by Nick Bunker
Nobody knows who first awarded the name to this corner of Massachusetts, but it must have happened very soon after the earliest settlers arrived. Winthrop used it without any comment, as though it was already familiar. Whoever it was, by doing so he sent a clear message home about the potential of the New World, because the old Romney Marsh was land of the sort that every English farmer wanted most. Nobody understood this better than Robert Cushman.12
When he gave his sermon at New Plymouth in 1621, he preached about high rents and greedy landlords, and in his part of Kent the effects of both were very visible. Cushman was born in 1578 at a place called Rolvenden. Under Elizabeth I, this and the nearby village of Cranbrook achieved modest infamy, as a hive of Puritans who clashed with the authorities. But if outsiders had heard of them, the most likely reason lay in their valuable location. Rolvenden stood on a hill above the river that fed Romney Marsh, and the dead center of the marsh lay only ten miles off.
By the early seventeenth century, the reclaimed soil had become a vast ranch, divided into hundreds of smallholdings each of forty acres, with the tenants including Rolvenden men. As many as ninety-five thousand sheep and cattle lived on the rich grassland, in a space less than one-third as large as the salt marshes of Massachusetts. And as the population grew, and the price of grain and cattle feed rose, the cost of land at Romney soared. Rents per acre at Romney were four or five times higher than the English average. They almost doubled in the twenty years before the Mayflower sailed.13
So, when somebody borrowed the name for the marshes at Revere and Lynn, where nobody need pay rent at all, he issued an invitation that many farmers might find irresistible. Competition for grazing land in England was starting to taper off a little, thanks to the economic slump in Europe and the falling price of wool, but rents dropped only slightly, and the small farmer remained insecure. And for some of them, insecurity was becoming terminal, as more powerful men sealed their dominance of the wetlands that remained.
Since the 1580s, statesmen such as Burghley had worried that so much of England seemed to be infertile wasteland. As far back as 1589, a Dutch engineer proposed a vast plan to drain the fens of eastern England and turn them into cornfields and pasture. When, in the 1590s, disastrous harvests led to appalling hardship, projects such as these came to be seen as urgent necessities.14
For the next five decades, schemes to drain English wetlands proceeded in counterpoint with projects for new colonies in North America. Sometimes the same men were involved in both. Most of the fen drainage ventures were failures, for many reasons: costs far exceeded estimates, engineering skills were lacking, and the projects encountered angry opposition. Using a law passed in 1600, the Crown awarded control of immense tracts of wetland to “undertakers,” investors from the aristocracy or from the City of London. In return for financing the work, the undertakers received most of the fens they drained: hence their unpopularity among the farmers already occupying the same territory and rearing animals on it.
All of this had a direct bearing on the fate of the Pawtucket. The first colonists arrived on the American Romney Marsh in 1629, in the shape of two men in their twenties, Edmund Ingalls and his younger brother Francis. In England, they came from Skirbeck, by the sea close to the old Boston in Lincolnshire. Skirbeck was a fenland parish, and the two Ingalls boys lived by raising livestock. When their father died in 1617, he left them eight cows, nearly forty sheep, fifteen horses, and a rick full of hay, but prosperity such as this might not last. Here rents were still rising, and the fens around Skirbeck were among those that attracted most attention from outsiders. In 1630, Charles I granted tens of thousands of acres of the Boston fens to a consortium of undertakers, led by a well-connected courtier. Despite angry protests from the residents, the project went ahead amid allegations of corruption among local officials.15
The Ingalls brothers left no documentary evidence to say precisely why they left for America, but these were the circumstances from which they came. It seems likely that they were among the farmers displaced by fen drainage. They were also Puritans, with a Puritan vicar. This would have given them a clinching motive for emigration. In Massachusetts, they settled first at Salem and then moved to Lynn. As many as fifty other English families followed in their footsteps in 1630, with “a large stock of cattle, sheep and goats.” In doing so, they entered a space far less empty than it must have seemed to them. With its deer, shellfish, herbs, and berries and with ground ideal for maize as well as wheat, Romney Marsh already provided a spacious home to the Pawtucket. They were about to suffer their own catastrophe.
