Making Haste from Babylon

by Nick Bunker

  Davison came from a modest background, and he owed his advancement to merit. He carried out difficult diplomatic missions, and he married well: his wife was a cousin of the Earl of Leicester, the queen’s favorite, and Leicester in turn was close to Walsingham. Both men, and Davison, had Puritan leanings. A man in his fifties, Davison counted among his personal friends Sir Robert Jermyn, the Puritan squire, and also John Stubbs, the man who lost his hand for insulting the queen.

  Brewster became very close to William Davison, and late in the summer of 1585 he traveled to the Dutch Republic in his retinue. Bradford’s eulogy says that Davison treated the young man “rather as a son than a servant … and … Imployed him in matters of Greatest trust and Secrecye.” During the five months he spent with Davison in the Netherlands, the future Mayflower passenger encountered men and situations of a kind that could not have been more suitable for the training of a colonist. Among them he met not only the Earl of Leicester but also the gentleman whom many regarded as England’s paragon of virtue, the poet and soldier Sir Philip Sidney. Sidney was Leicester’s nephew, and he married Walsingham’s daughter. Leicester, Walsingham, and Sidney formed a close network of kinship and political sympathy, with Davison affiliated too.

  On the afternoon of September 3, 1585, William Davison disembarked at the port of Flushing, in the Dutch province of Zeeland. In the coming weeks, Brewster was at his side at every moment. Brewster took part in a Puritan crusade, a crusade that Davison did his best to advance, and a crusade that served as another forebear of the Mayflower project.22

  VALIANT IN THE LORD’S CAUSE

  Three times in the last five hundred years, British commanders have led their troops across the Dutch island of Walcheren. It has two sizable towns: Flushing, at its southwestern corner, and Middelburg, a little way inland. A glance at a map will soon tell you why this elongated patch of mud and sand has so often invited attack, and why the fighting has often been bloody. Extending for nearly forty miles, Walcheren and the smaller islands to its east form the northern bank of the estuary of the river Scheldt. They control the long approach to the port of Antwerp.

  In the sixteenth century, Antwerp had the busiest docks in western Europe, forming an entrepôt between the Baltic and the Mediterranean. Thanks to its Calvinist zealots, Antwerp also served as the chief point of origin of the Dutch revolt. This made the Spanish all the more determined to recapture the city. After a long siege, the Spanish army under the Duke of Parma forced Antwerp to surrender in August 1585. The news reached London a few days before Davison left for his mission across the North Sea.

  By the time he set foot in Flushing, elements of the Spanish army had advanced to within thirty-five miles of the town. Short of supplies, Parma was weaker than he appeared, but it was widely expected that he would soon press home his advantage. Either he would thrust north on land to isolate Walcheren, or he would make an amphibious assault across the Scheldt. In October, Davison sent home reports that Parma was assembling flat-bottomed boats to serve as landing craft, and bundles of timber to serve as bridges across canals.

  Parma could count on the low morale of the people of Zeeland, exhausted by a long war, and on help from Catholics who remained behind the Dutch front line. The English sent over a military engineer to inspect the fortifications, and his dispatches were gloomy: he found “the common people without obedience, the soldier in miserie and disorder for want of pay, the Governors weary, & tired for lack of good assistance.” He described flawed and feeble defenses, while the Dutch commanders were divided.23

  All of this tested Davison’s diplomatic skills to the utmost. The previous year, after long debate, the queen finally agreed that England must help the Dutch rebels, to prevent Spain from occupying the entire eastern side of the North Sea. She authorized an oceanic naval war, with Drake unleashed against the Spanish in the Caribbean. At the same time, an English expeditionary force of seven thousand men prepared to go to the relief of the Dutch Republic, with Leicester in command.

