by Nick Bunker
For the young Brewster, the future Pilgrim, another set of opportunities existed, but they came by way of his mother’s relatives, not those of his father. In about 1564, William Brewster the bailiff married a widow called Mary Simkinson. In about 1566 she gave birth to young William. Before her first marriage, Mary Simkinson was called Mary Smythe, and she belonged to a successful family in the port of Hull. Her brother John Smythe, the Pilgrim’s uncle, was a merchant, trading wine and other cargoes between Poland, Norway, La Rochelle, and Spain, and he served three terms as mayor. Another of the boy’s uncles was Francis Smythe, a clergyman, minister of a wide parish on an island in the marshes between Scrooby and the Humber. He was also a Cambridge University graduate, from the argumentative college of St. John’s, and his sons studied there too.12
Through his mother, therefore, Brewster came from a civic echelon of literate local ministers and businessmen. From them, and from his schooling, he might acquire a richer and more adequate idea of what it meant to be a gentleman. As we shall see, it was probably with their help that the young man obtained his place at court with William Davison. In the town of Hull, we find a trail that eventually led all the way to the coast of New England. The route went by way of education and politics.
FOR GOODNESS AND RELIGION
We know nothing about William Brewster’s childhood. The Pilgrim enters the archives for the first time on December 3, 1580. On that day, he became an undergraduate at Cambridge himself, at the college of Peterhouse. He did not take a degree, and he remained at the university for little more than a year. However, we know what ideas he encountered. At his death his library in America still contained books that were in vogue at Cambridge when he was a student.13
Among them were new books about courtesy, gentility, and civilized behavior, and especially a work written by an Italian humanist, Stefano Guazzo. Within its pages, Brewster would encounter an alternative definition of rank, depending on neither wealth nor heredity. First published in Italy in 1575, the book soon reached England, where it came out in translation in 1581 as The Civile Conversation. Its language and its message bear a striking similarity to the eulogy composed after Brewster’s death by William Bradford.
Guazzo was a lawyer, working for the Dukes of Mantua. His book celebrates gentlemen who acquire gentility by way of diligent public service to their city or to their nation. Far from slotting individuals into fixed places in a hierarchy, Guazzo says that the best men are those “who from verie lowe place with the ladder of their owne vertue climbe to most respected highness. As manie Popes, Emperours and Kings have done being the sonnes of verie meane men.” His ideal gentleman has the qualities that Bradford saw in Brewster—piety, learning, discretion, humility, and generosity—but also the specific kind of bravery that he displayed in New England.
Guazzo said that the finest gentlemen were those who shunned wealth and fame, and instead did battle with “povertie, ignominie, pain and death.” In a passage echoed by Bradford, he taught a lesson that spoke directly to the plight of Separatists. “Those poore Gentlemen are to be pittied,” says Guazzo, “who by some mischance & evill hap, not by their owne fault, are become poor and low.” Relevant to the Pilgrims, exiles who left home to follow a life of hard labor in foreign lands, this sentiment appears in the Brewster eulogy as well. According to Bradford, his mentor was “tender-harted and Compassionate of such as were in Missery but especially of such as had bin of Good estate and Ranke and were fallen into wante and povertie either for Goodnes and Religions sake or by … Injury and oppression.”14
These ideas could acquire an incisive edge if they were hammered together with evangelism, and with political philosophy, to form an ideology of valor and resistance, derived from ancient history. For any educated Elizabethan, the icons of courage were the Roman heroes whose stories they read in Latin at the grammar school. We find men of such a kind alluded to in William Bradford’s history of the colony, where he cites the inspiring example of noble Romans like Cato and Seneca, who died in defense of the Roman republic or in defiance of a tyrant. And in Brewster’s youth, there was another new book—again, he owned a copy of it in New England—that plainly advocated a more open society where rank and gentility were won by merit and hard work.
