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[Illustration
THE ROMANTIC STORY
_of the_
MAYFLOWER PILGRIMS
ALBERT CHRISTOPHER ADDISON]
[Illustration
Well worthy to be magnified are they
Who, with sad hearts, of friends and country took
A last farewell, their loved abodes forsook,
And hallowed ground in which their fathers lay.
Wordsworth]
[Illustration
The breaking waves dash'd high
On a stern and rock-bound coast;
And the woods, against a stormy sky,
Their giant branches toss'd.
Mrs. Hemans]
THE ROMANTIC STORY _of
the_ MAYFLOWER PILGRIMS
AND ITS PLACE IN THE
LIFE OF TO-DAY
_High ideals in the conduct of life are what survive, and that is why
the Pilgrim Narrative stands forth in the pages of every history as one
of the great events of the time._--SENATOR LODGE, _at the dedication of
the Pilgrim Memorial Monument at Provincetown, August 5th 1910_.
[Illustration:
_Photograph by A. S. Burbank, Plymouth_
_From the Painting by W. F. Halsall_
THE MAYFLOWER IN PLYMOUTH HARBOUR]
THE
ROMANTIC STORY
OF THE MAYFLOWER
PILGRIMS
AND ITS PLACE IN THE
LIFE OF TO-DAY
BY
A. C. ADDISON
AUTHOR OF "OLD BOSTON: ITS PURITAN SONS
AND PILGRIM SHRINES," ETC.
WITH NUMEROUS ORIGINAL ILLUSTRATIONS
[Illustration]
BOSTON
L. C. PAGE & COMPANY
MDCCCCXI
COPYRIGHT, 1911, BY
L. C. PAGE & COMPANY
(INCORPORATED)
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
FIRST IMPRESSION, SEPTEMBER, 1911
THE.PLIMPTON.PRESS.NORWOOD.MASS.U.S.A
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. OLD WORLD HOMES AND PILGRIM SHRINES 1
II. THE ARREST AT BOSTON AND FLIGHT TO
HOLLAND 27
III. LIFE IN LEYDEN--ADIEU TO PLYMOUTH--THE
VOYAGE TO THE WEST 47
IV. "INTO A WORLD UNKNOWN"--TRIALS AND
TRIUMPH 71
V. THE PILGRIM ROLL CALL--FATE AND FORTUNES
OF THE FATHERS 123
VI. NEW WORLD PILGRIMS TO OLD WORLD
SHRINES 159
INDEX 189
THE PUBLISHERS WISH TO ACKNOWLEDGE THE COURTESY OF MR. A. S. BURBANK, OF
PLYMOUTH, MASS., IN AUTHORIZING THEIR USE OF HIS PHOTOGRAPHS,
REPRODUCTIONS OF WHICH FORM A CONSIDERABLE PORTION OF THE ILLUSTRATIONS
OF THIS BOOK
ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
The Mayflower in Plymouth Harbour _Frontispiece_
The Cells, Guildhall, Boston xi
A Bit of Old Gainsborough 5
The Old Manor House, Scrooby, where William Brewster was
born.--Scrooby Church 9
The Cottage at Austerfield where William Bradford was born 13
The Old Hall, Gainsborough, in which the Separatist Church
was founded in 1602 17
Guildhall and South Street, Boston 21
The Old Courtroom, Guildhall, Boston 25
The River Witham, Boston 29
The Pilgrim Cells, Guildhall, Boston, showing the Kitchen
beyond 33
Old Town Gaol, Market-place, Boston 37
Trentside, Gainsborough 41
Elder William Brewster 45
John Robinson's House, Leyden, where the Pilgrim Fathers
worshipped 49
St. Peter's Church, Leyden 53
Bust of Captain John Smith 57
The Embarkation of the Pilgrims 61
Model of the Mayflower 65
Plymouth Harbour, as seen from Cole's Hill 69
The Landing of the Pilgrims 73
The March of Miles Standish 77
The Canopy over Plymouth Rock 81
The Old Fort and First Meeting-House 85
Pilgrims going to Church 89
The Departure of the Mayflower 93
Captain Miles Standish 97
Governor William Bradford 101
The Pilgrim Memorial Monument at Provincetown 105
Plymouth Rock 109
A Bit of Old Boston 113
The Site of the Old Fort, Burial Hill, Plymouth 117
First Church, Plymouth 121
The Pilgrim Fathers' Memorial, Plymouth 125
John Alden.--Priscilla Mullins 129
Governor Bradford's Monument, Burial Hill, Plymouth 133
Governor Carver's Chair and Ancient Spinning Wheel 137
Elder Brewster's Chair and the Cradle of Peregrine White 141
The Grave of John Howland 145
The Grave of Miles Standish, Duxbury 149
The Miles Standish Monument, Duxbury 153
Governor Edward Winslow 157
Mayflower Tablet on the Barbican, Plymouth, England 161
Scrooby Village 165
The Ancient Kitchen, Guildhall, Boston 169
Robinson Memorial Church, Gainsborough 173
Tablet in Vestibule of Robinson Memorial Church,
Gainsborough.--Memorial Tablet on St. Peter's Church,
Leyden 177
Design by R. M. Lucas for the Tercentenary Memorial at
Southampton 181
The Font, Austerfield Church.--The Font, Primitive Methodist
Chapel, Lound 185
PREFACE
By a strange yet happy coincidence, on the very day the writer of these
lines sat silent in a Pilgrim cell at Boston--the Lincolnshire town
where the Pilgrims were imprisoned in their first attempt to flee their
native country--pondering on the past and inscribing his humble lines to
the New World pioneers, the President of the American Republic was at
Provincetown, Massachusetts, dedicating a giant monument to the planters
of New Plymouth, the last of the many memorials erected to them. The
date was the fifth of August, 1910. President Taft in his address at the
commemoration ceremonies declared very truly that the purpose which
prompted the Pilgrims' progress and the spirit which animated them
furnish the United States to-day with the highest ideals of moral life
and political citizenship. Three years before, another American
President, Mr. Roosevelt, at the cornerstone laying of this monument,
enlarged on the character of their achievement, and in ringing words
proclaimed its immensity and world-wide significance.
