by Nick Bunker
Bradford described a real voyage, experienced firsthand, but he carried his own heavy cargo of associations. In almost every sentence, he alludes to the Bible. Was Howland an ordinary young man? Or a junior Moses, saved from the water like the prophet when Pharaoh’s daughter found him floating in the Nile? Were the crew of the Mayflower another grumbling batch of Jacobean sailors? Or, as they debated the cracked beam, did they act out the roles of the sailors who threw Jonah into the sea?
For Bradford, trained by Ainsworth, each episode carried a plethora of meanings. In the splitting beam, he would see more than a damaged lump of wood. For him, it might represent the rot caused in the soul or in the Church, by sin or by strife. England was Egypt, the Atlantic was the Red Sea, and Cape Cod was Sinai. The stormy passage of the Mayflower re-enacted other voyages in the Bible: the ark of Noah, Paul’s journey to Rome, and on the waters of Galilee the twelve disciples, with Christ as master of their fishing boat.
Inside the head of William Bradford, the Pilgrims mimed out these episodes of sacred history. When they reached dry land, they repeated another ancient formula. At Provincetown, the Pilgrims fell on their knees and thanked God, says Bradford. Again, behind his narrative lies a Hebrew model. It came by way of Bradford’s knowledge of a Jewish ritual, the birkat hagomel, a ceremony of thanksgiving.
A FIRST THANKSGIVING
In 1618, the first prayer book for sailors appeared in print in England, written by a parish minister in the City of London. He had recently given a farewell sermon to the crew of the Royal James, bound for the Orient for the East India Company, and his book carried a dedication to its shareholders. Dr. John Wood gave it the subtitle Holy Meditations for Sea-Men. It contained prayers to be read at sea, before a battle, during a storm, or at the funeral of a crewman.
Among the prayers he included one titled “Thankes-Giving to God After Deliverance from a Tempest.” The clergy often read thanksgiving prayers, and under Elizabeth it became customary to draft new ones for every blessed occasion: the end of an epidemic, the Armada’s defeat, or some bloody massacre inflicted on the Irish.20 Wood composed a seagoing version, using as raw material words and phrases from the Psalms to assemble a chorus in praise of the might and mercy of God. One psalm gave him more words than any other. This was Psalm 107, used later in the English rite for a burial at sea. It spoke of seamen engulfed by a storm who pray to God until he brings them to a peaceful harbor.
As a Separatist, wary of official worship, Bradford did not care for prefabricated liturgy read from a book. However, the Pilgrims had all grown up with thanksgiving prayers, and every Christian had a duty to say such things. If the prayers followed the Bible, no one could object. So Bradford did the same. At the end of chapter 9, after his meditation on the American landscape, he also repeats verses from Psalm 107, words that describe the journey of the Israelites across Sinai. “When they wandered in ye deserte wildernes out of ye way, and found no citie to dwell in, both hungrie & thirstie, their sowle was overwhelmed in them,” writes Bradford, quoting the Psalm from the Geneva Bible, the translation used in early New England. “Let them confess before ye Lord his loving kindnes, and his wonderfull works before ye sons of men.”
For the Pilgrims, these words carried a double meaning, arising from a Hebrew source. If Bradford turned to the notes Ainsworth added to Psalm 107, he would find Ainsworth quoting Maimonides. Writing about the Mishnah, the Jewish code of laws, the rabbi said that the words of the Psalm, including the verses quoted by Bradford, gave birth to the Jewish rite of thanksgiving. The Talmud listed four occasions when the birkat hagomel was compulsory: the healing of a sickness, the release of a prisoner, the end of a voyage, and the arrival of travelers at their destination. Ainsworth listed them too, and described the form taken by the Jewish prayer. It was a public confession of the goodness and majesty of God, of exactly the kind that the Pilgrims performed at Provincetown.21
A year later, most likely in October 1621, after their first harvest, the colonists held the festivities commemorated by the modern Thanksgiving. Winslow described them in two sentences. He mentions three days of feasting on game, wildfowl shot by the English, and venison killed by the native warriors who joined the celebrations. This is more or less all he says, but Winslow’s brief paragraph has given birth to a weary torrent of controversy. Did they eat turkey? Did they wear pointed hats? Was the event holy or secular, a wilder version of an English harvest festival? Did they call it a thanksgiving? Or was it something the native people termed a nickommo, a ritual feast or dance held to avert drought or sickness, to celebrate good fortune or bring victory in war?
