COLLEGE OF ARCHITECTURE LIBRARY Cornell University Library F 68.M15 1920 Homes and haunts of the Pilgrim fathers. 3 1924 020 682 690 N' XI Cornell University Library The original of this book is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924020682690 HOMES AND HAUNTS OF THE PILGRIM FATHERS NOTE. — The chapters written for the original volume by Dr. A. Mackennal have been retained for this, slightly altered in two or three paragraphs, in view of more recent research. Other chapters have been more materially changed, and additions have been made, all with the object of providing a useful, up-to-date book for the Tercentenary of the sailing of the Mayflower. ,^a^ •r iHK PORCH, AL-sri-:RFii':i.i) church. HOMES AND HAUNTS OF THE PILGRIM FATHERS A New Edition of Dr. ALEXANDER MACKENNAL'S work, revised and pardy rewritten , By H. ELVET LEWIS, M.A. Kenny l Butlbr Londonderry BASTON. MARYLAND Illustrated with coloured plates and many drawings AND PHOTOGRAPHS BY ChARLES WhYMPER '*Wp On the Customs House, Plymouth PHILADELPHIA GEORGE W. JACOBS & COMPANY PUBLISHERS 1920 Gainsborough Old Hall. PREFACE TO-DAY, when the closer union of Great Britain and America has come to mean so much for the future well-being of the world, such a volume as this attains to fresh importance. Here a story of heroic enterprise is told, not in the key of controversy, but of pious regard. The bitterness of political and religious strife, three hundred years ago, is entirely eliminated ; and those men and women, in the little adventurous ship, stand out more clearly in their simple but enduring faith. For every champion of liberty of the conscience who sailed in the Mayflower, to help in founding a new free common- wealth across the seas, thousands of the like mind stayed behind to continue the struggle for freedom in the old land. The descendants of both have just emerged as comrades- in-arms from the most tremendous conflict for human freedom Preface ever waged. The future peace and progress of the world depend on their continued co-operation. It would indeed be a tragedy if any political exigencies promoted misunder- standing between people whose hearts and consciences have been attuned to the same endeavour by such a past as is recorded in the story of this great pilgrimage. Let 1920 mark a deepening and strengthening of the union, not by means of bonds that change and wear and break, but by those more lasting bonds of spirit allied to spirit in a common effort to benefit the whole of the human race, and in a fellowship of hardy endurance till the work is accomplished. ^ la ^^_vt^^ The Lake, Thonock, Gainsborough. \_Phoiochrojnc. VI EDWARD WINSLOW. The only known portrait of any of the Pilgrim Fathers CONTENTS CHAPTER I. Gainsborough . CHAPTER II. William Brewster and the Church at Scrooby CHAPTER III. AUSTERFIELD — ThE HOME OF GOVERNOR BRADFORD CHAPTER IV. Myles Standish and the Standish Country . CHAPTER V. Boston CHAPTER VL Cambridge and Corpus Christi College . PAGE 13 37 51 75 vu Contents CHAPTER VII. Governor Winslovy of Droitwich . CHAPTER VIII. Holland and John Robinson . CHAPTER IX. Delfshaven and Farewell Words . PAGE 82 • "3 CHAPTER X. Southampton 125 CHAPTER XI. Plymouth . 135 Site of the Old Stocks, Scrooby Churchyard, vin COLOURED PLATES DRAWN BY CHARLES WHYMPER The Porch, Austerfield Church ScROOBY AT Eventide Standish Hall The Barbican, Plymouth Frontispiece 25 52 136 BLACK AND WHITE ILLUSTRATIONS AND PHOTOGRAPHS Coat of Arms on the Customs House, Plymouth Gainsborough Old Hall ..... The Lake, Thonock, Gainsborough A Portrait of Edward Winslow . Site of Old Stocks, Scrooby Churchyard the Return of the Mayflower to England The Pillared House, Gainsborough The Old Hall, Gainsborough. Another View of Gainsborough Old Hall ThOxXock Hall, Gainsborough The Aegir, Morton Corner, Gainsborough The Bridge, Gainsborough Oriel Window, Old Hall, Gainsborough Interior of the Old Hall, Gainsborough Scrooby, from the road to Gainsborough Communion Rails in Scrooby Church . Scrooby Church and Manor House from the River Idle ... . . Ancient Pews in Scrooby Church . The Stable of Scrooby Manor House . Inside the Scrooby Stables . Scrooby Manor House Site of Palace, Scrooby The Old Manor House, Scrooby . Scrooby Church Austerfield Chapel South Doorway, Austerfield Church . Ill V VI VII VIII XII 13 14 IS 16 17 19 22 24 25 27 28 29 30 33 34 35 35 36 39 41 IX Black and White Illustrations and Photographs The Old Font, Austerfield . Ancient Sign at Wisbeach, the Town of Dorothy May Governor Bradford's Home, Austerfield Steps to Cellar, Governor Bradford's Cottage Cellar in the Bradford Home Ancient Building in Wisbeach Standish Hall ... Standish Church, Interior Porch of Standish Church DuxBURY Hall, a Standish Home . To THE Memory of James Standish Vane on Standish Church Standish Church . . . Standish Cross ...... Standish Hall, the Oldest Portion Standish Arms ... . . Standish Chapel, Interior The Stocks, Standish . . Cotton's Pulpit, Boston Church The Cotton Library, Boston . Boston Stump, from the Wash Old Wooden Door, Boston Church Nearing Boston .... Coming up the River to Boston Boston Stump and Market Place . The Kitchen, Guildhall, Boston The Old Poor House, Boston An Old Book from the Cotton Library, Boston The Inner Quadrangle, Corpus Christi College Cambridge . . . . The Church of Sturtox-le-Steeple, near Gainsborough Tower of St. Benedict's Church, Cambridge. Old Porch, St. Benedict's Church, Cambridge The Inner Court, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge The Chapel, Peterhouse, Cambridge Peterhouse, from the Fellows' Garden The Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Cambridge . Old Houses on Castle Hill, Cambridge Interior of St. Benedict's Church St. Peter's Church, Droitwich .... 43 45 47 48 40 SO 51 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 61 62 63 64 65 67 68 69 70 71 72 72 73 73 74 75 76 76 77 78 78 79 So 81 82 Black and White Illustrations and Photographs The Canal, Droitwich .... High Street, Droitwich ; Salwarpe River De oude Schans, Amsterdam . Vliet Canal, looking Towards Leyden. Seventeenth Century House in Leyden View of the Hague, 90 ; A Holland Canal An Orphanage, Leyden . Site of Robinson's House, Leyden . The Academy, Leyden HooG Street, Leyden . . . Roman Castle at Leyden ... . . Hooglander Church (St. Pancras), Leyden . Chapel in St. Anne's Almshouse, Leyden St. Peter's Church, Leyden . . ... School on St. Peter's Cpiurch Canal, Leyden The Academy, Leyden ...... Tablet on site of John Robinson's house in Leyden . Vliet Canal, going towards Delft Old Delft . . ... Nieuwe Kerk, Delft Stadhuis, Delft .... Delft, Municipal Offices and Town Hall . Delft Fishmarket, 121 ; The Water Tower, Delft Departure of the Mayflower from Delft . Southampton, from an early print .... Facsimile of the 161 i Map of Southampton The West Gate, Southampton The Old City Walls, Southampton .... Norman Fireplace in King John's Palace, Southampton The Barbican, Plymouth. ... In a Street Behind the Barbican . The Mayflower Tablet in the wall, Plyjiouth . The Spot where the Mayflower lay in the Barbican The Barbican, from Coxside .... A Bit Behind the Barbican .... Old Palace, St. Andrew's Street, Plymouth The Mayflower Stone, Plymouth .... Cottage on the Old City Wall, Plymouth . Doorway in the Priesten House, Plymouth Mayflower Memorial, Plymouth, U.S.A. 83 84 85 87 89 91 91 95 97 98 01 03 05 07 08 09 12 14 IS 17 18 19 23 24 25 27 29 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 41 42 43 XI ^ ? xu Homes and Haunts of the Pilgrim Fathers CHAPTER I GAINSBOROUGH 'By the margin, willow-veiled, Glide the heavy barges trailed By slow horses.' THE year 1920 marks the tercentenary of the sailing of the Mayfloiver, from Plymouth, with its load of Pilgrims, westward bound. To the vast majority of their contemporaries, their emigration, with its personal sorrows and many misgivings, was but a minor incident in the annals of the year — if, indeed, it was known at all except to a limited few among the people of England. But the little sailing vessel of one hundred and eighty tons was a silent maker of history : the breath of the Eternal Spirit stirred in its sails. The Pilgrims, unknowing to themselves, were the parents of a mighty Commonwealth. Undreamt of splendours lay concealed in the petty worries and disappointments of the harassed emigrants, exiles of an unfa\ouied faitb The controversies of those days have in pa:t passed away ; or, at least, the spirit of a just judgment has so changed the attitude of men on both sides of the controversy, that the tercentenary cekbia- tions of 1920 are likely to unite Christians of many names in a concord of esteem. Ihen, too, the great war has brought the United States into such close alliance of con- fidence and sacrifice with us and othei nations of Europe, that the Mayflowei becomes a new symbol. The of that ship — and the sinking Lusitania — have impres- sively affected the world's future. Careless of their own significance, the Pilgrims have so blurred or blotted out their records, that The Pillared House Gainsborough. sailing of the Homes and Haunts of the Pilgrim Fathers very little is known of the personal history of all but a few. Either their birthplaces are either uncertain or quite unknown. The one district that gives firm ground to tread on lies at the meeting of the three counties of Lincoln, Nottingham and York, ' where they border nearest together,' as Bradford describes it. John Robinson's birthplace was all along in doubt ; but more recently evidence has been discovered which decides in favour of the village of Sturton-le-Steeple. Scrooby, as the birthplace of Brewster, and Austerfield, as the birthplace of Bradford, are more certain. But more important than their definite place of birth is their spiritual record. And here the Separatist Church at Gainsborough stands chronologically first. Its influence was powerful and the extent of it wide throughout the district in the early part of the seventeenth century. In the month of June, 1896, the foundation-stone of the John Robinson Memorial Church at Gainsborough was laid by the American Ambassador of the day — the Hon. T. F. Bayard. Although not himself a Puritan, he could not ' believe that anyone with a mind more single, and more anxious to honour the true servant of God, John Robinson, could have stood and spoken at the corner-stone of the Memorial Church in Gainsborough' than himself In that sentiment he expressed the more generous judgment of history, and anticipated the spirit of the tercentenary, on both sides of the Atlantic. John Robinson's place in the religious history of England and America is assured ; he is honourably remembered in the annals of the city and the university of Leyden ; his beautiful character appears in his writings, and in the loving remembrance of him cherished by his two **S- The Old Hail, Gainsborough. 14 Gainsborough Another view oF Gainsborough Old Hall friends William Bradford and Edward Winslow, the able Governors of the Plymouth Colony. What we know of him makes us wish to know more. His personality has emerged, placid and victorious, out of the controversies of the stormy seventeenth century. Pilgrims to Gainsborough ought to come to it by the road from Scrooby. They will be in the footsteps of Robinson and Bradford and Brewster ; and the mind will be full of them, striving to understand ' the burden of the Lord ' which was upon them, as the men of the village went to share their anxieties with the men of the town. It is an old- fashioned road, winding between hedges and under trees, bordered by strips of grass, greener and more loved by cattle than the grass of the meadows ; it is untouched by the railway, which thrusts itself on the eye in every other road leading to the town. The tower of the parish church grows on the view, a Gothic structure two hundred years older than the Pilgrims, although the body of the church is modern. There, too, is the Trent, always the same, coming down from the moorlands of Staffordshire, not so clean as it was before Burslem and Burton and Nottingham became the crowded manufacturing towns they now are, but keeping its old easy flow, which is broken at times by the ' aegir,' the tidal bore that rushes up destructively, and must have made the ferry-crossing very risky. The bridge is new, but lovers of the picturesque forget both the newness and the toll as they look on the cluster of houses bordering the river. George Eliot's description is 15 Homes and Haunts of the Pilgrim Fathers exact, when from this point you see ' the town of St. Ogg's — that venerable town with the red-fluted roofs and the broad warehouse gables, where the black ships unlade themselves of their burthens from the far north, and carry away, in exchange, the precious inland products, the well-crushed cheese and the soft fleeces, which my refined readers have doubtless become acquainted with through the medium of the best classical pastorals.' George Eliot goes on, with an aesthetic accuracy which leaves you perfectly content to have no descriptive details : ' It is one of those old, old towns which impress one as a continuation and outgrowth of nature, as much as the nests of the bower-birds or the winding galleries of the white ants : a town which carries the traces of its long growth and history like a millennial tree, and has sprung up and developed in the same spot between the river and the low hill from the time when the Roman legions turned their backs on it from the camp on the hillside, and the long-haired sea-kings came up the river and looked with fierce, eager eyes at the fatness of the land. It is a town " familiar with forgotten years." ' Yes ; Gainsborough is all that — picturesque, dream)-, quaint ; but not as you come to it by rail. Then you see the smoke, and hear the din of driving wheels and re- volving shafts and clashing doors ; and your eyes are blinded to the past, and your ears do not take in the silence of bygone centuries. Gainsborough is three towns in one. From the market-place, which unites them all, the town expands to the railway, concentrates itself toward the river, and along the roads, where the neat villas of the prosperous tradesmen are, it steps out leisurely into the country. It is a curious, even a mysterious, town ; not striking, but interesting, with an interest which grows ; in the general absence of buildings of monumental antiquity, you wonder that it should look so old ; you search for beauty, which you do not discover, and your eye is caught by some bit of domestic picturesqueness or venerable age. There are soft, low hills about it, with the shadow of trees, and green patches that look up meekly through the smoky air. But you will not find the charm and the rest if you tarry where the ' works ' are ; you must make your way to the Trent. There is the old Gainsborough — the dreamy town, in some places not too clean ; there the sloops and schooners still come up, and the barges still come down • Thonock Hal], Gainsborough. lb Gainsborough there is the source and the modest wealth and tranquil industries which made a centre to which it was worth the railway's while to come. And there, too, is the town with which is associated the name of John Robinson ; to which Bradford brought his cheeses and his wools ; to which Brewster may have resorted, occasionally, on a market-day, if he wanted to buy or sell a horse, and could not transact his business without crossing the Trent. There is in Gainsborough one noble relic of antiquity — the manor- house ; or, as it is now called, the Old Hall. George Eliot describes this too, with accuracy of observation and sympathetic insight : ' It was the Normans who began to build that fine old hall, which is like the town, telling of the thoughts and hands of widely sundered generations ; but it is all so old that we look with loving pardon at its inconsistencies, and are well content that they who built the stone oriel, and they who built the Gothic facade and towers of fiiuest small brickwork with the trefoil ornament, and the windows and battlements defined with stone, did not sacrilegiously pull down the ancient half- timbered body with its oak- roofed banqueting hall.' In Stark's History of Gainsborough we have a mpre careful architectural ac- count of the erection : ' The front of the Old Hall is principally constructed of large oak timber framing, forming three sides of a quad- rangle, open to the south ; but the back part of the building is generally of brickwork.' ' On the north side there is part of a very beautiful pointed stone structure, which probably was originally intended for a chapel. . . . This chapel was probably executed by Richard de Gaynisburgh, a distinguished mason, who flourished about the end of the fourteenth century, and was much employed in repairing and beautifying the cathedral at Lincoln, in the east end of which he was buried.' ' Sir Thomas Burgh, temp. Henry VI. and Edward IV., appears to have bestowed considerable pains in re-building the Manor House, as the greater part of it seems to be of the style of architecture then beginning to be in use. The tower, at the north-west end, about eighty feet in height, is built entirely of brick, and finished in a most masterly manner, the bricks being all well smoothed and excellently joined. The trefoil ornament is here very conspicuous ; and the whole bears evident marks of the utmost care and attention having been bestowed upon it.' The Aegir, Morton Corner, Gainsborough. 