Down through the years the leaders of men have borne burning witness to
the wonderful work of the Pilgrim Fathers. Its influence is deep-rooted
in the world's history to-day, and in the life and the past of our race
it stands its own enduring monument.
The object of the present narrative is to give to the reader an account
of the Mayflower Pilgrims that is concise and yet sufficiently
comprehensive to embrace all essentials respecting the personality and
pilgrimage of the Forefathers, whom the poet Whittier pictures to us in
vivid verse as:
those brave men who brought
To the ice and iron of our winter time
A will as firm, a creed as stern, and wrought
With one mailed hand and with the other fought.
In the pages which follow, the Old World homes and haunts of the Pilgrim
Fathers are depicted and described. The story has the advantage of
having been written on the scene of their early trials, concerted plans
of escape, and stormy emigration, by one who, from long association, is
familiar with the history and traditions of Boston and the quaint old
sister port of Gainsborough, and perhaps imparts to the work some
feeling of the life and local atmosphere of those places in the days
that are dealt with, and before. The Pilgrims are followed into Holland
and on their momentous journey across seas to the West. The story aims
at being trustworthy and up-to-date as regards the later known facts of
Pilgrim history and the developments which reflect it in our own time.
It does what no other book on the subject has attempted: it traces the
individual lives and varying fortunes of the Pilgrims after their
settlement in the New World; and it states the steps taken in recent
years to perpetuate the memory of the heroic band. The tale that is told
is one of abiding interest to the Anglo-Saxon race; and its
attractiveness in these pages is enhanced by the series of illustrations
which accompanies the printed record. Grateful acknowledgment is made of
much kindly assistance rendered during the preparation of the work,
especially by the Honourable William S. Kyle, Treasurer of the First
(Pilgrim) Church at Plymouth, Massachusetts.
_Men they were who could not bend;
Blest Pilgrims, surely, as they took for guide
A will by sovereign Conscience sanctified._
* * * * *
_From Rite and Ordinance abused they fled
To Wilds where both were utterly unknown._
--WORDSWORTH, "_Ecclesiastical Sonnets,"
Part III. Aspects of Christianity in
America, I. The Pilgrim Fathers._
_In romance of circumstance and the charm of personal heroism the story
of the Pilgrim Fathers is pre-eminent._
--J. A. DOYLE'S "_English in America_."
_The coming hither of the Pilgrim three centuries ago ... shaped the
destinies of this Continent, and therefore profoundly affected the
destiny of the whole world._
--PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT, _at the laying
of the corner-stone of the Pilgrim
Memorial Monument at Provincetown,
Massachusetts, August 20th, 1907_.
[Illustration: THE CELLS, GUILDHALL, BOSTON _With winding staircase to
court-room above_]
FROM A PILGRIM CELL
THE PILGRIMS' CELLS,
GUILDHALL, BOSTON, LINCOLNSHIRE.
This is written in a Pilgrim cell, one of those dark and narrow dungeons
which the Pilgrim Fathers tenanted three hundred and four years ago, in
the autumn of 1607, and behind the heavy iron bars of which men have for
generations delighted to be locked in memory of their lives and deeds.
The present-day gaoler, less terrible than his predecessor of Puritan
times, has ushered me in and closed the rusty gate upon me, and left me
alone, a willing prisoner for a space. I look around, but do not start
and shrink in mortal dread as must once the hapless captives here
immured.
'Tis a gloomy place as a rule; but just now some outer basement doors,
flung open, admit the autumn sunlight, which floods the hall floor and
penetrates to the cell where I am seated. To get here I have stooped and
sidled through an opening a foot and a half wide and five feet deep, set
in a whitewashed wall fourteen inches thick. I stand with arms
outstretched, and find that the opposite walls may be pressed with the
finger-tips of each hand. The cell extends back seven feet, and the
height is the same between the bare stone floor and the roughly boarded
roof. All is dingy, cobwebbed, musty, and silent as the grave. Like the
neighbouring tenement it is cold, mean, melancholy, fit only to be
shunned. Yet its associations are dear indeed. For this is holy ground,
a hallowed spot, a Mecca of modern pilgrims. It has a history held
sacred in two hemispheres, that of religious persecution, of loyal
resolution, of physical fetters and spiritual freedom.
Such is the story inscribed upon these walls, a record which may be read
in all their time-worn stones, on every inch of their rusted bolts and
bars. For they are the cells of the Pilgrim Fathers. Here was the first
rude break in their weary worldly progress, a journey which was to
continue with affliction into Holland, thence back to Plymouth, and,
after a last adieu there to English soil, on in the little Mayflower to
New Plymouth and a New England.
