now upwards of eighty, and no vigorous action was to be expected of him. His 'good secular understanding' found a congenial field in amassing a fortune by means of fines, renewals of leases, and other sources of profit arising from episcopal estates, the greater part of which, according to Wood, was 'wheedled away from him by his second wife—who was too young and cunning for him'—to the impoverishment of his children by his first wife. At the close of his life he yielded to her persuasions to leave Wells and settle at Walthamstow in Essex. Here he died in April 1670, in his ninetieth year, and was buried in the parish church. He left two sons by his first wife—William, who became a D.D., and was appointed by his father to the archdeaconry of Bath, and John, a layman, who inherited the family estate at Cuddesdon.
[Wood's Athenae, iv. 839, Fasti, i. 285, 339, 344, 358, 470, ii. 259, 362; Walker's Sufferings, p. 70; Laud's Troubles, pp. 185-6; Lansd. MS. 984, f. 190. Kennett's Collections; Cussans's Bishops of Bath and Wells, pp. 63-9; Prynne's Canterburies Doom, pp. 27, 90 (bis), 97-100, 134-41, 153, 353, 377; Heylyn's Cyprianus Angl. pp. 215, 272 sq., 294; Articles of Impeachment, 1642; Gardiner's Hist. of Engl. 1603-42, vii. 314, 320 sq., viii. 116.]
PIERSON. [See also Pearson and Peerson.]
PIERSON, ABRAHAM (d. 1678), New England divine, born in Yorkshire, graduated B.A. from Trinity College, Cambridge, on 2 Jan. 1632–3. He went out to America, as member of the church at Boston, between 1630 and 1640. In 1640 he and a party of emigrants from Lynn in Massachusetts formed a new township on Long Island, which they named Southampton. There Pierson remained as minister of the congregational church for four years. In 1644 this church became divided. A number of the inhabitants left, and, uniting with a further body from the township of Weathersfield, formed under Pierson a fresh church at a settlement at Branford, within the jurisdiction of New Haven. In 1666 Pierson migrated yet a fourth time. The cause of this last change is among the most significant incidents in the early history of New England. When, by the order of Charles II, a new charter was granted to Connecticut, incorporating New Haven with that colony, several of the townships of New Haven resisted. This resistance, based on the exclusive tenacity with which the New Englander regarded the corporate life of his own community, was intensified by the peculiar conditions of the two colonies in question. Newhaven, rigidly and severely ecclesiastical from the outset, had, like Massachusetts, made church membership a needful condition for the enjoyment of civic rights. No such restriction was imposed in Connecticut. The men of Branford, supported by Pierson, opposed the union with Connecticut. When their opposition proved fruitless, they forsook their home, leaving Branford almost unpeopled, and, taking their civil and ecclesiastical records with them, established a fresh church and township at Newark, within the limits of New Jersey. There Pierson died on 9 Aug. 1678. His son Abraham was the first head of Yale College, Connecticut. In 1659 Pierson published a pamphlet entitled ‘Some Helps for the Indians, showing them how to improve their natural reason, to know the true God and the true Christian Religion.’ It is a short statement of the fundamental principles of monotheism, with a linear translation into the tongue of the Indians of New England. A copy of verses by Pierson on the death of Theophilus Eaton [q. v.] is published in the ‘Massachusetts Historical Collection’ (4th ser. vol. viii.)
[Winthrop's Hist. of New England; Trumbull's Hist. of Connecticut; Savage's Genealog. Dict. of New England.]
PIERSON, originally PEARSON, HENRY HUGO (1815–1873), musician, born at Oxford on 14 April 1815, was son of Hugh Nicholas Pearson [q. v.], dean of Salisbury. Pierson was educated at Harrow, where he won the governor's prize for Latin hexameters, and at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he graduated B.A. in 1830. He was destined for the medical profession, but his predilection for music proved irresistible, and he soon devoted himself entirely to the art. While at college he published his first work, ‘Thoughts of Melody,’ six songs, the words by Lord Byron, which Schumann reviewed in the ‘Neue Zeitschrift für Musik.’ His earliest teachers were Corfe, Walmisley, and Attwood, the pupil of Mozart. In 1839 Pierson went to Germany and pursued his musical studies under Reissiger, Tomaschek, and the celebrated organist Rinck. On the retirement of Sir Henry Bishop in 1843, Pierson was elected, in the following year, to the Reid professorship of music in the university of Edinburgh, Sterndale Bennett being another candidate for the post. Pierson's disposition was too sensitive and retiring to enable him to fill a public office. After protesting in vain against the mismanagement of the Reid bequest, he soon resigned the chair, and made his permanent home in Germany, where
