at Wherwell), about 1590, with whom he had six children: Nathaniel, Deborah, Stephen, Samuel, Ann, and Theodate, who later married Christopher Hussey (1599–1686), also one of the earliest settlers of New Hampshire.

The plough[a] and the image of a sun rising from its base feature on Bachiler's coat-of-arms which were included in a 1661 work on the origins of heraldry by Sylvanus Morgan.

He incurred the hostility of the Puritan theocracy in Boston, being believed to have cast the only dissenting vote among ministers against the expulsion of Roger Williams.

Despite his age, he was uncommonly energetic, and throughout some two decades pursued settlement and church endeavors, always engaged in controversy and confrontation with Bay Colony leaders.

[14][15][16][17] In 1638, Bachiler and others, including his son-in-law Christopher Hussey, successfully petitioned to begin a new plantation at Winnacunnet, to which he gave the name Hampton when the town was incorporated in 1639.

[17] His ministry there became embroiled in controversy when Timothy Dalton was sent to the town as "teaching assistant" by the Boston church after New Hampshire was absorbed by Massachusetts in 1641.

In other respects, Bachiler's reputation was such that in 1642, he was asked by Thomas Gorges, deputy governor of the Province of Maine, to act as arbitration "umpire" (deciding judge) in a Saco Court land dispute between George Cleeve and John Winter.

By 1644, Cleeve had become deputy governor of Lygonia, a rival province to that of Gorges' in Maine established from a resurrected Plough Patent, and asked Bachiler to be its minister at Casco.