Alone in a Pilgrim cell! What thoughts the situation kindles; how
eagerly the imagination shapes and clothes them; what scenes this mouldy
atmosphere unfolds. The very solitude is eloquent with pious
reminiscence; the void is filled again, peopled with those spectres of
an imperishable past; their prayers and praise fall on the listening
ear, a soft appeal for grace and strength, the lulling notes of a rough
psalmody; then answering dreams and visions of the night.
THE AUTHOR.
1911.
I
OLD WORLD HOMES AND PILGRIM SHRINES
THE ROMANTIC STORY _of the_ MAYFLOWER PILGRIMS
I
OLD WORLD HOMES AND PILGRIM SHRINES
_View each well-known scene:
Think what is now and what hath been._--SCOTT.
Lincolnshire stands pre-eminent among the English shires for inspiriting
records of trials borne and conflicts waged for conscience' sake. The
whole country, from the lazy Trent to the booming eastern sea, teems
moreover with religious interest. To read what happened between the
births of two famous Lincolnshire men--Archbishop Langton in the twelfth
century; and Methodist John Wesley in the seventeenth--is like reading
the history of English nonconformity. The age of miracles was long since
past; yet Stephen Langton, Primate of England and Cardinal of Rome, was
a champion of the national liberties. He aided, nay instigated, the
wresting of Magna Charta from King John. That was not the result of his
education; 'twas the Lincolnshire blood in his veins. For the outrage on
the Romish traditions the Archbishop was suspended by the Pope.
Probably he would have been hanged if they could have got at him.
But we can go back farther even than Langton's time. Not many miles from
Gainsborough is the Danish settlement of Torksey, rich in ecclesiastical
lore. Here Paulinus baptised the Lindissians on the sandy shore of the
Trent, in the presence of Edwin, King of Northumbria. Hereabout, they
say, King Alfred the Great was married to the daughter of Etheldred, and
the old wives of Gainsborough used to recite tales of Wickliffe hiding
on the spot where once stood the dwelling-place of Sweyn and of Canute.
[Illustration: _Photograph by Brocklehurst, Gainsborough_
A BIT OF OLD GAINESBOROUGH]
Lincolnshire has always had the courage to bear religious stress, and
strange things are read of it. It was near Louth that the insurrection
known as "The Pilgrimage of Grace" began. Eighty-five years before the
sailing of the Mayflower, and thirty years before William Brewster was
born, the ecclesiastical commissioners for the suppression of
monasteries (which were plentiful in Lincolnshire) went down to hold a
visitation at Louth. But the excursion was not to their pleasure. As one
of them rode into the town he heard the alarm bell pealing from the
tower, and then he saw people swarming into the streets carrying bills
and staves, "the stir and noise arising hideous." He fled into the
church for sanctuary, but they hauled him out, and with a sword at his
breast bade him swear to be true to the Commonwealth. He swore. That
was the Examiner. When the Registrar came on the scene he was with scant
ceremony dragged to the market cross, where his commission was read in
derision and then torn up, and he barely escaped with his life. For the
same cause there were risings at Caistor and Horncastle--two of the
demurest of modern towns. The Bishop's Chancellor was murdered in the
streets of Horncastle and the body stripped and the garments torn to
rags; and at Lincoln the episcopal palace was plundered and partially
demolished.
But Lincolnshire need rest no fame upon such merits as these. Greater
honour belongs to the county, for it was Lincolnshire that made the most
important of all contributions to the building of America when it sent
forth the Pilgrim Fathers, and afterwards the Puritan leaders, who met
for conference in the eventful days of the movement in Boston town, in
Sempringham manor house, or in Tattershall Castle, to lay the
foundations of the Massachusetts settlements. And, as Doyle in his
"English in America," truly says, "In romance of circumstance and the
charm of personal heroism the story of the Pilgrim Fathers is
pre-eminent. They were the pioneers who made it easy for the rest of the
host to follow." Their colony was the germ of the New England States.
Amid the quiet pastures threaded by the Ryton stream, where the counties
of York and Lincoln and Nottingham meet, are two small villages, the
homes of the only Pilgrim Fathers satisfactorily traced to English
birthplaces. A simple, pathetic interest clings to these secluded spots.
At Scrooby is the manor house wherein William Brewster, the great heart
of the pilgrimage and foremost planter of New Plymouth, was born.
Archbishops of York had found a home here for centuries; Wolsey, at the
close of his strangely checkered career, lodged there and planted a
mulberry tree in the garden; Bishop Bonner dated a letter thence to
Thomas Cromwell. And when William Brewster became Elder Brewster,
pensive Puritans often gathered there to worship, "and with great love
he entertained them when they came, making provision for them to his
great charge." His condition was prosperous and he could well afford to
do it. A Cambridge man, Brewster early took his degree at Peterhouse; he
next saw service at Court, and accompanied Secretary Davison to the
Netherlands; afterwards succeeding his father and grandfather as post on
the great North Road at Scrooby, a responsible and well-paid office,
which he filled for nearly twenty years.
The parish church, "not big, but very well builded," as Leland said; the
quaint old vicarage; the parish pound, and all that remains of the
parish stocks: these stand witness to the antiquity of Scrooby. A little
railway station and rushing Northern expresses are almost the only signs
of twentieth century activity.
