In 1646 Penelope Pelham was a thirteen-year-old girl a little worried by the Indians but not much. The possibility of sinning was much more alarming, as her stepmother Elizabeth, now married to her father, Herbert Pelham, was very godly and a little stern. The family lived in Cambridge on the corner between Dunster and South streets with a view to the marshes and the Charles River. Her father’s land was near the new towns of Sudbury and Framingham, named after their home towns in East Anglia.
The Civil War in England had caused the economy of New England to go into free fall. The intricate web of debts and bills of exchange which reached across the Atlantic very nearly disintegrated beneath the onslaught of falling prices and foreign commodities becoming unaffordable. Elizabeth and Herbert Pelham went back to East Anglia. Herbert needed to attend to his inheritance from his first wife’s family, the Waldegraves. He had a lawsuit pending against his brother-in-law, who had moved into his property, the manor house Ferriers at Bures St Mary. Most likely he was excited because his father-in-law, Colonel Godfrey Bossevile, was on a number of important committees in the new regime. That might advance his fortunes.
Herbert may have always seen New England as a speculative venture and never intended to live there forever. But for his teenage daughter Penelope, who had left England when she was five, Massachusetts was home. An atmosphere of submission to the Lord who held the colony in His mighty hand was the background to her upbringing. For the old and the scholarly, Satan was always lurking. New England could be a harsh place for anyone with ideas of their own after the horror of the Anne Hutchinson scandal. Public learnedness in women fell under suspicion for a generation. At her trial Anne had been told: ‘you have stepped out of your place; you [would] rather have been a husband than a wife, and a preacher than a hearer’.
Along with her brother Nathaniel – who was to be educated at Harvard before looking after the Pelham estates – Penelope elected to remain in Boston. They were to reside at their aunt Penelope Bellingham and Governor Bellingham’s house while the rest of the family took a ship back to England. Penelope liked being part of a close-knit community in Boston, privileged and protected by her position as Governor Bellingham’s niece.
CHAPTER XII
Leaving for London, 1646
New England had narrowly escaped another war with the Indians. But Massachusetts faced a continuing crisis about competing ideas of political authority. Although the town deputies now had their own separate assembly, their growing numbers demanded greater powers from the magistrates. Many were discontented with the churches excluding newcomers who, in a challenge to the old order, were demanding civil rights.
Those who were not members of the covenanted Puritan churches were barred from political and commercial life, effectively second-class citizens. To vote you had to be a freeman, and to be a freeman you had to be a member of a church. And you still had to contribute to your local church even if you were not allowed to belong to it. Under threat of a severe fine, every Lord’s Day you were obliged to appear at your local congregation. Many simply moved on to the greater freedoms of the Rhode Island plantations – heretical or not – to live under less oppressive rules.
The orthodox party at Boston headed by Governor Winthrop was furious. Edward took it personally, as did Governor William Bradford, and they tried to tighten up the rules. In the summer of 1645 Boston’s General Court attempted to persuade the other New England colonies to introduce legislation to make church membership even more exclusive, such as allowing baptism only to church members and their children. These measures were intended to suppress any settlements which opposed and undermined the Scriptures – such as Anne Hutchinson’s – ‘under a deceitful colour of liberty of conscience’, as the United Colonies commissioners put it.
To Edward’s outrage his close neighbour William Vassall was one of the pro-toleration party. Vassall had drafted a bill for freedom of religion at Plymouth. Most of the deputies backed Vassall, but Bradford refused to allow the matter to come to a vote, and Edward concurred. Today what Vassall wanted sounds innocuous enough – ‘full and free tolerance of religion to all men that would preserve the civil peace, and submit unto Government’ – but to Edward and Bradford that would put an end to a New England built on churches which had covenants with God. For some time Edward had been infuriated by Vassall’s attempt to disseminate what he regarded as the ‘spirit of division … creeping in amongst us’.
