Robert Harvard

• from Harvard House & a Brief History of  John Harvard of  Stratford-upon-Avon

John Harvard was baptised on 29 November 1607, in St Saviour's Southwark, the second son of Robert Harvard, butcher, and his second wife Katherine, the daughter of Thomas Rogers of Stratford-upon-Avon, a substantial butcher, maltster and grazier. It was Thomas who, after the Stratford fire of 1594 rebuilt the house which now bears the name of his grandson.   The theatrical life of London was centred on Southwark in the late sixteenth century and it is quite likely that Robert Harvard knew both William Shakespeare and his younger brother Edmund. It may indeed have been through their introduction that he met his second wife, whom he married at Holy Trinity Church on 8 April 1605. 

John Harvard was brought up in Southwark and was educated at St Saviour's Grammar School, of which his father was a governor. From the age of 7 boys attended from 7.00 am to 11.00 am and from 1.00 pm to 5.00 pm in winter, and an hour earlier and later in the summer. Their studies were based on grammar, the classics and, increasingly in the early years of the 17th century, on the Bible in either the Geneva or the more recent Authorised version.   
In 1625 when John was 18, plague once more ravaged the capital and within the space of 5 weeks the Harvard family buried 4 children and their father, Robert. That Robert was a successful man is evidenced by his will, made shortly before his death, in which he left £600 between his surviving sons, of whom there were only two, John and Thomas, at his death. His widow, Katherine, also well provided for, remarried within 5 months and was again widowed 5 months after that, her second husband, John Elletson, leaving her the bulk of his property. It was to be the estate inherited from his mother (who married again), which enabled John Harvard to be such a generous benefactor in the New World. 

1. "The Ancestry of John Harvard" Genealogical Gleanings in England, Volume 2. By Henry Fitz-Gilbert Waters, New England Historic Genealogical Society.  Page vi, Preface.  "in July, 1635, Katherine (Harvard) (Elletson) Yearwood made her will and died, leaving her property, which had been derived from her three husbands, the butcher, the cooper, and the grocer, to her two sons, John and Thomas Harvard ..." 
2. Harvard family. The John Harvard family collection, 1577, 1622, and 1828-2007. HUG 1447, Harvard University Archives.