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List of Illustrations
FIRST PLATE SECTION
Washing Fleece and Sorting Wool, Isaac Claesz van Swanenburg, 1607–12 © Courtesy of the Lakenhal Museum, Leiden, Holland
Leiden Town Hall © The author
John Robinson’s home in Leiden, the Groeneporte or Green Gate on the Kloksteeg © The author
The Mayflower carrying the Pilgrim Fathers across the Atlantic to America in 1620, Marshall Johnson, c. 1850–1921. Private Collection / Peter Newark American Pictures / © Bridgeman Images
Illustration of the signatures of the Pilgrim Fathers, from Hutchinson’s Story of the British Nation. Photo by Three Lions / Getty Images
The Signing of the Mayflower Compact, Edward Percy Moran, c. 1900 © Pilgrim Hall Museum, Massachusetts / Bridgeman Images
‘Powhatan’s Mantle’, deer hide with shell bead decoration, 17th century © Courtesy of the Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford
Princess Pocahontas on her visit to England, Simon de Passe, 1616 © Virginia Historical Society, Virginia / Bridgeman Images
Pine writing cabinet with mother-of-pearl inlay, believed to have been brought on the Mayflower by Pilgrim William White © Courtesy of the Pilgrim Hall Museum, Massachusetts
The Brewster chest, Norway pine, probably made in Holland, early 17th century © Courtesy of the Pilgrim Hall Museum, Massachusetts
Mary Chilton Winslow’s will, 31 July 1676 © Courtesy of the Massachusetts Archives, Massachusetts
Peregrine White’s cradle, descended in the Winslow family, probably made in Holland c. 1620 © Courtesy of the Pilgrim Hall Museum, Massachusetts
First American sampler, Loara Standish, before 1655 © Courtesy of the Pilgrim Hall Museum, Massachusetts
The Winslow joined chair, American red oak, c. 1650–1700 © Courtesy of the Pilgrim Hall Museum, Massachusetts
‘Inhabitants of Virginia’, from Admiranda Narratio by Thomas Hariot, published 1590, Theodore de Bry, coloured engraving after John White © Service Historique de la Marine, Vincennes, France / Bridgeman Images
Plimoth Plantation: the living museum at Plymouth, Massachusetts, which recreates the settlement as it would have looked in 1627 © David Persson / Shutterstock
Massasoit bronze statue in Plymouth, commissioned to commemorate the 300th anniversary of the peace treaty with the Pilgrims, Cyrus Dallin, 1921 © Courtesy of the Pilgrim Hall Museum, Massachusetts
William Bradford bronze statue in Plymouth, the companion piece to the Massasoit statue, though not cast until 1976, Cyrus Dallin © Courtesy of the Pilgrim Hall Museum, Massachusetts
Roger Williams Leaving Salem Under Obloquy, H. Brackner, 19th century © Courtesy the Heckscher Museum of Art, New York / August Heckscher Collection / Bridgeman Images
Beaver hat, worn in Plymouth by men and women, ownership attributed to Constance Hopkins © Courtesy of the Pilgrim Hall Museum, Massachusetts
Portrait of John Winthrop, artist unknown, bequest of William Winthrop, 1830 © Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Massachusetts
The attack on the Pequot Indian Fort or ‘palizado’, illustration from Newes from America, John Underhill, 1638 © Courtesy of Paul Royster and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Nebraska
Anne Hutchinson bronze statue in Boston, Cyrus Dallin, 1915 © Courtesy of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, State House Art Commission
John Cotton, illustration from the Boston Herald, 1930 © Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Massachusetts
Site of the original 1636 Governor Winslow house, Careswell © The author
Miantonomo Monument, photograph from T. Bicknell Scrapbook © Courtesy of the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology, Brown University, Rhode Island
The Isaac Winslow House in winter © Courtesy of Cynthia Hagar Krusell
Portrait of Edward Winslow by an anonymous English artist, school of Robert Walker, 1651. The letter has these words at the bottom: ‘from yr loving wife Susanna’ © Courtesy of the Pilgrim Hall Museum, Massachusetts
SECOND PLATE SECTION
Portrait of Josiah Winslow by an anonymous artist, painted in London c. 1651 © Courtesy of the Pilgrim Hall Museum, Massachusetts
