The Mayflower

by Rebecca Fraser

  The Indians were kindly and well disposed. They were constantly called on to guide the colonists: ‘when the English have travelled forty, fifty, or three score miles into the country, they have entertained them into their houses, quartered them by themselves … not grumbling for a fortnight or three weeks’ tarrying’. John Winthrop was not above staying the night when he got lost amidst the immense forest, although he was once embarrassed when it turned out he was occupying a squaw’s wigwam. William Wood, a clergyman visiting Massachusetts in 1633, wrote down his observations of the symbiosis between the Indians and the English, and noted that for ‘these ranging foresters’ it was as easy for them to find their way around ‘as the experienced citizen knows how to find out Cheapside Cross’.

  Wood himself and two companions attempting to reach Plymouth were misled by what appeared to be a broad path to follow. They assumed it must be made by their fellow English because the one thing they knew was that the Indian trails were practically invisible. In fact it was a path taken by some Narragansetts specialising in trading their goods for English shoes, which they had worn home, making the track look like it was made by the settlers. Wood and his two companions travelled in circles, never reaching the ocean. Fortunately in the depths of the forest they found a wigwam – a ‘homely lodging’ where they were fed ‘with the haunch of a fat bear’. The next morning, for a piece of tobacco and a fourpenny whistle, the son of their friendly albeit naked host conducted ‘us through the strange labyrinth of unbeaten bushy ways in the woody wilderness twenty miles to our desired harbour’.

  Indian braves rescued injured people from the snow. They took one man home on their bare shoulders to their wigwams in which Wood rapturously claimed they rested better and more securely than some ‘blind obscure old England’s Inn’.

  Wood wrote admiringly about the Indians. Perhaps he did not reflect the views of all settlers, but warmth towards the Indians was fairly widespread. It was thought they would soon learn ‘any mechanical trades, having quick wits, understanding apprehensions, strong memories, and a quick hand in using of the axe or hatchet or such like tools’. For their part the Indians remained enthralled by the colonists’ technology such as iron tools like ploughs, as opposed to the shells they used or ‘flint-tipped shovels’.

  In terms of relations between the colonies, inevitably the new arrivals clashed with Plymouth over the beaver trade, but on the whole they were friendly. Massachusetts needed Plymouth’s crops and animals to keep them going until their own farms were established. Plymouth did very well from the agricultural trade, which enhanced Edward’s opinion that there must be closer links with the businessmen in the north.

  One person who did not share Edward’s view was the ascetic Bradford. He was far from delighted by the wealth that started to flow into the country. He was not interested in greater comfort, he did not care whether settlers could swap agricultural goods for English manufactures such as cloth instead of having to weave it themselves, as they become better off. This was not the vision for which he had sailed on the Mayflower. Secretly he feared it would be ‘the ruin of New England, at least of the churches of God there, and will provoke the Lord’s displeasure against them’. (At the end of his life Bradford would say that Plymouth had been a small candle to light a thousand, which had ‘shone unto many, yea in some sort to our whole nation’. Massachusetts was the beginning of the many.)

  Edward had a more outgoing nature. As he had correctly predicted, in New England religion and profit could jump together. He grew to profoundly admire Winthrop. Always intellectually curious, as he became older and more self-confident through his work for the colony, Edward found the sharp and authoritarian people in Massachusetts stimulating, and was impressed by their sense of civic purpose. He was an ambitious man, not just a utopian. He became a frequent visitor to Boston for both business dealings and social interaction.

  John Winthrop reinforced Edward’s sense of mission, buoying up a new tendency to grandiosity that increasingly impelled him through life. He had heard that Governor Winthrop had bucked up the nervous settlers on board the Arbella as they crossed the Atlantic, telling them the eyes of all people were on them, ‘For we must Consider that we shall be as a City upon a Hill’. That appealed.