Most likely, it meant one thing to one person and something else to another, as communal occasions always do. But if we could ask William Bradford to define the first Thanksgiving in America, he would point to something else. He would say that it took place at the instant of arrival, at the moment on Cape Cod when the Pilgrims fell on their knees to say the Jewish prayer. And yet even this act of devotion contained an undercurrent of melancholy, of a kind often found between the lines of Bradford’s text. He likened the Pilgrims on the Cape to Moses, as the prophet gazed out across the plain of Jericho. At the end of the book of Deuteronomy, from a mountaintop Moses saw the promised land. As Bradford knew well, the prophet had crossed Sinai, but he never entered Canaan. Moses died, leaving his bones in an unmarked grave on the edge of the wilderness. An identical fate awaited half the Mayflower’s passengers and crew.
Here we leave the Pilgrims for the time being, on the Outer Cape, approaching the first snowfall. Behind them lay a long process of formation. To find its beginnings, we have to go back two generations, and to violent death in eastern England nearly forty years before. At New Plymouth, Bradford and his comrades recalled as heroic forerunners two Englishmen who were hanged in 1583. They died on gibbets in a muddy field near the market town of Bury St. Edmunds.
Their execution came about because of the career of a man called Robert Browne. Thanks to him, Separatists like the Pilgrims came to be known as Brownists. A man who embarrassed everybody, including William Bradford, he earned the nickname “Troublechurch Browne.” Time and again historians have mentioned him briefly and then pushed him quietly to one side, pretending that this infuriating, volatile character had little direct influence on the Pilgrims. It is time Browne came in from the cold, and with him the concealed history of Pilgrim origins. They lie deep within the reign of Queen Elizabeth, in England and also among the Calvinist gentry of France.
Part Two
ORIGINS
Chapter Four
TROUBLECHURCH BROWNE
Nothing would bee done for a Plantation until some hundred of your Brownists of England, Amsterdam and Leyden went to New Plimouth.
—CAPTAIN JOHN SMITH, TRUE TRAVELS, ADVENTURES, AND OBSERVATIONS (1630)1
Easter week in 1580 was hot, unseasonably so. On Wednesday, April 6, at six o’clock the working day was finished, and the English were eating, drinking, or at play: or, if they were devout, they might be listening to a midweek sermon, as they were in a church opposite Newgate Prison. Later, it was claimed that boatmen felt a strange unquietness in the waters of the Thames. If so, it was the only sign that anything was wrong.
Suddenly, on the south coast, people heard a detonation like the firing of cannon at sea. For weeks, the locals had been readying defenses against the danger of a Spanish invasion. Perhaps, for an instant, they feared that this was the first salvo of a bombardment. Before the noise died away, the ground began to move under the impact of the most severe earthquake to strike England for more than a century.
It began when a fault slipped twenty miles beneath the Strait of Dover, sending shock waves south to Normandy and as far north as York. As it ended, Londoners heard ragged chimes from a hundred parish churches, as the tremor caused the bells to ring a disorderly peal. Some panicked, like lawyers dining in the Inns of Court, who ran out into the street with their knives still in their hands. Others blamed the
ir quivering wainscots on rats or weasels. The earthquake lasted less time than it took to say the Lord’s Prayer.
Only two people died. One was a shoemaker’s boy, killed by a falling stone as he sat beneath the minister at Christ Church, Newgate. A serving girl beside him succumbed to her injuries later. Apart from that, damage was modest: a church tower in Kent cracked from top to bottom, flooding on the French coast, and a fallen wall at Dover Castle. But although it ranked low on the Richter scale, in the Elizabethan mind the tremor became another dreadful warning of punishment for sin.2
Separatism took shape during this period, the early 1580s, when its protagonist, Robert Browne, achieved notoriety. Some of those who traveled on the Mayflower were at school, at university, or starting apprenticeships: at least seven of her passengers were already aged between eight and eighteen. Exposed to new ideas taught by young schoolmasters, by equally youthful academics, or by preachers from the pulpit, they were also far more likely to be literate than earlier generations.