Portrait of Penelope Pelham Winslow by an anonymous artist, painted in London c. 1651 © Courtesy of the Pilgrim Hall Museum, Massachusetts
Penelope Pelham Winslow’s embroidered silk shoe, made in England or France c. 1650. Material: pigskin, silk and galoon (silk-covered thread). Thought to have been worn by Penelope Pelham at her wedding to Josiah Winslow © Courtesy of the Pilgrim Hall Museum, Massachusetts
Monument to Sir William Waldegrave (died 1613), his wife Elizabeth and their ten children in St Mary’s Church, Bures © Courtesy of Alan Beales, Bures
Smallbridge Hall, home of the Waldegrave family, which was visited twice by Queen Elizabeth I © Courtesy of Alan Beales, Bures
Penelope Winslow’s deposition about her Waldegrave grandfather © Courtesy of the National Archives, Kew (Ref.: C8/338/282)
Ferriers © Courtesy of Alan Beales, Bures
Philip King of Mount Hope, engraved interior page for The Entertaining History of King Philip’s War, Paul Revere, 1772 © Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Massachusetts
Algonquian bowl of carved elm burl, known as King Philip’s bowl, 1655–75 © By permission of the Massachusetts Historical Society
King Philip at Mount Hope: ‘Western View of Mount Hope’, illustration from Other Indian Events of New England, State Street Trust Co., Forbes, 1941 © Courtesy of the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology, Brown University, Rhode Island
The Bible in Algonquian, commissioned by John Eliot, showing the first page of Genesis, 1663 © By permission of the Master and Fellows of Jesus College, Cambridge
A Map of New England, printed by John Foster, 1677. Originally published in William Hubbard’s The Present State of New-England © Collection of the Massachusetts Historical Society
And will the white man still pursue: lithographic print of Weetamoo engraved by J. Andrews & C.A. Jewett, 1889 © Courtesy of the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology, Brown University, Rhode Island
The Captivity of Mrs Rowlandson, illustration from Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, Vol. XV, 1857 © Courtesy of the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology, Brown University, Rhode Island
Captain George Curwen, attributed to Thomas Smith, Boston, 1675 © Courtesy of the Peabody Essex Museum, Massachusetts
Wheeler’s Surprise: Nipmuck Indians attack the settlement of Brookfield, Massachusetts in August 1675, Van Ingen Snyder, c. 1860. Glasshouse Images / Alamy Stock Photo
A portrait of Colonel Benjamin Church from an engraved frontispiece for The Entertaining History of King Philip’s War, Paul Revere, 1772 © Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Massachusetts
Elizabeth Paddy Wensley in one of the most celebrated early American portraits. Elizabeth’s daughter Sarah
married Isaac Winslow. Artist unknown, Boston, 1670–80. © Courtesy of the Pilgrim Hall Museum, Massachusetts
The Death of King Philip, illustration from Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, Vol. XV, 1857 © Courtesy of the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology, Brown University, Rhode Island
King Philip’s Seat, Mount Hope, Bristol, Rhode Island. Photo © R. Gerry, courtesy of the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology, Brown University, Rhode Island
The slate tombstone showing the Winslow and Pelham coat of arms made in Boston, commissioned by Isaac Winslow © Courtesy of the Pilgrim Hall Museum, Massachusetts
List of Maps
A simplified map of the colonies of 17th century North America
A simplified map of southern New England in 1675, before King Philip’s War, showing English settlements and American Indian tribes
A simplified map of the colonies of 17th century North America
A simplified map of southern New England in 1675, before King Philip’s War, showing English settlements and American Indian tribes
PROLOGUE
1676
On 12 August 1676 as dawn revealed the dark pine trees and low shores of Rhode Island, the rising sun also lit up the dome-shaped rock called Mount Hope. From the ledge where his men had pitched camp for the night, the chief of the Wampanoag tribe, whom the English called King Philip, looked down and prepared to flee. He and his braves were completely surrounded by English soldiers.