  Edward developed a warm friendship with Winthrop, for whom he raised cattle. This may have begun through Susanna knowing a number of the Lincolnshire settlers, as her uncle’s family had professional connections with the Earls of Lincoln. Edward’s letters show a sort of hunger for Winthrop’s approval; he wished for ‘the whetting of and quickening of our affections towards each other’. Edward’s own strong character and convivial ways, which were able to handle Indian chiefs as easily as Puritan grandees, stood him in good stead. The friendship which developed meant that within a few years Edward was trusted to represent Massachusetts as well as Plymouth on his business trips back to England, of which he had many in the 1630s.

  Edward was now forty and had come into his own. He was rightly confident of his powers of leadership. In the wilderness a can-do mentality allied to a natural charm went a long way, and it got him to prominence in Boston. Edward was always ‘employed for the Colony in occasions of great weight’. He seems to have enjoyed being a representative and public figure, who had the ability to put into words many of the aspirations of the colonists.

  * * *

  His path to becoming a trusted envoy for the Massachusetts colony began with an embarrassing and regrettable episode in 1634. Men from the Piscataqua colony – which had been taken over by a new colonising entity, the Saybrook plantation, which itself had links to English investors in the Massachusetts Bay Company – clashed with John Howland during one of his stints in the trading house up on the Kennebec. Trappers led by a man named John Hocking tried to sail further upriver into Plymouth’s territory. There was an altercation and Hocking refused to leave, so Howland sent two men out into the middle of the river to cut the cables to Hocking’s boat’s anchor. Hocking shot at one of the Plymouth men and killed him, whereupon his friend shot Hocking dead. This was exactly the sort of thing no one wanted to happen, especially when the New England colonies were at such a fragile stage. John Winthrop wrote that it had ‘brought us all and the Gospel under a common reproach of cutting one another’s throats for beaver’.

  Archbishop Laud had got wise to his enemies hiding in New England, practising their illegal religion, and in 1634 he had set up a Commission for Regulating the Plantations to prevent it. He was looking for excuses to withdraw the charter on any pretext, and especially from those colonies where men were being killed.

  For this reason Massachusetts dealt peremptorily with the Pilgrims who had been on the Kennebec. John Alden was arrested and the Massachusetts Council demanded to see the Kennebec patent. Plymouth was outraged but listened to reason, and Edward was sent to England with letters of apology from Winthrop and Dudley to Lord Saye and Sele. It was at this moment that Thomas Morton and his employer Sir Ferdinando Gorges saw their chance.

  In the midst of Edward’s audience in the Privy Council, the mocking figure of Morton appeared, attacking the seditious way of life at Plymouth. Ever since Morton had been expelled he had been looking for vengeance, while Gorges’ plan was to dissolve the New England Council. He aimed to make himself governor general of the area with the power to go to America and reform the Puritan settlements.

  Morton accused Edward of illegally preaching in church and illegally marrying couples. Edward replied that the absence of a minister made it necessary. Had he not preached, ‘we might have lost the life and face of Christianity’. As for marrying couples, he believed it was ‘a civil thing, and he found nowhere in ye word of God that it was tied to ministry’. After all, he himself had been married that way in Holland. As far as the English authorities were concerned, however, conducting marriages while not a member of the clergy was a crime. Edward was immediately sent to the Fleet prison.

  For around six months Edward languished in
jail, leaving Susanna to be supported by her friends. She had very little idea whether her husband would survive the squalid conditions. It was then that Lord Coventry came to the rescue.

  One of the attorneys of the Court of Wards was John Winthrop’s brother-in-law Emmanuel Downing, a future immigrant to New England.* He found out Edward had been released because of the influence of Lord Coventry. Lady Coventry had heard her old friend’s son was in prison and told Edward to petition her husband, who was now Lord Keeper: ‘Mr Winslow, being my Lord Keeper’s countryman, whose father also his Lordship loved very well, his Lady sent last night to Mr Winslow to give him notice of her husband’s affection to him, and willed him to petition his Lordship for the furtherance of his freedom out of prison: the which he hath now done.’