When Standish and Winslow went up the Mystic, they found the grave of Nanepashemet, the sachem of the Pawtucket. When he died, he left not only his widow, the Squa Sachem, but also three sons. They were known to the English as Sagamore John, Sagamore James, and Sagamore George. Of the three, George was by far the youngest, born, it seems, in 1616. The English also called him George No-Nose, though his real name was Wenepoykin. It fell to Wenepoykin to fight to recover Romney Marsh, stolen from his people during the first decade of the new colony beside Massachusetts Bay.
By 1630, because of disease and attacks by the Micmac to the north, the surviving Pawtucket had dwindled to a small but still significant number. Sagamore John led a group of forty warriors based at West Medford. His brother James lived by the Saugus at Lynn, with another forty men, while more made their homes on the marsh between the two. In 1633, the smallpox epidemic devastated those who remained. In the words of Thomas Hutchinson, the New England historian of the 1770s: “John, Sagamore of Winisimet, and James of Lynn, with almost all their people, died of the distemper.”
Before the epidemic, tensions had already existed between the Pawtucket and the English, with complaints about cattle trampling fields of maize. What happened afterward is not entirely clear, but as the Ingalls brothers settled down to farm and run a tannery, they attracted envious glances from the south. In 1634, the town of Boston officially annexed Romney Marsh as a whole. Its citizens began to divide up the land, with the lion’s share allocated to the wealthiest inhabitants. The Ingalls brothers received 120 acres, but by far the largest tract went to Captain Robert Keayne, commander of the Boston militia. In the end, Keayne owned eight hundred acres—“some of the best land on the New England coast,” it was said—including the stretch behind Revere Beach.*
From his brothers, Wenepoykin inherited the title of sachem of Chelsea and Lynn and in due course he began to wage a battle in the law courts at Boston to recover his property. Starting in 1651, the legal proceedings continued fitfully for eighteen years, as Wenepoykin tried to obtain a judgment against the new landowners on Romney Marsh, including Keayne. Although they offered no defense, except right of occupation, Wenepoykin lost his campaign of litigation and took up arms of a different kind. He fought against the English during King Philip’s War in 1676. When it ended in defeat for the native people, they shipped him off to Barbados as a convict. Eventually he returned, and died in about 1684. After his death, his family signed away their claim to land at Lynn, in return for silver worth sixteen pounds.16
A WESTERN DESIGN
Grievous stories such as that of Romney Marsh have almost too many dimensions. Religion, politics, ecology, and disease, dynastic warfare in Europe, and the ambitions of men and women of many kinds, tanners as well as evangelists, gentlemen landlords as well as fenland farmers: all of them had their roles to play in the making of New England. The foundation of the new colonies resembled a Jacobean drama. It had as many scenes and quite as much ambiguity as a play by Shakespeare, and this book has only covered act 1.
When a story is so complicated, with so much nuance, it serves no purpose to allot praise or blame in simple ways, as though we were slicing up the acres on Romney Marsh. To the south, in the Plymouth Colony, for example, the evidence suggests that Indian rights to land received far more respect. As for the Bostonians, perhaps men like Robert Keayne were acquisitive, or grasping, but if we co
uld place him in the dock, Keayne would have his own case to make. What purpose did it serve, he might say, for a tiny people who lacked livestock to occupy soil that could house so many English families? It was smallpox, not the English farmer, that dispossessed George No-Nose, Keayne might argue, and smallpox killed the European and the native alike. Samuel Fuller died the same death as Sagamore John.17
So was the fate of the Pawtucket unavoidable? Did they fall victim not to greedy individuals but to blind and impersonal economic forces? In a sense they did. But this need not have been inevitable. What if cattle had never sailed to Massachusetts? Without them, no evictions would have taken place at Romney Marsh. But livestock could only cross the sea because English mariners had built larger ships and learned to sail them effectively. That was another story: the evolution of English enterprise by sea. Again, it possessed a logic of its own, but it did not follow anybody’s master plan.
