Though she was a shy and religious person, Elizabeth Bossevile was not an insignificant girl when it came to that all-important seventeenth-century gentry family background. She belonged to the powerful and influential Greville clan through her mother Margaret. Greville cousinship did Edward proud, catapulting him into the group of Puritan colonising aristocrats who were also at the heart of the English revolution.
Once Herbert Pelham discovered Edward was related to his wife, what had begun as natural liking for his earnest and enthusiastic friend – and amazement at Edward’s heroic activities as an early colonist – became a positive duty of care for someone in his kinship circle. In a few years Edward’s son Josiah would marry Herbert’s daughter Penelope in New England. The two families would become completely enmeshed.
But even before this marriage, Herbert kept a friendly eye on a man who could be disorganised and chaotic but whom he admired for his godliness and willingness to take on difficult challenges. Herbert was one of the very few Puritan aristocrat investors in the Saybrook group (George Fenwick was another) who had put his money where his mouth was and actually taken up land in New England. He knew from experience what it meant to settle because he had done so himself.
It worried Herbert that there was no proper financial provision for Edward’s role. Interested in money and land – of which he had quantities on both sides of the Atlantic – Herbert was secretly moved by Edward’s unwavering belief that funds would appear like manna from heaven. He became his champion, frequently lobbying John Winthrop to make sure the Massachusetts government supported his friend financially.
Herbert had to point out to Winthrop that in England expenses were ‘greater than happily you can conceive’. Letters from Herbert to Winthrop claim it was impossible to shake Edward from faithfully discharging ‘that trust you have reposed in him’, and his ‘care and diligence in improving every opportunity, and his many wearisome journeys and attendancies for the despatch of the business he came about’.
Hesilrige and Edward took to one another. Edward embarked on an elegant way of life, doubtless visiting Sir Arthur Hesilrige’s fifteenth-century manor house, Noseley Hall in Leicestershire, where Oliver Cromwell spent the night before the Battle of Naseby in 1645. Legend has it that Cromwell stabled his horses in the thirteenth-century chapel. Even if Edward found Hesilrige a little loud, he was in awe of him. He was staying with a legend of the Civil War. Hesilrige’s high colour and prominent eyes spoke of a vigour Edward found very appealing. His regiment were known as the lobsters because of their heavy three-quarter-length armour. They were an alarming sight as they advanced. Sir Arthur was a member of the Independent political faction. More fundamentally religious than the Presbyterians, the Independents had widespread support in the army. A large number of them were fervent nonconformists, and often members of sects. Their most important leader was Oliver Cromwell. They were in some ways similar to New England churches in their championing of congregational churches. Unlike the orthodox party in New England, they believed in religious liberty for Protestants. But their passionate godliness was to Edward’s liking.
It was hard to get Parliament to concentrate on the New England colonies. Charles I remained a prisoner. Normal authority had disintegrated and the sense of events rushing out of control increased when the New Model Army kidnapped the king.
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When push came to shove, Edward swiftly disposed of the accusations against Massachusetts. With so much at stake he was a little economical with the actualité. New England was a kindly place. If there were problems, he hoped God and Christ would ‘discover, pardon, and reform what is amiss amongst us’. With some exhilaration he explained their way of life, how the New England colonies were ‘growing up into a nation’. But the settlers might as well return to England, if they did not have ‘the power of government, and cannot administer justice seasonably on all occasions’. The colonies were not very old, they were up against constant internal and external danger. For Parliament to rule on the New England colonies when they had no MPs was not in the English Parliamentary tradition.
Some 130 years before the American Revolution, Edward wrote: ‘if the Parliaments of England should impose laws upon us having no burgesses in their House of Commons, nor capable of a summons by reason of the vast distance of the ocean being three thousand miles from London, then we should lose the liberty and freedom I conceived of English indeed’. Every shire and corporation with their knights and burgesses consented to their laws, and opposed ‘whatsoever they conceive may be hurtful to them: but this liberty we are not capable of by reason of distance’.