  Only a month before, Downing had been asked to help smooth over reports that John Endecott had cut out the red cross of St George in the royal ensign on the grounds that it had been given to England by the Pope and was thus ‘a relic of Antichrist’. Charles I’s attitude to the New England colonies became markedly more aggressive. Ships began to be prevented from sailing from London ports without licences for the passengers, in case they were hiding Puritan subversives. The Boston leaders were acutely worried and they fortified Castle Island in Boston Bay because Laud was rumoured to be dispatching soldiers to seize back the company charter. But at least Edward had escaped.

  * * *

  In September 1633 John Cotton, fleeing persecution, arrived in Boston on the same ship as his equally charismatic fellow minister Thomas Hooker, the future founder of Connecticut. They both had a genius for popular preaching. A couple of years later around 120 people from Newtown departed with Hooker as their leader. They had come out from East Anglia specifically as part of his congregation. They went west along Indian trails, following what is now called the Old Connecticut Path, and founded Hartford. Mrs Hooker lay on a litter as they stumbled through the woods in the shadow of towering trap rock formations. The settlers drank milk from the 160 cattle they drove before them.

  Meanwhile a brilliant young clergyman named Roger Williams had declared the Massachusetts charter invalid. Drawn to the Indians, whom he got to know at Plymouth, Williams’ fertile mind decided the king of England could not grant land in New England as it belonged to the native inhabitants. Nothing could have been more disastrous – or more typical of its author. The charming but completely unorthodox Williams had a new idea every two minutes. One saying of the time was that the inside of his head must be like a windmill.

  A follower of Thomas Hooker, he found his way to Plymouth shortly after arriving in Boston in 1631. He was accompanied by his heavily pregnant twenty-one-year-old wife Mary. It was to be the story of her life in America that no sooner had she moved into lodgings than she had to move on. Williams was meant to be a minister in Boston but, oblivious to anything other than the pursuit of truth, and with his usual impulsiveness, he announced that the church in Boston was corrupt because it was still linked to the Church of England. He preferred separatist Plymouth.

  Roger Williams described himself as a ‘Seeker’, searching for ‘soul liberty’. Although to our ears this may sound attractive, to the early settlers he was too disruptive. He had not been in Plymouth for very long before ideas began to proliferate. He profited from Plymouth’s unusual openness to Indian culture and developed a very warm relationship with Massasoit.

  By Massasoit’s own account he and the Wampanoag Indians were curious about Plymouth’s religion. They assumed that anyone who preached was a sachem, and attended services in the meeting house to hear them. Almost fifty years later Roger Williams realised how unusual he himself was in that God had furnished him ‘with advantages … scarce any in New England had. First a constant zealous desire to dive into the Natives language. Secondly God was pleased to give me a Painful, Patient spirit to lodge with them in their filthy smoky holes … to gain their tongue.’*

  His wife gave birth to their first child at Plymouth, and the Williams and Winslow families were thrown together in its tiny society. Edward and Roger became close friends, sharing a deep feeling for the Indians and ethnographical fascination with their lives. In Williams’ case the kindness of the Indians to him created a burning passion that never faded. He became their devoted champion for the next forty years.

  John Winthrop appealed to Edward’s need for a father figure providing order and stability. Roger Williams appealed to Edward’s emotional and romantic side. Williams’ sensitive and unorthodox personality set up an echo in Edward’s faith in the New World. Even though Edward thought Williams was wrong about many issues – especially the subject of authority – there was a warmth and and fearless logic to him that Edward found irresistible. He would describe him as ‘the sweetest soul I ever knew’.

  The issue of the charter and land compact had begun when Williams was living at Plymouth. The leaders asked him to write a treatise on the matter, which he sent on to Boston. Winthrop reported in his journal that it ‘disputes their right to the land they possessed here and concluded that claiming by the king’s grant they could have no title: nor otherwise except they compounded with the natives’.