17 Homes and Haunts of the Pilgrim Fathers We owe very much to these restorers and beautifiers of the older time ; we recognise how much we owe them when we see what destruc- tion the architectural self-consciousness of our own century works on the remains of antiquity. The plasterers and whitewashers of the Georgian period covered up much beautiful building, but at least they left it for us to unveil ; many of our recent enthusiasts have destroyed precious work for the sake of uniformity in style. In this Old Hall of Gains- borough, timber and brick and stone, Gothic and Tudor and English domestic work, blend in an exquisite harmony, as gratifying to the eye as it is full of historical suggestion. When the Separatists were forming their Church, the hall was inhabited by a family of marked Puritan traditions. William Hickman, afterwards made Sir William Hickman, by James I., at Belvoir Castle, bought the manor of Lord Burgh in 1596 ; and he lived in the manor- house until his death in 1625. These Hickmans were a noteworthy race, strong and enterprising men, some of them distinguished for their pisty. We should not have guessed them to be Normans from their name ; but the historian relates the tradition that they came into England with the Conqueror. Their genealogical record begins with 1272, when Robert Hickman was lord of the manors of Bloxam and Wickham, in the county of Oxford. They served the Kings of England in the Army, about the Court, and in Parliament, some of the younger sons becoming traders in London. They acquired the manor of Woodford Hall, in Essex, early in the fifteenth century. Walter, the grandfather of Sir William, is mentioned as a benefactor of churches in Northamptonshire. Sir William Hickman's father was Anthony, a London merchant. His mother was Rose Lock, daughter of a mercer in London, and heiress to her mother, Catherine Coke. There is preserved at Thonock Grove, a house about two miles out of Gainsborough, to which the family removed in the middle of the last century, a manuscript written by this lady, from which we gather that she added force of character and religious devotion to the already well-endowed Hickmans. Its title reads thus : — ' Certaine old stories, recorded by an aged gentlewoman, a time before her death, to be perused by her children and her posterity. Written by her, w"' her owne hand, in the 85*" yeere of her age, and about the yeere of our Lord 1620' (the year in which the Mayflower was ploughing her way across the Atlantic). She begins with a reference to her father and mother. Of her father she finds this story in Hollinshed's Chronicle: — ' In the 25th yere of King Henry 8, being the yeere of o'' Lord 1534, at the sute of the ladye Katherine, dowager, a curse was sent from the pope, which cursed both the king and the realme. This curse was set vp in the towne of Dunkirk, in Flanders ; for the bringer thereof durst no Gainsborough neerer approach, where it was taken down by Mr. Lock, of London, mercer.' ' For y' act y" king gave him lOo" a yeere, and made him a gent of his privye chamber, and he was the king's mercer, and his ma'^ vouchsafed to dine at his house. Moreov"' he was knighted, although Ak, The Bridge, Gainsborough. Tie was never maior, but only sherief of London, and so was never any London'' before him. ' I remember y' I have heard my father say, that when he was a yong merchant, and used to go beyond sea, Queene Ann Boloin, y' was mother to o'" late Queene Elizabeth, caused him to get her y"= gospells and epistles, written in parchment in French, together with the psalmes. ' My mother, in the dayes of King Henry the 8th, came to some light of the gospel, by meanes of some english books, sent privately to her by •one of my father's factors, from beyond sea : whereupon she used to call me w*'^ my 2 sisters, into her chamber, to read to us out of the same good books, very privately, for fear of troble, bicause those good books were then accounted hereticall ; and a merch' named Paginter, who used to bring english bybles from beyond sea, was slaine w"' a gun as he went in the streete. — Therefore my mother charged us to say nothing of •her reading to us, for fear of troble.' Proud as Rose Lock was of her father and mother, Mrs. Anthony Hickman was quite as proud of her husband. We see this in her statements that, before he married her, he was worth ;^ 1,000 by his books, ' y' were examined by m)^ father's appointment ' ; that he and her brother were merchant venturers, and had ships of their own, ' and ■did make divers voyages into farre countries, some of which voyages were of such note and fame, as they are spetially recorded by Mr. Richard 19 C 2 Homes and Haunts of the Pilgrim Fathers Hackluit ' ; and that ' it pleased God to blesse and prosper well their adventures, and though thereby their riches did increase, yet they did not set their harts uppon them ' ; but used their wealth for the relief of godly preachers, ' some of whom did afterward suffer martirdom in Queene Mary's days ' ; and among them she specially mentions the martyr Bishop Hooper, John Foxe of the Book of Martyrs, and John Knox. She soon had occasion to shew herself of as fine a fortitude as her parents and husband. Though only a girl when Mary came to the throne, she joined with her husband in sheltering persecuted Protestants, and in holding religious services in her house, at which the Communion of the Lord's Supper was partaken of When her husband, ' to drive away the wicked days,' went to Antwerp, after a tedious imprisonment for Nonconformity, she could not well go with him. A child was born soon after, of whose baptism she naively writes : ' I sent to Oxford, to y" Byshops, (who were then and there in prison, and did afterwards suffer martirdom there,) to be advised by y*^™, wheth' I might suffer my chylde to be baptized after the popish manner ; who answered me, y* the sacrament of baptisme, as it was used by the papists, was the least corrupted, (that is, less than the other sacrament,) and therefore I might ; but therewithall, they said y' I might have gone out of England before y' time, if I had done well : and so my chylde was baptised by a popish priest ; but, bicause I would avoide the popish stuff as much as I could, I did not put salt into the handkerchief y' was to be delivered to the priest, at the baptisme ; but put sugar in it, instead of salt.' She joined her husband at Antwerp, where they thought themselves safer than in England, not 'for any more liberty of the gospell given there,' but because there were 'not parish churches but only cathedral,' and it was not easily seen who came to church and who not. Another child was born in Antwerp, who was preserved from popish baptism by a pretty evasion. ' Whereas, it is the custom there, to hang at the streete doore, when a woman lyeth in, a little peece of lawne : it was so, y' our house opened into two streetes, therefore I hanged forth a peece of lawne uppon either side or doore, to y" end, y* the neighbours, on either side, might suppose that it went out at the other doore, to be baptised.' At last deliverance came by the death of Queen Mary, 'which was not a little joyful to me to heare of ; for during the tyme of her tyrannous reigne, I had often prayed earnestly to God, to take either her or me forth of the world. In all which time,' she concludes, ' I never was present at any of the popish masses, or any other of their idolatrous service, for all which blessings and deliverances, sent to me from my good God, I most humbly beseeche his ma"-, y' I and mine, may never forget to be thankfull ; not seeking our owne vaine glory thereby, but 20 Gainsborough giving all praise and glory to his goodness, who so graciously preserved, blessed, and delivered me.' It would be very pleasant to believe that Sir William Hickman favoured the Gainsborough Separatists ; for then we might go on to imagine that the banqueting hall in the manor-house served them, at least occasionally, as a chapel ; and that this good old lady might have talked with Brewster, who had been as loyal a subject of Queen Elizabeth as herself But the probabilities are on the other side. A man might be a strong Puritan, and also a strong opponent of the Separatists ; and the Hickmans were evidently courtiers when they could be so without violence to their Protestantism. Brewster's public career closed years before he became a Separatist ; the Hickmans were in association with the Crown to the last. Anthony Hickman, LL.D., of Cambridge, brother of Sir William, fought a long battle with the university, but it was to defend the rights of the Crown as well as his own religious liberty. He had been elected a Fellow of Corpus Christi College, by mandate from the queen. ' He refused to take orders, being well affected to the Puritans.' There was difficulty about his continuance in his fellowship, because he would not even be ordained deacon ; and then, on his re-election, there arose a question as to his seniority. The struggle may be deciphered in various manuscripts in the British Museum ; but there is no suspicion of Anthony's being a Separatist. Sir William's eldest son, Willoughby, was created a baronet by Charles H., in 164.3. The pastor of the Separatist Church in Gainsborough was the Rev. John Smyth, who came there from Lincoln, where he had been appointed preacher after he had already suffered imprisonment for Nonconformity. He had been a Fellow of Christ College, Cambridge ; but he was a much older man than Robinson, and could hardly have been his contemporary at the university. The earliest date given for Robinson's residence is 1 592, in which year Smyth was in the Marshalsea prison. John Smyth is known to ecclesiastical students at the Se-Baptist ; that is, the man who, finding none from whom he could conscientiously accept baptism, baptised himself He has been much scoffed at for this, but the scorn is not deserved. Brook, the grave author of the Lives of the Puritans, puts his case fairly : ' The Brownists, who denied the Church of England to be a true Church, maintained that her ministers acted without a divine commission ; and, consequently, that every ordinance administered by them was null and void. ' They were for some time, however, guilty of this inconsistency, that while they re-ordained their pastors and teachers, they did not repeat their baptism. This defect was easily discovered by Mr. Smyth ; whose doubts concerning the validity of baptism, as administered in the national Church, paved the way for his rejecting the baptism of infants altogether. Upon further consideration of the subject, he was led to 2 I Homes and Haunts of the Pilgrim Fathers conclude, that immersion was the true and only meaning of the word baptism ; and that the ordinance should be administered to those only who appeared to believe in Jesus Christ. But the absurdity of Mr. Smyth's conduct certainly appeared in this, that refusing to apply to the German baptists, and wanting a proper administrator, according to his views of the ordinance, he baptized himself.' Smyth also became an Armi- nian, whereas Robinson and those who were with him were decided Calvinists ; and a number of other ' singular notions ' were attributed to him ; so that ultimately his memory was not grateful to his early friends. It is to be put down to his credit that Crosby, and the Baptists generally, defend his repu- tation. He was an able man, eloquent and popularly persuasive ; one would say also of marked, even anxious, veracity. His fre- quent changes of opinion are an evidence of this. He was very kind to the poor. In Amsterdam he practised physic, ' in administering whereof he usually took nothing of the poorer sort.' Of the rich, too, 'he took but half so much as other doctors^ did, excepting some, who being able and well-minded, urged more upon him.' On the other hand, he was a bitter controversialist, even for those days ; he was also unstable. Bradford has written of him : ' His inconstancy and unstable judgment, and being so suddenly away with things, did soon overthrow him.' Amsterdam was the scene of these less happy incidents in his relation to his brethren ; there is no hint that there was trouble in Gainsborough. In a controversy with Mr. Bernard, a Nottinghamshire neighbour — a controversy embittered by the fact that they had been neighbours, and that Bernard had once tried to become Vicar of Gainsborough — Smyth appeals in his defence ' to the town of Gainsborough and those there that knew my footsteps in this matter.' There is regretful remembrance, as well as blame, in Bradford's dismissal Oriel Window, Old Hall, Gainsborough. 22 Gainsborough of him. ' In one of these Churches (besides others of note) was Mr. John Smith, a, man of able gifts, and a good preacher, who afterwards was chosen their pastor. But these afterwards falHng into some errours y" Low Countries, ther (for y" most part) buried themselves, and their -names.' Local tradition has been exhausted by enquirers after relics of the Pilgrim Fathers in Lincolnshire. And because the enquiry very often creates the remembrance, local tradition has given us as much fancy as fact. Examination into family registers, and documents not directly connected with Separatism, may enable those who come after us to know much about which we can only wonder and conjecture. The emigration of the Gainsborough Church to Amsterdam, about 1606, was so complete, that soon all traces of them were lost in their old home, and Separatism was at an end in Gainsborough. The Act of Uniformity, in 1662, called a new Dissent into being. The Vicar of Gainsborough was not ejected; but, in 1725, 'Francis Hopkinson, formerly a mercer, left the sum of i^200, to be laid out in the purchase of land, for the support of a Presbyterian or Independent Minister to the Society of Protestant Dissenters in Gainsburgh, that he might receive the income thereof, during the term of his ministry ; ' and some other endowments were afterward made for the same object. ' The Society of Protestant Dissenters of the Presbyterian or Independent persuasion' is referred to, under these terms, in two other gifts ; and thus we know that the descendants of the Puritans in Gainsborough shared the generous expectation which was entertained in the early part of the eighteenth centuiy, ' that a 'happy union' of the Independents and the Presbyterians was practically accomplished. But religious controversy was not yet dead. The old Presbyterian meeting-house, with its ample close, passed under Unitarian manage- ment, and the orthodox Dissenters were in obscurity until the Evangelical Revival changed the face of England. John Wesley often preached in 'the large body of the old hall' ; and George Whitefield preached there, in or a little before the year 1767. Sir Neville G. Hickman was friendly alike to the Calvinistic and the Arminian societies which were formed in the days of England's great awakening. ' A large room (chamber) ' was used by preachers of Lady Huntingdon's connexion ; and the VVesleyan Methodists used a 'large room of the ground floor of the east wing of that building.' The Gains- borough manor-house has this pleasant memory connected with it ; about the time of the Hickmans' removal to Thonock — probably immediately after — it gave a home to the two small and earnest companies out of which sprang the Methodist Society and the Congregational Church, whose buildings are now conspicuous objects in the old town. 23 Homes and Haunts of the Pilgrim Fathers UMttMiiMaiiiiHiiHtauii Interior of the Old Hall, Gainsborough. 24 2: w > aq O O O William Brewster and the Church at Scrooby ~j Scrooby, from the road to Gainsborough. CHAPTER II WILLIAM BREWSTER AND THE CHURCH AT SCROOBY ' Love thyself last : cherish those hearts that hate thee ; Corruption wins not more than honesty. Still in thy right hand carry gentle peace, To silence envious tongues. Be just, and fear not : Let all the ends thou aim'st at be thy country's. Thy God's, and truth's.' SCROOBY, in Nottinghamshire, — Scrooby Manor, as it is not very accurately styled in the Pilgrim Story, and in many contemporary documents ; Scrooby Court, as, occasionally, the local people call it, — has been rediscovered within living memory. It is worth a visit by those who love ' a pleasing land of drowsyhead,' if it were for nothing else than the sense it gives of Tudor England. It lies on the Great Northern Railway, between Retford and Doncaster, on the direct road to Scotland ; and when you have got out at the station, when the smoke of the engine has cleared into the sky and the rattle of the train is borne away, this is what you see. A broad meadowland, not well cultivated, hummocky plots of stiff soil, in which the dock grows plentifully, and through which creeps the River Idle, between low sedgy banks, where rises the yellow flag, a Madonna among the irises, and the marsh marigold spreads, more golden than the buttercups of the field. A grey church is before you, with quiet tower and a short spire, not too obtrusively piercing the sky. And then you come on the little village, consisting of a single street, with three or four rough sideways, leading 2S Homes and Haunts of the Pilgrim Fathers by scattered cottages to farm-steadings. A solitary horse is drawing a clay-stained cart ; cattle browse in stillness ! men and women work here, and children go to school ; but all is leisurely. Without hurry you recall the memories which have brought you from the town. We shall have a more vivid image of William Brewster, and his life in Scrooby, if we are not too quick to summon him before us ; let us dwell for a little on an eai'lier story, a touching incident of the year 1530. Wolsey spent a few weeks of the late summer in his palace here, when he was on his way from the council-chamber of Henry VIII., to hide his broken heart in York. Readers of Shakspere are struck with the sudden change from pride to meekness, from insolence to suavity, in the cardinal after his fall ; they wonder if Griffith's account of him is as true as it is affectionate, — ' He was a scholar, and a ripe and good one ; Exceeding wise, fair spoken, and persuading ; Lofty and sour to those who loved him ; But to those men that sought him sweet as summer.' We shall understand all this better if we peruse what is said of him by his faithful servant Cavendish, whose Life of Wolsey Shakspere had evidently read before he wrote his play. Scrooby had been since Dome&day Book an appanage belonging to the Archbishops of York, who made the palace a hunting-lodge ; and on his way hither from Southwell, where Wolsey had been spending the time since Easter, he passed through several parks well furnished with deer. Divers gentlemen tried to get him to join the chase, at least to distract his cares by looking on a hunt. ' But in no wise they could entreat him to hunt. Although the worshipful gentlemen being in his company provoked him all that they could thereto, yet he would not consent, desiring them to be contented, saying that he came not into the country to frequent or follow any such pleasures or pastimes, but only to attend to a greater care that he had in hand, which was his duty, study, and pleasure.' And thus ' he came to Scroby, where he continued till after Michaelmas, ministering many deeds of charity. Most commonly every Sunday (if the weather did serve) he would travel into some church thereabout, and there would say his divine service, and either hear or say mass himself, causing some one of his chaplains to preach unto the people. And that done, he would dine in some honest house of that town, where should be distri- buted to the poor a great alms, as well of meat and drink as of money to supply the want of sufficient meat, if the number of the poor did so exceed of necessity. And thus with other good deeds practising and exercising during his abode there at Scroby, as making of love-days and agreements between party and party, being then at variance, he daily frequented himself there about such business and deeds of honest charity.' Seventy years after, the hundred of Basset-Lawe, where these churches are in which Wolsey heard his chaplains preach, had become a 26 William Brewster and the Church at Scrooby -.