Did New England have to happen at all? What if the Duke of Buckingham had brought his men home safely from the Île de Ré? Or what if he and King Charles had never provoked the French cardinal to lay siege to La Rochelle? The war between England and France was not bound to occur. What if it had never broken out, or if Charles I had won some victories? In either case, at home the political temperature would have fallen sharply.
Sea captains from Barnstaple might have proceeded happily on their way, carrying wine and woolens back and forth across the Bay of Biscay. They might never have needed to cross the Atlantic. And would John Winthrop and the Puritans have simply stayed at home? However much they hated Archbishop Laud, it was the crisis in Parliament in 1629 that tipped the balance in favor of departure to America. That crisis would not have occurred without the quarrels about taxation arising from the war.
Of course, this kind of speculation has its limits. Leaving aside the events of the late 1620s, were there deep and chronic flaws in the way England ran its affairs, in matters of religion, politics, and finance? There probably were, and if so, then occasional explosions of discontent were inescapable. Sooner or later men and women would seek an outlet by way of emigration. And the harsh demographics of old England provided another incentive. Even if they did not, there were other strategic reasons to make a push across the ocean.
New England simply offered too many resources—beaver skins, naval stores, and naval bases—for old England to ignore it indefinitely. So perhaps the turning point actually lay in the Canadian expeditions by the Kirkes. Their victories showed that England could challenge France and Spain for control of the North Atlantic. They also made a handsome profit, by way of pelts and captured ships and ordnance.
We could pursue arguments like these indefinitely, but we might end up by explaining nothing at all. The truth is that Calvinist zeal was far more important than any other single factor in bringing about the creation of New England. We cannot simply edit the Puritans out of the picture, however much some historians wish to try. It was the Plymouth Colony that made the essential breakthrough. The Pilgrims invented the model and set the tone for what came later. Investors like Pocock and Cradock would not have persisted with transatlantic projects if they had not seen Bradford and his people show how the job could be done. Even if New England was inevitable, somebody had to be first. And for the task to be accomplished, religion was essential, for two reasons. One had to do with money, while the other concerned morale.
Men such as Cradock and Pocock persevered because they possessed a sort of evangelical superego. It was nurtured in places such as Bread Street Ward, and it goaded them on when others gave up. Many people wished to make money in the City of London, but less hazardous ways existed than the American option, and those who put up the money for Massachusetts were few in number. They were very definitely Puritans, and Puritans of a particular type, the kinds of people who drilled in the Artillery Garden and refused to pay the forced loan demanded by the king.
Morale was necessary too, for leadership and as a means to cope with adversity. Commenced in a dire economic climate, when capital was short and mishaps were many, the Mayflower enterprise might have fallen apart at any point in its first seven years if circumstances had been even slightly more adverse. Although they soon learned to feed themselves, the colony could have failed if the Pilgrims ran out of gunpowder, lead, copper, and iron tools, if they provoked Massasoit or lost all their boats, or if a smallpox epidemic as severe as that of 1633 had occurred ten years earlier. Even if complete collapse had not occurred, the Plymouth Colony might have split into fragments, or its demoralized members might have headed south to Virginia. That last option would have been the easiest at any time after 1623. By way of John Pory, they had established good relations with Jamestown, and the start of a boom in the output of tobacco was beginning to make the south seem far more attractive.
Without Separatism, what reason to continue would Bradford, Winslow, and Brewster have possessed? Without an ideology, potent but flexible too, how would they have weathered each of the catastrophes that befell them? That being so, we need to understand exactly what Separatism was, and why it came into being as it did. Sadly, it has become commonplace to skewer the Pilgrims to a blackboard with modern vocabulary such as “fanatic” and “fundamentalist,” terms that either did not exist at the time or meant something very different from their modern definitions.