[Illustration: _Photograph by Welchman Bros., Retford_
THE OLD MANOR HOUSE, SCROOBY, WHERE WILLIAM BREWSTER WAS BORN]
[Illustration: _Photograph by Welchman Bros., Retford_
SCROOBY CHURCH]
The Scrooby community was an off-shoot from that at Gainsborough, the
first Separatist church formed in the North of England, of which the
pastor was John Smyth, a graduate of Cambridge, an "eminent man in his
time" and "well beloved of most men." Smyth preached at Gainsborough
from 1602 to 1606, when he was driven into exile. The members of his
church gathered from miles around to its services, crossing into
Gainsborough by the ferry-boat on the Trent. This continued for two or
three years, until at length "these people became two distinct bodies or
churches, and in regard of distance did congregate severally; for they
were of sundry towns and villages."
Richard Clyfton, once rector of Babworth near Retford--"a grave and
reverend preacher"--was the first pastor at Scrooby; and with him as
teacher was "that famous and worthy man Mr. John Robinson," another
seceder from the English Church, who afterwards was pastor for many
years "till the Lord took him away by death."
Next to Brewster, William Bradford was the most prominent of the lay
preachers among the Scrooby fraternity. He became Governor Bradford of
the Plymouth Colony--"the first American citizen of the English race who
bore rule by the free choice of his brethren"--and the historian of the
Plymouth Plantation. Bradford, a yeoman's son with comfortable home
surroundings, lived at Austerfield, an ancient agricultural village
about three miles from Scrooby on the Yorkshire side. The pretty cottage
of his birth is still shown by the roadside near the Norman church, and
the parish register bears the record of his baptism, on March 19, 1589.
A youth of seventeen years, he walked across the fields to join the
Scrooby brethren in their meetings. He and Brewster, the two men who
were to impress their individuality so powerfully upon the religious
life of the American people, became firm friends, and, says their later
historian,[1] that friendship, "formed amid the tranquil surroundings of
the North Midlands of their native land, was to be deepened by common
labours and aspirations, and by common hardships and sufferings endured
side by side both in the Old World and the New."
[Illustration: _Photograph by Welchman Bros., Retford_
THE COTTAGE AT AUSTERFIELD WHERE WILLIAM BRADFORD WAS BORN]
But it was Robinson to whom they jointly owed much guidance. When, in
Bradford's own words, "They could not long continue in any peaceable
condition, but were hunted and persecuted on every side;" when "some
were taken and clapt up in prison, and others had their houses beset and
watched night and day, and hardly escaped their hands;" and when "the
most were fain to fly and leave their homes and habitations and the
means of their livelihood," it was John Robinson, the devout and learned
pastor, who led them out of Nottinghamshire into Holland, and there
inspired within them the vision of complete earthly freedom in the
new country across the Atlantic.
Robinson was a Lincolnshire man. Gainsborough claims him, and on
Gainsborough his first solid memorial has been raised. Many are familiar
with Gainsborough who have never seen the town. Up the Trent sailed
Sweyn, the sanguinary Dane, to conquest; and his son Canute--he that
ordered back the rising tide, and got a wetting for his pains--was at
Gainsborough when he succeeded him as King of England.
Gainsborough is the St. Ogg's of "The Mill on the Floss," and the Trent
is the Floss, along which Tom and Maggie Tulliver "wandered with a sense
of travel, to see the rushing spring-tide, the awful AEgir, come up like
a hungry monster"--the inrush of the first wave of the tide, a
phenomenon peculiar at that time to both the Trent and the Witham.
What George Eliot wrote of St. Ogg's describes old Gainsborough
to-day--"A town which carries the trace of its long growth and history
like a millennial tree, and has sprung up and developed in the same spot
between the river and the low hill from the time when the Roman legion
turned their backs on it from the camp on the hillside, and the
long-haired sea-kings came up the river and looked with fierce eyes at
the fatness of the land."
And in sketching the history of St. Ogg's the novelist remembered that
time of ecclesiastical ferment now written about, when "Many honest
citizens lost all their possessions for conscience' sake, and went forth
beggared from their native town. Doubtless there are many houses
standing now," she said, "on which those honest citizens turned their
backs in sorrow, quaint gabled houses looking on the river, jammed
between newer warehouses, and penetrated by surprising passages, which
turn at sharp angles till they lead you out on a muddy strand
over-flowed continually by the rushing tide." Did not Maggie Tulliver,
in white muslin and simple, noble beauty, attend an "idiotic beggar" in
the still existing Old Hall, where the Fathers worshipped and John Smyth
taught--"a very quaint place, with broad, jaded stripes painted on the
walls, and here and there a show of heraldic animals of a bristly,
long-snouted character, the cherished emblems of a noble family once the
seigniors of this now civic hall"?
In this Old Hall the Separatist church was founded in 1602, and here it
had the friendly protection of the Hickman family, Protestants whose
religious sympathies had brought them persecution and exile in the past.
[Illustration: _Photograph by Welchman Bros., Retford_
THE OLD HALL, GAINSBOROUGH, IN WHICH THE SEPARATIST CHURCH WAS FOUNDED
IN 1602]
But the "foreign-looking town" which George Eliot endowed with romance
had, like the neighbouring estuary town of Boston, which her language
might have served almost as well to paint, been the abode of hard,
historic fact. We can imagine the Scrooby brethren crossing the ancient
ferry to bid their friends at Gainsborough farewell. For in 1607 we
read, this "groupe of earnest professors of religion and bold assertors
of the principle of freedom and personal conviction in respect to the
Christian faith and practice" had formed the resolution to seek in
another country the liberty they found not at home.[2] But it was as
unlawful to flee from their native land as to remain in it without
conforming, for the statute of 13 Richard II, still in force, made
emigrating without authority a penal crime.
