The Mayflower

by Rebecca Fraser

  CHAPTER II

  Leiden

  Edward probably arrived in Holland in the late spring of 1617. The snows that encased the country in a thick white coat had finally departed and boats could navigate the canals again. This was the time of the Little Ice Age, the very cold winters that afflicted Europe for much of the seventeenth century. The sort of enchanted pale landscape just vanishing as Edward glided through a silent countryside can be seen in the work of contemporary Dutch artists. In England, frost fairs were held on the Thames. In the Netherlands the whole population went skating mad, strapped bones onto their boots and flew for miles along the canals that criss-crossed the flat countryside. The ice was a time for wild exuberance. Of all the European nations the Dutch seem to represent a sober way of life. But Edward came to think they were not as serious-minded as he might have expected – especially on Sundays when life did not take on the hushed feel it did in Puritan homes in England.

  At the beginning of his adventure into the unknown, Edward was in a state of high excitement, neither impoverished nor wealthy but full of characteristic vitality. Travelling light, with the suit he stood up in, some sheets and a plate or two, he was a good-natured fellow, always interested in his surroundings and lit by an inner spiritual glow. He was looking forward to playing his part in the great battle between Protestants and Catholics – and dazzled by the thought of aiding Brewer.

  Holland was the front line against the forces of darkness, the Roman Catholic Spanish Empire against which the seventeen Protestant provinces of the Netherlands had revolted in 1566. It held the sort of appeal Jerusalem once had for crusaders. The commitment to Protestant thought of all kinds was such that the Calvinist university at Leiden had become known for free expression and as a centre for publishing the work of exiled Puritan divines which James I forbade.

  For the journey, first by horse to Gravesend, then ship, Edward was wrapped in the sort of thick serge mantle that England and the Netherlands were celebrated for manufacturing. Though he was moving to a foreign country, the huge English presence made him feel at home. The English had begun to aid the Dutch in 1585. Over 100,00 Englishmen served in Holland, both in English and Dutch regiments as mercenaries and as members of the peacetime garrisons. Towns such as Flushing, Brill and Ostend were like English colonies. Many recruits fought in Dutch regiments out of personal sympathy, to keep the new Dutch Republic liberated from their former Spanish overlords.

  In Leiden, all Edward’s emotional needs were unexpectedly satisfied. He joined a separatist church headed by the inspirational minister John Robinson, one of the most interesting theologians of his day. The church – known as the Scrooby community, from its roots in Nottinghamshire – was a mixture of independently minded people like himself from all over England, and some Dutch followers.

  And they changed Edward’s life. It was one step to go to Holland, only across the North Sea, quite another to travel 3,000 miles across the stormy Atlantic to America. But three years after he arrived in Leiden, Edward was ready to emigrate.

  The Scrooby church initially had no thoughts of emigrating. The core members under William Brewster and John Robinson had arrived in Holland between 1608 and 1609. Escaping from the English authorities because they were an illegal body, their interest was in being able to worship as they pleased. They had gone first to Amsterdam where there were various other English separatist churches, of which some of them had been members at different times. Subsequently they moved to Leiden because of disagreements and because William Brewster had contacts there from when he had been a young trainee diplomat. The community was a modest gathering of exiles from an obscure part of England but its members had extraordinary determination. The church believed they had a covenant like the Jewish people of old. Their comparison was the working of God’s will to save the chosen people in the Old Testament. They constantly looked to the Bible for guiding examples.

  John Robinson was soon at the forefront of the vibrant intellectual life of Leiden. From the beginning his church had been treated with respect because Robinson was a major Protestant theologian, one of the most brilliant minds of his generation. In England, the 1604 canons had meant he had to resign his fellowship at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, where he had once been dean. In Leiden, he was invited by the eminent intellectuals of the day to take part in debates about Calvinism. The notably tall and dark Robinson was not only a kindly man dedicated to his parishioners’ welfare, he was an academic and thinker. Anywhere but in England, it was quite natural for him to enter the public dialogues which engaged the hearts and minds of the time.

