The Scrooby congregation contained another feisty female member, the surprising matriarch of the Chilton family from Sandwich. Most unusually for a woman the spirited Mrs Chilton had been amongst several members of her congregation named as being expelled from their local church. There was also a midwife in the church community, Mrs Sarah Willett, whose daughter sailed on the Mayflower as the ward of the Carvers. In his magnificently open-handed way, Thomas Brewer was supporting her, further suggesting a female-friendly atmosphere.
Despite their half-starved lives and grinding existence, there was a mood of joyousness amongst the fervent congregation when they were preached to by the kindly Robinson, who had a uniquely paternal relationship with them. Their escape from England with their cherished beliefs and shared poverty bound them tightly together, dependent on one another for support.
With a theologian of the calibre of Robinson at its head the church had an impressive reputation amongst the thinking godly. By 1617 it was no longer a small group of people from Nottinghamshire and South Yorkshire. It had grown to almost 300 people from all over England. Leiden was an international city which the church reflected, and it attracted members of the huge French Protestant or Walloon community. A number became members of Robinson’s church, like Hester Mahieu, who was married to an English woolcomber named Francis Cooke. Hester’s sister Marie was married to a Jean Delannoy, the ancestor of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. John Robinson’s new brother-in-law, the respected and wealthy English merchant John Carver, most likely had formerly been married to a now deceased Walloon lady. In 1616 Carver married Mrs Robinson’s recently widowed sister Katherine. Carver probably had business interests in Leiden in the textile industry and he moved into the Robinson and White family compound. Soon after the Carvers’ marriage they buried a child in November 1617. The Carvers had surmounted a great sorrow in their lives, but they were full of robust hope for the future. Robinson described John Carver as someone who had ‘always been able so plentifully to administer comfort unto others in their trials’.
And although those trials were many, the community were immoveable about their beliefs and completely unself-pitying. Though their appearance was affected by too much work and poor lodgings, and while they lived on the cheapest cuts of meat from the tripe market and also frequently had no idea where the next penny was coming from, they were nevertheless a joyous community, so much so that years later Edward said ‘never people upon earth lived more lovingly together’.
He was twenty-two years old and full of energy. One of his most charming qualities was his enthusiasm. It went with an impulsiveness his family may have rued. Edward was almost overwhelmed by the warmth, kindness and strength of belief of the community he joined. He seems to have lived in a haze of religious excitement surrounded by truly sincere Christians. Even the church’s children’s names reflected existences lived in the shadow of a demanding God: four of William Brewster’s five children were called Fear, Patience, Love and Wrestling, and William and Susanna White’s was called Resolved.
Intoxicated by the intense atmosphere, Edward married one of the church parishioners, a devout, gentle young woman named Elizabeth Barker. His parents might have dreamed of their eldest son marrying a daughter of one of Mr Winslow’s wealthy patrons, but Edward insisted on being joined to an unknown woman he barely knew. The important thing was that she shared his ideas. By May 1618 they had married in the imposing town hall on the Breestraat, with Jonathan Brewster and Mary Allerton, the wife of the London tailor Isaac, as witnesses.
Elizabeth probably came from East Anglia. There is no mention of her being a cloth worker or weaver, which might suggest that she was a woman of independent means. One of her other witnesses may have been a cousin or niece, suggesting she was part of a family group. On the other hand, it is possible that she was a woman who, like many separatists, was daring in her serious-mindedness, and sufficiently unconventional to travel without a male protector to the United Provinces to join a church in which women had a role.
Edward and Elizabeth Winslow moved into their own lodgings. At much the same time Edward’s younger brothers Gilbert and John came to Leiden. The marriage may have been one of the reasons they came, or perhaps they too already intended to emigrate. They probably lodged in the same boarding house with the young couple, for this was a time of little privacy.