Not Gainsborough alone in the North and East appeals to the never-ending
stream of reverent New World pilgrims to Old World shrines. On an autumn
day of the year above named came Elder Brewster to the famed new borough
of Boston. There he cautiously looked about him, and made a bargain with
the captain of a Dutch vessel to receive his party on board "as
privately as might be." But they were betrayed, arrested, stripped of
their belongings and driven into the town, a spectacle for the gaping
crowd, then haled before the justices at the Guildhall and "put into
ward," there to await the pleasure of the Privy Council concerning them.
Boston is a unique old shrine--a place "familiar with forgotten years,"
as George Eliot says; a town, as already hinted, resembling Gainsborough
in many outward features, but even wealthier in associations dear to the
hearts of New World pilgrims. Boston and Gainsborough are regarded as
the two most foreign-looking towns in England. Many of Boston's
inhabitants still hold the brave spirit which enabled their ancestors to
endure the religious stress of the seventeenth century. It has been a
cradle of liberty since that idea first held men's thoughts and roused
them to action.
The quaint buildings, the ancient towers of Hussey and of Kyme, the
Guildhall, the Grammar School, the great church with its giant tower all
crusted o'er with the dust of antiquity: these stood when Bradford and
Brewster and their companions in search of freedom were arraigned before
the magistrates for the high crime and misdemeanor of trying to leave
their native land.
[Illustration: _Photograph by Hackford, Boston_
GUILDHALL AND SOUTH STREET, BOSTON]
They must have had secret friends in the place; for some time after
their Boston adventure the Government sent down Commissioners to make
serious inquiry as to who had cut off the crosses from the tops of the
maces carried before the Mayor to church "on Sundays and Thursdays and
solemn times." John Cotton, the Puritan vicar, openly condemned the act.
Suspicion fell upon churchwarden Atherton Hough. But he denied it,
though "he confessed he did before that year break off the hand and arm
of a picture of a Pope (as it seemed) standing over a pillar of the
outside of the steeple very high, which hand had the form of a church in
it." The confession seems to have been safely made, and doubtless
churchwarden Hough was proud of it. He might have been better employed
at that moment; but if any be tempted to censure his Puritan zeal, let
them remember the temper of the times in which he lived. There was
something more than wanton mischief behind it all. It was not in fact a
"picture" of a Pope, but an image much more innocent. But the
resemblance was sufficient for Atherton Hough.
The venerable Guildhall, where Brewster and the rest faced the justices,
stands in a street containing the queerest of riverside warehouses. One
of them, old Gysors' Hall, was once the home of a family belonging to
the merchant guilds of Boston, which gave to London two Mayors and a
Constable of the Tower in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The
Guildhall itself dates from the thirteenth century; the image of St.
Mary which once adorned its front shared the fate of the "picture" on
the church tower, with the difference that the Virgin vanished more
completely than the "Pope." The hall is regularly used by the public;
and local authorities with long and honourable history still deliberate
in the ancient court-room, with its wagon roof, its arch beams, its
wainscoted walls, and the Boston coat-of-arms and the table of Boston
Mayors since 1545 proudly displayed to view. Except for its fittings and
furniture the chamber presents much the appearance now that it did when
the Pilgrim Fathers, brought up from the cells which exist to-day just
as when they tenanted them, stood pathetic figures on its floor and were
interrogated by a body of justices, courteous and well-disposed, but
powerless to give them back their liberty.
[Illustration: _Photograph by Hackford, Boston_
THE OLD COURTROOM, GUILDHALL, BOSTON
_Where the Pilgrims' Fathers faced the Justices. In the floor on the
left is the trap door to the staircase leading down to the Cells. The
Court ceased to be held here in 1843_]
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Dr. John Brown in "The Pilgrim Fathers of New England and their
Puritan Successors."
[2] "Seeing themselves thus molested, and that there was no hope of
their continuance there, they resolved to go into y^e Low Countries,
wher they heard was freedome of religion for all men; as also how
Sundrie from London, and other parts of y^e land had been exiled and
persecuted for y^e same cause, and were gone thither and lived at
Amsterdam and in other places of y^e land, so affter they had continued
togeither about a year, and kept their meetings every Saboth, in one
place or other, exercising the worship of God amongst themselves,
notwithstanding all y^e dilligence and malice of their adversaries, they
seeing they could no longer continue in y^t condition, they resolved to
get over into Hollad as they could which was in y^y year
1607-1608."--Bradford's "History of Plymouth Plantation."
II
THE ARREST AT BOSTON AND FLIGHT TO HOLLAND
[Illustration: _Photograph by Hackford, Boston_
THE RIVER WITHAM, BOSTON]
II
THE ARREST AT BOSTON AND FLIGHT TO HOLLAND
_Well worthy to be magnified are they
Who, with sad hearts, of friends and country took
A last farewell, their loved abodes forsook,
And hallowed ground in which their fathers lay._
WORDSWORTH.
Great things were destined to result from that none too joyous jaunt of
Elder Brewster's when, late in 1607, charged by the Scrooby community to
find them a way out of England, he went down to Boston and chartered a
ship. William Bradford was of the Boston party. Everything was quietly
done. In all likelihood the intending emigrants never entered the town,
but gathered at some convenient spot on the Witham tidal estuary where
the rushing AEgir hissed.