  The town government of Leiden gave financial support to all reformed foreign churches – English, French and German – that sought sanctuary within its fortress-like walls. The city’s remarkable spirit made it a magnet for Protestant intellectuals. Leiden was the centre of the largest printing industry in Europe, as part of the United Provinces’ proudly Protestant culture and dedication to religious freedom, and for thirty years it was a safe haven for exiled Protestant dissidents. For Edward, being with people who could understand his own religious yearnings was immensely exciting.

  He lodged with his printing boss William Brewster. If Edward had been unconsciously looking for heroic patterns to live by, he found them in his landlord. Brewster had been a man of considerable position in his own neighbourhood in England. A pillar of the strongly hierarchical local community, a respected magistrate, the administrator of the estates of the Archbishop of York, he had lived in a manor house with a moat. Now he had a personal relationship with one of the most attractive figures in Leiden, the town secretary, Jan Van Hout. The connection had been forged thirty years previously when Brewster, then an eighteen-year-old trainee diplomat, had visited Leiden as part of an Elizabethan delegation in 1585–6.

  The trusted protégé of the Elizabethan Secretary of State William Davison, William Brewster was at Peterhouse, Cambridge, in the 1580s at the time of maximum separatist interest. Davison’s treatment at court – he became the scapegoat for the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots – may have made Brewster’s intense nature more carelessly defiant. One way of bending the rules of the Church of England had been for gentry families to appoint Puritan vicars to livings, or to found Puritan lectureships for unbeneficed clergy. Their role was to preach in tandem with, and frequently in opposition to, the local vicar. But under James I’s clampdown these vicars were no longer licensed. They were forced to go underground and make illegal churches. Leaders of these small gathered churches found so much they could not countenance in the new canons that in the end, reluctantly, a separate church was the only answer. They took their brave congregations with them.

  It was Brewster who had taken it upon himself to hide John Robinson, who had returned to his home town of Sturton in Nottinghamshire when he was expelled from his parish in Norwich. Robinson’s church followed him. His parishioners were utterly bound up by the idea of coming as close as possible to the primitive church of the Apostles. Puritans considered reading the Bible the real way to salvation, but since adult illiteracy was so high, the Puritans also emphasised listening to sermons. In Brewster’s church, a local congregation of the archbishop’s tenant farmers and copyholders studied under benevolent guidance. At a time when the poorest people were not expected to be involved in church government, the circumstances of the Scrooby church’s conception meant its membership was always unusually broadly based. But like all separatist churches, a feeling of personal spiritual conversion – which Edward himself had experienced – was paramount.

  Once the fact that the Scrooby separatist church was gathering to pray in a room at Scrooby Manor had been betrayed to the church authorities, imprisonment, possibly death, were the future they looked at if they continued to practise separatism. The church members fled in the night, taking little more than the clothes they stood up in. They were more like a family than church acquaintances, their bonds intensified by neighbourliness and exile.

  The
exodus took place just as the war between the newly independent northern Netherlands and Spain was reaching a twelve-year truce. The warm-hearted and generous-minded Van Hout, remembering Brewster from the noble past, welcomed the Scrooby church, and his patronage smoothed their path. Van Hout helped the church successfully apply to the city authorities for permission to settle in Leiden, perhaps even wording their application. He found them lodgings and introduced them to wealthy merchants who employed them as weavers. Those who wished to elevate their sons to get them into Leiden University used William Brewster’s skills as a tutor. Van Hout’s nephew, the historian Jan Jansz Orlers, who was one of the mayors of Leiden, helped with the distribution of books printed by the Brewster Press (also known today as the Pilgrim Press). He took them to the Frankfurt Book Fair, even then an important event for the publishing industry.