#«ii««j***> s o O 27 Homes and Haunts of the Pilgrim Fathers stronghold of Puritanism. At Sutton-cum-Lound, a parish ecclesiastic- ally, then as now, united to Scrooby, first Henry Brewster and after him James Brewster were vicars ; these were near relatives of the Pilgrim Father. Richard Clifton, the ' good and fatherly old man, having a great white beard,' who went to Amsterdam to join the Scrooby Church, of which he had been either the pastor or the teacher, was formerly Rector of Babworth, a few miles away. ■" To Worksop, farther off to the south, Richard Bernard came in 1601, from Epworth, the parish in which Samuel Wesley the elder afterward lived, and in which John Wesley was born. Bernard was a pronounced Puritan, but he never became a Separatist ; he subsequently wrote the Separatists Schisnie, to which Robinson's J itstification of Separation was a reply. Robert Gifford, another clergyman who ' seemed weary of the ceremonies,' and was 'hotly persecuted by the Prelates,' although he never left the Established Church, held a Yorkshire vicarage close to Worksop. These are the more eminent of the Puritan clergy from whose preaching and conferences came the Separatist Church of Scrooby. It gives the modern pilgrim a start of mingled surprise and pleasure, as he turns down the road to the sight of the old palace, to see a sign- post pointing him ' To the Post-Ofifice.' For he remembers that William Brewster was postmaster, or ' post,' as he was called in those days. The post then was a much more important person than the small farmer who now distributes letters to the villagers, and graciously receives the many American and the few English strangers who come to see the spot where the Church which so mightily influenced the history of the United States was formed. Scrooby lay on the great North Road ; it was a station taken in going from London to Doncaster and Durham, Newcastle and Berwick-upon-Tweed. The post was, in the first place, an officer of the Crown, whose duty was to supply horses to the royal messengers, and send them on their way with all speed and comfort. For this service Brewster received the sum of twenty pence a day, afterward raised to two shillings, and a sufficient profit on the charges he was at in entertaining the messengers themselves. Occasionally, like the Norwegian bonde, the post would attend to the wants of the ordinary j ~ traveller, though he was warned that this must not inter- fere with his first service due to the Crown. Some ac- counts for food and lodging and mile- age which have Scrooby Church "and Manor House from the River Idle. William Brewster and the Church at Scrooby come down to us shew a much more liberal tariff than the station-master on the roads in Norway is allowed to charge. William Brewster's family was of some local standing ; he himself had once had prospects of employment about the Court. His friend Bradford has told us this : ' After he had attained some learning, viz. the knowledge of the Latin tongue and some insight into the Greek, and spent some small time at Cambridge, and there being first seasoned with the seeds of grace and virtue, he went to the Court, and served that religious and godly gentleman Mr. Davison divers years, when he was Secretary of State ; who found him so discreet and faithful, as he trusted him above all others that were about him, and only employed him in matters of greatest trust and secrecy. He esteemed him rather as a son than a servant, and for his wisdom and godliness in private he would converse with him more like a familiar than a master. He attended his master when he was sent in embassage by the Queen into the Low Countries (in the Earl of Leicester's time) as for other weighty affairs of State, so to receive posses- sion of the cautionary towns ; and in token and sign thereof the keys of Flushing being delivered to him in her Majesty's name, he (Davison) kept them some time, and com- mitted them to his servant, who kept them under the pillow on which he slept the first night. And at his return the State honoured him with a gold chain, and his master committed it to him, and commanded him to wear it when they arrived in England, as they rode through the country, until they came to the Court.' It was an exceedingly important mission on which Davison had been sent in company with the Earl of Leicester, and the queen's advisers were gratified with the result. But Elizabeth had de- signs of her own which Ancient Pews in Scrooby Church, showing tine old carving. 29 Homes and Haunts of the Pilgrim Fathers The Stable of Scrooby Manor House. had been thwarted by the earl's ac- tion. She was in- flamed, also, b)' the personal jealousy she ah\a)'s felt \'ihere Leicester was concerned ; and ^\llen Da\ison apj eared at Couit, her fury broke out on him. She was for refusing to ratify the cnpjagements into which Leicester had entered, and dro\'e Davison out of her presence with her usual roughness of speech. He was bold enough to go to her again, ' and with tears besought her to be better advised, laying before her the dishonourable, shameful, and dangerous effects of so unhappy a message, which would be utter ruin to the cause, and her own dishonour and undoing.' Elizabeth gave way a little ; but Davison was too honest a man for her ; and soon after he fell into lasting disgrace. The next year saw the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, whose death Elizabeth passionately desired, but for which she wished to disclaim the responsibility. She threw the blame on Davison, who had received from her the warrant under which Mary died ; and his public career was at an end. William Brewster remained with his master 'some good time after, doing him many ofifices of service in the time of his troubles.' From what we know of his character, we may well believe that this young man, who had brought with him from. Puritan Cambridge 'the seeds of grace and virtue,' and was sincerely attached to 'that religious and godly gentleman Mr. Davison,' was glad to escape from the degradations of life at Court. He was twenty-three years old in 1587, when 'he flung away ambition,' and came to the quiet house in Scrooby, where his father was postmaster, and where he had himself been born. Another of Davison's young assistants — private secretary to the councillor, as he would be called to-day — whose hopes of employment at Court were now blighted, was George Cranmer, grand-nephew of the martyr. Cranmer's most intimate friend was Edwin Sandys, son of the Archbishop of York, with whom, as the lord of Scrooby Manor, the Brewsters were in intimate association. The Pilgrim Fathers came afterward to be in constant correspondence with Sir Edwin Sandys when he was directing the affairs of the Plymouth Company, under whose protection they sailed for America. Every link in the association of Scrooby with New Plymouth is of interest ; even more interesting are the spiritual sympathies binding together men whose ecclesiastical courses were so different. William Brewster and the Church at Scrooby It was a grave company to which we have been introduced, — Davison and the Archbishop of York, the senior men ; George Cranmer, Edwin Sandys, and William Brewster, the younger ones ; and they were sure to discuss questions of ecclesiastical polity in a catholic temper. Dr. Brown has fully described for us Davison's Puritan fidelity ; Mr. Hunter alludes to his largeness of view. ' Davison,' he says, ' was eminently a Puritan himself, one of the more reflective and philosophical, we may believe, of their party, extending his views, as Brewster did, beyond the mere ceremonies, to the great principles which ought to govern men in the management of ecclesiastical affairs, and in their dealings with each other respecting them.' The archbishop had been a Puritan, even a violent Puritan, in his young days at Cambridge ; and although he knew how to become a personal favourite with Queen Elizabeth, and followed the Tudor tradi- tion of enriching his family with Church lands, he was still able to take a broad view of Church questions. The preamble to his will contains a valuable sentence, whose double application he must have seen. He easily acknowledges that ' our Ecclesiastical Polity, in some points, may be bettered,' as to which, as well as to rites and ceremonies, he would reserve particulars to the discretion of the godly, saying only thus : ' That the state of a small private Church, and the form of a large Christian kingdom, neither would long like, nor at all brook, one and the same Ecclesiastical Government.' His son, Sir Edwin, in his Eiiropce Specuhini, has written of the troubled state of ecclesiastical affairs, in a style in which, Mr. Hunter says rightly, ' we cannot but perceive a correspondency in some parts with the celebrated Farewell Address of Robinson.' He is discussing 'what kind of unity poor Christendom may hope for, whether-jUnity of Verity, or Unity of Charity, or Unity of Persuasion, or Unity of Authority, or Unity of Necessity.' His sentences are long'^enough to satisfy Coleridge, without Coleridge's dignity and exactness ; but we see his meaning. ' There is an agreement,' he says, ' in the general founda- tion of religion, in those articles which the Twelve Apostles delivered unto the Church, perhaps not as an abridgement only of the faith, but as a touch-stone also of the faithful for ever ; and whilst there was an entire consent in them, no dissent in other opinions only should break peace and communion.' 'The seat of truth,' he beautifully says, 'is aloft, of virtue in the midst, both places of honour, but neither truth nor virtue draw to an utter extremity.' He believes that, by regarding only essentials, a Church government, and an order of worship, may be established universally in all Christian dominions. For all other questions it should be lawful for each man so to believe as he found cause ; not condemning others with such peremptoriness as is the pride of some men of overweening conceits ; and the handling of all contro- versies for their final compounding to be confined to the schools, to 31 Homes and Haunts of the Pilgrim Fathers councils, and to the learned languages, which are the proper places to try them, and fittest tongues to treat them in.' Old Isaak Walton's description of the domestic troubles of Richard Hooker has become one of the well-known passages of English literature ; it is to Edwin Sandys and George Cranmer we are indebted for his most vivid picture of them. They had been^favourite pupils of Hooker in Oxford ; and when they visited him in his poor Buckinghamshire parsonage, they found him, with Horace in his hand, 'tending his small allotment of sheep in a common field, which he told his pupils he was forced to do then, for that his servant was gone home to dine and assist his wife to do some necessary business. When his servant returned and released him, then his two pupils attended him unto his house, where their best entertainment was his quiet company, which was presently denied them, for " Richard was called to rock the cradle." ' It is a long way from Drayton Beauchamp, in Bucks, to Scrooby ; but as we remember that Hooker was at this time writing his Ecclesiastical Polity, we may conjecture the subject of their quiet conversation, so quickly interrupted. There is a marked contrast, too, between the Ecclesiastical Polity and the Defence of Separation, but the men who wrote the books were of a like spirit. It is a purely fanciful group, for Robinson was far younger than Hooker ; but it makes a pleasant picture, rich with suggestions of regret for wasted opportunities — the two masters in controversy, Richard Hooker and John Robinson, and between them the three disciples, Edwin Sandys, George Cranmer, William Brewster. Brewster resigned the office of post on September 30, 1607 ; in April, 1608, he was fined for recusancy ; in the same year the Scrooby Church was following the Gainsborough Church to Amsterdam. In the meantime the manor-house had been their place of worship, and he had been a generous host. ' They ordinarily met at his house on the Lord's Day, and with great love he entertained them when they came, making provision for them to his great charge.' Mr. Hunter says that Bradford, whose truthfulness he does not suspect, ' leaves us with the impression that Brewster had an independent fortune.' The statement i§ not well grounded ■ Bradford lets us see that the host of the Church was straitened by the charges he was at. It is his benevolence, not Bradford's narrative, which has created the false impression on Mr. Hunter. No eulogium can be more honourable, more touching than this fact — that Brewster's ample generosity should have obscured the truth that his means were not large. William Brewster must have been a singularly winning man. Bradford does not enlarge on his virtues until he describes his death ; and then he writes : ' I should say something of his life, if to say a little were not worse than to be silent.' Among his virtues it is his modesty which gradually affects us most. ' In New England he would labour with his hands in the fields as long as he was able ; yet when the Church 32 William Brewster and the Church at Scrooby 33 Homes and Haunts of the Pilgrim Tathers had no other minister, he taught twice ever^ Sabbath, and that both powerfully and profitably, to the great contentment of the hearers, and to their comfortable edification ; yea, many were brought to God by his ministry. He did more in this behalf in a year than many that have their hundreds a year do in all their lives.' And yet he accepted Robinson's decision that, as he was not a pastor, he must not preside at the Lord's Supper. We never find him in the first place: he is Davison's servant ; second to Robinson in Leyden, and to Bradford in Plymouth. ' None did more offend and displease him than such as would haughtily and proudly carry and lift up themselves, being risen from nothing.' ' He had a singular good gift in prayer, both public and private, in ripping up the heart and conscience before God, in the humble confession Scrooby Manor-House. of sin, and begging the mercies of God in Christ for the pardon of the same.' He is among the Pilgrim Fathers as was Andrew among the Apostles : always coming in behind some one else, — ' Simon Peter's brother'; the friend of John ; the adviser of Philip; yet always depicted as doing good. He had found the ' sure and safe way to rise in,' which Wolsey confessed himself to have ' missed.' Of the manor-house at Scrooby there are now only the foundations, an arch in the farmhouse that occupies part of the site, which manifestly must have belonged to a nobler building, and a few finely moulded timbers supporting the roof of the stable. The mansion was pulled down before the middle of the seventeenth century ; a Nottinghamshire antiquarian writes of it, in 1673, as having been, 'within memory, a very William Brewster and the Church at Scrooby ^iH nj faKi*^ 5t,-«4^ 1-0 a (/^ Site of Palace, Scrooby. fair palace.' The moat is dry ; a small garden retains something of its old good culture, but the park is a somewhat coarse meadow. Crossing over to the church, you come on the pound, or pinfold, filled The Old Manor House, Scrooby. D 2 Homes and Haunts of the Pilgrim Fathers with nettles ; close to it is another nettle-grown enclosure, in which are the remains of the stocks. In the farthest angle of the churchyard is a small house, called the vicarage. It consists of a house-place and a smaller room on the ground floor : there is no staircase ; you must get to the two garrets by a moveable ladder. Some of the parish clergy of England lived in houses thus mean ; Hooker's house may have been little better ; but the Vicar of Scrooby lived at Sutton, and this cottage is misnamed. The church walls are in good preservation, but of the