* * *
The first great mover in the English colonisation movement had been Sir Walter Raleigh. But it was Raleigh’s friend the Protestant clergyman Richard Hakluyt the Younger who changed the debate. Hakluyt converted the nation to the need for Protestant colonies in the New World, and made investing in them a patriotic duty. A sense of Protestant mission spread through English educated society, encouraged by a flood of travel books.
As a founder member of the Virginia Company, Hakluyt persuaded James I to grant it a charter to settle on the east coast of America between the 45th and 38th parallels. A major influence on public opinion and policymakers, Hakluyt’s travel narratives convinced both Elizabeth and James I it should be national policy to colonise the eastern seaboard of America and promote Protestant settlement as a buttress against the Pope. As a printer, it seems Edward already had considerable awareness of the huge volume of material about the New World. Long before he left England for Holland, exploration and colonisation had been the passion of the day. The French began making settlements in Canada and Acadia, while the Spanish had settlements in Florida and the west coast of America, at San Francisco and Los Angeles. The Dutch East India Company paid the English navigator Henry Hudson to explore the east coast of America. The Spanish Fleet no longer controlled the world’s oceans. The dissolution of the monasteries and the sale of their lands had liberated capital. Gentlemen adventurers and merchants were awash with money. The explorer John Smith was a hero because of the amazing adventures described in his chronicles of Jamestown, the little settlement founded by the Virginia Company in 1607 on the mighty James River.
In the City of London 300 to 400 gentlemen regularly attended the Virginia Company feasts at three shillings a head. It was fashionable to have a sermon after the meal in the way that corporations today might have a well-known speaker. The Dean of St Paul’s (the great ‘metaphysical’ poet John Donne) often obliged, preaching on the need to think about how many Indians were converted before asking ‘what trees, drugs or dyes that ship had brought’. The chief glory of colonisation must be the spreading of the Gospel. They would be rewarded by having extended Christ’s kingdom to America: ‘You shall have made this island, which is but as the suburbs of the old world, a bridge, a gallery to the new, to join all to that world that shall never grow old, the kingdom of heaven.’
Edward’s world view was coloured by an anti-Catholic interpretation of global events. In a milieu where Thomas Brewer and William Brewster saw books they printed as ‘the chief weapons in the struggle “between the Saints and Antichrist”’, his mentality took in the additional strand of the visionary.
Even as he married Elizabeth, plans were made for a small advance party of the fittest of the church community to leave Holland and go to America, to prepare the way for the less able-bodied, wives and younger children. Leaving Holland could not come too soon for some. Many lived in small damp buildings working night and day, contributing to the Dutch Republic’s economic miracle. It was a fact of life in seventeenth-century England and the Dutch Republic that children worked, and the lucrative ribbon industry, for example, depended on small fingers. The church were tired of a harsh way of life dictated by others. Their children were becoming ‘decrepit in their early youth; the vigour of nature being consumed in the very bud as it were’. For all the intellectual freedom of Leiden, the Dutch were harsh taskmasters.
Some members of the church found work as individual craftsmen – milliners, cobblers, cabinetmakers, pipe makers or stonemasons – but most were forced into the lowest-paid, least-skilled jobs in the cloth industry because they were foreigners. William Bra
dford, who had owned his own land in England, had to become a serge weaver.
Some were fortunate to live in the odd funnel-shaped weavers’ cottages along the canals of Leiden. Whole families lived in one-room apartments such as those in the fourteenth-century house which today is Leiden’s Pilgrim Museum. In a typical wooden dwelling, the bed was built into the wall. There was no space for a kitchen, just a fire. In one room families lived, washed, took in piecework and maybe invited a friend to share a bite.
The domestic scenes painted by Vermeer tend to depict a peaceful hall containing a harpsichord, with a young girl being instructed in music by a tutor. In reality the back-breaking work of the wool industry painted by Isaac van Swanenburg was how most members of the church lived. To full or clean the wool, half-naked men trampled on it. The work required brute force.
And the atmosphere was no longer peaceful. The glorious commitment of the United Provinces to freedom of speech was coming to an end. As a condition for James I’s allegiance during the impending war against Spain, there was to be no more printing in the Netherlands of material offensive to the English government, and no more independent English church congregations.