It was called De Republica Anglorum (Concerning the Republic of the English). A manual for politicians, it analyzed the workings of government in England from top to bottom. First published in 1583, it went through another eight editions in the next forty years. The book was written by Sir Thomas Smith, a lawyer and diplomat, and its most striking feature was its title, suggesting that England itself was a republic, albeit a republic presided over by a queen. Remarkably, too, Smith analyzed society in simple, economic terms. If England prospered, said Smith, it was because its social hierarchy was flexible and open. In England, men could climb up from one rank to another and alter their status, simply by making money.
Smith said bluntly that if somebody had an income of £1,000 a year, then he was a nobleman. To qualify as a knight, all he needed was £120. Gentlemen simply had to pass a very basic test. In order to live, did they have to do manual labor? If not, because they survived on the rental income from their land, or because they had a learned profession, or even a business in the City of London, then they ranked as members of the gentry. Gentlemen, said Smith, “be made good cheape in England.”
He even found an honored place for yeoman farmers in the social order. In Smith’s eyes, the yeomen had earned respect as the foot soldiers of medieval armies, and they continued to play a vital role in government, as jurors and constables and by choosing members of Parliament. For Smith, Parliament lay at the heart of the English republic, and among the yeomen he praises that stout class of patriots, the “forty-shilling freeholders,” farmers with enough land to allow them to vote in a county election. The leading Separatists in the Trent valley came from exactly this social grade. The village of Sturton had eight forty-shilling men. Among them was John Robinson, father of the Pilgrim pastor.15
So, in the books he read, and in the ideas that circulated around him, the young William Brewster encountered competing visions of what it meant to be virtuous and to be genteel. And, in the conditions of the Scrooby region, the endless squabbles, and the shabby conduct of the local gentry, he could see how far reality fell short of any moral principles at all. We can understand why he might turn to the radical, evangelical solution offered by Puritans. He might come to see Puritanism as a means to shape an alternative, richer ideal of what it meant to be a Christian gentleman. It would be based on effort, enterprise, public service, or honest commercial success, a hybrid of the values of Sir Thomas Smith and Guazzo.
However noble a set of ideas may be, they will not survive without an environment in which they can take effect. The events in the real world that shaped the young man took place in the realm of war and sectarian conflict. Two rebellions occurred, with consequences that cut across the social landscape of his youth. Their effects must have reinforced the motives that made the young Brewster a Puritan.
The first was the Northern Rising, a futile attempt by Catholic noblemen to depose Elizabeth and place Mary, Queen of Scots upon her throne. It was a debacle, and it led to a Protestant backlash, a backlash that created a local Puritan movement. The second rebellion was the revolt against Spain by the Netherlands. Here the critical year was 1572, when the Calvinist privateers known as the Sea Beggars began a guerrilla war on Spanish shipping. Eager to help them, the Protestant seaport of Hull readily entered the fray. In the year in question, the town’s mayor was John Smythe, the uncle of William Brewster.
REPUBLICS OF THE GODLY
In December 1569, eight thousand troops approached Scrooby from the south and from the west. They came under the command of Edward Clinton, Earl of Lincoln. From each stop along the route, including Scrooby, Clinton sent dispatches back to Whitehall Palace, because he was advancing up-country against six thousand Catholic rebels.
In Nov
ember, the rebels tore up the Protestant service books in the cathedral at Durham. They did the same in nearly eighty churches across the North Parts. They restored the Mass, and received the pope’s forgiveness for their past obedience to the heretic Elizabeth. In the end, the Northern Rising failed chaotically, after the Privy Council moved the Queen of Scots out of reach. However, the episode left a deep mark, and not only on the families of seven hundred people hanged as traitors.