interior, as it was in Brewster's days, little remains. What does remain has special interest for the antiquarian ; it is some oak carving, in excellent preservation, of a luxurious vine, ' bearing fruit.' The vine, in ecclesiastical decoration, is the symbol of the Church ; and it seems like an irony of time, that has devoured so much, to have spared this symbol in a place where the Church was wasted by division and marred with distrust. Scrooby Church. Austerfield— The Home of Governor Bradford CHAPTER III AUSTERFIELD -THE HOME OF GOVERNOR BRADFORD FROM Gainsborough, in Lincolnshire, we have come to Scrooby, in Notts ; a short walk of three or four miles more will take us to Austerfield, another little place lifted into notice by the story of man's piety and modest worth. We keep to the meadows as far as we can, and soon cross the River Idle into Yorkshire. We no longer tread the narrow northern road which once brought the horseman through Scrooby ; we find ourselves on a broad highway, and under an avenue of fine elms we reach Bawtry. Going straight through the town, and dipping under the railway viaduct, in another two miles we arrive at Austerfield, of which Mr. Bartlett has given us the picture. ' A hamlet of the most humble description, simply a double row of rustic cottages, old-fashioned and mossy, but with their geraniums in the windows, and bright patches of flowers in the little gardens, displaying that neatness and instinctive rural taste peculiar to the better class of English husbandmen^' Bawtry is a more important place than either Austerfield or Scrooby. It consists mainly of one street, ample enough to accommodate the weekly market, and the three annual fairs of wool and cheese and corn, to exercise horses and give room to deploy large flocks of sheep and herds of oxen. The width of the street confers no dignity on the small town ; it rather dwarfs the houses on either side. Looking farther, you see signs of a modest prosperity ; ambition dies here, but one might have comfort as well as quiet in Bawtry. Richard Monckton Milnes made Bawtry Hall his home ; it was a congenial resting-place for his particular literary turn, and here he wrote appreciative words of the Pilgrims and the Mayflower. Passing between these three places, we see how natural it was for the Separatists west of the Trent to form a Church distinct from that in Gainsborough. Everything here is rural ; we are in a yeoman's home : Gainsborough, with its shipping, its seafaring life, its breath of salt water — modest as all this must have been — was not like this. Here they were within easy call of one another : Gainsborough was a good fifteen miles away from Austerfield, and at the end of the journey there was the Ctl Homes and Haunts of the Pilgrim Fathers uncertain river, liable to floods from above and the tidal wave from below, which must have made the ferry often unquiet and sometimes unsafe. There is no need to fancy any trouble with Pastor Smyth and his Gainsborough flock, like that which afterward sent the Pilgrims from Amsterdam to Leyden ; the yeoman's love for field-walks and an easy ford is enough for us to remember. We begin to apprehend another fact, which to the student of the literature alone seems very strange. For two hundred years the precise home of the Pilgrim Fathers in England remained unknown. And yet it was indicated in Bradford's history ' of Plimoth Plantation ' and Cotton Mather's sketch of Bradford, with a clearness that leaves no doubt possible. 'They were of sundrie towns and vilages,' says Bradford, ' some in Notinghamshire, some of LincoUinshire, and some of Yorkshire, wher they border nearest together.' ' They ordinarily mett at his [that is, Brewster's] house, on y" Lord's Day, which was a manor of y" bishops.' Mather says : ' Among these Devout People was our William Bradford, who was born Anno 1588, in an obscure village called Ansterfield.' These notes of place are unmistakeable ; there is no other spot in England where they all unite. The slight slip made in deciphering the name — Ansterfield for Austerfield — could not mislead any one who was on the right track. These sentences from Bradford and Mather had been read and reprinted again and again, they were quoted wherever the old story was told, and still people continued ignorant of the locality meant until 1849. Then the spot was identified by the Rev. Joseph Hunter, who speaks of himself as 'sprung from persons who maintained many of the principles and adopted many of the practices by which these people were distinguished, and who were, indeed, the chief supporters of them in the hundred of Broxtowe which adjoins to Basset-Lawe.' Baptismal registers, legal documents, old lists have since been studied, with the result of absolutely sustaining the identification. This ignorance of a fact so patent is easily understood from a literary point of view. ' Neither Bradford nor Brewster,' says Mr. Hunter, ' nor the divines who were concerned in the movement were of the eminent of the earth, about whom there is a curiosity widely extended through the country which gave them birth, and concerning whom nothing is thought unimportant.' Curiosity as to the lives of the inconsiderable is with most Englishmen a modern endowment, and we have only lately come to understand the value of antiquarian study as an aid to historical accuracy. Moreover, the events of the Commonwealth and the Restoration had obscured the earlier incidents. Nonconformity was associated with Cromwell's Independents and the men of the Ejectment ; very few knew anything of the Ecclesiastical Idealists of the later years of Elizabeth and the beginning of James's reign. The persons who were interested in the Pilgrim Fathers were mostly on the other side of the Atlantic, 38 Austerfield— The Home of Governor Bradford 39 Homes and Haunts of the Pilgrim Fathers without the means of exploring English records or visiting English sites. Just as the story of Abram's migration was written on Hebrew, not on Assyrian soil, so, until recent years, English concern in the Pilgrim Fathers has been little more than a reflex from the stirring history of American constitutional freedom. But down here, v/here the counties of Lincoln, Notts, and York ' border nearest together,' we feel, as well as understand, the neglect into which the homes of the Pilgrim Fathers fell. We are in a land of forgetfulness. The farms, the streams, the skies, the low rolling hills wooded to the top, remain, the rooks draw to their nests, and the lark rises from the sod, as in the bygone centuries, while persons have died out of remembrance. The little girl, playing before her mother's house, is cared for, as her white pinafore and rosy cheeks and sunny hair reveal ; the tired husbandman knows he has a home to go to at nightfall ; twilight deepens into darkness, and doors shut in a full, if not a vivid, life. But the men whose haunts we come seeking are forgotten. Their emigration was so thorough that no tradition of them lingers in the place which once knew them so well. What calls itself tradition is the new play of a somewhat sluggish fancy. American visitors arrive in numbers every year ; and from their questions and their talk fragments of story are picked up, which the villager tries to associate with the familiar objects about him, but not with much success. He calls these modern Americans ' the Pilgrims ' ; he is very vague about the difference between the martyrs of Mary's reign and the persecuted in the times of Elizabeth. The exodus has been complete. And then, perhaps, the curious visitor remembers that not only have Scrooby and Austerfield forgotten Brewster and Bradford ; Bradford also has left unmentioned the names of Austerfield and Scrooby. Mr. Hunter is continually regretting that the old writer, who has told us so much of the events in which he took a leading part, has not given us more precise information concerning places and names and dates, all that we should like to be sure of in trying to recall the Pilgrims in their habit as they lived. We are baffled by a double indifference. The places they quitted were so indifferent to the cause they were devoted to, that the remembrance of them has been cut off; and they were so indifferent to everything except the cause in which they suffered, that only by the aid of the antiquarian can we fix their local habitation and their social standing. We know that the Pilgrims had not forgotten their old homes ; they wrote letters to England, and heard from some whom they had left behind. Among modern American Puritans fancy has played about the story of Bradford's second marriage. Bradford's first wife was ' Dorothy May of Wisbeach.' She was only sixteen years of age when she was married to him in Leyden, in 1613. 40 Austerfield — The Home of Governor Bradford Her father was one of the exiles, and a member of Robinson's congregation ; beyond that nothing is known of her, except her tragic end. She survived the perils and hardships of the voyage in the Maj'- Jlower ; but, while the vessel was lying at anchor at Cape Cod, and before any foothold had been gained upon the soil of America, the young wife fell overboard, through some accident, and was drowned ; her husband at the time was absent, having gone ashore with the first party of exploration. Two years after, the ship Anne brought to Plymouth, among other passengers, a young widow, Alice South- worth, whom Bradford married, and with whom he lived thirty-four years in happy wedlock. What calls itself tradition will have it that she was an old Nottinghamshire sweet- heart ; that the ' course of true love ' had not ' run smooth ' with the boy and girl ; but that, when both had lost their first consorts, Bradford courted her by letter, and was accepted. It may be so, but it is all uncertain, it is not even likely ; and we may seriously err if we transfer our modern literary sentiment concerning romantic love to seventeenth-century Puritanism. The biographies of the period let it be seen that lovers loved, and husbands and wives were passionately attached to one another then as now, but they were shyer than we in talking of their affections ; conscience was more to them than courtship. In Cotton Mather we rnay read the cause ot what looks like a perm.anent alienation between Bradford and his birthplace. Mather South Doorway, interior of Porch, Austerfield Church. A' Homes and Haunts of the Pilgrim Fathers tells us that the people of Austerfield 'were as unacquainted with the Bible, as the Jews do seem to have been with part of it in the days of Josiah ; a most Ignorant and Licentious people, and like unto their Priest.' He tells us also that Bradford's uncles, in whose charge he was left an infant orphan, became bitterly opposed to him on religious grounds. As a boy, he used to walk to Babworth, a distance of ten miles, to hear the rector, Richard Clyfton, a Puritan who came very near Separatism. ' Some lamented him, some derided him, all disswaded him : Nevertheless, the more they did it, the more fixed he was in his Purpose to seek the Ordinances of the Gospel, where they should be dispensed with most of the Commanded Purity ; and the sudden Deaths of the chief Relations which thus lay at him, quickly after convinced him what a Folly it had been to have quitted his Profession, in expectation of any Satisfaction from them. So to Holland he attempted a removal' Mather's strong language doubtless represents the original tradition received from Bradford himself ; it shews us that his life in Austerfield must have been so bitter as to make him glad if he could forget it ; we can perceive a certain dignity of studied silence in his narrative — he would not record the names of villages which he could only think of with reprobation. William Bradford occupied the same relation to the body politic of New Plymouth as William Brewster sustained to the Church. Both Church and colony were democratic communities, under the leadership of men freely chosen by the members of the colony and the Church. When the company on board the Mayflower saw land, it was discovered that they were far to the north of the territory where they had received permission from England to settle, and that therefore the letters patent they bore with them were invalid. To guard against anarchy, they met in the cabin, and signed a solemn agreement, constituting themselves into a ' civill body politick,' pledging themselves, by virtue of this covenant, 'to enacte, constitute, and frame such just and equall lawes, ordinances, acts, constitutions, and offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most meete and convenient for y" generall good of y'^ Colonie, unto which we promise all due submission and obedience.' The significance of the ' Mayflower Compact,' as it has been called, has been recognised by all American historians. Bancroft regards it as the origin of popular constitutional liberty. John Quincey Adams says : ' This is perhaps the only instance in human history of that positive, original, social compact which speculative philosophers have imagined as the only legitimate source of government. Here was a unanimous and personal assent by all the individuals of the community to the association, by which they became a nation.' And it is the Scrooby Church covenant applied to political life. There is nothing said in the political compact about the Church ; nothing said in the Church covenant about the nation. But the solemnity of the 42 Austerfield— The Home of Governor Bradford The Old Font, Austerfield. 43 Homes and Haunts of the Pilgrim Fathers personal pledge by which they bound themselves to one another, the recognition of the equal consent of all the members of the community as the source of authority, and the freedom from specific regulations, handed down by tradition from the past, or deduced from abstract speculation, are conspicuous characteristics of both agreements. ' As y" Lord's free people,' says Bradford of the Separatists of Gainsborough and Scrooby, ' they joyned themselves (by a covenant of the Lord) into a church estate, in y" fellowship of y" gospell, to walke in all his wayes, made known, or to be made known unto them, according to their best endeavours, whatsoever it should cost them, the Lord assisting them.' The Mayfloxver company bind themselves 'solemnly and mutually in y" presence of God,' to ' enact, constitute, and frame such just and equall lawes, ordinances, acts, constitutions, and offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most meete and convenient' Their claim of freedom to interpret the conditions and obey the exigencies of the future ; their fearless reliance upon God for wisdom, fortitude, and mutual fidelity, in meeting all possible demands, are quite as important a contribution to human liberty as is the theory of equality and brotherhood. The American Continent was the place where this large and liberal doctrine of Church life and national government first found development ; but its birthplace was that obscure corner in Old England where Nottinghamshire runs up into Lincolnshire and Yorkshire. The ' Pilgrim Republic,' as Mr. John A. Goodwin well calls the colony of New Plymouth, lasted about seventy years, and for nearly the first half of this time William Bradford was its governor. When he was unanimously chosen, on the death of John Carver in 1621, he must have known that responsibility for the well-being, even for the existence, of the colony was thrown largely on him. Sickness was rife ; in less than a year, out of a hundred and one who landed from the Mayflower, fifty- one were dead. They had not grain enough for both food and seed ; supplies were slow in coming from England ; they lived almost entirely on fish. The Indians were watchful ; the graves of the dead had to be made level with the soil, lest their foes should see how rapidly their ranks were thinning. Discontent occasionally appeared among their own people. ; and stragglers from vessels brought disafi'ection. The municipal law, the habit — social and economical — of the colony had to be determined ; the men who had broken away from precedent had to make decisions for future guidance. Every record which has come down to us reveals in Bradford a man whose courage, patience, practical wisdom, resource, and tact were equal to the emergency. The earlier years of the colony were the most troubled ; very slowly stability and prosperity emerged ; the aid of New Plymouth was sought by neighbouring settlements which followed them from England ; and its political example was copied by the new-comers. 