Two-thirds of yeomen and tradesmen in eastern England could read, twice as many as two decades previously, and this was the social group and region from which most of the Pilgrims came. The content of what they read made its mark as they responded to something that felt like a crisis. In the reactions to events such as the earthquake, we find a Mayflower mentality developing, a state of mind in which some men and women might feel compelled to seek radical alternatives to the status quo.3
THE WRATH OF GOD
Within twenty-four hours, a printer of sheet music rushed out a godly ballad, “moving us to repent by ye example of ye earthquake.” Fifteen earthquake pamphlets appeared, with the same dire message at their heart, and the queen’s bishops composed an earthquake prayer for obligatory recital.4 Was England an especially wicked place? The shaken kingdom had many reasons to feel precarious.
England was Protestant, but its religious independence dated back only fifty years, since Henry VIII broke from Rome. When Elizabeth became queen, after the death of her Catholic sister, Mary, she restored the Protestant faith, but even so the Reformation remained incomplete and unsafe. Menaced from within by covert Roman Catholics, by vagabonds, and by the idle poor, England was threatened from outside by Philip of Spain, by the Jesuits, and by their truculent henchmen, the Irish. Or so it seemed to the Privy Council.
In February, they ordered ships back to their ports, to be ready against a Spanish assault. A few weeks before the earthquake, they told every county in England to draw up muster rolls of available armed men. When a Catholic earl began an insurrection in Ireland, word reached London that Spanish warships were gathering, heading perhaps for Bantry Bay, to join the rebel in kicking down England’s back door.
Fears about the succession added another twist of alarm. Mary, Queen of Scots lived in restless captivity in the north of England, waiting if Elizabeth died to assert her own solid claim to the Crown. Unmarried, Elizabeth had no uncontested heir of the Protestant persuasion. Worse still, she was considering a marriage with a Catholic, the Duke of Anjou, brother of the king of France. Until it was abandoned in 1582, this project came and went for four years of fitful negotiation, causing all sorts of trouble. As we shall see, it helped engender new ideas about politics, ideas that flowed into Separatism and came to influence the Pilgrims.
Why did the Anjou proposal anger the Protestant gentry? Because it put at grave risk the informal constitution by which they, and England, had come to be governed. This rested on a few simple assumptions. Gentlemen would be loyal to the queen, defend the realm, pay modest taxes, and enforce the law, serving as justices of the peace, the local representatives of the Crown. In return, the JPs would run their localities as they saw fit, free from interference by cardinals, monks, and foreigners. They would also keep, of course, the Church property that they had acquired since King Henry dissolved England’s monasteries.
At the apex of the system sat the queen, supreme but not omnipotent, obliged to listen to advice, ignore it though she often did. To make laws, and raise taxes, she had Parliament to help her, but more relevant were her privy councillors, and they were led by two evangelical Protestants, Lord Burghley and Sir Francis Walsingham. Burghley was the queen’s lord treasurer, and Walsingham served as secretary of state.
A royal marriage with a papist threatened to break the unwritten rules of the kingdom. A French consort might bring with him toleration of Catholics, and new competitors for royal favor and the rewards of public office. That, perhaps, was why, in the months before the earthquake, the Privy Council read seething letters from Protestant squires, such as one who warned of the “serpentine subtlety” of the French and the “inevitable danger … of bondage, agreed upon by that holy father, the Pope.”5 In private, Walsingham said much the same, while Burghley bided his time.
Walsingham remembered that Anjou’s mother had ordered the murder of the French Protestants, on the feast day of Saint Bartholomew, eight years before. Might such an atrocity occur in England too? What if Elizabeth died in childbirth, and Anjou seized power as a regent, raising the child in the Roman faith? Fears of a second massacre of Saint Bartholomew lingered all the more strongly, since refugee Huguenots had fled from France and settled in England. They made friends with Walsingham, and his Puritan allies, they told stories about persecution, and they wrote books expounding their ideas.