  The Brewster family had included MPs in their ranks and had been in Nottinghamshire for at least 200 years. They were educated professional people – clergymen, diplomats and magistrates. Now William Brewster’s son Jonathan – who could once have reasonably expected to attend Cambridge – was in the cloth trade and his father was dependent on Brewer’s charity.

  One of the Scrooby community was an autodidact of great culture and vast reading named William Bradford. He was about Edward’s age and came from a well-to-do South Yorkshire family of farmers. He told Edward that of all the ‘godly’ who had escaped to Leiden, William Brewster had suffered the greatest loss. Older than most of them, he had exchanged an important government position and status for a hard way of life. His health had been lost through imprisonment in Boston, England.

  Most of the original church found work in the cloth industry. A good many had had some experience of piecework weaving in their cottages in England. Brewster’s uncertain health meant he was grateful when the ebullient Brewer employed him as a sedentary publisher. Edward was proud of his new friends Brewster and Bradford. Because of his celebrated learning, Robinson had rather reluctantly become a star turn in the acrimonious debate at Leiden University between Calvinists and Arminians,* and Edward thrilled to see Robinson’s keen brain and rhetorical skills defeat his opponent. Bradford reports Robinson as winning a ‘famous victory for the truth’. For the rest of his life Edward Winslow would have a slightly grandiose hankering to be at the centre of things. In Leiden he was in the thick of a new battle for the soul of Protestantism.

  Edward was billeted with the kindly Brewster in a small dark alley round the corner from the Pieterskerk. Today it is called William Brewster Steeg, but when Edward lived there it had no name, being generally known as the Stinck Steeg or Rubbish Alley. The damp lodging crumbled away long ago, but the remains of the wall of the house where Brewster lived and where Edward helped print books can just be made out. His host was a shabby yet indefatigable figure, impoverished, exiled and very close to the edge. Melancholy determination was the air most common to him, although in his presence Edward found the sort of affirmation he was searching for.

  Brewster was paid by Brewer to be the publisher of all the Puritan literature now flooding towards England. Some dated back to the Puritan rebel texts of Elizabeth’s time, including the writings of Thomas Cartwright. There were also contemporary offerings, the thoughts of other exiled theologians who had suffered for their beliefs.

  The Brewster Press had a distinctive logo, a bear with heraldic plumes. The books were often practical. John Robinson wrote a defence of lay preaching, The People’s Plea for the Exercise of Prophesying, one of Elizabeth I’s particular dislikes, while Thomas Digton explained why people should not kneel in church, nor make the sign of the cross during Baptism. There was a Dutch translation of John Dod and Robert Cleaver’s Ten Commandments. This Puritan bestseller of the day was a sort of compendium guide to Puritan ethics. Edward’s education gave him the great advantage of being able to read both Latin and Greek. References in such languages formed a formidable part of the esoteric ecclesiastical arguments he and Brewster were setting, and he found plenty to get his teeth into.

  Living with English Puritan heroes, Edward walked with amazement the cobbled streets where in recent memory the Dutch had fought their great war of liberation against their Spanish overlords. Every Dutch town had its history of death endured for the Protestant cause against the Catholic Spanish. Leiden’s was seminal in the history of the republic because it had been victorious, the starving inhabitants withstanding siege by the Spanish armies. Eventually the Dutch cut the dikes so that ships could sail to Leiden’s rescue, but farmland reclaimed over the centuries was destroyed as a result. The siege was the city’s defining event whose memory formed part of the dominant culture, the subject of hundreds of paintings and tapestries.

  William the Silent granted Leiden the honour of a brand-new and emphatically Calvinist university. The oldest university in the Netherlands, it was founded six months after the year-long siege ended. Beside it was planted its famous garden, the Hortus Botanicus, created by the adventurous Leiden professor of botany Carolus Clusius, who introduced the Turkish tulip to Holland – and thus to Europe.