But William Vassall’s point was that he had left England for freedom of conscience. If he could not have that in New England, where could he have it? In May 1645 he asked a local minister, Ralph Partridge, ‘Shall we never be at rest, nor suffered to worship God according to our consciences?’ More poignantly, he also wanted to know ‘how is it that the persecuted have become persecutors?’
In 1646, amidst mounting tensions as the lower house of deputies flexed their muscles and demanded a legal code not at the discretion of the magistrates, rebels upped the stakes. Vassall had already secretly appealed to the English government to intervene when Winthrop waded into the election of a militia leader in the small town of Hingham. Winthrop was forced to defend himself in court against the charges of arbitrary government. Vassall and the other merchants now presented a highly critical Remonstrance or petition to the General Court. It accused Massachusetts of extreme cruelty to those who were not members of the independent congregational churches. But as far as Edward and his friends were concerned, this was not England and English laws should not have to apply. By criticising membership of the independent Puritan churches, the Remonstrance undermined the whole basis of the New England experiment.
William Vassall had a powerful brother, Samuel, who was an MP in London. He had been on the committee which was behind the recent granting of freedom of religion to Bermuda. If Bermuda, why not Massachusetts?
Massachusetts moved to defend its privileges in the way it knew best – with extreme severity.
Although the Remonstrance was in the name of an English merchant – Dr Robert Child, who was visiting Boston to explore the manufacture of iron – Vassall was one of its most important authors. Most inconveniently for Edward, Vassall was the father-in-law of Edward’s beloved stepson Resolved White (Susanna’s son by her first marriage), and lived far too close – at Scituate, the next town to Marshfield. Although in the past they had been friends Vassall was now hated by Edward, who regarded him as being behind the dangerous unrest. Vassall’s ‘busy and factious spirit’ made him a threat to civil authority. Edward was a kindly man but his anger led to disdain. In what was to become a pamphlet war in England and Massachusetts, Edward described in biting words how Vassall had encouraged the others: Vassall knew better ‘how to ripen such fruit than all the costermongers in London’.
Vassall came from a highly respectable family and was extremely wealthy, with property in London as well as New England, Barbados, Marshfield and Scituate. An early member of the Massachusetts Bay Company, he had moved to Plymouth because it was less oppressive than the Bay. In 1640 Resolved married Judith Vassall, a marriage which at the time had seemed appropriate and pleasing. The young Whites farmed at Scituate and then Marshfield until 1662 when Judith died. They also had a farm on the North River. Resolved was given one hundred acres bordering his father-in-law’s land – a generous bequest. Resolved had grown into a thoughtful young man who also helped farm Edward’s land at Marshfield. Edward had brought him up as his own son. Josiah, Edward’s son with Susanna, who was almost a decade younger, regarded Resolved as his brother, as his will makes clear. The dispute with Vassall was not only intensely inconvenient – it was also very sad.
The Winslows and Vassalls, two well-to-do and godly families, had once been on cordial visiting terms. Edward was pleased to meet a neighbour with an interest in political ideas in a place where many of his relations were good people but not intellectual. (Edward sometimes felt starved of learned company, hence the frequent visits to Boston and his fascination with the cultivated J
ohn Winthrop.) Edward therefore initially enjoyed long discussions with Vassall over haunches of venison or hunched against the wind along the pale Atlantic shore as the two men walked together. Vassall pressed on Edward what to him was now a blinding necessity, and he tried to draw his friend over to religious toleration. But Edward was immoveable: the covenant with God through their New England churches had preserved them in the wilderness.
However, Vassall’s ideas about a more inclusive religion were welcomed by some of Edward’s own family. Parish records show that Josiah and Edward’s nephew Kenelm joined the liberal church Vassall founded at Scituate, which was not particular about allowing Communion to those who were not church members. Some were even members of the Church of England. Vassall insisted it was no crime: ‘that sweet communion of souls, the love of brethren, so highly commended to us by the Holy Ghost is not broken but for great failings’. Perhaps even Susanna attended services there, possibly believing that Edward had become rigid and too much under the influence of the severe John Winthrop. She may have disapproved of the reaction to Anne Hutchinson and her terrible death. (One of the accusations against Jane Hawkins, Mistress Hutchinson’s friend and fellow midwife, was that she had given women herbs for fertility. This was a charge which the commonsensical Susanna may have viewed with some contempt.)
