administrative business of the government in the first years of Elizabeth’s reign, and largely influenced her foreign policy until his death, which occurred on the 20th of April 1566. Sir John Mason married Elizabeth, daughter of Sir Thomas Isley of Sundridge, Kent, and widow of Richard Hill. He had no children, and his heir was Anthony Wyckes, whom he had adopted, and who assumed the name of Mason and left a large family.
See J. A. Froude, History of England (12 vols., London, 1856–1870); Charles Wriothesley, Chronicle of England during the Reigns of the Tudors, edited by W. D. Hamilton (Camden Soc., 2 vols., London, 1875); P. F. Tytler, England under the Reigns of Edward VI. and Mary (2 vols., London, 1839); John Strype, Ecclesiastical Memorials (3 vols., Oxford, 1824) and Memorials of Thomas Cranmer (3 vols., Oxford, 1848); Acts of the Privy Council of England (new series), edited by J. R. Dasent, vols. i.–vii.
MASON, JOHN (1586–1635), founder of New Hampshire,
U.S.A., was born in King’s Lynn, Norfolk, England. In 1610
he commanded a small naval force sent by James I. to assist
in subduing the Hebrides Islands. From 1615 to 1621 he was
governor of the English colony on the north side of Conception
Bay in Newfoundland; he explored the island, made the first
English map of it (published in 1625), and wrote a descriptive
tract entitled A Briefe Discourse of the Newfoundland (Edinburgh,
1620) to promote the colonization of the island by Scotsmen.
Here he was brought into official relations with Sir
Ferdinando Gorges, then a commissioner to regulate the Newfoundland
fisheries. In March 1622 Mason obtained from
the Council for New England, of which Gorges was the most
influential member, a grant of the territory (which he named
Mariana) between the Naumkeag or Salem river and the
Merrimac, and in the following August he and Gorges together
received a grant of the region between the Merrimac and
Kennebec rivers, and extending 60 m. inland. From 1625 to
1629 Mason was engaged as treasurer and paymaster of the
English army in the wars which England was waging against
Spain and France. Towards the close of 1629 Mason and
Gorges agreed upon a division of the territory held jointly
by them, and on the 7th of November 1629 Mason received
from the Council a separate grant of the tract between the
Merrimac and the Piscataqua, which he now named New
Hampshire. Thinking that the Piscataqua river had its source
in Lake Champlain, Mason with Gorges and a few other associates
secured, on the 17th of November 1629, a grant of a
region which was named Laconia (apparently from the number
of lakes it was supposed to contain), and was described as
bordering on Lake Champlain, extending 10 m. east and
south from it and far to the west and north-west, together
with 1000 acres to be located along some convenient harbour,
presumably near the mouth of the Piscataqua. In November
1631 Mason and his associates obtained, under the name of
the Pescataway Grant, a tract on both sides of the Piscataqua
river, extending 30 m. inland and including also the Isles
of Shoals. Mason became a member of the Council for New
England in June 1632, and its vice-president in the following
November; and in 1635, when the members decided to
divide their territory among themselves and surrender their
charter, he was allotted as his share all the region between the
Naumkeag and Piscataqua rivers extending 60 m. inland,
the southern half of the Isles of Shoals, and a ten-thousand acre
tract, called Masonia, on the west side of the Kennebec river.
In October 1635 he was appointed vice-admiral of New England,
but he died early in December, before crossing the Atlantic.
He was buried in Westminster Abbey. Forty-four years
after his death New Hampshire was made a royal province.
See Captain John Mason, the Founder of New Hampshire (Boston, 1887; published by the Prince Society), which contains a memoir by C. W. Tuttle and historical papers relating to Mason’s career, edited by J. W. Dean.
MASON, JOHN YOUNG (1799–1859), American political
leader and diplomatist, was born in Greenesville county,
Virginia, on the 18th of April 1799. Graduating at the university
of North Carolina in 1816, he studied law in the famous
Litchfield (Connecticut) law school, and in 1819 was admitted
to practice in Southampton county, Virginia. He served in the
Virginia house of delegates in 1823–1827, in the state constitutional
convention of 1829–1830, and from 1831 to 1837 in
the National House of Representatives, being chairman of the
committee on foreign affairs in 1835–1836. He was secretary
of the navy in President Tyler’s cabinet (1844–1845), and was
attorney-general (1845–1846) and secretary of the navy (1846–1849),
succeeding George Bancroft, under President Polk. He
was president of the Virginia constitutional convention of 1851,
and from 1853 until his death at Paris on the 3rd of October
1859, was United States minister to France. In this capacity
he attracted attention by wearing at the court of Napoleon III.
a simple diplomatic uniform (for this he was rebuked by
Secretary of State W. L. Marcy, who had ordered American
ministers to wear a plain civilian costume), and by joining with
James Buchanan and Pierre Soulé, ministers to Great Britain
and Spain respectively, in drawing up (Oct. 1854) the famous
Ostend Manifesto. Hawthorne called him a “fat-brained,
good-hearted, sensible old man”; and in politics he was a
typical Virginian of the old school, a state’s rights Democrat,
upholding slavery and hating abolitionism.
MASON, SIR JOSIAH (1795–1881), English pen-manufacturer,
was born in Kidderminster on the 23rd of February 1795,
the son of a carpet-weaver. He began life as a street hawker
of cakes, fruits and vegetables. After trying his hand in his
native town at shoemaking, baking, carpentering, blacksmithing,
house-painting and carpet-weaving, he moved in 1814 to
Birmingham. Here he found employment in the gilt-toy trade.
In 1824 he set up on his own account as a manufacturer of
split-rings by machinery, to which he subsequently added the
making of steel pens. Owing to the circumstance of his pens
being supplied through James Perry, the London stationer
whose name they bore, he was less well known than Joseph
Gillott and other makers, although he was really the largest
producer in England. In 1874 the business was converted
into a limited liability company. Besides his steel-pen trade
Mason carried on for many years the business of electro-plating,
copper-smelting, and india-rubber ring making, in conjunction
with George R. Elkington. Mason was almost entirely self-educated,
having taught himself to write when a shoemaker’s
apprentice, and in later life he felt his deficiencies keenly. It
was this which led him in 1860 to establish his great orphanage
at Erdington, near Birmingham. Upon it he expended about
£300,000, and for this munificent endowment he was knighted
in 1872. He had previously given a dispensary to his native
town and an almshouse to Erdington. In 1880 Mason College,
since incorporated in the university of Birmingham, was opened,
the total value of the endowment being about £250,000. Mason
died on the 16th of June 1881.
See J. T. Bunce, Josiah Mason (1882).
MASON, LOWELL (1792–1872), American musician, was born at Medfield, Massachusetts. For some years he led a business life, but was always studying music; and in 1827, as the result of his work in forming the collection of church music published in 1821 at Boston by the Handel and Haydn Society, he moved to Boston and there first became president of the society and then founder of the Boston Academy of Music (1832). He published some successful educational books, and was a pioneer of musical instruction in the public schools, adopted in 1838. He received the degree of doctor of music from New York University in 1855. He died at Orange, New Jersey, on the 11th of August 1872.
His son William Mason (1829–1908), an accomplished pianist and composer, published an interesting volume of reminiscences, Memoirs of a Musical Life, in 1901.
MASON, WILLIAM (1725–1797), English poet, son of William Mason, vicar of Holy Trinity, Hull, was born on the 12th of February 1725, was educated at St John’s College, Cambridge, and took holy orders. In 1744 he wrote Musaeus, a lament for Pope in imitation of Lycidas, and in 1749 through the