The church in Holland had been getting help from sympathetic Puritans back home. The king and the Anglican bishops continued to react against separatist churches and nonconformist clergy, but a very large proportion of the political nation of Jacobean England (the merchants, the magistrates, the MPs, the knights of the shire) were themselves ‘godly’ – meaning they were Puritans.
Sir Horace Vere, the celebrated English soldier and governor of the Dutch town of Brill, employed one of the many exiled nonconformist preachers, William Ames, as military chaplain. Ames became a close personal friend and religious adviser to Vere and his wife. The protests of the English bishops, once they found out, were ignored by Sir Horace. As the historian Keith Sprunger has pointed out, ‘English-language chaplains were needed, and these positions were a God-given blessing for the deprived and silenced preachers from England. The English bishops could exert very little supervision over the English religion of the Low Countries.’ One of the soldiers in the regiment in which Ames served was a fiery, impulsive young man from Lancaster named Myles Standish, whose name is one of the best known in early colonial history.
John Carver, John Robinson’s beloved brother-in-law, and the articulate and thoughtful Robert Cushman were at court lobbying for a licence to go to America. Various grandees in the Virginia Company promoted their emigration plans, including Robert Rich, the 2nd Earl of Warwick. The sincerity of the group’s religious and Protestant beliefs meant that the Virginia Company looked favourably on them because they were going to advance the gospel of the kingdom of Christ. In a letter, John Robinson and William Brewster set out a moving description of their hopes and expectations: ‘It is not with us as with other men whom small things can discourage, or small discontentments cause to wish themselves at home again.’ The Virginia Company replied ‘the thing was of God’.
Helping Protestant colonies became more pressing once the Thirty Years War began. In the great battle against Roman Catholicism already consuming the seventeenth century, it was better to have conscientious Protestants acting as a bulwark against the Spanish in the New World, than being a nuisance in England or Holland.
The dedication of many important government figures – including Sir Robert Naunton, the king’s Secretary of State for foreign affairs – to the cause of international Protestantism meant they were willing to help ultra-Protestant communities create colonies abroad. Sir Thomas Coventry was an investor. Naunton tried to enlist royal support, disguising the fact that the Scrooby church were separatists. Sir John Wolstenholme, one of the most important sponsors of exploration of the day and a commissioner of the navy, represented their views to the Privy Council (in an anodyne fashion, glossing over the issue of ordination by bishops). He managed to get the approval of both the king and the bishops by February 1618.
But despite Wolstenholme’s sponsorship, nothing moved forward. One of the church’s members who was part of the negotiating team was arrested at an illegal meeting.
And then in 1619 Brewer and Brewster ill-advisedly decided to send a sort of ballistic missile from Holland to England, ruining everything. Their campaigning zeal against bishops got the better of them just as the church’s negotiations were entering their final phase. It was discovered that they were responsible for publishing an attack on five articles in the new liturgy imposed by James I on the Church of Scotland.
Possibly Brewster and Brewer thought their secret printing would never be found out. Brewer may have become increasingly obsessive. His wife and two of his children had died, leaving only one daughter named Mercie, and he had been extremely ill himself.
The printed material was a straightforward attack on royal policy, and it was no longer tenable for Sir Robert Naunton to help them. Instead he gave the order to hunt the publishers through the Netherlands. It took six months to track them down, with Brewster being mistaken for Brewer in various semi-comic episodes. Brewster narrowly escaped arrest, fleeing for his life into England. From August 1619 until June 1620 he was in hiding, probably in the north of England among old family friends. Edward was now out of a job. The type had been smashed and the room it was set in was locked by orders of the town government. James I successfully pressurised the United Provinces to stop their support of Puritan printing.