  Grand strategy is one thing, and politics quite another. The Dutch did not trust the queen, suspecting that she was secretly making peace with Spain. Elizabeth did not trust the Dutch, believing that they intended to do the same. Wisely, too, the queen feared that the cost of war might bleed her dry, if the campaign descended into a quagmire of trench warfare. So Elizabeth agreed to help the Dutch only if they handed over two so-called cautionary towns, fortified places controlling the mouths of the nation’s great rivers. One of these was Flushing, with nearby the artillery fort of Rammekens, guarding the Scheldt. The other was Brill, thirty miles to the north, with its cannon sweeping the mouth of the Lower Rhine. With Brewster in attendance, first Davison had to ensure that the Dutch ratified the treaty, signed in August, which contained these terms. Then he had to take possession of Brill and Flushing and garrison them with English troops.

  On arriving at Flushing, Davison hurried north to The Hague. He obtained the necessary Dutch agreement, and then he made his way to Brill. It was desperately short of armaments, with only seven cannon and two barrels of gunpowder. The English soldiers who arrived to man the walls were raw and poorly trained. Worse still, as Davison received the keys of the town, he found himself squabbling with his own general in the field.

  English troops had been coming ashore for more than a month. As they marched inland, they came under the command of the queen’s finest soldier, Black Jack Norris, who bore that name because of his dark hair, his vicious temper, and his savagery in Ireland. Brave but arrogant, Norris wished to lead the army out against the Spanish, to secure the Rhine crossing at Arnhem. Davison disagreed: he preferred caution. He wished to concentrate the available soldiers at defensive strong points. He also wanted to displace Black Jack, in favor of his kinsmen Leicester and Sidney, when they arrived later that autumn.

  Three private letters survive from Sidney to Davison, dated 1586. In Sidney’s handwriting, and signed “your loving cosin,” they were letters that the young Brewster must have seen. Between the lines lay a common ideology of militant Calvinism, in which both Davison and Sidney believed.24

  A man quite as fiery as Black Jack, Sidney had two ambitions. Either he would sail with Drake against the Spanish, and plant his godly colony in America, or he would lead a Protestant alliance in Europe against the same papist enemy. The queen vetoed the first alternative, and he never sailed from Plymouth. Instead, with the avid support of Walsingham and Davison, he joined Leicester’s expedition, as military governor of Flushing. In doing so, Sir Philip carried across the North Sea the hopes of English Puritans, eager to put into practice the doctrine of sacred resistance to a tyrant by aiding the Calvinist Dutch against Philip of Spain.

  At least two hundred English gentlemen followed Leicester to the Netherlands, bringing with them county detachments of infantry and cavalry. Among them was Sir Robert Jermyn, keen to redeem himself from his disgrace at Bury. He saw the expedition as a religious duty. As he wrote in a letter to Davison in August, listing the troops who were on their way from Suffolk: “all which and the rest which shallbe employd in that service, I praye God to blesse with his reward that thei may be valiant in the Lords cause, & fight his battailes with corage.” His Puritan friends, the preachers, had rallied to his side, preaching farewell sermons, in which they told the soldiers “how to use this calling & profession of a soldier in true Dutye to God & to their soveraigne.”25

  Davison and Sidney shared these sentiments entirely. Both men were friends of Mornay, the French ideologue of rebellion. A briefing paper survives, apparently from Davison’s files, that uses Old Testament rhetoric like Mornay’s to describe the coming campaign. Again they drew inspiration from a Hebrew king, but this time Hezekiah, who destroyed the altars of the pagans and renewed the covenant with God. So too the Earl of Leicester would root out from the Netherlands the last vestiges of popery. Once on Dutch soil, both Leicester and Sidney hastened to put in place Protestant reforms of a kind far more radical than those permit
ted at home. To serve the garrison at Flushing, Sidney opted for a church along Huguenot lines, governed jointly by ministers and by lay elders. For the Dutch Republic as a whole, Leicester called a national synod, with the aim of making Calvinism compulsory and discipline rigid.26

  As so often, circumstances hindered the work of godliness. Sidney did not reach Flushing until November 18, when bad weather blocked the harbor. He had to wade ashore at Rammekens and then walk three miles to the town. He found Davison at his wit’s end with worry. After occupying Brill, Davison had entered Flushing in October, with the help of five ragged companies of infantry. Riddled with disease and short of food, the troops were forced to sleep in churches because, filled with refugees, the town had no billets. Departing Dutch soldiers had left their barracks in a filthy state. On Davison’s first night in Flushing, when the gates were locked, the keys were given to William Brewster to keep beneath his pillow: a detail recalled by Bradford in America sixty years later. The people of Flushing were restive and possibly hostile, and the English garrison was three hundred men short of adequacy.