The rising had shown that the North Parts remained unconquered by Protestant reform. A new archbishop arrived at York, in the person of Edmund Grindal, a firm Calvinist who had taken refuge in Germany during the reign of Mary Tudor. Writing to Burghley, Grindal expressed his horror at the popery he found among the northerners, with their rosary beads and archaic funeral rites. They had three evil qualities: they were ignorant, they were stupid, and they were stubborn. They displayed, said Grindal, “great stiffness to retain their wonted errors.”16
Grindal began a campaign to convert the north, with new clergy, new schools, and discipline imposed on the disobedient. To help him, from 1572, he had the new lord president of the Council of the North, which acted as the right arm of the Privy Council in the region. The new president was the so-called Puritan earl, otherwise known as Henry Hastings, third Earl of Huntingdon. Another keen Calvinist, he sheltered Puritan writers, and he encouraged prophesying, those sessions of Bible reading, dialogue, and prayer so dear to the evangelical Protestants of the age.
For more than twenty years, Huntingdon waged a relentless war against what remained of the Roman Catholic faith. By the time he died in 1595, as many as thirty priests and eight laypeople had been sentenced to death by hanging at York. No record remains of any Protestant nonconformists meeting the same fate, although technically the laws applied to them too, if they published open attacks on the Church of England or on the queen’s supremacy.
For most of the reign of Elizabeth, therefore, men and women in this region could function as Puritans with little fear of interference. This was especially so around Scrooby, within the area policed by the archdeacon of Nottingham. It was very rare indeed for a Puritan to be prosecuted for the offenses of which they were usually accused. The archdeacon took little interest in rooting out nonconformity, unless Catholics were involved. In 1587, he carried out an inspection of the area, covering some fifty parishes. Nearly half replied with simply two words, “Omnia bene”: “All is well.” He probed no further, although some of these parishes had Puritan ministers known to have flouted the rules of worship.17
Things began to change a little in the 1590s, when rules against nonconformity became more strict. But even then, the penalties meted out were mild. In 1593, a new archbishop ordered an inquiry into the conduct of the parish clergy, and in the Quadrilateral his officials found three ministers with Puritan tendencies. Among them was William Bradford’s friend Richard Clifton, rector at Babworth, seven miles from Scrooby. A decade later Clifton became one of the core group of Separatists, revered by Bradford. When he arrived in Holland, says Bradford, Clifton was “a grave and fatherly old man … haveing a Great white beard and pitty it was that such a reverend old man should be forced to leave his country.”18 In the 1590s, he escaped with nothing more than a mild rebuke.
Clifton failed to wear the surplice, and during baptism he left out the sign of the cross. He admitted both offenses, but the judge simply dismissed him with a warning. His case was trivial compared with the opposite threat of popery. Nor did the authorities make anything more than a token effort to coerce or to chastise laypeople. Between 1596 and 1603, the court prosecuted in only sixteen cases where men and women had gone missing from their parish church. The bulk of these cases had nothing to do with belief. They concerned men caught in the alehouse or playing cards during evening prayer, or opening a shop or working in the fields on the Sabbath. Even if a person was convicted, the penalty for nonattendance was small: a fine of one shilling, and this was often waived.
William Brewster the Pilgrim benefited from the same lenient policy. Early in 1598, after three years of failed harvests, the archdeacon relayed to the churchwardens a questionnaire, circulated to every parish in England. Far from being some tyrannical tool of oppression, it was chiefly intended to ensure that parishes were doing their best to help the poor. In April, the Scrooby churchwardens turned up among wardens from more than twenty villages, on the day when responses were due to be given. They reported Brewster and several others for the offense of “sermon gadding,” the Puritan habit of forsaking the parish church to hear a better preacher elsewhere. They also accused Brewster of “publicly repeating” sermons, a practice frowned upon by conservative clergymen. The archdeacon’s court summoned Brewster to explain, then sent him away with a verbal warning. No further action was taken.19
This was typical. By far the dominant theme in the region was the official campaign against the Catholic faith. The Brewsters and their kin the Smythes of Hull were immersed in this process too, as active participants in the same campaign against the old religion. Just before Grindal left York, he gave old William Brewster the post of bailiff at Scrooby; it is most unlikely that he would have done so unless Brewster was seen as a safe pair of hands, with sound opinions. And later, when Brewster became postmaster, he must have received the full endorsement of the Puritan earl, for reasons of national security.