Vassall remarked sardonically that if the New England colonies were given such independence, Ireland would be next. But the Plantations Committee backed off. There were many listeners sympathetic to Edward’s views, especially when he reminded them of the colonists’ noble struggle, what they had fled England to avoid – ‘the hierarchy, the cross in baptism, the holy days, the Book of Common Prayer, etc.’ In the next ten years, England herself moved towards a way of life predicated on ideas of a godly reformation very similar to New England’s. Edward’s listeners liked his sincerity.
Edward won the war but lost the battle: the Earl of Warwick and Samuel Vassall insisted Gorton’s settlement must continue. Freedom of religion remained an unbreakable principle for them and for Sir Henry Vane the younger.
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Less than six months after he arrived, Edward had achieved victory against the Remonstrants, and had got a reputation amongst Independent politicians. He thrived in the electric atmosphere. One of the most powerful of the new men, the lawyer William Steele, talked of ‘the integrity, abilities and diligence of the said Mr Winslow being well known … as also his great interest and acquaintance with the members of Parliament and other gentlemen of quality in the respective counties of the commonwealth’.
Edward had assurances from the Plantations Committee that the English government would not interfere in local justice, nor retrieve the Massachusetts Bay charter, nor send over a governor general. The commission left them ‘all that freedom and latitude, that may, in any respect, be duly claimed by you’, and recognised ‘that the limiting of you in that kind may be very prejudicial (if not destructive) to the government and public peace of the colony’.
Strictly speaking Edward had no pressing reason to remain in London. And yet he did, carried away by the unrolling of an extraordinary revolution. It was astonishing to be in London after the reforming Confession of Faith had been produced by the Westminster Assembly of Puritan divines advising Parliament. London was thronging with New Englanders whom Edward knew. An astounding number – probably a quarter of its inhabitants, many of them young men who came as soldiers – returned to the old country. The New England divines Thomas Weld and Hugh Peter had been sent to offer advice on the new church discipline, as well as representing Massachusetts’ business interests. Peter, who had been an army chaplain in the Netherlands, became the most celebrated New Model Army padre and a close companion of Cromwell. He was even voted a salary by Parliament. Young George Downing, the son of Edward’s friend Emmanuel, came to work for Hesilrige. The Boston magistrate Israel Stoughton and John Leverett, a future governor of Massachusetts, came back to England at the behest of the celebrated siege captain Thomas Rainborowe. The Rainborowes were a commercial clan with strong links to New England. Edward and Susanna knew Thomas’s sister Martha, who lived in Charlestown from the 1630s with her first husband. Later she married John Winthrop a couple of years before his death. Susanna may have urged Edward to be in touch with the Rainborowes, but he disliked the anarchic side of the Levellers – a movement coming to the fore as he arrived. Rainborowe was their hero, but they reminded Edward of Gorton.
Hesilrige became Edward’s patron and Edward’s fortunes rose with the Independents. In later July 1647 the army occupied London, bringing them to power. Their ranks included Puritan merchants in the City who had been involved in New Englan
d for the past quarter of a century. Edward had dealt with them for years, especially the Andrewes brothers who were investors in Plymouth and Massachusetts. Thomas Andrewes became the first lord mayor of the Republic after the execution of Charles I. London MP Matthew Cradock had been a founding member of the Massachusetts Bay Company and its first governor. Cradock never went out to New England, but he had an estate and shipbuilding interests there. John Endecott was his wife’s cousin.
Many of the more regicidal Independents worshipped at certain City churches: St Stephen’s in Coleman Street was a centre for political radicalism and Independent Puritanism, and members of its congregation found their way to North America. In 1638 one of St Stephen’s most famous pastors, John Davenport, founded the colony of New Haven in Connecticut.
Specialising in trade in North America and the Caribbean, they came to power after the Civil War. Over the years Edward had become personal friends with a number of them. He had bought goods from them or convinced them to lend more money to the struggling colony.