  Williams also criticised the system of government. It had struck him that magistrates had no right to administer oaths or punish people for not observing the Sabbath. In 1636, having been asked to retract his views and refused, Williams was about to be arrested and shipped home. But he was warned in advance – probably by John Winthrop, who retained great fondness for him and his real godliness. The only place where Williams could find safety was with Massasoit. He escaped and lived in the Indian chief’s winter camp.

  For much of his time at Plymouth, Williams had preferred to be alone with the Indians: ‘My Soul’s desire was to do the Natives good, and to that end to learn their language (which I afterward printed) and therefore desired not to be troubled with English company.’ Now he had the opportunity. He bought land from Massasoit with the permission of Massasoit’s overlords, Canonicus and his nephew Miantonomo. His long-suffering wife Mary duly joined him, taking the fifty-mile path through the forest with their two-year-old daughter Mary, and a baby named Freeborn. Edward came to Providence in person and put a piece of gold into Mary’s hands. He also warned Roger to move to the other side of the water because he was within Massachusetts’ bounds.

  * * *

  In the late 1630s the most bitter row erupted in Boston over the teachings of Anne Hutchinson, darkening the already stormy atmosphere.

  Anne was the strong, clever wife of the prominent Lincolnshire merchant William Hutchinson, who was a deputy to the Massachusetts governing assembly in Boston, the General Court. The charismatic midwife daughter of a clergyman, the scholarly Anne soon had around sixty men and women coming to her house twice a week to discuss Scripture. In England, Scripture discussion groups were illegal; this was what they had come to New England for. At Mistress Hutchinson’s Bible classes, conversion frequently occurred. She was inspiring, stimulating and reassuring. The problem was that her ideas undermined the authority of the clergy in Boston, and thus the whole Massachusetts colony.

  The Hutchinsons’ house was directly opposite John Winthrop’s and he became alarmed by Anne’s large public meetings criticising John Wilson, the chief minister of the Boston church. Winthrop disliked her intensely: she was ‘a woman of a ready wit and bold spirit’ who had brought over ‘two dangerous errors’ from England, namely that the Holy Spirit was dwelling in a saved or ‘justified’ person, and that good works were not a sign of being saved or sanctified. Winthrop wrote: ‘From these two grew many branches.’

  According to Anne none of the ministers except John Cotton were sealed by the Holy Spirit. Anne was one of Cotton’s most devout parishioners and a personal friend. In England she had often travelled twenty-four miles several times a week to hear him preach. Cotton’s revelation – that spiritual conversion (known as Free Grace) was needed, not works – struck Anne with such force that she b
egan to give lectures on the subject assisted by visits from the Holy Spirit. Cotton preached a covenant of grace but the other ministers preached a covenant of works.

  Anne’s view was that the saved (or elect) would know they were saved or ‘justified’ from their own feelings of spiritual conversion. As her exciting reputation grew, more would have attended her meetings, had she the space.

  The complicated subject of grace had generated quarrels between Protestant theologians for the past hundred years. It caused mayhem in New England because so much was at stake. Massachusetts was no ordinary colony as far as its members were concerned, but a key element in the struggle against the Antichrist.

  Worse still, the recently arrived new governor, the young and emotional Henry Vane, was a great supporter.* The sensitive Puritan son of one of Charles I’s most trusted courtiers, to his family’s surprise Vane had abandoned court for a godly life in New England. His long hair and elegant clothes were met with a certain amount of surprise, but he was a popular and accommodating soul. It was hoped his election might end talk of the charter being removed.

  Anne and her supporters were so many that they threatened the theocratic colony and its magistrates. The clergy were a key part of the political system, and the Boston church became agitated. They emphasised the covenant of works and the need for ministers to interpret the word of God to the laity. The colony divided between Anne and the orthodox led by John Winthrop.

  Anne’s brother-in-law John Wheelwright, another minister who had recently emigrated to Massachusetts, sided with her. He was just as fiery and sufficiently popular for supporters to sign a petition on his behalf, and he was made the chief preacher at Mount Wollaston or Quincy.