Apart from the military importance of the Great North Road, and the need to safeguard the royal mail, Scrooby needed a reliable man for another reason. Long after the Northern Rising, the Privy Council continued to worry about Catholic dissidents, men and women perhaps merely biding their time before another insurgency. Bawtry, between Austerfield and Scrooby, was regarded as “a dandgerous place,” so dangerous that in 1578 it became the subject of a special report to Burghley from an intelligence officer.
Bawtry contained, said the writer, two families of suspect Catholics, “a trybe of wicked people … Traitors, rebells, feugetyves, conspirators.” They were the Mortons and the Thurlands, and the officer listed their names and misdeeds. Their young men made covert trips to Rome, and traveled back and forth across the north of England: alarming behavior, since the Queen of Scots was only twenty miles from Bawtry, in captivity at Sheffield. Both families were neighbors of the Brewsters and the Bradfords: William Bradford’s uncle Robert rented land from the Mortons. In the local records, their names appear frequently as Catholic recusants, cited for failing to attend their parish church. Hence the need to have a trustworthy man to watch the mail at Scrooby.20
In such an atmosphere, the local Puritans could hope to do far more than simply live a quiet and pious life. In alliance with the authorities, they might even take the reins of power themselves. This was the case at Hull, where Brewster’s kinfolk did exactly that. In the town, the Smythes and their neighbors built a marine republic of their own, with the approval of Grindal and the Earl of Huntingdon. Godly, disciplined, and patriotic, it became another forerunner of the Plymouth Colony.
Merchants ran the town. Of the twelve aldermen, more than half were overseas traders, dealing with Russia in the north, and the Canaries in the west, and they sent whaling voyages to the Arctic. As mayor of Hull, Brewster’s uncle was a powerful figure, since Hull was the kingdom’s fourth-busiest port. Events at Hull mirrored those occurring at Bury, and in other godly republics where magistrates strove to create what Smythe and his colleagues called a well-ordered commonwealth. Burghley used a less pompous phrase, calling places like Hull “good towns,” but the message was identical. A good town punished drunkards, set the poor to work, and kept its streets clean. It employed a godly preacher who gave sermons three times a week, with the residents obliged to attend.
During Smythe’s first term, he put in place regulations allowing him to punish the lazy, the tipsy, or the lecherous. Soon, like Bury, Hull had more than fifty rules designed to keep its people within the confines of the straight and narrow. To assist them, Hull appointed a red-blooded Puritan as
parish minister. He refused to wear the surplice, and he tried to end the Catholic practice of bell ringing. When some of his flock rang the bells on All Saints’ Night, the vicar and the mayor turned up to stop them. A scuffle followed, and the minister threw a punch at a passing sailor. If this was a little undignified, the jail provided another weapon against the enemy. In 1577 the prison at Hull held twenty-two Roman Catholics.21
If asked to justify their severity, Smythe and his colleagues would point across the sea to the Netherlands, where the revolt against Spain was at its height. During Smythe’s second term, Hull welcomed two warships operated by the Sea Beggars, allowing them to resupply. Every night the townsmen slung a chain across its harbor mouth in case of a Spanish attack. They could not allow renegade Catholics to form a fifth column: or so they would argue.
For the career of William Brewster, the politics of Hull may have been decisive in a very direct and personal way. In 1584, during Smythe’s last term as mayor, Hull chose as its high steward the most fiery Protestant member of the Privy Council. This was Walsingham, the queen’s secretary of state, a man who eagerly supported English intervention to help the Netherlands. The post of high steward made him Hull’s friend and patron at court. In return, Hull paid Walsingham a fee and accepted his influence over the town’s affairs. Within less than a year, the young Brewster joined the staff of William Davison, who was Walsingham’s closest subordinate. We can guess, though no documentary proof exists, that Walsingham did the mayor of Hull a favor, by finding a job for his nephew, in return for his appointment as high steward. The relationship between Davison and Brewster had profound consequences for the future.