Whether the Dutch skipper was dissatisfied with the fare promised him,
or he feared detection and punishment, cannot be told. Yet, when the
fugitives were all on board his vessel, and appeared about to sail, they
were arrested by minions of the law. Bitter must have been their
disappointment; stern, we may be sure, their remonstrance. But they
could do nothing more than upbraid the treacherous Dutchman. They were
not kept long in doubt as to their fate. Put back into open boats, their
captors "rifled and ransacked them, searching them to their shirts for
money, yea, even the women further than became modesty, and then carried
them back into the town, and made them a spectacle and wonder to the
multitude who came flocking on all sides to behold them." A goodly sight
for this curious Boston mob. "Being thus first by the catchpole officers
rifled and stripped of their money, books, and much other goods,"
proceeds the account, with an honest contempt for the writings of the
law, "they were presented to the magistrates, and messengers were sent
to inform the Lords of the Council of them; and so they were committed
to ward."
The basement cells in which the prisoners were placed had been in use at
that time for about sixty years, for "in 1552 it was ordered that the
kitchens under the Town Hall and the chambers over them should be
prepared for a prison and a dwelling-house for one of the sergeants."
There must have been more cells formerly. Two of them now remain. They
are entered by a step some eighteen inches high; are about six feet
broad by seven feet long; and in lieu of doors they are made secure by a
barred iron gate.
[Illustration: _Photograph by Hackford, Boston_
THE PILGRIM CELLS, GUILDHALL, BOSTON, SHOWING THE KITCHEN BEYOND]
Into these dens the captives were thrust. Short of a dungeon
underground, no place of confinement could have been more depressing.
Only the heavy whitewashed gate, scarce wide enough to allow a man to
enter, admits the light and air; and the interior of each cell is dark
as night. We can imagine the misery of men fated to inhabit for long
such abodes of gloom; it must have been extreme. They look as if they
might have served as coal cellars for feeding the great open fireplaces
which, with their spits and jacks and winding-chains, still stand there
in the long open kitchen much as they did when they cooked the last
mayoral banquet or May Day dinner for the old Bostonians.
A curious winding stair (partly left with its post), terminating at a
trapdoor in the court-room floor, was the way by which prisoners
ascended and descended on their passage to and from the Court above.
Now these justices who had the dealing with the Pilgrim Fathers were
humane men, and were not without a feeling of sympathy for the unhappy
captives. It is therefore reasonable to suppose that during some portion
of this time, when their presence was not required by the Court, they
may have found them better quarters than the Guildhall cells. There was
a roomy ramshackle pile near the church in the market-place, half shop,
half jail, of irregular shape, with long low roof, which in 1584 was
"made strong" as regards the prison part, though in 1603--four years
before the date under notice--it was so insecure that an individual
detained there was "ordered to have irons placed upon him for his more
safe keeping," with a watchman to look after him! And thirty years later
the jail, "and the prison therein called Little-Ease," were repaired.
We know what "Little-Ease" means well enough; and so did many a wretched
occupant of these barbarous places. The Bishop of Lincoln, in the old
persecuting days, had at his palace at Woburn "a cell in his prison
called Little-Ease," so named because it was so small that those
confined in it could neither stand upright nor lie at length. Other
bishops possessed similar means of bodily correction and spiritual
persuasion.
This was worse than the Guildhall cells, with all their gloomy horror;
and if the magistrates entertained their unwilling guests at the town
jail, we may rest satisfied they did not eat the bread of adversity and
drink the water of affliction in Little-Ease, but in some more spacious
apartment. We have no evidence that they did so entertain them, and the
traditional lodging-place of these intercepted Pilgrims is the Guildhall
and nowhere else. It is probable, all the same, that a good part of
their captivity was spent in the town prison.
[Illustration: _From a Drawing by the late William Brand, F. S. A._
OLD TOWN GAOL, MARKET-PLACE, BOSTON]
Although the magistrates, from Mayor John Mayson downward, felt for the
sufferers and doubtless ameliorated their condition as far as they
could, it was not until after a month's imprisonment that the greater
part were dismissed and sent back, baffled, plundered, and
heart-broken, to the places they had so lately left, there to endure the
scoffs of their neighbours and the rigours of ecclesiastical discipline.
Seven of the principal men, treated as ring-leaders, were kept in prison
and bound over to the assizes. Apparently nothing further was done with
them. Brewster is said to have been the chief sufferer both in person
and pocket. He had eluded a warrant by leaving for Boston, and we know
this was in September, because on the fifteenth of that month the
messenger charged to apprehend Brewster and another man, one Richard
Jackson of Scrooby, certified to the Ecclesiastical Court at York "that
he cannot find them, nor understand where they are." On the thirtieth of
September also the first payment is recorded to Brewster's successor as
postmaster at Scrooby.
How the imprisoned Separatists fared, there is nothing to show. No
assize record exists. The Privy Council Register, which could have
thrown light on the matter, was destroyed in the Whitehall fire of 1618;
and the Boston Corporation records, which doubtless contained some entry
on the subject that would have been of the greatest interest now, are
also disappointing, as the leaves for the period, the first of a volume,
have disappeared.
Eventually the prisoners were all liberated. That dreary wait of many
weeks was a weariness of the spirit and of the flesh. Patiently they
bore the separation, and by and by they met to make more plans. Next
spring they agreed with another Dutchman to take them on board at a
lonely point on the northern coast of Lincolnshire, between Grimsby and
Hull, "where was a large common, a good way distant from any town." This
spot has been located as Immingham, the site of the new Grimsby docks.
