Church's fall was the more terrible because from a height. He was a member of a very distinguished family, and he had been afforded in his youth all the best opportunities of the day. In 1754 he was graduated at Harvard, and after studying with Doctor Pynchon rose to considerable eminence as a physician and particularly as a surgeon. Besides talents and genius of a sort, he was endowed with a rare poetic fancy, many of his verses being full of daintiness as well as of a very pretty wit. He was, however, somewhat extravagant in his habits, and about 1768 had built himself an elegant country house near Boston. It was to sustain this, it is believed, that he sold himself to the king's cause.
To all appearance, however, Church was up to the very hour of his detection one of the leading patriots of the time. He had been chosen to deliver the oration in the Old South Meeting-House on March 5, 1773, and he there pronounced a stirring discourse, which has still power to thrill the reader, upon the massacre the day celebrates, and the love of liberty which inspired the patriots' revolt on that memorable occasion. Yet two years earlier, as we have since discovered from a letter of Governor Hutchinson, he had been anonymously employing his venal pen in the service of the government!
In 1774, when he was a member of the Provincial Congress, he was first suspected of communication with Gage, and of receiving a reward for his treachery. Paul Revere has written concerning this: "In the fall of '74 and the winter of '75 I was one of upwards of thirty, chiefly mechanics, who formed themselves into a committee for the purpose of watching the movements of the British soldiers and gaining every intelligence of the Tories. We held our meetings at the Green Dragon Tavern. This committee were astonished to find all their secrets known to General Gage, although every time they met every member swore not to reveal any of their transactions except to Hancock, Adams, Warren, Otis, Church, and one or two others."
The traitor, of course, proved to be Doctor Church. One of his students who kept his books and knew of his money embarrassment first mistrusted him. Only treachery, he felt, could account for his master's sudden acquisition of some hundreds of new British guineas.