  Davison had very little cash. So he ran up huge debts with local merchants, writing out IOUs that he hoped Burghley would honor. Meanwhile, the military engineer had sent back to England his pessimistic report: walls too long, ramparts easy to climb, cannon defective. That autumn, Black Jack captured by storm two Spanish forts near Arnhem, but at the cost of heavy losses. As winter approached, he withdrew toward Flushing to spend the winter seething with anger at his demotion. Another long delay followed, until Leicester finally arrived with the bulk of the expeditionary force, on December 11. By that time, Sidney had sunk into depression, demoralized by the lack of men, money, and supplies.

  William Brewster was an eyewitness of all these events. He also saw at the closest of quarters the first of a sequence of disasters that led to the failure of the expedition, and left the Dutch even more dangerously exposed to a Spanish offensive. The catastrophe occurred when Leicester ignored the queen’s instructions and agreed to become governor-general of the Netherlands. It led to furious arguments. First Leicester quarreled with Elizabeth, and then he fell out with the Dutch, because of the highhanded manner in which he behaved.

  At Flushing, Leicester slept in Davison’s house, where they began talks with the Dutch about the role that Leicester would play. Brewster was part of the English delegation as Leicester embarked on a triumphal procession across the Netherlands. Feted with banquets, pageants, and odes composed in his honor, Leicester arrived on January 3, 1586, at the city of Leiden.27 Again Brewster stood at the center of things, lodging with Davison in the home of Paulus Buys, the leading government official in the province of Holland. An ardent supporter of the Anglo-Dutch alliance, Buys wanted Leicester to take on the leadership of the Dutch Republic, and Sidney agreed enthusiastically. Fascinated by ancient history, Sidney argued that his uncle should become a dictator, like the men who saved Rome from the likes of Hannibal.28

  On January 15, with Davison standing by, Leicester accepted the Dutch offer of the governorship. When the outraged Elizabeth ordered Leicester to resign, the earl promptly placed the blame on Davison. Recalled by the queen, he left Flushing for England a few weeks later. He was a sick man and in temporary disgrace, but Sidney and his Dutch friends kept him abreast of events with a stream of correspondence. Davison took home a gold chain, a gift from the Dutch, and he entrusted it to William Brewster, who wore it as they rode to Whitehall. In the autumn, as the pendulum swung again, Davison returned to royal favor, and the queen promoted him to sit alongside Walsingham as her second secretary of state. Brewster remained in his service.

  Meanwhile, Leicester had achieved very little in the Netherlands. An English officer betrayed the frontier fortress of Deventer to the Spanish, while Leicester angered the Dutch by banning their merchants from trading with the enemy. He also waged a futile campaign against Parma in the river country north of Arnhem, and during it he lost Sir Philip Sidney. One September morning, as a screen of English cavalry led by Black Jack and Sir Philip patrolled the country around the town of Zutphen, the mist parted. It lifted to reveal a much larger force of Spanish musketeers and pikemen. In the skirmish that followed, a musket ball smashed Sidney’s left thigh, and twenty-five days later he died in agony from gangrene. The earliest report reached Davison in England in the first week of November 1586. It fell to him to console Sir Francis Walsingham.29