The busy, bulky figure of Edward, who perpetually had business on hand, who always had time for everyone, had changed. He had become much harsher in his judgements. In 1644 he personally approved the extradition to Massachusetts for adultery of Mary Latham, the eighteen-year-old wife of a Marshfield farmer. The tragic girl was executed, and died ‘very penitently’. In a pathetic speech from the scaffold on Boston Common she urged ‘all young maids to be obedient to their parents, and to take heed of evil company’. (Massachusetts enforced the death penalty more rigorously than Plymouth, where, although it was on the statute books, it was never implemented.) Of course Edward was not alone in demanding strict rules. Parts of his community remained harsh. Even his own dear stepson Peregrine and his wife Sarah were convicted of premarital fornication in 1648–9 (though their sentence was commuted to a fine).
The anxious scrawny youth who had scrabbled for shellfish by the sea fresh off the Mayflower had gone forever. Edward was now a man who owned 1,000 acres and his figure reflected that. The body that had once survived on Indian rations had swelled into luxuriant folds, enjoying a superb diet he shot for his family on his estate. But he increasingly felt he was not living amongst kindred spirits. Perhaps he was too successful. In December 1639 he wrote of how ‘Malicious and slanderous persons’ were defaming him ‘with impudent, false and shameless reports to my no small grief and trouble’. He now spent more time with the people of Massachusetts than those of Plymouth. Far more hardline in every way, he had drawn much closer to Boston, especially once Vassall began operating in his neighbourhood. As a United Colonies commissioner he had to spend the night in Boston on a regular basis. Edward had become sufficiently close friends with the merchant Robert Keayne, one of Boston’s most notorious figures, to be made an executor of his will.
Edward had a confessional relationship with John Winthrop in Boston which he does not seem to have been able to replicate in Marshfield. In the winter he often felt marooned in his home. Paths became impassable in December, and the sea dangerous. The weather forced Edward to kick his heels at Careswell, missing ‘many godly and precious friends and brethren I have both in Boston and elsewhere amongst you’. Perhaps he and Susanna also drifted apart when one of their sons died in 1640 (it is not clear whether this was Edward junior or John, who are mentioned in the Division of Cattle in 1627 but of whom nothing else is heard). Edward saw it as God punishing him for his pride. Susanna may have concentrated on her loss.
* * *
Plymouth did not have the overseas merchants and their capital which Edward and his brother John needed. It did not have the contacts in English commercial circles which were so important for success. Boston had those connections naturally, and the ambitious Winslows gravitated there.
Soon after its founding Boston became the main seat of importing, followed by Salem. And with that came all the little seedlings of culture and information that accrue to a big port town – whether they were ideas, or news, or foodstuffs, or articles of manufacture. Plymouth harbour was unsuitable for transatlantic business as it could not accommodate deep-water vessels. The presence of the Massachusetts colony thirty miles north stymied Plymouth’s development. The first ship had been built in what was to become Boston port in 1631, and a shipbuilding industry rapidly followed. The Winslows became very much part of the bustling Boston scene, a city growing with extraordinary speed from the village of farms with which it began. It is unsurprising that John Winslow, who became one of Boston’s wealthier merchants, should choose to move there in 1656. He had started trading with the West Indies via Boston when the English Civil War and Royalist warships made English seas too dangerous for commerce.
Edward’s friendship with Massachusetts leaders and his openness to other colonies – like many other elements in Edward Winslow’s variegated life – were not perceived with unalloyed approbation by Plymouth. In the spring of 1645 the United Colonies suggested Plymouth became a partner in the fur trade with all the other colonies. But this offer was firmly turned down. There was such ‘a disproportion in our estates to theirs’ that they would not do well as a poor relation against much wealthier partners. What Plymouth did have was excellent trade up the coast. The towns on the north-eastern seaboard depended on Plymouth to provide things they lacked: tallow, pork, beef, hides, oil from whales, hemp, tar and timber.