Such were the obsessions of the time. “God hath spoken unto us these many yeares, so many wayes, by the troubles of his Church, by the Slaughter of his Saints,” wrote one author. “By monstrous births, by strange shapes … by foreign warres abroad, by tumults at home, and now of late by an Earthquake … there remaineth nothing now but the day of our Visitation. The Lord will come in his wrath, to iudge and punish us.”6 For some, however, the earthquake might also be a call for action, a commandment to complete the work of Reformation, in a land where it remained at risk. That was what being a Puritan meant.
PURITANS
For five centuries or so, since the Norman Conquest or before, England had lived a double life. Unified from the center by the Crown, and later by Parliament too, out in the provinces the kingdom divided itself into enclaves. The Church, the state, and the economy took a honeycombed, cellular form. They consisted of overlapping units, layered one over the other: the diocese, the county, the archdeaconry, the hundred, the borough, and the town with a weekly market. At the base of this system lay the most fundamental cell, the parish, with usually a single village as its nucleus.
England had nine thousand parishes, each with a church and a minister, known as a rector or a vicar. If he were lucky, the minister lived on tithes, paid by his parishioners, equal to a tenth of the gross produce of the land: grain, pulses, livestock, and everything else. If he were less fortunate, the tithes belonged to a local landowner or perhaps a college at Oxford or Cambridge, and the minister received only what they chose to give him. Money matters of this sort caused frequent quarrels, and so did another feature of the system: the fact that, in many parishes, the landowner or some other lay outsider also owned the right to nominate the minister. A parish and its tithes became property to be bought, sold, rented out, or mortgaged, by people motivated by ambition or greed as much as by religion.
In theory, beneath the queen the Church was uniform and regimented, with every parish worshipping identically. The Book of Common Prayer set out in detail the order of service. Ministers had to wear caps and white linen surplices, make the sign of the cross at baptism, and marry couples with a wedding ring. Worshippers knelt to receive Holy Communion. These old Catholic habits aroused the most frequent Puritan opposition. In practice, however, the Church was far less unified than it might seem, and rules were often bent or ignored.
In some parishes in London, in the universities, in seaports, and in market towns in the eastern counties, Protestant reform had advanced the furthest. There, where the landlord studied Saint Paul and Calvin, or hired a man who did, religion meant the preaching of the Word. In such a p
lace worship centered on the sermon, not the Eucharist. To give sermons a sharper bite, reformers borrowed from Switzerland a new practice, called “prophesying.” It referred to a meeting where clergy, and very occasionally laypeople, assembled to discuss the sermon’s meaning, to fast, to study the Bible, and to pray aloud.
This was Puritanism. The word entered the dictionary as an insult, coined by a Catholic to make fun of hot Protestants who wished to do away with every last trace of Romanism. Puritans preferred to give themselves other labels: “professors of the Gospel,” “professors of sincerity,” or simply “the godly.” They did not necessarily have special beliefs about God: Puritans were Calvinists, but so too was everyone else, at least in theory. Double predestination formed part of the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion, drawn up in 1562 with the queen’s reluctant endorsement. Instead, people recognized Puritans by the way they acted, by the tone of their voices, and most of all in their demands for a new constitution for the Church. Puritans did not simply read Calvin. They wished to create a Calvinist society, with religious assemblies based on the Swiss and French Reformed churches that he inspired.
Of course not everyone wanted to be a Puritan: they were a distinct minority. Roman Catholics fought a rearguard action from sandbagged foxholes in remote locations. Even non-Catholics could blunt the edge of Reformation by choosing to cling to old ways or by ridiculing the godly. Many parishes lacked piety of any kind. In the middle of the century, recruitment of ministers had collapsed. Henry VIII had stripped the Church of assets, inflation shrank the value of clerical incomes, and religious strife made the priesthood a dangerous calling. In the 1570s, 80 percent of congregations never heard a sermon, for lack of competent men. This situation was changing, as the universities became factories for cloning clergymen, their principal function until the reign of Queen Victoria. By the early seventeenth century, preachers had been found for more than half the parishes in England; but the process was slow, many doubted the need for reform, the Church was divided, and Elizabeth could not force her subjects to cohere.