The word “fundamentalist” had no currency before 1910. It came into being in America to refer to evangelical Christians who were defending biblical religion against modern phenomena, such as Darwinism. On the day the Mayflower left Plymouth Sound, Darwin remained a very distant prospect far below anybody’s horizon. By the standards of our age, everybody was a fundamentalist in the seventeenth century, of some kind or another. When it comes to fanaticism, the Pilgrims could point their finger at many contemporaries far more guilty than they. If we want to find the worst effects of religious hatred in the period, the place to go is central Europe. Over the course of the Thirty Years’ War the population of Greater Germany fell by more than seven million.
Preserved at Barnstaple in Devon, this may be the earliest manuscript surviving in England to document the financing of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. It concerns a dispute in 1635 between the London investor John Pocock and the Boston settler John Humfrey, about a cargo shipped on the Gift of Barnstaple. (Barnstaple Town Council and North Devon Record Office, Document B1/4090)
In any event, Separatism did not originate in religion alone. Its roots lay in the English politics of the early 1580s, when men and women worried about the defense of the realm, about the succession to Queen Elizabeth, and about the best way to run their localities in an age of divisive change. For a William Brewster, Separatism offered a means to respond, in religious language, to a set of situations or a predicament that went far beyond matters of worship. Compounded with ideas about gentility and good government, and seasoned with Greek and Roman ideals of republican virtue, Separatism gave rise to ambitions that had secular consequences. The new colony had to pay its way and govern itself, as well as kneel on the Sabbath.18
By any criteria that a Jacobean might recognize, the Plymouth Colony succeeded in all these respects, and remarkably so. Of course, even in 1640 the new English colonies between the Connecticut valley and Maine remained small. There were some twenty thousand settlers at the most, and many of these decided not to stay. Not long ago, a British historian called Susan Hardman Moore published a book correctly showing that a quarter of those who came west across the Atlantic went home again, not least because, in the 1640s, the Puritans seemed to be winning a great victory in the civil war in the old country.* But if we stand the statistic on its head, then 75 percent remained in America. This was quite enough to win a poll in favor of the New World by an overwhelming majority.
Why was this so? In the 1640s, New England suffered its own recession, but it survived, because by then it possessed a flexible, diverse way of life, in a material sense if not in others. Vital in the earliest phase, the trade in
beaver fur remained important, but less dominant than it had been. This was because other activities abounded. Men working for Cradock set up the first American shipyard, on the Mystic in 1633. On the Saugus, John Pocock helped finance the first ironworks. Fishing carried on all year round, from places such as Cape Ann, while along the river terraces of the Connecticut valley corn grew in plenty. On the salt marshes of the coast, the herds of cattle multiplied.19
New England swiftly became an essential element within the much larger system that evolved from the voyages of the Charles. By the 1640s, by far the largest cattleman in New England was another farmer from south Lincolnshire, the freethinking nonconformist William Coddington. Like Pocock, Coddington resisted the forced loan; like the Ingalls brothers, he came to America as a Puritan from old Boston; and in the middle of the 1630s, he migrated to the marshes of Rhode Island. From Narragansett Bay he shipped livestock to the West Indies.20 Fish and timber made the same journey. English settlers in the Caribbean needed supplies that Massachusetts could provide, and in return they sent sugar and tobacco to New England. There was also the matter of slavery, because slavery was already embedded in the Sugar Islands. That subject lies beyond the limits of this book, but its looming presence must be registered: black slaves came to Boston as well as to Barbados. This was another possibility that John Witheridge created.
All of this happened under the banner of what became the British Empire. It did not yet exist, in a sense that Queen Victoria might recognize, but the flag was rising up the mast and beginning to flap in a strong wind from the west. Sixty years before, when Browne was pondering Separatism, the Spanish had annexed Portugal. By doing so in 1580, Spain apparently gave itself an unshakable grip on the Atlantic trades, because Portugal brought with it Brazil and the Portuguese island territories. When Edward Winslow died, in the 1650s, the place and the circumstances of his death told a very different story.