44 Austerfield— The .Home of Governor Bradford m -stt Ancient sign at Wisbeach, the town of Dorothy May. And to Bradford's leadership this was largely due. Greater individuals than he may have appeared in American history ; but when we consider the men he led, the wisdom with which he led them, and the confidence they felt in their leader, we are not surprised to hear him still styled — out of reverence and affection — Governor Bradford. Bradford was a man of the north- eastern English midlands. The quick ear can"still catch in the speech of the folk in South Yorkshire and its Lincolnshire border the slightly nasal twang and the rising inflection of the voice which we associate with New England. The ' obscure and ignorant and licentious village ' which moved. Cotton Mather's scorn was Bradford's only English home. He was not, like his friends, a Cambridge student. It was in his wandering about these fields that he cherished ' a youth sublime ' ; these gentle uplands and this open 'sky gave room for his sou! to expand. From the sale of his small estate here he gained the means to emigrate and start a new life in Holland. From his Nottinghamshire friends he not only received his religious convictions, but also the zeal he had for sound knowledge. ' He was a Person for Study as well as Action ; and hence, notwithstanding the Difficulties through which he passed in his Youth, he attained unto a notable Skill in Languages ; the Dutch tongue was become almost as vernacular to him as the Etiglish ; the French tongue he could also manage ; the Latin and the Greek he had mastered ; but the Hebrew he most of all studied. Because, he said, he would see with his oivn eyes the A ncient Oracles of God in their Native Beauty! Of course, all this does not mean accurate scholarship of the university standard even of that time, still less the modern severe critical judgment ; but it does mean love of learning and zeal for truth. The intellectual and spiritual habit was acquired in his boyhood and early youth, when he crossed the fields to Babworth, where he enjoyed 'Mr. Richard Clifton's Illuminating Ministry,' and went clown to Scrooby to converse with Downes and Brewster, or walked over to Alkley, where lived the Rev. Mr. Silvester, a friend of the family, who had a good library of English and Latin books. Lying a little back from the road is Austerfield Chapel, with its beautiful Norman doorway ; and here may still be read the register of his baptism. ' 1589, March 19th. William, the son of WiUiam Bradfourth.' The register follows the Old Style ; we should write, March 19, 1S90. The parish book contains the names of several 45 Homes and Haunts of the Pilgrinri Fathers Bradfords, of different generations, their baptisms and marriages and deaths. Their name was spelt indifferently Bradfurth and Bradfourth ; he himself signed his name William Bradford. The chapel is very interesting. It is a small building, consisting only of a nave and chancel, separated from each other by a Norman arch. You enter from the south side ; before you there is a walled-up doorway, the upper part of which is now a large window, through which the gable corner of a farmhouse looks in upon you, and, when the barns are full, the top of a yellow haystack. Some beautiful old Gothic windows, and Norman work lately uncovered, are being carefully restored. The building is worth preservation for its antiquity ; it has undergone little change, no structural change, for centuries. Austerfield is a chapelry, dependent on the parish of Blythe. This is a good specimen of the smaller old ecclesiastical buildings, erected in a style as pure as that of the noblest parish church. The present font is modern ; an old capacious vessel for water has been brought back into the chapel, and is shewn as the original font. Dr. Dexter found, in a yard in Austerfield, another old stone vessel, used for watering poultry, which has a primitive look. This was bought for America, and is now in a Congregational Church in Chicago. Which of these two vessels is the font in which Bradford was baptised, or if either of them were so, is a question to be decided by archaeologists, not by local makers of tradition. At the upper end of the village stands a comfortable house, now divided into two cottages, lying open to the sun, and commanding a view of the farms around. You are told that this is ' the Bradford House.' The term is American rather than English ; but Bradford's early home may have been here ; this is such a dwelling as a yeoman, in easy circumstances, would have lived in three hundred years ago. Persons who think of good architecture as referring to structure more than ornamentation will see excellence in the building. It is a two- storied Elizabethan house, of well-laid bricks, with sharply squared corners ; the tiled roof is not deeply eaved, but sufficiently so to throw the rains off the walls. It has no trees about it ; and being exposed to the sunshine and to every wind, it has no moss nor lichen growing on it ; neither has any toad-flax nor stone-crop found a rooting-place between the bricks. Entering by the left-hand door, you find yourself in the 'house- place,' or ' house,' as it is called in the midland counties. This was the living-room, with broad chimney and a large oven to the grate ; overhead are the racks from which hams and game might hang ; on the wall above the fireplace, in Bradford's time, there would have been a brass blunderbuss among the bright pewter pots and platters. When the door is thrown wide open, as it mostly is in such a house, and the fire is burning briskly, the ' house-place ' is the cheeriest, friendliest part of the 46 Austerfield— The Home of Governor Bradford Homes and Haunts of the Pilgrim Fathers Steps to Cellar. dwelling ; you need no parlour as you sit chatting in a room like this. The right-hand door probably served for the kitchen, unless it was added when the house was divided in two ; it admits you to another large room, where the rougher work was done. Across this room a flight of broad stone steps takes you into a small cellar, also admirably built. This you are told is ' the place where the Pilgrims used to worship, for fear of the persecutors.' It is very unlikely. The cellar is not a concealed room ; the door is seen from the kitchen, and two windows, one on the steps leading to it, the other in the cellar itself, are pierced in the outside wall. The imagination, unable to people this cellar with frightened people at their prayers, calls up another picture — the notable housewife and her serving-maids. Bradford was a youth of eighteen, unmarried, when he went out from Austerfield. His mother died when he was a child ; one sister, Margaret, died the day after her baptism, four years before he was born ; he had another sister, Alice, two years and six months older than himself, but of her we know nothing more. No woman form associates itself with the life of this pensive boy. But we think that a woman must have designed this cellar. It is dry in floor and walls ; the brick- and stone-workr is good ; the door is directly opposite the window, so that it can be kept well aired ; and the window itself, just under the ceiling, opens to the north, from which no sunbeam strikes the shelves. Butter and milk and fresh meat could be kept here ; the bacon would be on the rack in the house-place, and the cheeses in an out-building. If this be, indeed, the Bradford House, the future governor was born in a well-planned home. Another touch will complete our brief sketch of Bradford in Austerfield. His father and mother died when he was an infant, and one little sister the day after her baptism. The ' sudden deaths ' of his 'chief relations' are mentioned by Mather: a cousin William 'died young ' ; two other children of the same family died unbaptised in 1595 and IS97. The Bradfords were a short-lived house. He himself had a feeble childhood. ' Soon and long sickness kept him, as he would afterwards thankfully say, from the Vanities of Youth and made him the fitter for what he was to undergo.' He lived to a good old age, and seems to have been a hale man in America. His last winter brought with it some indisposition ; and ' as the Spring advanced, his health yet more declined ; yet he felt himself not what he counted Sick, till one Day.' Austerfield— The Home of Governor Bradford His early impressions of sickness and death sobered, but did not daunt him ; like the trials of his fidelity, they prepared him for a vigorous manhood, and the ' ineffable consolations ' amid which he passed away. May 9, 1657. At the time he put the final touches to his history, he had four children, three of whom were married. There are many of his descendants now in the United States, able to trace succession from him, and some of them proud to bear his name. Cellar in the Bradford Home. 49 Homes and Haunts of the Pilgrim Fathers ,,;( This ancient building in Wisbeach, the birthplace of i Dorothy May, was originally an old Guild Hall, and then until comparatively recently a portion of the Grammar School. 50 Myles Standish and the Standish Country Standish Hall. CHAPTER IV MYLES STANDISH AND THE STANDISH COUNTRY ' My gracious lord, I tender you my service, Such as it is, being tender, raw, and young ; Which elder days shall ripen and confirm To more approved service and desert.' ' Why, what a wasp-stung and impatient fool Art thou, to break into this woman's mood. Tying thine ear to no tongue but thine own ! ' ' Yea, there, thou makest me sad and makest me sin. In envy that my Lord Northumberland Should be the father to so blest a son, A son who is the theme of honour's tongue ; Amongst a grove, the very straightest plant ; Who is sweet Fortune's minion and her pride.' MYLES STANDISH among the Pilgrim Fathers — this is a con- junction which at first seems a little startling. We remember him mainly from the tradition that he had the ill luck usually attending a man who does his wooing by proxy ; and Longfellow has rendered him small service bj' contrasting him with the youthful figure of John Alden, and making him the object of the winsome Puritan maiden's merriment. And yet he was a person who won both admiration and love ; as he was utterly loyal of heart, his friends were utterly loyal to him. He served the infant settlement well. But for him the colony of New Plymouth might have come to a speedy and disastrous end, and all the future of the American Republic would have been other than it is. We cannot think of the United States without recalling the influence on the national life of the religious habit and the free spirit of Massachusetts and Connecticut ; and these bear the impress of the early settlement. The Pilgrim Fathers did not take into the New World Penn's determination to use none but peaceful methods with the Indians ; they 51 E 2 Homes and Haunts of the Pilgrim Fathers meant to fight, if only by fighting they could make themselves secure ; and Standish led their skirmishes. His bravery was unfailing ; not sickness nor weariness nor any ill success could daunt him, and his dexterity well supported his courage. He knew how to surprise the Indians in their encampments and guard his little band against their attacks ; he could also negotiate terms of peace with them, and he had friends among their chiefs. He learnt to speak their language ; more- over, those among the sagamores who could read ' the captain's eye ' knew he was an honest as well as a brave man, and gave him their confidence. Also, he was the trusted comrade of the settlers in their mercantile projects, helped to determine their colonial policy, and was sent to England to represent their wishes. Time after time Governor Bradford called him into his council ; for twenty-nine years out of the thirty-six of his life in New England he was ' assistant ' to the governor ; he was also for six years treasurer to the colony. He served his people without fee or salary ; by his own exertions he gained a competency for himself, and left his children well provided for. He was a reading man ; studied Caesar's Commentary and other military writings, as well as books of contemporaneous theology. He had also some skill in medicine ; and Bradford speaks of him as a tender nurse. In the terrible sickness which fell on the settlers a short time after their landing, when out of the hundred and one who had come ashore many were dead and many in hospital, and only six or seven were left sound persons, Myles Standish, the military commander, joined Elder Brewster in doing the homeliest and the most womanly service ; ' unto whom,' says Bradford, ' myselfe and many others were much beholden in our low and sicke condition.' Edward Winslow, William Bradford, and Myles Standish are known in American literature as the Triumvirate, the three men whose joint exertions both saved and made the state. Mr. John A. Goodwin has made a sympathetic study of Myles Standish in his charming book The Pilgrim Republic. He especially dwells on the fact that Standish might easily have made himself military dictator of the settlement, and sums up his account of him thus : ' Great as a ruler over others, he was far greater as a ruler over himself. His services merit our warmest gratitude and challenge our admiration. He was the man of men whom the Pilgrims most needed to come to them, and nothing was more improbable than that such a one would do so, or, if he did, that he would long remain loyal, steadfast, and submissive to the voice of the people. No man ever more decidedly had a mission, and none ever more nobly fulfilled it.' Bradford's many references to Myles Standish warrant this eulogium. From Bradford and his editors we also have descriptions which explain Priscilla's slighting estimate of the 'choleric captain,' the 'little chimney' that is ' soon hot,' He was ' eager and peremptory,' so one writes of 52 ' -^ ;sa| STANDISH HALL Myles Standish and the Standish Country Standish Church, Interior. Homes and Haunts of the Pilgrim Fathers him. Lyford, the disreputable minister who gave the Pilgrims so much trouble, and of whom they found it so hard to get rid, thought, wrongly however, that it would be easy to displace him if another military leader were sent out from England, ' for this Capten Standish looks like a silly boy, and is in utter contempt' Morton, of Merry Mount, calls him ' Captain Shrimp ' ; but the shrimp took Morton the Cavalier prisoner, and sent him ignominiously back to England. Standish was the Harry Hotspur of the Pilgrim band, a man whom it was easy to make fun of, but one whom his friends knew how to value, and whom even they who scoffed at him would have been glad to call their own. It is evident that Longfellow had read Bradford carefully ; he reproduces some of the old writer's affectionate touches ; underneath the poet's laughter we can see his admiration. But it is dangerous to laugh at a hero ; the valet's depreciation clings. The difference between Bradford and Longfellow is simply this — and in its result it is much : Bradford gives us a heroic character with some amusing defects ; Longfellow paints a humorous personage of innate nobility. As was inevitable, the humour has thrown the nobility into the shade. Standish's presence and position among the Pilgrim Fathers will probably surprise some, who look upon the Separatists as the narrowest section of the Puritans ; and who, despite the testimony of history, are never weary of afifirming that they had no place in their community for any one who was not in religious agreement with them. Standish was not a member of the Church, and probably had little sympathy with their creed or with their religious observances, although he was too large of nature to try to disturb them. Nevertheless, his name is attached to the Mayflower Compact. There was a certain commissioner- ship which only a Church member could fill ; but in other respects he was equal, in responsibility and standing, with the heads of the colony. The personal attachment on both sides was sincere and deep. He had been attracted to John Robinson in Leyden, and thought so much of the exiles that he joined them when they went to settle in America. One of the last two letters written by Robinson before his death contains a touching reference Porch of. Standish Church. 54 Myles Standish and the Standish Country to Standish. There had been a fight with Indians, and the slaughter of seven of them had been referred to in letters that reached Leyden from Plymouth. This is Robinson's reply : ' Concerning y" killing of these poor Indeans, of which we heard at first by reporte, and since by more certaine relation, oh ! how happy a thing had it been, if you had converted some, before you had killed any ; besids, wher bloud is once begune to be shed, it is seldom stanched for a long time after. You will say they deserved it. I grant it ; but . upon Duxbury Hall, the home of the younger branch of the Standish family. what provocations and invitments by those heathenish Christians ? Besids, you, being no magistrats over them, were to consider, not what they deserved, but what you were by necessitie constrained to inflicte. Necessitie of this, espetially of killing so many, (and many more, it seems, they would, if they could,) I see not. Methinks one or two principals should have been full enough, according to that approved rule, The punishment to a few, and y" fear to many. Upon this occasion let me be bould to exhorte you seriously to consider of y" dispossition of your Captaine, whom I love, and am perswaded y'^ Lord in great mercie 55 Homes and Haunts of the Pilgrinm Fathers n-E M£MOI{y 0F\\ \~^ f J.AIivlES S1"ANDISH\\ LATHOM HOUSE ¥7 1 » Robinson's especially in and for much good hath sent him among you, if you use him aright. He is a man humble and meek amongst you, and towards all in ordinarie course. But now if this be meerly from an humane spirite, ther is cause to fear that by occasion, espetially of provo- cation, ther may be wanting y' tenderness of y'= life of man (made after Gods image) which is meete. It is also a thing more glorious in mens eyes, then pleasing in Gods, or convenient for Christians, to be a terrour to poor barbarous people ; and indeed I am afraid lest, by these occasions, others should be drawne to affecte a kind of rufling course in the world.' characteristic tenderness of conscience appears here ; his reference to the 'heathenish' conduct of some neighbouring white settlers in their original provocation of the Indians, and in his fear lest Standish's virtues may be of natural disposition rather than of divine grace ; and some persons may think that the military governor on the spot was a better judge of what was needed than the pastor in Holland. Indeed, Robinson anticipates this criticism, and does not deprecate it ; for he adds : ' I doubt not but you will take in good part these things which I write, and as ther is cause make use of them.' The passage illustrates the abiding problem of the Church — how to harmonise the convictions of the Christian teacher with the sense of duty in those who are responsible for the safety of the community. It illustrates equally