Sixty years earlier, before the coming of the Mayflower, Philip’s father’s land stretched to Cape Cod. But by 1676 Mount Hope was his son’s last remaining stronghold.
The Indians had been so successful at evading the English that Philip was convinced they were secure in this most secret home territory. He had not bargained for the tracking skills of Colonel Benjamin Church, the commander of the English, who was using Indian scouts to supplement the colonists’ woodcraft. Philip had escaped too often, and Church was determined to trap him. In the duel of wits that had been going on for the past month, Church made careful mental notes of Philip’s way of operating. One of Philip’s men going out to relieve himself in the early morning had been shot at. Now gunfire was ricocheting wildly up the rock.
As the Indians returned fire, Philip threw off his meal satchel, cloak, jewellery and powder horn, which would weigh him down. Gun in hand, he started to leap through the wood into the swamp. The English were wary of swamps because they were so difficult to navigate. Philip had a good chance of escaping through its dark recesses as he had in the past.
Perhaps, though, he no longer cared very much what became of him. The fight had gone out of him after the English had caught his wife and treasured nine-year-old son. Clergymen in Boston were now debating bringing biblical precedent to bear on whether it was right to hang this boy – the child of a rebel – or sell him into slavery.
CHAPTER I
Droitwich
There was nothing in the annals of family history to suggest that Edward Winslow, and eventually his younger brothers, would migrate to live in a religious colony 3,000 miles away. Everything about his early life seemed comprehensively tied down by the entangling webs of tradition and desire for worldly position. His father, also called Edward, was an aspiring merchant, in the prosperous Midlands market town of Droitwich.
Edward senior dealt in grain and pease, had an interest in the salt business and travelled for work, mainly to Bristol, sometimes to London for a court case or to hand over clients’ monies. He was in effect a paralegal, or legal executive – someone with a knowledge of the law but not sufficiently well educated to have been qualified – and seems to have been an unofficial notary or person of standing in the community who could be relied on for witnessing legal documents.
He mingled with the elite who ran the town. Though regarded as a decent and reliable chap, he was not quite one of them. He and his wife Magdalen were always scraping by, though she was of gentle birth and the Winslows themselves had seen better days. To her chagrin he never owned his own house. They moved home several times over twenty-five years. Sometimes they lived pleasantly in the sort of cosy sixteenth-century salt merchant’s house which today is still seen in Droitwich High Street; at other times, as business waned they found themselves in smaller, damper lodgings.
Edward and Magdalen Winslow’s eldest child was christened Edward on 20 October 1595 over the medieval font in the ancient church of St Peter in Droitwich. They went on to have four more sons – John, Gilbert, Josiah and Kenelm – and a daughter, Magdalen.
For several hundred years the Winslows had been recorded as living in Worcestershire as yeomen farmers. But at the end of the sixteenth century Edward senior’s father, Kenelm Winslow, decided to stop being a yeoman farmer getting by on seventy-five acres, and became a cloth merchant.
There has been much debate about the Winslows’ social status. In the more class-ridden age of the nineteenth century, rumours proliferated that they were of aristocratic descent. They themselves, however, were proud to use the term yeomen, which is what we would call middle class.
Yeomen could be wealthy enough to move amongst the gentry, and a reference in a seventeenth-century history of Worcestershire suggests that at some point Kenelm was a man of considerable estate, but then fell on hard times. However, it is generally agreed among historians that he owned a large house at Kerswell Green. Today it is a Grade II listed building, a thatch-roofed farmhouse from the late medieval period, with various alterations in the seventeenth, eighteenth and twentieth centuries – a fairly extensive half-timbered house with a large hall, gables and expensive brick elements.
Judging by the inventory attached to his will, Kenelm was a man who was accustomed to the elegances of the sixteenth century: he had table linen and napkins, and drank out of glasses. His meals were cooked in brass pans and served in brass pots and pewter dishes.