  By this time, events were overtaking Davison himself. His tenure as secretary lasted only four months. It coincided with the trial and execution of Mary, Queen of Scots. For this Queen Elizabeth made him the scapegoat. The chain of events was complex, and Davison’s role in the death of Mary remains open to varying interpretations. But we can be sure of one thing: Davison went on trial in March 1587, charged with issuing the death warrant without the authority of Elizabeth. Convicted, Davison spent eighteen months in the Tower of London, before the queen allowed him to retire to private life. Throughout this period, William Brewster stuck with him, “doeing him many offices of service in the time of his troubles,” as Bradford put it. In return, when old William Brewster died, Davison helped ensure that the younger William succeeded his father as postmaster at Scrooby. He took up the position in 1590.30

  Debts, disease, and short rations, clashing egos, complicated politics, and impossible logistics: these were the realities of the Leicester expedition. As we shall see, they bore a close resemblance to the early history of New England. Even the science of military engineering had its relevance to the Plymouth Colony, with its fort and its artillery facing the forests of the interior. What better training could William Brewster have received for the challenges he would experience in America?

  During his years with William Davison, Brewster also encountered the militant ideals of the international Calvinists of the 1580s in their most highly developed form. He entered the world of Mornay, Walsingham, and Jermyn, men for whom theology and patriotism were simply two sides of the same anti-Spanish coin. Far from being an abstraction, something purely theoretical, their ideology found its embodiment in the life and death of Sir Philip Sidney. On a Dutch battlefield, Sidney had displayed a belligerent kind of Christian fortitude: one that William Bradford would later celebrate in his account of Brewster’s own adventures.

  So what became of the young Puritan? In the 1580s, Brewster could expect an excellent career, as a trusted servant of a great official. Barely two decades later, the same man was a refugee, in exile in Leiden, the city where he had been a member of Leicester’s entourage. Men such as Davison never had to be Separatists. Why did it become the fate of William Brewster? Why did he find Brownism unavoidable?

  This question has an orthodox answer. After the death of Elizabeth, along came the coercive King James, the monarch who harried the Puritans out of the land. Or so the story goes. He certainly wanted them gone, and his arrival set in train the events that led to the settlement of New England. But this did not happen in some simple, mechanical way, and the explanation is far from straightforward. King James was a very complicated man. We begin at the end of his reign, when the corpse of the Anglo-Scottish king lay on an autopsy slab.

  * The best attempt at a biography was made by another English clergyman, Harold Kirk-Smith, in his useful book William Brewster: “The Father of New England” (Boston, Lincolnshire: 1992).

  * Historians have often said that as well as becoming postmaster, William Brewster the Pilgrim succeeded his father as bailiff at Scrooby Manor. Actually, no documentary evidence for this has been found. In view of his father’s quarrel with the archbishop’s widow it seems unlikely.

  Part Three

  SEPARATION

  Chapter Seven

  THE ENTRAILS OF THE KING

  No kingdom lackes her owne diseases.

  —JAMES I, BASILIKON DORON (1603)1

  His skull was so hard and so strong that the surgeon had to struggle to break it open with a chisel and a saw. He found a swollen brain pa
cked tightly inside the thin film of cells that enveloped its surface. The white matter filled the membrane, spilling out onto the table under the surgeon’s hands. He prized out the dead man’s heart, and the onlookers saw that it was unusually large. They found that his lungs and gallbladder were black. One kidney was sound, but the other had dwindled to such a tiny size that the surgeon had to rummage for it in the dead man’s bowels. When at last he located it, he picked out two small kidney stones.

  Although the departed had passed away three months short of his fifty-ninth birthday, he was already senile in body. Gravely weakened by arthritis, he suffered from kidney disease, and possibly he had endured a series of small strokes. It seems that a larger stroke killed him, after eight days of fever. Only his liver remained entirely normal. This the royal doctors expected, since the case notes record the feel of the organ—“naturally good, big, bloody and strong”—when tested by hand during the king’s lifetime. Despite his many years of heavy drinking, the postmortem revealed no sign of fatty liver or cirrhosis. The tissue was as fresh and healthy as a young man’s.