the large-heartedness both of Standish and of the Pilgrim Fathers, that men so dififereut in habit and temperament should have carried on together the anairs of the little commonwealth. Myles Standish spent the greatest part of liis life out of England, a self-banished man. In his earliest youth he was fighting Spain in the Netherlands, an officer in Queen Elizabeth's army ; and here he acquired his skill as a soldier. When 'the famous truce' of twelve years was agreed to between the Spaniards and the Dutch, to which Bradford gratefully alludes as lasting all the time the Scrooby Church was in Holland, he stayed where he was ; and, in Leyden, he became acquainted with Robinson and Bradford and the rest of the exiles. The reason of his absence from his Lancashire home was, not political necessity, nor any misconduct on his own part, but disgust at a wrong he believed to have been done him by some powerful relatives. He loved England, loved to visit it ; when he made a home for himself in the New World, he called it Duxbury, the name of one of the historic Standish homes. It was characteristic of him to remain away from a 56 Myles Standish and the Standish Country Vane on Standish Church. place where he would be fretted by the sense ot personal injustice which he was powerless either to set right or to resent. In his will he inserted the following clause : ' I give unto my son and heir-apparent, Alexander Standish, all my lands, as heir-apparent by lawful descent, in Ormistic, Bouscouge, Wrightington, Maudsley, Newburrow, Cranston, and in the Isle of Man, and given to me as right heir by lawful descent, but surreptitiously detained from me, my great-grandfather being a second or younger brother from the house of Standish of Standish.' Ormistic is Ormskirk, Bouscouge is Burscough, Cranston is Croston, all in the hundred of Ley- land, in the County Palatine of Lancaster. Claims of this sort are often supposititious ; but there is reason for believing that Myles's wrong was not imaginary. Mr. Goodwin tells a curious story which goes to confirm the suspicion of injustice done him. ' Early in this century the American descendants of Myles began an inquiry into the case. It was found that, while Elizabeth's commission indicated Standish's birth as in 1584, the leaf for 1584-5, in the Chorley parish register, had been pumiced so carefully as to leave no trace of the writing, though the record is otherwise complete from 1549 to 1652. This defaced page is not even now open for inspection. In 1847 Mr. Bromley, an attorney for the heirs, obtained leave as an antiquary to examine the volume ; but the rector, finding him searching for Standish's birth, arrested him under some ancient law, and enforced on him a fine of about £']^, with the alternative of imprisonment; and he even refused to certify that the register is illegible at this point.' The belief that Myles Standish was victimised is deeply embedded in American sentiment. The family of Standish was for some centuries one of the most powerful in the North of England. The road between Wigan and Chorley passes through a noble sweep of country, which, in the seven- teenth century, must have been a fine farming tract, with corn-fields and grazing land, enclosed by the stately woods which still bound the property. The traveller passes the Boar's Head Inn, and farther on the White Crow, names which call up visions of a hunting gentry and a rural people alert to notice animal portents. This is the Standish estate. At the southern end is Standish Manor, which, in 1287, was held, under Earl Ferrars, by Jordan, grandson of Thurstan de Standish. A few years after Jordan's brother Hugh acquired Duxbury Manor, and founded the younger branch of the family. The township of Standish was of importance during the Roman occupation of Britain ; and the Standish family is known to have been here since the Norman 57 Homes and Haunts of the Pilgrim Fathers Conquest. Thurstan de Standish (1221) is, however, the illustrious personage from whom both the elder and the younger branches love to trace their descent. The Standishes have been allied by marriage to many of the most distinguished English houses — the Heskeths and the Harringtons in Lancashire, and the Dukes of Norfolk, among others. They have been mixed up with great political events. John Standish was the first to wound Wat Tyler, when knocked down by the Lord Mayor of London, and for this service he was knighted by Richard IL Henry Standish, a Franciscan friar, was Bishop of St. Asaph in the time of Henry VHL ; he sided with Queen Cath- erine in the matter of the divorce, going on his knees to Henry in the vain endeavour to turn him from his purpose, and afterward helping the ■queen to prepare her defence. They were fighters too, win- ning distinction at Agincourt, and in Scotland in the fifteenth century. They were not always found on the same side. At the Reformation a permanent division took place between the elder and the younger branches ; the Dux- bury people becoming Protes- tant, while the Standishes of Standish adhered to the old faith. Thomas Standish, of Duxbury, sat in the 1640 Parliament as a Parliamen- tarian ; his son, a Royalist, was shot in the siege of Manchester two years after. Ralph Standish, of Standish, the son-in-law of the Duke of Norfolk, joined the Pretender at Preston, in November, 1715, and with difficulty saved his estate. Their diversity, in politics and religion, does not seem to have been by craft, that the family might be secure, whichever side won ; it was in their nature to follow their own wa)'. Mr- Bartlett, who visited the district in 1853, found this to be the tradition concerning them. Speaking of the two halls, and the two branches of the family, he says: 'There has been no end of litigation and dispute with regard to the property, so Standish Church. 58 Myles Standish and the Standish Country that, as an old man in the neighbourhood observed, " it seemed as if there were a spell hanging over it." ' It is nob possible, in the absence of more specific information, to know on what terms Myles Standish lived with the heads of the two houses ; nor can we safely conjecture the circumstances under which he was deprived of his lands. In his will his title is affirmed to be through the Standishes of Standish. He makes no claim to Duxbury, which had been held, during eleven generations, by direct male descent from Hugh, the founder of the younger branch. With this agrees the tradition of his being a Roman Catholic, although this tradition - , is confused by his alleged bap- tism in Chorley Church. He called his eldest son Alexander, that being the name of the possessors both of Standish and of Duxbury Halls during Myles's youth. Any wrong there was seems to have been perpetrated by an immediate relative, not by the head of either house. During the present century a great change has passed over the aspect of the region. The Wigan coal - field has been worked ; the London and North- Western and the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railways have come, developing a great traffic ; and various factories, chemical among others, are busily in operation. The wealth of the territorial lords has largely increased, while the male descendants of the Standishes of Standish and Duxbury have died out. Man- sions occupy various heights for miles around Wigan ; but they belong to manufacturers and professional men who direct the local industries. Both halls have now been sold to strangers ; the ' family portraits ' in Standish, ' Spanish and Italian pictures' in Duxbury, seen by Mr. Bartlett, have been dispersed; the latest report is that Standish Hall is to be turned into a brewery. It was on a dull day in early April that I set out from Wigan on a ramble in search of Myles Standish. Driving along the elevated road which leads to Duxbury Hall, I thought how beautiful a county this Standish Cross. 59 Homes and Haunts of the Pilgrinn Fathers must have been before it became prosperous. The low hills, the undulating fields, the old hedgerows, the beeches and the ashes, once lay open to the sun ; now they lie open to the pall of smoke that covers nearly the whole of Northern England, and which, more than the moisture brought in from the sea when the west winds blow, is the cause of the bad weather of Lancashire. The dull atmosphere was scarcely broken up by the breeze ; it seemed ' moving altogether, if it moved at all ' ; there was a fitful mildness in the air, and there were fitful gleams from the sky, which about noon became a short spell of sunshine. Large works bordered the road, with carboys and railway-waggons and horses waiting for their loads ; it would have been a tedious prospect, but the activity of the workmen enlivened it. A stately viaduct broke out from a tunnel ; then the railway ran into a deep cutting in the valley below : should Lancashire ever become a ruin, persons will come from far lands and call these objects beautiful, as now we speak of the beauty of the aqueducts on the Appian Way. Always, when the eye glanced forward, there were the beckoning hills and the rolling uplands, and the bare trees revealing the symmetry of their structure, the strong arches of their boughs, and their ma.ssive outline. In the middle distance were coal-pits, with their widespread rubbish- tips, tall chimneys, counting-houses, clanking chains, and clustered cottages where the workmen and their wives and children live. The feeling of space grew on one — space being slowly filled up, but not annihilated. By-and-by we came to Duxbury, suddenly, unexpectedly, though I had been asking for it all along. The hall is a large square mansion, the outside walls about seventy years old ; it has neither stateliness of proportion nor beauty of treatment. But the situation ! — the Standishes had the old English sense for sites in their building. The house lies in a little hollow, and faces the south ; woods and fields are around you ; the sun came out, warming the skin and lighting up the prospect. No sign of factory or coal-pit was visible from where I stood ; if only the smoke would lift, I should see the land somewhat as Myles Standish saw it. It was an empty house, save for a few servants ; the garden was being prepared for its new occupants, and I was kindly allowed to walk about it. But this was no old garden ; except for half a dozen splendid yews and the rich brown soil, nothing was here on which Myles Standish could have looked. These square mansions effectually destroy the ieeling which years should bring; signs of decay suggest the need of the bricklayer and the plasterer and the mason ; they move no reverence, stir no vague regret. It was a pleasant sight, but it had no sentiment in it. After a short stay I drove off, back for Standish Church and Hall, along the drive and to the right on the Wigan road ; and then the sentiment came, startlingly, quite unlike anything that could have been 60 Myles Standish and the Standish Country s^>.. anticipated. We had reached the EllerbeckCollieiy, when I turned to get a last look at the park. It was no longer visible ; a huge tip, stretch- ing from the works to the road, filled up the view. In the hazy light it was a fine object, like a massive bastion, striding out, with a menacing aspect, as if to guard the mansion beyond. So has England changed ; castles and military works are gone ; homes are defended by pro- ductions, the fruit of enter- prise and toil. Turning up a road lead- ing westward, two or three miles before reaching Wigan, we came to Standish Church and village, on the way to Standish Hall The church is a fine edifice, in excellent preservation, uniformly built in Perpendicular Gothic, of the early Tudor period. Entering by the south porch, you come at once on the Standish chapel, which the later Catholic lords of the manor have not used, although they were the proprietors of the advowson. Directly opposite this is another chapel, serving as a vestry, with Standish graves underneath. There are no conspicuous Standish monuments ; but on the northern wall, near the chancel, there is a slab to the memory of a humble Standish, who was gamekeeper to another Lancashire family. The church floor is largely made up of tombstones ; but the nave is so closely filled with pews that no inscription can be read. In the broad market-place outside the church there is an ancient cross, and close by it the stocks, both bearing signs of recent restoration. The stocks have not been used for well nigh a century ; and some time since 1853, when Mr. Bartlett was here, they were removed in a, state of partial decay. When, in 1897, there was a question of celebrating the sixtieth year of the Queen's reign by some permanent memorial, on the motion of a primitive village antiquary the stocks were repaired and put back in their original place, and the cross was also cleaned and repaired. The Standish cottages are not attractive. They are inhabited Standish Hall. Oldest portion — which was new when Myles Standish was born. 61 Homes and Haunts of the Pilgrinn Fathers mostly by colliers, whose families seem abundantly fed, but with little education. A short drive took me to Standish Hall, another building facing the south, standing among fields and within woods, all sadly neglected and suffering from uncontrolled damp ; the house has a beautiful prospect, down a wooded valley toward the western side of Wigan. It is not a stately mansion, like Duxbury ; it has been built at various times, and can scarcely be called beautiful, but it is eminently picturesque and interesting. The front occupies two sides of an irregular quadrangle. The oldest part is what remains of a two-storied timber house, which was new when Myles Standish was born ; on the east side is a chapel, with bell-tower, of red brick and Georgian architecture. At the western end of the timbered building is the doorway, with rooms overhead, and beyond this another Georgian bit of red brickwork, all of plain style and three stories in height. The house ends in a western wing, of a single story, in plastered work and quite modern in date. It looks as if it had been added for a billiard-room ; it really consists of two apartments and a corridor. Everything has gone to decay ; through the windows, you catch sight of antiquities which you long to examine. One small room in the original home has a Standish device over the chimneypiece ; not the three dishes, but the owl and rat. The north side — that is, the back of the hall — is really the most picturesque part. On the left is the chapel, with the gable of the nave rising above the lower gable of the chancel. The body of the hall, behind the south front, has three projecting gables over the servants' quarters. Still farther forward are outhouses, with an outer staircase, a laundry with ventilating turret, and beyond this, to the west, another gable. The gables are admirably proportioned, and, rising in their clear colour and fairly sharp edges, they carry on the eye from portion to portion of the home, and set you wondering as to the histories of the rooms they veil. In this old hall was concocted the Lancashire plot of 1694, for replacing the Stuarts on the throne. Here, doubtless, many a futile dream was dreamed, of changing the new order in Church and State, till gradually the Standishes ceased to find themselves influential persons in the territory of their fathers. Then the hall was let to strangers ; for many years France was the loved resort of the owner. Now the ancient mansion is alienated from the race. Outside the Standish grounds is another colliery, the Prospect pits ; and here, too, the mound of refuse has taken the - '■ form of a bastion, but not so gloomy nor so grand as that of Duxbury. A visit to the home of the Standishes will give the reflective visitor much material for thought ; years roll by in an hour, changes accomplish them- selves in his vision, and always there is a human Standish Arms. 62 Myles Standish and the Standish Country Standish Chapel. 63 Homes and Haunts of the Pilgrim Fathers background ; it is an old dwelling-place, of men and women and their children, amid whose relics he is standing. But one thing refuses to come when he bids it. There is here no image of Myles Standish. One little object in the Pilgrim Hall, at Plymouth, Massachusetts, awakens a feeling he has not here : a girl's sampler, with the legend, ' Lora Standish is my name.' The name Lora goes back to 1398, when Lora, daughter of Sir Roger de Pilkington, married Lawrence de Standish, of Standish Hall. The memory and fame of the Standishes have passed over with Myles to America. c 64 Boston CHAPTER V BOSTON THE associations of Boston in Lincoln- shire with the Pilgrim Fathers are twofold. In the early part of the seventeenth century that growing port on the Withain was the scene of the first attempt on the part of the members of the Church at Scrooby to escape to Holland. The little sleepy English town, on the other hand, added more than it deemed to its own glory when it gave the name of Boston to that settle- ment on the eastern shores of Massachu- setts which rapidly deve- loped into the great town which has had so much to do, during the last century and a half, with the his- tory and de- velopment of the United States. But the English Boston was not linked by any such close and intimate association with the origin and fortunes of the Pilgrim Fathers as Gainsborough and Scrooby and Standish. Although the history of Boston, like that of many another quiet Eriglish town, stretches back into a remote past, and although ever since Cotton's Pulpit, Bx)ston Church. 