As a Plymouth farmer Edward was preoccupied with everyday decisions about trading (in one letter he says he had to send cattle to the Boston market but ‘the weather is so hot, the fly so busy and the woods so thick’ he decided to send them by water). But what got him out of bed in the morning was the thought of ‘that great and weighty work which doth so much concern the glory of God in raising up his church among us’. And like all the New England politicos of his day, Edward was fascinated by the godly revolution in England.
* * *
Success beyond the wildest dreams of the Puritan party had begun with the extraordinary spectacle of Charles I invading Scotland, to impose the Anglican prayer book on the Scottish church. The defeat of local English militias left the Scottish army on the English side of the border at Newcastle, and Charles I had to call the Long Parliament in late 1640, to pass finance bills after the Bishops’ War with Scotland had bankrupted him. Within a week, in return for granting money for an army and to the amazement of the New England Puritans, their great enemy William Laud, the Archbishop of Canterbury, was impeached.
Edward found it hard to keep his thoughts from the maelstrom blowing through the mother country. He badgered John Winthrop for information and lamented news of his old friend Lord Coventry’s death. Since his spell in prison Edward had got to know John Winthrop’s brother-in-law Emmanuel Downing. He and his wife, Lucy Winthrop, had moved to New England in 1638 and were in touch with informed opinion in London. In a letter to John Winthrop that summer Edward asked to be remembered to them: ‘what will be the issue of these sore beginnings the Lord only knoweth, but it concerneth us deeply to be affected with them as a people that must share with them in weal and woe’.
The Long Parliament got all Laud’s reforms thrown out, and the ‘papist’ altar rails destroyed. The Court of High Commission which had terrorised Puritans was no more. There were riots in London against bishops. John Winthrop’s contacts in high places meant information about the dramatic changes in England arrived by every ship. One in four New Englanders who returned to England to fight in the Civil War or participate in the Republic were from Massachusetts.
* * *
Edward’s brothers, whose farms surrounded him at Marshfield, had none of his ambitious interests. There was now quite a number of houses scattered all over the marshes with fine vi
ews out to sea. By 1640 Marshfield had its own church and was officially incorporated as a town. Josiah, Edward’s brother, was town clerk for many years. Always present at the meetings held in the Marshfield church, he was a little slow at writing and rather disorganised. The same brotherly spirit that had got Josiah employed for Plymouth’s trading company meant the impatient Edward shrugged his shoulders as papers cascaded to the floor. Josiah’s disorderliness may have been the reason it took well over a decade to get permission for a town corn mill on the South River.
As governor in 1636, Edward had been the driving force behind getting a legal code for Plymouth that year. He was a man with a flair for organisation and had a passionate energy which meant he could never be still. For periods, that ardent fervour burnt low like a pilot light; but with the Remonstrance it flared up again. When New Englanders first started going back to England, Edward also felt a yearning to return. At the end of December 1646, he got his chance.
Although Vassall’s associate Robert Child had been imprisoned, Vassall himself had escaped with a copy of the petition. It was thought the petitioners intended to demand a governor general to enforce Presbyterian rule and revoke the charter. It was very important that someone went to Old England and put the case for New England.
In a public-relations disaster that August, Samuel Gorton had done just what Edward feared: published an account of being persecuted at Shawomet, and manhandling and vicious treatment by the Bay’s commissioners. Even the Indians, he said, were treated nastily. The Narragansetts had asked ‘how we could live, seeing the Massachusetts had not only taken our estates from us in goods and chattels, but also our houses, lands and labours, where we should raise more, for the preservation of our families, and withal told us that their condition, might (in great measure) be parallel with ours’.
The Mayflower Page 23