  With its motto ‘Praesidium Libertatis ’ – ‘Bastion of Liberty’ – the university became a refuge for free-thinking philosophers. The backer of the Brewster Press, Thomas Brewer, cunningly enrolled as a mature student, guaranteeing him safety from prosecution. The university prided itself on the privileges of its members, who were allowed a freedom of debate remarkable for the time. Once enrolled at the university their rights were an iron wall against any angry monarch such as James I demanding their extradition.

  Holland’s generosity to so many groups of religious exiles rewarded her materially. By the early 1600s she was the centre of industries brought there by merchants and artisans from Brabant and Flanders and Jews from Portugal and Spain. The result was an astonishing economic transformation. For the next century and a half Holland became the foremost commercial power in Europe. Like England, Holland saw an astonishing expansion in its wealth through new institutions such as a stock market and joint stock companies which increased its share of world trade. These were ways of pooling money or capital that became highly successful vehicles of exploration because the risk was spread.

  At the time Edward was in Leiden, the contemporary painter Frans Hals was often commissioned by Dutch town worthies to paint group portraits. His images show the sort of people the English government crossed swords with. The strong faces of the burghers suggest a bourgeois confidence which was a novelty in Europe. Seriousness, optimism and vigour rightly belonged to a people who established the Dutch Republic against all the odds. It confirmed their sense of themselves as the Elect.

  The Scrooby church met in a building that can still be seen today, a large house called the Groeneporte or Green Gate on the Kloksteeg. It had a deceptively narrow front, but the grounds extended back 300 feet into a broad garden. Robinson and his family lived in the house, and at least twelve other families – including those of his wife and three sisters-in-law – inhabited what were noted in town records as twenty wooden cottages in the garden.

  This arrangement added to the community feeling of warmth and intimacy, but it was really because Leiden was so overcrowded due to the refugee crisis that throwing up shacks in any empty space had become the rule. Born to a wealthy yeoman family, Robinson married one of the White sisters. All four sisters and their brother were involved in the church at Leiden.

  The extended Robinson/White family was well-to-do, but many of the rest of the original Brewster church who gathered for services at Green Gate were badly off. As former tenant farmers on the Archbishop of York’s lands they had always struggled to get by, but in Holland they were at the harsher mercies of Dutch masters where spending twelve hours at their looms was normal. Safe in Robinson’s house, they held services and discussed the Bible in a way which had been forbidden to them in England. That was reward enough. We may imagine them, their wan heads rising from simple white collars bowed in prayer for hours
. All kinds of discussion took place. Robert Cushman, one of the community’s agents in England devising strategies to get the church out of Holland, was a deacon of the church whose strong convictions made him fond of lay preaching. A keen student of the Bible, this wool merchant left Canterbury for Leiden probably because he had links with the group of forty separatists from nearby Sandwich on the south coast who also joined Robinson’s church. They had close links with Thomas Brewer, who had an estate nearby.

  Cushman was an especially intense personality, with many business connections which made him a natural choice to arrange to get the community out of Holland. For him, emigration was a solution if there was nowhere for people to exercise their talents, what he called ‘that knowledge, wisdom, humanity, reason, strength, skill, faculty, &c. which God hath given them’. People living as outcasts, uselessly passing the days, were ‘not slaves’. Therefore they should see whether there was another country where they could ‘do good and have use towards others’.

  Robinson was rigorous and daring, and he found evidence in the Bible that there should be an active role for women in church services. According to him, ‘if immediately, and extraordinarily, and miraculously inspired’, women ‘might speak without restraint’ during a church meeting. Perhaps affection for his many sisters-in-law and their powerful presence encouraged him to celebrate women’s intellect and rationality. Women were allowed to make a profession of faith, even accuse a brother they believed to have sinned. Finally, if a man would not dare accuse the church of some wrongdoing, ‘yea, in a case extraordinary, namely where no man will, I see not but a woman may reprove the Church, rather than suffer it to go on in apparent wickedness, and communicate with it therein.’