65 Homes and Haunts of the Pilgrim Fathers the Norman Conquest it has been the seat of commercial activity and of steadily increasing trade, especially as a port on the east coast, yet for the great majority of Englishmen ' Boston Stump ' sums up their knowledge of the antiquities and features of interest in the town. This famous tower is indeed well worthy of such widespread know- ledge. It is the tower of the church of St. Botolph, founded in 1309, .and partly restored in 1857 by some of the inhabitants of the greater Boston over the sea, who thus in practical and enduring shape acknow- ledged their association with the older city. The tower of St. Botoli)h's, closely resembling in general appearance the tower of Antwerp Cathedral, rises to a height of two hundred and ninety feet. It is crowned with a beautiful octagonal lantern, and over the flat cornlands of Lincolnshire, or as the sailor on the North Sea is making for the mouth of the Witham, can be seen for over forty miles. The great New England name closely associated with the older Boston is that of John Cotton, who in 161 2 became Vicar of St. Botolph's. Born in 1585, he entered Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1598, and finally became Fellow and Tutor of Emmanuel College in that university. While at Cambridge he passed under influences similar to those which had previously so powerfully guided and moulded the views of John Robinson. Cotton carried with him to his vicarage at Boston strong Puritan sympathies, a high conception of the ministerial ofiice and work, and a resolution to be diligent and faithful in his spiritual office. These qualities, which endeared him to the best members of his flock, made him at the same time an object of suspicion to those in authority under such rulers as James I. and Charles I. In 1633 he was compelled to resign his charge, and, although in danger of arrest, made his way to London, and escaped to New England. There, in the new Boston, he was made colleague of John Wilson in the pastorate of Boston Church. It was from members of the modern representatives of this Church that much of the money came which in 1857 went to Boston Stump. The pulpit which John Cotton filled is still in use in the church ; and though the England of James I. thought him only worthy of imprisonment because he dared to think for himself and to place the precepts of the New Testament above the ordinances of men, the Boston of to-day honours his memory as one of her noblest sons. The Cottonian Library, which occupies a room over the porch of Boston Church, also comme- morates his influence. Under a king like James I., and with Bishops like Laud and Bancroft not only in power, but supported by the whole authority of king and executive, the humble Christians of Gainsborough and Scrooby were certain to fare but ill. So intolerable did their position become, that they determined to take refuge in the only European country where religious toleration was possible — in Holland. But whilst it meant 66 Boston 67 F 2 Homes and Haunts of the Pilgrim Fathers '_. «^^^X' S-,--.,^'-- Boston Stump, Trom the Wash. The famous 'Stump' has helped sailors in and out of harbour for generations and is one of the best known landmarlis along the eastern coast of Lincolnshire. 68 Boston Old Wooden Door, Boston Church. 69 Homes and Haunts of the Pilgrim Fathers Nearing Boston. fines, imprisonment, and possibly death to stay, escape was illegal, and had to be accomplished secretly. It is here that Boston be- comes prominent in our story. What happened there cannot be better told than in the words of Dr. John Brown. ^ ' These voyagers in search of freedom resolved to move as a body, and not in detached companies, and to make Boston, on the Lincolnshire coast, their point of departure. They therefore hired a vessel wholly to themselves, making agreement with the captain to be ready at a certain date to take them and their goods at a convenient place where they would meet him. Meantime the deceitful scoundrel had privately arranged their betrayal, and no sooner had they stepped on board than the officers and searchers vvere at hand to arrest them. Put back into open boats, the minions of the law "rifled and ransacked them, searching them to their shirts for money, yea, even the women further than became modesty, and then carried them back into the town, and made them a spectacle and a wonder to the multitude who came flocking on all sides to behold them. Being thus first by the catchpole officers rifled and stripped of their money, books, and much other goods, they were presented to the magistrates, and messengers were sent to inform the Lords of the Council of them ; and so they were committed to ward." 'Boston, in which these unfortunate prisoners found themselves after their arrest, one of the most curious old towns in England, had long been declining from the good old days when, in the reign ot Edward III., it sent seventeen ships and three hundred and sixty men for the invasion of Brittany. Its ancient buildings, — the quaint old house in Wormgate, the old building in Spain Lane, the Grammar School, the Hussey Tower, the Guildhall in South Street, and, most of all, the great Church of St. Botolph, with its magnificent tower, seen as a landmark far off at sea, and known all the world over as Boston Stump, — these all bespeak the antiquity and former importance of this eastern port on the Lincolnshire coast. It was in the old court-room on the first floor of the Guildhall that William Brewster and his companions were presented to the magistrates, and it was to the old cells, still to be seen on the ground floor, they were remitted back " till order came from ^ The Pilgrim FatJicrs of Nciu England^ pp. loi— io6. 70 Boston the Council Table.'' These cells had been in use at that time for about sixty years, for "in 1552 it was ordered that the kitchen under the town-hall and the chambers over them should be prepared for a prison and a dwelling-house for one of the sergeants.'' ' The magistrates were not unfavourable to them, for Puritanism was too rife in Boston itself for them to think ill of those who went that way. When, a quarter of a century later, nine hundred Puritan colonists sailed for Massachusetts with John Winthrop, many of the leading townsmen of Boston were among the number : Richard Bellingham, recorder of the town from 1625 to 1633, Atherton Hough, mayor of the borough in 1628, and Thomas Leverett, an alderman ; Thomas Dudley, Richard Bellingham, and John Leverett were afterwards governors of Massachusetts, and William Coddington, father and governor of Rhode Island ; while John Cotton, the Puritan preacher of Boston Church for twenty years, became one of the leading religious forces of New England life. ' The seeds of all this movement ' were therefore in the town at the time these prisoners were there. This was probably why that, as Bradford tells us, " the magistrates used them courteously and shewed them what favour they could, though they could not deliver them till order came from the Council Table." What was done in the matter by the Lords of the Council we do not know. After detaining them for a month, and possibly receiving instructions to that effect from the Privy Council, the magistrates dismissed the main body of the prisoners, sending them^ back to their homes at Scrooby or elsewhere, and keeping Coming up the river to Boston. 71 Homes and Haunts of the Pilgrim Fathers Boston Stump and Market Place. Old Kitchen, Guildhall, Boston. 72 Boston The Old Poor House, Boston. seven of the leaders still in prison. These, after a further period of detention, they bound over to appear at the Assizes. One of these seven, Bradford tells us, was William fSrcwster, who " was chief of those that were taken at Boston, and suffered the greatest loss." What happened at the Assizes there are no records to shew, but the failure of this attempt in the autumn of i6oS did not piovcnt the making of other endeavours to get away in the course of the following spring.' ' ^^^"^^ An Old Book from the Cotton Library, Boston. Homes and Haunts of the Pilgrim Fathers E at U 74 Cambridge and Corpus Christi College CHAPTER VI CAMBRIDGE AND CORPUS CHRISTI COLLEGE THE name of John Robinson has a place of its own among the Pilgrim Fathers. In an age of sharp controversy he, took an active part, but he retained to the end an open mind and, in a remarkable degree, quietness and charity of spirit. In the midst of discouragements and accumulating disappointments, his trust in God's leading never wavered, and therefore his courage upheld him and became the strength and stay of his little flock in the hour of decision. It is only quite recently that the place of his birth has been fixed. The Rev. W. H. Burgess, by diligent and successful search of wills and registers, has settled the long doubt, and by documentary evidence has settled the honour on Stur- ton-le-Steeple, in the county of Nottingham, and a short distance from Gainsborough. John Robin- son, of Scrooby and Leyden, was probably born about 1576; and there i s ground for believing that, while still a mere youth of sevent een, he entered the Uni- versity when The Church of Sturton-le-SteepIe, near Gainsborough. 75 [Photo, Wclchma7i. Homes and Haunts of the Pilgrim Fathers Tower of St. Benedict's Church, from Corpus. Cambridp;e was keenly alive to the religious movements of the time. That eminent Puritan William Perkins was public catechist of Robinson's own college, where it was his duty to read a lecture every Thursday during term time on some useful subject of divinity. He was also afternoon lecturer at St. Andrew's Church, where he attracted great numbers of Cambridge men by his earnest spirit-stirring addresses ; and as Robinson states that his ' personal conversion ' was brought about in the Church of England, it is probable that it was under this man's influence, all the more probable, inasmuch as in later years Robinson published a catechism as an Appendix to Mr. Perkins Six Principles of the Cliristian Religion. It so happens that in Corpus Christi College have survived even more complete and undoubted remains of the Elizabethan period than in many of the other Cambridge colleges. The visitor who now wanders into the old court, or studies the Saxon architecture in St. Benedict's Church, looks upon buildings upon which the eye of John Robinson may have rested hundreds of times. If the entry quoted above really refers to the great Separatist teacher, then undoubtedly he often trod the picturesque old court, and often entered the church so rich in Saxon remains. He is not enrolled upon the list of famous men who have gone forth from Corpus, or, as in his day it was called, Bene't College. But though his name does not stand beside those of Matthew Parker, Thomas Tenison, Nicholas Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, and others, it may yet be doubted whether any one of these has so potently influenced the thought and life of succeeding generations as the quiet student who first in his own mental and spiritual life worked out the problem of religious liberty, and then spent his life in striving to bring others into that liberty wherewith Christ had made him free. Corpus Christi now makes a much more imposing show among the many architectural glories of Cambridge than it did three centuries since. But with the splendid range of recent buildings Old Porch, St. Benedict's Church, Cambridge. Cambridge and Corpus Christi College The Inner Court, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. facing Trumpington Street and with the great new quadrangle we have nothing to do. These came into existence long after John Robinson's day. The visitor who passes through t,he great quadrangle into the inner court comes upon a range of buildings that present now almost the identical features which they possessed in 1 598. The engravings of Corpus which accompany this chapter enable the reader to look upon the identical walls and windows and ranges of rooms with which John Robinson himself was familiar for years. The old hall has fallen from its early dignity, and is now merely a kitchen ; but the handsome window is as it was three centuries ago. St. Benedict's Chui'ch was used for the religious services of the college for more than two centuries before the college chapel was built. The tower of this church is one of the finest specimens of Saxon architecture extant, and was built prior to the year looo ; that is, it has braved the storms and survived the chances of over nine hundred years. The interior, of which also we present an illustration, is famous for its fine Saxon arch. Cambridge itself possesses a rich treasure of early buildings, notwith- standing the vandalism of recent centuries and the inevitable pressure of the modern utilitarian spirit. Of these we present two or three typical examples. The first is the noted Church of the Holy Sepulchre, one of the four surviving round churches in England. This building is said to n Homes and Haunts of the Pilgrim Fathers 'i^-:--'-'-~ The Chapel, Peterhouse, Cambridge. Peterhouse, From the Fellows' Garden. 78 Cambridge and Corpus Christ! College 79 Homes and Haunts of the Pilgrim Fathers have been consecrated in iioi. The western door, which is shown in our engraving, is a fine example of the Norman semicircular arch, with zig-zag mouldings. St. Peter's College is the oldest of the Cambridge foundations, dating from the close of the thirteenth century. The i-estorers of the eighteenth century exerted much ingenuity in endeavouring to destroy its most characteristic features under the guise of restoration. The older streets of Cambridge still contain houses upon which the eye of John Robinson and his contemporaries may often have rested. One such, a bit of picturesque Cambridge on the domestic side, we present to our reader. Neither of our great universities has, during the last two centuries, looked upon the Separatist movement in the religious life of the nation with at all a kindly eye. Nor is it to be expected from human nature that they should. If John Robinson was right in the contention for which he sacrificed preferment, for which he suffered exile, for which the men he trained preferred the rigours and desolations of New England with freedom, to the comforts of Old England with religious bondage, then much of the religious life and polity of the Oxford and Cambridge of to-day is fatally mistaken. But the spiritual descendants of John Robinson recognise, and recognise gratefully, that in both universities, and perhaps in Cambridge especially, influences have been at work, and are tending more and more in the direction of John Robinson's ideal — religious freedom, and religious equality in subjection to no lordship but that of Jesus Christ. Old Houses on Castle Hill, Cambridge. 80 Cambridge and Corpus Christi College Interior of St. Benedict's Churcii. Hotnes and Haunts of the Pilgrim Fathers CHAPTER VII GOVERNOR WINSLOW— OF DROITWICH r [Photocltrojne. St. Peter's Church, Droitwich. N looking for the early home of Edward Winslow, we travel from East Anglia to Worcestershire — to the ' old, very old ' town of Droitwich. The Romans knew the value of its salt supply ; the Roman coins and pieces of pottery unearthed in the district testify to its importance for them. Leland describes it in his day : — ' The Wich standeth somewhat in a valley or lower ground betwixt two small hills, on the left ripe (bank) of a pretty river, that not farre beneath the Wyche is called Salop brook. The beauty of the town in a manner standeth of one street, yet there be many lands beside.' The town was loyal to Charles, and after the defeat of the Royalist army at the battle of Worcester might have suffered more than it did, except — it is supposed — for the fact that Sergeant Wilde, Lord Chief Baron of Exchequer to Cromwell, was a native of the town and would naturally use his influence to protect it from retaliation. St. Peter's Church in the town dates back from Saxon days. But in the course of centuries the original structure has been completely blotted out or hidden ; there are a few traces of ancient work. Since the end of the eighteenth century the building retains little even of what it was in the Commonwealth period. In this church Edward Winslow was baptized, and the record survives: — '1S9S October 20 baptized Edward son of Edward Winslow, born the previous Friday.' His family was of some standing in the county ; he was the only one of his class, apparently, among the Men of the Mayfloiver. He was travelling for pleasure in Holland, when he came in contact with the Exile Church of Leyden, and remained there under the ministry of John Robinson. He has written a valuable and effective defence of the church and its pastor. Replying to a hostile critic, who had — 'upon a great mistake' — made allegations against the church of division or disagreement, as being the cause of emigration to New England, he writes : ' Nothing is more untrue : For I perswade my selfe, never people 82 Governor Winslow^ —of Droitwich upon earth lived more lovingly together, and parted more sweetly than wee the Church at Leyden did, not rashly in a distracted humour, but upon joynt and serious deliberation, often seeking the minde of God by fasting and prayer, whose gracious presence we not onely found with us, but his blessing upon us from that time to this instant [1646], to the indignation of our adver- saries, the admiration of strangers, and the exceeding consolation of our selves, to see such effects of our prayers and teares before our pilgrimage here bee ended.'