The Reverend John Wheelwright had become vicar of Bilsby, England from 1623 to 1633.

A hiatus in the records of his English parish indicates that its pastor was absent during the years 1628 and 1629.

It may be inferred that he had come to New England with Endicott in September of the former year, and lived with associates in Massachusetts during the succeeding winter.

The conditions were favorable for Wheelwright, or any other congenial foreigner, to obtain a right of settlement within the limits of New Hampshire.

The principal result of Wheelwright’s activities at this time appears to have been the execution of a settlement treaty or option with the native sagamores of southern New Hampshire, to which John Oldham had been a witness.

This document will later be disputed as a forgery by many historians.

His second wife is Mary, daughter of Edward and Sussana Hutchinson of Alford, Lincolnshire, England; whom he had married in England about 1631 (Mary Hutchinson's sister Anne had in 1632 married Wheelwright's friend, the Reverend Ralph Levett, a fellow Cambridge graduate and protégé of John Cotton, who became the vicar of nearby Grainsby, Lincolnshire.)

While the Reverend Wheelwright is vicar at Bilsby in 1636 he is driven from his Anglican church for non-conformity.

With his second wife, her mother Sussana, and their five children and accompanied by Augustine Storer, brother of his first wife, Wheelwright sails for Boston, arriving on June 12, 1636.

Well received here, he becomes pastor of the Eaxe Chapel at Mount Wollaston, Boston, where he will remain for a few months.