Kenelm was a daring and perhaps rather too entrepreneurial type, a trait his grandson Edward junior would inherit. Becoming a clothier or cloth merchant was one of the swiftest means to wealth during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Worcester and Droitwich were boom towns because of the cloth industry. Ever since the Roman occupation, Droitwich’s position on massive salt deposits made it prosperous. As well as being the best preservative for fish and meat before refrigerators, in the late Middle Ages salt’s chemical properties became integral to the cloth trade, and Droitwich really took off. Salt was not only used for cleaning, dyeing and softening wool and leather but the trade also expanded into materials used in shipbuilding, such as flax and hemp, as well as medicines and ointments. A tradition of commerce and centuries of busy, crafty merchant activity and lucrative trade meant Droitwich was notably successful. And its propinquity to Worcester had a knock-on effect.
Worcester was famous for its rich red dye and was a centre for the international wool trade. Merchants in the late sixteenth century were the new success story. They were flexing their muscles, feeling their strength. Famously termed ‘the middle sort of people’, they were ‘a composite body of people of intermediate wealth, comprising substantial commercial farmers, prosperous manufacturers, independent tradesmen and the increasing numbers who gained their livings in commerce, the law and the provision of other professional services’. Kenelm Winslow and his son Edward now had their feet fairly well set on the first rungs of this dynamic merchant community. It was the place to be.
Thanks to trade and exploration in the late sixteenth century, England was diversifying and spreading its influence internationally. As a result the landed gentry were being enticed into commerce. There were far fewer university places than now, and many gentry families made their sons apprentices. In an inheritance system of male primogeniture, apprenticeships for younger sons had social cachet, particularly in the London livery companies. Daniel Defoe summed up the change as ‘this amphibious creature, this land-water thing called a gentleman tradesman’.
This process would have been particularly clear at Droitwic
h where the burgesses (the powerful merchants) ‘be poor for the most part; because gentlemen have for the most part the great gain of it and the burgesses have all the labour’. Among those of ‘the meaner rank’ (which simply meant non-noble) who ‘had and have salt-makings here’ was Kenelm’s son Edward. He rented salt vats from Robert Wintour.
Though Worcestershire was a centre for Catholic recusants, the Winslow family’s leaning was straightforwardly Protestant. Edward was a client of the rising Puritan gentry of the county. Perhaps one of the traditions Kenelm passed on to his son was a taste for the fiercer, more fervent side of the new Protestant ideas through contact with Dutch merchants in the wool trade.
The Netherlands was where all English cloth was finished, and also the home of a legendary Protestantism. What a man believed – and why he believed it – was a constant subject of discussion which had a natural appeal for ruggedly individual merchants such as Kenelm whose success relied entirely on their own enterprise and brains.
Although Kenelm did not leave a huge amount of cash, his way of life was comfortable and elegant. He was a fairly successful figure in the merchant world. His son had expectations of various inheritances, and the fact that they did not materialise left Edward’s wife Magdalen feeling hard done by, she having been brought up to better things.
Nevertheless, Edward Winslow became a well-placed member of the town’s hierarchy. His signature can be seen on deeds of sale of salt vats belonging to various well-off families who had gentry status, such as the Wildes, the Wyeths, the Bucks and the Gowers. In various documents in what today would be called small claims courts he is described as ‘gent’. This was a pleasing description, for not all yeomen were so honoured, and indeed the fact that Edward rented his vats and was taxed at the lowest rate of twenty shillings suggests he did not own his property but was living in rented accommodation. Given his slightly impecunious circumstances, and despite his energy and can-do abilities, he remained outside the magic circle of the burgesses and members of the corporation who in addition to owning the vats, ran the town and elected its two MPs. Although he was outside the inner circle, that did not mean that he was not longingly looking in. He just needed a bit of luck. In this socially mobile society, wealth and a grand house were all that lay between a yeoman and a fully paid-up member of the gentry.*
The Mayflower Page 1
