SAD NEWS FROM ENGLAND.
“Thou know’st ’tis common; all that live must die.
Passing through nature to eternity.”
SHAKSPEARE’S _Hamlet_.
The Pilgrims were fretted by the unsatisfactory and clogging
conditions of their compact with the London partners. Their
prosperity was perpetually menaced by the factions and the chicanery
of a herd of merchants whose only god was mammon, and who cared
nothing for justice and sober living and their plighted word, if only
they might make their heaps high and massy.
Early in 1625, the colonists determined to initiate measures which
should look to their disenthralment, and whose result should be to
give them in fee simple those lands which their patient skill had
wrung from the sturdy hand of unwilling and churlish nature. Standish
was commissioned to go to England, and open negotiations with the
Merchant-adventurers.[523]
Two ships, which had come out on a trading voyage, were now about
to sail for home. In the larger of these the redoubtable captain
embarked. “Being both well laden, they went joyfully home together,
the greater towing the lesser at her stern all the way over. And
they had such fair weather, that they never once cast off till both
were shot deep into the English channel. Yet there the little vessel
was unhappily seized by a Turkish rover, and carried into Sallee,
where master and crew were made slaves; and her cargo of beaver-skins
was sold at sixpence a piece. Thus were their hopes dashed, and
the joyful news they meant to carry home was turned to heavy
tidings.”[524]
Fortunately for Standish, the Turk was satisfied with the morsel he
had already gotten into his capacious maw, and did not pursue the
bigger ship; so that he escaped a life of Eastern servitude, and
safely reached the English soil. Wasting no time, he hastened to meet
the London partners; and so skilful was his diplomacy, that he made
arrangements for the gradual absorption of the Plymouth debt by the
settlers, “taking up a hundred and fifty pounds of it on the spot,
though at fifty per cent. interest, which he bestowed in trading and
in the purchase of such commodities as he knew to be requisite for
colonial use.”[525]
In the spring of 1626, he returned to Plymouth,[526] bringing with
him the mournful intelligence of the death of Cushman in England
and of Robinson in Leyden,[527] a double bereavement to the Pilgrim
pioneers.
The loss of no other two men could have dealt so stunning a blow to
the infant settlement. Plymouth was almost buffeted from its feet.
The loss seemed irreparable to human eyes; but God, who uses his
servants, delights to show the world that they are not indispensable
to him. Cushman had been “as their right hand to the Pilgrims, and
for divers years had done and agitated all their business with the
Adventurers, to the great advantage of his friends.”[528]
But Robinson was mourned with a peculiar sorrow. Attached to their
great teacher by the tenderest personal ties, by many favors rendered
and received, by marriage vows plighted at his altar, by mutual
perils undergone for a common faith, by expectation of his arrival
and reunion on the bleak New England strand, is it strange that
Plymouth at large wept sore for him, and plucked its beard?
“Robinson’s powerful ascendency over the minds of his associates,
acquired by eminent talents and virtues, had been used
disinterestedly and wisely for the common good. With great courage
and fortitude, he had equal gentleness and liberality; and his
intellectual accomplishments and the generosity of his affections
inspired mingled love and admiration. Though he passed his life in
the midst of controversy, it was so far from narrowing his mind, that
his charity towards dissenters distinguished him among the divines
of his day as much as his abilities and learning, while his broad
and tolerant views continued to ripen and expand as he grew towards
age,”[529] and bloomed into the grave.
In especial he won the benediction of the seventh beatitude; for
he was famous as a peacemaker, and there are many instances of
reconciliation between those at variance effected by his fine
Christian tact.[530]
“He fell sick Saturday morning, February 22, 1625. Next day he taught
twice; but in the week, grew feebler every day, and quit this life
on the 1st of March. All his friends came freely to him; and if
prayers, tears, or means, could have saved his life, he had not gone
hence.”[531]
He died in his fifty-first year, “even as fruit falleth before it is
ripe, when neither length of days nor infirmity of body did seem to
call for his end.”[532] The discarded flesh-tabernacle was laid to
rest in the chancel of one of the churches at Leyden,[533] allotted
by the Dutch for the use of the English exiles; and the magistrates,
ministers, professors, and students, followed him to the grave.[534]
Robinson was the Moses of the Pilgrims, and like his prototype, he
looked into the promised land from the top of Pisgah, but he did not
enter it. Intrigue balked him of that felicity, and “hope deferred
made his heart sick.” But ideas cannot be barred out. His entered the
wilderness, and germinated democracy and the representative system.
“His truth, planted at Plymouth, has blossomed on the rocky shores,
in the sheltered valleys, and on the breezy hills of New England, and
borne a grand harvest.”