The Virginia Company decided that it was too risky for a patent to be made out in the Leiden congregation’s name. The Virginia Company would not trouble them if they settled in Virginia but a patent had to be granted by the company in the name of someone else (all patents had to be made to a person, not a corporate group). It was secured in the respectable name of John Wyncop, a minister in the aristocratic household of the Countess of Lincoln, but he died so the process had to start again. In February 1620 a patent was granted to John Peirce on behalf of the Pilgrims and, though the text does not survive, it is assumed that it followed other patents for individual plantations and was also within the jurisdiction of Jamestown.
The English authorities demanded that Brewer be arrested and sent to London, but Leiden initially refused to yield him up. Their university was mainly composed of foreigners, they said – what sort of precedent would it set? It was agreed that Brewer could go to England to be interrogated about his printing and publishing activities, but could not be tortured or badly treated and must be returned safe and sound to Leiden as a member of the university – as indeed he was.
But now the process of exploring ways to get out of Holland had to be speeded up. The church already had a problem in that one of its most enthusiastic sponsors in the Virginia Company, Sir Edwin Sandys, was a divisive personality, and a suspicious figure for those cautious backers looking for an uncontroversial investment vehicle, as investors tend to. He raised hackles with his independent ways, and his irreverence for James I.
Rumours about the church’s seditious nature gave the proposed colony a dodgy reputation, while Sandys’ involvement only highlighted the big question mark already hanging over John Robinson’s nonconformist head. Most ordinary investors had anxieties about Robinson’s fervent beliefs, and these doubts meant that in the end the money to send Robinson to America was never forthcoming.
At this point the chief men of the church – who by now included the energetic Edward – sent a letter from Leiden telling the Virginia Company to stop trying to negotiate with the king’s Privy Council. They also gave up attempting to get the Virginia Company to raise funds and instead just accepted any merchants willing to back them.
Small groups of people starting private plantations had become the mode. A number were named after their leaders, such as Smith’s Hundred, Southampton’s Hundred and Berkeley’s Hundred. Over the next four years no less than forty-four patents were issued to private plantations. Among them was Thomas Weston, who began to organise a joint-stock vehicle to finance the Leiden community. An
ironmonger turned Merchant Adventurer, Weston and around seventy other investors of various kinds – his business acquaintances, and some connections of some of the colonists – provided the monies which got the church to America.
Investors, or Adventurers as they were known at that time, were looking for new opportunities. Merchants were suffering from administrative changes that brought about a decline in the wool trade in Europe. Fishing and furs from America were becoming new ventures to support with cash and investors were encouraged by the promotional material issuing from John Smith, the Jamestown colonist and celebrity. His vivid writings and genius for self-publicity promoted the colonisation he believed would save the English economy. His tales included an account of being saved from execution by the Virginian Indian princess Pocahontas. The Scrooby church came to regret that he did not come on their voyage, as his experience would have saved them from many mistakes, but the expense of hiring him (plus his lack of religious commitment) meant they preferred simply to buy his maps of New England.
Weston was a typical jack of all trades in the merchant world, perhaps a little like Edward’s father in that he could turn his hand to any business, from importing cloth to exporting wool and the carrying trade. He was not a member of the incorporated Merchant Adventurers of London and had been trading unlicensed in the Netherlands, for which he had received an official rebuke from the Privy Council. His agent in Amsterdam, Edward Pickering, was married to a member of the Leiden congregation. In a becalmed situation, Weston’s blind optimism was the breakthrough.
Edward’s friend and patron Lord Coventry decided to invest in Edward’s project. His name appears on the list of the Adventurers, alongside that of Thomas Brewer, who put money into the common stock. Lord Coventry felt sympathy for these gallant people battling the problems of colonisation with so little experience, and even less money. He was extremely well connected in the City of London both by marriage and by his practice. As legal counsel to both the Skinners’ Company and the Grocers’ Company, he could make helpful introductions that paved Edward’s way to raising money for colonial adventures, both in the short term and for years to come. He may well have lent Edward some of the £60 Edward invested personally in the Plymouth Colony stock.
The Mayflower Page 4