The women, with the children and their goods, came to the Humber by boat
down the Trent from Gainsborough; the men travelled forty miles across
country from Scrooby. Both parties got to the rendezvous before the
ship, and the boat was run into a creek. This was unfortunate, as when
the captain came on the scene next morning the boat was high and dry,
left on the mud by the fallen tide, and there was nothing for it but to
wait for high water at midday.
[Illustration: _Photograph by Bocklehurst, Gainsborough_
TRENTSIDE, GAINSBOROUGH]
Meanwhile the Dutchman set about taking the men on board in the ship's
skiff, but when one boatload had been embarked he saw to his dismay, out
on the hills in hot pursuit, "a great company, both horse and foot, with
bills and guns and other weapons," for "the country was raised to take
them." So the laconic historian says, "he swore his country's
oath--Sacramente," and heaving up his anchor sailed straight away with
the people he had got. Their feelings may be imagined; and their plight
was aggravated by a violent storm, which drove them out of their course
and tossed them about for a fortnight, until even the sailors gave up
hope and abandoned themselves to despair. But the ship reached port,
at last, and all were saved.
The scene ashore meantime had been scarcely less distressing than that
at sea. Some of the men left behind made good their escape; the rest
tarried with the forsaken portion of the party. The women were
broken-hearted. Some wept and cried for their husbands, carried away in
the unkindly prudent Dutchman's ship. Some were distracted with
apprehension; and others looked with tearful eyes into the faces of the
helpless little ones that clung about them, crying with fear and quaking
with cold.
The men with the bills and guns arrested them; but, though they hurried
their prisoners from place to place, no Justice could be found to send
women to gaol for no other crime than wanting to go with their husbands.
We know not what befell them. The most likely suggestion is that "they
took divers ways, and were received into various houses by kind-hearted
country folk." Yet this we do know. They rallied somewhere at a later
day, and John Robinson and William Brewster, and other principal members
of the devoted sect, including Richard Clyfton, "were of the last, and
stayed to help the weakest over before them;" and Bradford tells us with
a sigh of satisfaction that "notwithstanding all these storms of
opposition, they all gatt over at length, some at one time and some at
another, and some in one place and some in another, and mette togeather
againe according to their desires, with no small rejoycing"--to take
part in the wonderful movement, begun by the Pilgrims and continued by
the Puritans, that gave to a new land a new nation. Thus, wrote Richard
Monckton Milnes, in some verses dated "The Hall, Bawtry, May 30th,
1854"--
Thus, to men cast in that heroic mould
Came Empire, such as Spaniard never knew--
Such Empire as beseems the just and true;
And at the last, almost unsought, came gold.
[Illustration: _Copyright, 1904, by A. S. Burbank, Plymouth_
ELDER WILLIAM BREWSTER]
III
LIFE IN LEYDEN--ADIEU TO PLYMOUTH--THE VOYAGE TO THE WEST
[Illustration: _Photograph by W. P. Demmenie, Leyden_
JOHN ROBINSON'S HOUSE, LEYDEN, WHERE THE PILGRIM FATHERS WORSHIPPED]
III
LIFE IN LEYDEN--ADIEU TO PLYMOUTH--THE VOYAGE TO THE WEST
_Then to the new-found World explored their way,
That so a Church, unforced, uncalled to brook
Ritual restraints, within some sheltering nook
Her Lord might worship and His Word obey
In Freedom._--WORDSWORTH.
The first stage of the pilgrimage from the Old England to the New was
now accomplished. Before the end of 1608 the whole body of the fugitives
had assembled at Amsterdam. Two Separatist communities were already
there, one from London, of which Francis Johnson was pastor and Henry
Ainsworth teacher, and the other from Gainsborough under John Smyth. But
these brethren were torn with dissensions, and the Scrooby Pilgrims,
seeking peace, moved on to Leyden, where, by permission of the
authorities, they settled early in 1609. Here they embarked upon a
prosperous period of church life, and after awhile purchased a large
dwelling, standing near the belfry tower of St. Peter's Church, which in
1611 served as pastor's residence and meeting-house, while in the rear
of it were built a score of cottages for the use of their poor.
Eleven quiet years were spent in Holland. Governor Bradford says they
continued "in a comfortable condition, enjoying much sweet and
delightful society and spiritual comfort," and that they "lived together
in love and peace all their days," without any difference or disturbance
"but such as was easily healed in love."
The conditions of life were stern and hard, but they bore all
cheerfully. With patient industry they worked at various handicrafts,
fighting poverty and gaining friends. William Bradford was a fustian
worker when, in 1613, at the age of twenty-three, he married Dorothy May
of Wisbech; the marriage register which thus describes him is preserved
in the Puiboeken at Amsterdam. Brewster, who was chief elder to John
Robinson, now sole pastor of the congregation since Richard Clyfton had
remained behind at Amsterdam, at first earned a livelihood by giving
lessons in English to the students at the University. Then, in
conjunction with Thomas Brewer, a Puritan from Kent, he set up a
printing press, and they produced books in defence of their principles,
such as were banned in England. Similar literature, emanating from the
Netherlands, had excited the wrath of King James, who still possessed
sufficient influence with the States of Holland to enable him to reach
offending authors there. This James attempted to do in the case of Elder
Brewster through Sir Dudley Carleton, then English ambassador at the
Hague. The result was ludicrous failure.