One of the things which made Edward particularly appealing to the Independents was his promotion of the new mission to convert the Indians, which had some astonishing successes. John Eliot, back in New England, believed that total acculturation of the Indians must be achieved by placing them in Praying Towns, the first of which was at Natick near Roxbury. Their conversion to Christianity caught the imagination of the lobbyists, politicians, merchants, clergy and intellectuals milling round Westminster because of the biblical prophecy that the Conversion of the Jews would precede the great day of Christ’s return.
The downfall of the king was also believed to be ushering in the Second Coming. Many soldiers had millenarian expectations, and Cromwell himself had become increasingly convinced that he was fulfilling a providential destiny predicted in the Old Testament. Edward was living in restless anticipation of something amazing, heightened by the abolition of the bishops and the imprisonment of the king, which lent events in London an extraordinary quality.
The second Civil War broke out in June 1648. Scottish troops invaded and Oliver Cromwell’s generalship was decisive. In late November, masterminded by Cromwell and Ireton, the army sent a Remonstrance to Parliament demanding that Charles I be put on trial. When Presbyterian MPs refused and voted to continue to negotiate, Colonel Thomas Pride and his soldiers marched to the House of Commons and threw them out. In January 1649, to the horror of many fervent Parliamentarians – including Hesilrige – the king was put on trial. On 30 January he was executed.
* * *
On the whole Edward was a very conservative man. But as the revolution spiralled, his religious convictions meant he parted company for a while with Hesilrige, who did not accept the trial and execution of Charles I as legal, and refused to serve as a judge in the trial. Like many members of the House of Commons and House of Lords, he retreated to his country estate. They had fought against the king, and in theory liked the idea of a republic, but shied away from the deed.
Edward, used to taking quick decisions in the rough-and-ready arena of New England, did not have the same anxieties and scruples. And there were people who shared Edward’s hungry impatience, religious radicals who had no qualms about executing the king. For them, Charles I was merely a figure in an apocalyptic narrative.
We do not know for certain whether Edward was present at the execution, but it is unlikely he would have missed being amongst the crowds thronging Whitehall waiting for the king, who wore an extra shirt so as not to be seen to tremble with cold, to come out onto a platform outside Banqueting House that grey day at the end of January. Edward might have heard that strange cry, almost as if the whole country was in pain, when the king’s head fell with a thud to the sawdust. A great groan of regret and dread ran through the crowd after the head was raised by the masked executioner.
To the majority of the English nation, regardless of their politics it was a dreadful and upsetting event. Even those Independents who had agreed to be judges were so agonised by executing an anointed king that out of 135 commissioners, only 59 could bring themselves to sign the death warrant. Herbert Pelham’s neighbour, the clergyman Ralph Josselin, wrote: ‘I was much troubled with the black providence of putting the King to death, my tears were not restrained at the passages about his death.’ He hoped the Lord would not see it as a sinful action of the country.
Most New Englanders, however, had a different view of the king. There were no groans from them. Perhaps the emotional and psychological changes wrought by the process of emigration involved cutting themselves off from their roots. Living away from England for so long made Edward unsentimental. Perhaps he had been brutalised by life on the frontier. By April 1649, as much of England was still reeling in an atmosphere of horror and disbelief, the regicidal Republic appointed him as one of the twelve commissioners to auction Charles I’s goods like those of a common criminal. They included the Crown jewels, the king’s sceptre and orb, and his outstanding art collection. It was stated that most of the goods had belonged not to the royal family but to the Crown, and were now therefore the property of the Commonwealth. They could sell anything to pay the mutinous soldiers. And, to the shock of the polite world, they did.
Carts loaded not only with paintings torn from the walls of the palace of Whitehall but royal pots and pans processed through an amazed London to be auctioned at Somerset House. The commissioners made themselves thoroughly unpopular with their search warrants which enabled them to go anywhere. It is not clear if Edward bought anything. There is no record of his doing so. Perhaps he regarded them as tainted. His fellow commissioners bought priceless paintings and even the Crown jewels. Titians were sold for £10 apiece, Van Dycks for rather less. They were seized on by many Parliamentarians. Charles very quickly became a royal martyr. Ten days after his death the holy king’s apparently autobiographical memoir, the Eikon Basilike, relating his mental sufferings and spiritual strivings, was published. It became a bestseller.