[Illustration: ST. PETER'S CHURCH, LEYDEN]
Brewster quitted Leyden for a time and went to London, not as was
thought to elude the vigilance of the Ambassador, but to arrange with
shipmasters for a voyage to the West, which the Pilgrims had begun to
think about. While Brewster was being sought by the Bishop of London's
pursuivants, Sir Dudley Carleton, unaware of the hunt proceeding in
London, was actively searching for him at Leyden, and at last
triumphantly informed Secretary Naunton that he had caught his man. But
as it turned out, the bailiff charged with the arrest, "being a dull,
drunken fellow," had seized Brewer instead of Brewster! The prisoner was
nevertheless detained, and after some ado consented to submit himself
for examination in England, on conditions which were observed. Nothing
came of it however. Brewster returned free and unmolested and Brewer
remained in Leyden for some years, when, venturing back to England, he
was thrown into prison and kept there until released by the Long
Parliament fourteen years later.
Events were meanwhile shaping the destiny of the little Pilgrim
community. Holland, though a welcome temporary asylum, was no permanent
place for these English exiles, and their thoughts turned before long
towards a settlement in North America. By good fortune this was a
country then being opened up, and it appeared as a veritable Land of
Promise to these refugees in search of a new home.
The first attempt to found an English colony on the mainland of North
America was made in 1584, when Sir Walter Raleigh took possession of the
country and named it Virginia in honour of his Queen. Nothing came of
this venture, but in 1607 a company of one hundred and five men from
England, sailing in three small ships, had landed on the peninsula of
Jamestown in Chesapeake Bay, and the first permanent settlement was
established.
The chief of this Virginian enterprise was the redoubtable John Smith, a
Lincolnshire man, the first of those sons of empire to go out from the
East to the West. Strange that this pioneer in the wilderness, who gave
to New England its name, should have come from a country which was to
contribute so much to the peopling of the New England States. It is upon
record that in 1619 Smith, who was then unemployed at home, volunteered
to lead out the Pilgrims to North Virginia, but nothing came of the
offer.
[Illustration: _Photograph by James, Louth_
BUST OF CAPTAIN JOHN SMITH
_Presented by General Baden-Powell to the Louth Grammar School_]
The Leyden brethren in their hour of need turned to the Virginia
Company, and the negotiations for a settlement in the chartered
territory were not altogether unsatisfactory. The obstacle was their
religion. On the Council of the Company they had good friends; but its
charter not only enforced conformity, but provided stringent measures of
church government. Yet, though the Pilgrims could obtain no formal grant
of freedom of worship, the presumption that they would not be disturbed
was so strong that they accepted the conditions and were about to
embark when the Merchant Adventurers in London with whom they were
associated secured powers from the Plymouth Company, and they decided to
sail for New England instead of for Virginia.
Arrangements were not completed without "many quirimonies and
complaints;" but the exiles were saddled with such substantial
difficulties as want of capital and means of transport, and the
bargaining was all in favour of the merchants who were to finance and
equip the expedition. At length the compact was made and preparations
for the voyage were pushed forward, and the eventful day arrived when
the Pilgrims were to make the long, lone journey across the seas.
Pastor Robinson and a portion of his flock were to stay behind at Leyden
until the first detachment had secured a lodgment on the American
continent; and those about to sail, the majority of the little
community, went on board the Speedwell, a vessel of sixty tons. The
Pilgrims embarked included such stout-hearted pioneers as Brewster and
Bradford, John Carver, Edward Winslow, Isaac Allerton, Samuel Fuller,
and John Howland, all "pious and godly men;" also Captain Miles
Standish, who, though not a member of the congregation then or
afterwards, was a valiant soldier whose military experience and
well-tried sword would, it was suspected, prove of service in a country
where "salvages" were known to exist in large numbers and might have to
be encountered with the arm of flesh.
That was a touching scene and one which stands out boldly in the history
of the movement when, on a bright sunny morning in July, 1620, the
Pilgrim Fathers knelt on the seashore at Delfshaven and Mr. Robinson,
his hands uplifted and his voice broken with emotion, gave them his
blessing. Affecting also was the parting of the emigrants with those
they were leaving behind. They had need of all their courage and
patience.
They sailed with British cheers and a sounding volley fired as salute,
and made a brave enough show on quitting land; but troubles dogged them
on the waters. Delays and disappointments soon set in. The Speedwell
brought them to Southampton, where, anchored off the West Key, they
found the Mayflower of London, a bark of one hundred and eighty tons
burden, Captain Thomas Jones, and several passengers, some of them
merchants' craftsmen.
Here some anxious days were spent in patching up the compact with the
Adventurers, and while the vessels lay detained letters written by
Robinson arrived from Leyden, one for John Carver conveying the pastoral
promise--never, alas! redeemed--to join them later, and the other, full
of wise counsel and encouragement, addressed to the whole company, to
whom it was read aloud and "had good acceptance with all and after-fruit
with many."
[Illustration: _Photograph by A. S. Burbank, Plymouth_
_From the Painting by Weir_
THE EMBARKATION OF THE PILGRIMS]
With ninety people in the Mayflower and thirty in the Speedwell, and a
governor and assistants appointed for each company, the two vessels
dropped down Southampton water on August 15[3]; but they were scarcely
in the Channel when the smaller craft began to leak, and they had to run
into Dartmouth and overhaul her. The repairs occupied eight days. At
the end of that time the ships again stood out to sea; but, when nearly
three hundred miles past the Land's End, Reynolds, master of the
Speedwell, reported that the pinnace was still leaking badly, and could
only be kept afloat by the aid of the pumps. So there was nothing for it
but to turn back a second time, and the vessels now put into Plymouth,
the Pilgrims landing at the Old Barbican.