But Edward viewed the king not as the Lord’s anointed but as the last piece in an eschatological drama, and won golden opinions as the sort of man needed for the transformation of society. He was attractive, zealous and enthusiastic. By 1650 he had been appointed to one of the most important committees in the revolutionary government: the Committee for Compounding with Delinquents, as Royalists were known. Edward was one of only seven members, a position of considerable power. Every day he dealt with angry Royalists, many of whom had lost everything. Edward’s great enthusiasm for the godly experiment of New England made him the perfect Puritan revolutionary.
Edward’s lightning ascent of the political greasy pole came at a unique time when those who agreed with the idea of a godly commonwealth were favoured. It was during the year of the execution that Edward proved his credentials as a man wanting to bring in Christ’s kingdom on earth with his successful sponsorship of the Act to establish a corporation to convert the Indians of New England. It was one of the first actions of the Republican Parliament to help bring on the millennium.
Along with Herbert Pelham, Edward was on the board of this New England Corporation. The aim was to raise money for missionaries and teachers to civilise the Indians as well as sending goods for them. Raising hundreds of pounds in country collections, the Corporation bought goods for the Indians. The company sent books including 200 English Bibles, cloth, clothing, medicine, tools, seeds, spindles and needles.
The twentieth-century historian Gerald Aylmer’s examination of the personnel who made up the Cromwellian regime includes a long entry for Edward. Aylmer noted that, since the Commonwealth was a revolutionary regime which came to power through civil war, its ‘legality was not universally recognised in the country’ which put a premium on ideological reliability. In general it was personal recommendation which got the man the job. Edward most likely was helped by his friendship with the wealthy Puritan merchant Thomas Andrewes. Andrewes had been one of the commissioners of the High Court who was named to try Charles
I – and he had no qualms about doing so. The fact that one of Andrewes’ chief business partners in international trade, Samuel Moyer, was on the Committee for Compounding suggests that Andrewes may have recommended Edward. Andrewes had a drapery business which was so successful it helped finance the Parliamentary side. Edward by this time was exporting cloth probably as part of the activities of the New England Company. One of the Winslows’ backers, Richard Ffloyd, was the treasurer of the New England Company, and sufficiently close to Edward to be made an executor of his will. Ffloyd was another Englishman who had lived in Boston for over a decade, and returned when the war began.
Many at Boston had no wish to pay for the project to convert the Indians. Edward’s personal finances were strained, and Plymouth was not supportive. He was in low spirits, and at the beginning of 1650 he wrote to Massachusetts and asked that they ‘send over some other in his place’.
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It was not only financial concerns that had contributed to Edward’s dark mood. In late February 1649, the sixty-two-year-old Governor Winthrop had suddenly become very unwell. He was tended to anxiously by his new wife, Martha Rainborowe, who was expecting a baby. His son Adam wrote uneasily to his brother John Winthrop junior that their father had kept to his bed for over a month, a highly unusual state of affairs.
The great founder did not live to see the birth of his last child. On 26 March 1649, after several weeks of fever and the cough of consumption, he finally passed from life. John Cotton asked for prayers from the congregation for whom Winthrop had been a friend, a brother and above all like ‘a Mother, parent-like distributing his goods to brethren and neighbours at his first coming’. Governor Winthrop was buried in great state in what is now King’s Chapel Burial Ground, Boston. The day of his funeral was made a public holiday so that as many people as possible could attend, and it was delayed a week so that all could gather. Edward must have wished he was there to pay his last respects to the man who had been such an influence in his life. Perhaps wistful, on 26 April 1649 he gave a piece of land for a new meeting house in Marshfield.
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