-' (p. 84.) The testimony rings true, and it gives a pleasing picture of a church in earnest. As to its pastor, if h;e was ' rigid in his course and way at first,' to give the little company an opportunity of realizing what it stood for, towards his latter end, another aspect of his mind and character became more evident ; ' for his study was peace and union so far as might agree with faith and a good conscience, and for schism and division, there was nothing in the world more hatefull to him ' (pp. 93, 94.). He also preserves the 'wholesome counsell' given by Mr. Robinson in his parting address : 'Among other wholesome Instructions and Exhortations, hee used these expressions, or to the same purpose : We are now ere long to part asunder, and the Lord knoweth whether ever he should live to see our faces again ; but whether the Lord had appointed it or not, he charged us before God and his blessed Angels, to follow him no further than he followed Christ. And if God should reveal any thing to us by any other instrument of his, to be as ready to receive it, as ever we were to receive any truth by his Ministry : For lie was very confident the Lord had more truth and light yet to brake forth out of his holy Word ' (ibid. p. 97). Governor Winslow, not only by his administrative work in New England, but by important interests entrusted to him under Cromwell, affords proof that not only his position but his education also had fitted him for high service in connection with the young colony. His character and work left its stamp on the whole future of America. He was followed by his four brothers to New England — a fact that ^ Hypocrisie Unmasked. By Edw. Winslow. London. 1646. \_Photoch7-ojne. The Canal, Droitwich. G 2 Homes and Haunts of the Pilgrim Fathers testifies to the strength of his conviction and influence. It may be also that his influence and teaching account, at least in part, for the presence High Street, Droitwich. \Phoiochrome. and activity of men of the Independent way of thought in the neighbourhood of Worcester. There was, we know, a place of meeting in the Cathedral, during the Commonwealth, for a ' Congregational Church.' ^B "^'S^ Salwarpe River, near Salwarpe. [Photochrojne, 84 Holland and John Robinson CHAPTER VIII HOLLAND AND JOHN ROBINSON ' Nor shall the eternal roll of praise reject Those Unconforming a voluntary prey To poverty, and grief, and disrespect, And some to want — as if by tempests wrecked Only a wild coast. How destitute ! Did they Feel not that Conscience never can betray. That peace of mind is Virtue's sure effect ? Their altars they forego, their homes they quit, Fields which they love, and paths they daily trod. And cast the future upon Providence ; As men the dictates of whose inward sense Outweighs the world ; whom self-deceiving wit Lures not from what they deem the cause of God.' THE Scrooby Church continued together Bradford, and kept their meetings one place and another, exercising amongst themselves, notwithstanding all the malice of their adversaries. Then, seeing they continue in that condition, they resolved to get as they could, which was in the }'ears They were drawn to the Low Countries, heard that freedom of religion was there for how sundry from London, and other parts been exiled and persecuted for the same cause, and were gone thither, and lived at rAlr~ Amsterdam and in other places of the land. '* "' ' about a year, says every Sabbath in the worship of God diligence and De Oude Schans, Amsterdam. 8:; \_Plifltochroine, Homes and Haunts of the Pilgrim Fathers In the earlier days of Elizabeth's reign, when Protestants oi the Low Countries were fleeing from the wrath of Alva, many of them found refuge in England. Now Holland was repaying the debt ; and Holland and England were to unite in training the founders of the North American States for their eventful place in history. The successful resistance of Spanish tyranny under William the Silent had had two results : the establishment of Holland as the earliest home of liberty of thought— a distinction to which the gallant nation has never been untrue ; and the transfer of commercial supremacy from the Flemish to the Dutch. One of the trusts accepted by William, when he became Governor of Holland and Zeeland, was that he should maintain the exercise of the Reformed Evangelical Religion, but should not permit enquiries to be made into any man's religious belief, or disabilities to be inflicted on any because of their religion. Middleburg became a centre of Presbyterian and Congregational religious activity ; books of priceless value to Puritan literature were constantly being printed there and smuggled into England. Amsterdam had been the home of the earliest English Congregational Church — that of martyred Barrow and Greenwood and Penry — for more than ten years when the brethren of the Second Separation came, first from Gainsborough and afterward from Scrooby. The prosperity of Amsterdam dates also from the accession of William the Silent. The trade of Antwerp had been ruined ; merchants and manufacturers left the .Spanish Netherlands ; and Amsterdam was for a time the greatest mercantile city in Europe. It grew rapidly in size and population ; its promise was still high when the victims of English persecution sought a home in it. To a modern Englishman, this rapidly advancing prosperity would have been itself an attraction ; to the yeomen of the sixteenth century it was much the reverse. England was then as far behind Holland in mercantile enterprise and social amenities as in regard for liberty of thought and the rights of conscience. Bradford reveals a shrinking from contact with the higher civilisation of the Hollanders which, hard as it is for us to understand, needs to be taken account of as one feature of the rural life of the times. He says : ' Being thus constrained to leave their native soyle and countrie, their lands and livings, and all their freinds and famillier acquaintance, it was much, and thought marvelous by many. But to goe into a countrie they knew not (but by hearsay), wher they must learne a new language, and get their livings they knew not how, it being a dear place, and subjecte to the misseries of warr, it was by many thought an adventure almost desperate, a case intolerable, and a misserie worse than death. Espetially seeing they were not acquainted with trads nor traffique (by which y^ countrie doth subsiste), but had only been used to a plaine countrie life, and y" inocente trade of husbandrey. But these things did not dismay them 86 Holland and John Robinson View on Vliet Canal, looking towards Leyden. (though they did some times trouble them), for their desires were set on y'^ ways of God, and to injoye his ordinances ; but they rested on his providence, and knew whom they had beleeved.' In another passage he reveals a certain timorousness, as well as a sense of hardship before them, which they felt on their arrival in Holland. ' Being now come into y" Low Countries, they saw many goodly and fortified cities, strongly walled and garded with troopes of armed men. Also they heard a strange and uncouth language, and beheld y" dififerente manners and costumes of y" people, with their strange fashons and attires ; all so farre differing from y' of their plaine countrie villages (wherein they were bred, and had so longe lived), as it seemed they had come into a new world. But these were not the things they much looked on, or long tooke up their thoughts ; for they had other work in hand, and an other kind of warr to wage and maintaine. For though they saw fair and bewtifull cities, flowing with abundance of all sorts of welth and riches, yet it was not longe before they saw the grimme and grisly face of povertie coming upon them like an armed man, with whom they must bukle and incounter, and from whom they could not flye ; but they were armed with faith and patience against him and all his encounters ; and though they were sometimes foyled, yet by Gods assistance they prevailed and got y" victorie,' This bashfulness in a foreign country — so un-English, as we find Homes and Haunts of the Pilgrim Fathers ourselves calling it — was not a peculiarity of the Separatists from the midland counties alone ; it equally characterised the townsmen who had come from London in 1593. Indeed, they were even more unready than Robinson's company to make the effort required for the adoption of a higher standard of living. It is a pitiful story which Dr. Dexter recounts of the sufferings of these exiles in the journey from Kampen, on the Zuyder Zee, to Amsterdam, staying some time at Naarden, where they were helped by town's money. They were mostly poor Londoners, so poor that the imprisonment of the father for a few weeks brought his family to destitution. They had had to^part with their small stocks and household furniture at a forced sale ; they had not the daring of the soldier, the self-respect of the scholar, or the enter- prise of the merchant adventurer ; — they were Englishmen of the humbler class, as Shakspere knew them, — used to bear ' the whips and scorns of time, The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely, The insolence of office, and the spurns That patient merit of the unworthy takes.' In Amsterdam itself 'they were almost consumed with deep poverty ; loaded with reproaches ; despised and afflicted by all.' In the Bruinistensteeg (Brownists' Lane), in that city. Dr. Dexter found what remains of their last meeting-house, to which they removed in 1662. As Dexter looked on the building, ' no comelier than the little home among the boughs which the summer songster has deserted, after autumn winds and winter storms have devastated it and fouled it,' he thought of Henry Vaughan's beautiful lines : ' He that hath found some fledged bird's nest may know At first sight if the bird be flown ; But what fair Dell or Grove he sings in now. That is to him unknown.' It was a natural reflection for an American Congregationalist, with his mind full of the story of the Pilgrim Fathers after they had crossed the Atlantic ; an Englishman, thinking of the homes the earlier exiles had left, may have different thoughts. Twenty years after Dexter's visit a company of American and English descendants from the Separatists stood on the same spot. I had just before been at Naarden, the place which the immigrants from London had spent a few weeks at, on their way to Amsterdam, and where they were helped by public charity. Fourteen miles from the city, on the way to Utrecht, the railway drops you in a pleasant little spot, whose pretty wooden houses, standing among fine trees, bordering broad and dusty roads, remind one of the rural suburbs of Boston and the villages of New Jersey. Naarden is a small comely town, standing within walls, and havino- a large barrack as its most conspicuous feature. It looks as if it had 88 Holland and John Robinson Seventeenth Century House in Leyden. 89 Homes and Haunts of the Pilgrim Fathers undergone no great change in three hundred years. The houses are well cared for ; the narrow streets are so clean that, if you have brought your luncheon with you, you may sit down anywhere, and, spreading a clean napkin on the paving-stones, can eat it without disgust. I found my way into the back streets, but nowhere could I see a place in which poverty-stricken, tired wanderers, sick of heart, in quest of a humble shelter, might hide their heads. Everywhere was the same impression View of the Hague. of modest sufficiency ; the consciousness of misfortune would only be intensified here. In such a place no kindness of treatment could make artisans and small shopkeepers from Southwark and Rotherhithe and Deptford feel at home ; they could add nothing to the well-being of this self-contained municipality. I did not wonder that they went on to shroud themselves among the thousands of Amsterdam. Brownists' Lane, which finally received them, is a narrow, dingy street, abutting on a dirty little canal, one of those side-waters which anastomose the larger canals in 90 Holland and John Robinson Amsterdam, and are never made clean by a flushing current directly in from the sea. The people were like the place, unclean, coarse, living in penury ; they gathered round us, greedy to earn a florin by procuring candles and lighting us up the dark staircase which led to one of the Brownist homes. We rested on a small landing, not receiving a gleam of sunshine nor a ray of light from the sky. A door, one of four or five, opened and let us into a small room, beyond which was another, with A Holland Canal. window looking out on the alley. A low room on another floor, capable of holding perhaps a hundred people, and filled with disused things, was shewn us as the place of worship. The house was not left to decay, like a tenement in a London slum ; but it was frowsy and ill-aired. The hardness of the life of the poor, even in prosperous Amsterdam, was the impression which nothing could remove. This was the place, I thought, more befitting their circumstances than sunny Naarden, to which my spiritual ancestors came ; and they themselves were like the people whom I saw. Their humiliation, even more than their physical suffering, was borne in upon me. They had 91 Homes and Haunts of the Pilgrim Fathers left England under a great religious impulse, and to such trials their faith was exposed. Some of them went back to England and were forgotten ; many remained behind, and were forgotten here. And, while they were ' dreeing their weird,' the principles for which they endured were passing on to victory ; the next generation saw the Independents ruling England, teaching kings that law was above monarchy, and laying deep, both in the old land and in the new, the foundations of Christian democracy. There were now three communities of Enghsh Nonconformists in Amsterdam : the ' anciente church,' as Bradford styles it — that is, the body of London exiles, whose pastor was Francis Johnson ; ' Mr. John Smith and his companie ' — that is, the Gainsborough Church, settled here in i6c6 ; and the Scrooby Church, which had come over here in sections, under Bradford and Brewster and Eobinson. They often, perhaps habitually, worshipped together ; but each fellowship maintained its individuality. Partly this was due to the difference of social habit between them. Englishmen of the sixteenth century were not cosmopolitan : the citizens of London, the yeomanry, and the seafaring populationlof a provincial town had marked distinctions which kept them from mixing freely and easily with each other. Partly it was due to the uncertainty of tenure which characterised their life in a foreign city, their difficulty in finding means of living, and the special responsibility each man found himself under of looking after the well- being of those who had reached Holland in his own company. But there were other, subtler diversities between them — diversities which, under different circumstances, would have been slight and transitory, but which with them gradually assumed grave importance. The Scrooby Church had a more catholic temper than either of the other two churches — derived from Robinson's teaching, to whom Separatism was always an unwelcome necessity, the rigour of which he tried to soften, and from the influence of Brewster, who had something of the largeness of one who knew, however slightly, the ways of Courts. Smyth and Johnson were men of intenser, narrower minds ; they impressed their severity of judgment on the companies they taught. And between these two there was a variation. To neither of them was separation unwelcome ; they were marked individualists. But Smyth's zeal shewed itself in relation to Christian doctrine ; Johnson's in relation to the discipline of the Church. It is not pleasant to read of the strifes among the Separatists in Amsterdam ; we should remember that the religious freedom which they claimed, and have bequeathed as a rich heritage to Christendom, had its own problems to solve, and that all our learning is through mistakes. Conscience is a good servant, it is a bad master ; especially is it a bad dictator, assuming to give law to others. While Francis Johnson was a prisoner in the Fleet, he had married a 92 Holland and John Robinson young widow, Thomasine Boyes, whose husband, Edward Boyes, a well-to-do haberdasher on Ludgate Hill, had himself suffered, and died in the midst of his sufferings, for the cause. She seems to have been a generous woman, of a liberal temper and an open hand; she certainly was both a loyal and an affectionate wife. But she was light-hearted and fond of dress. She brought with her into Puritan circles something of the habit of the young City dame, living in a street which was constantly trodden by the richly attired gallants, who came from St. James's into the City to see the citizens' wives and to be seen by them. A kindly nature can recognise the beauty as well as the humour of the story — can be glad that love brought a little gaiety into this grim Puritanism. A friendly imagination would choose to depict Mrs. Boyes as drawn away from influences that might have corrupted her by the Gospel to which her husband was devoted, would remember that her character was never attacked, would see in the fact that she chose to share Francis Johnson's dangers, when she might have been a free woman in a gay city, the signs of a deeper nature, not insensible to piety and self-devotedness. But, because she still dressed smartly, Johnson's brother, a jealous and pragmatic man, would have the Church sit in judgment on her and her husband. The result was his own excom- munication ; but for many nights the members had to listen to unsavoury discussions among men of narrow minds. The trouble resulting from this was over before the Scrooby Church appeared in Amsterdam ; but new difficulties were in the way. Smyth was making the question of baptism and the Calvinistic doctrines the occasion of a new division ; An Orphanage, Leyden. 93 Homes and Haunts of the Pilgrim Fathers and the thorny subject of the Eldership was dividing Johnson and Ainsworth. The quarrels of the Church became a scandal in the city. Robinson, foreseeing how matters might go, determined to remove his community to more congenial surroundings. ' When they had lived in Amsterdam aboute a year,' says Bradford, ' Mr. Robinson, their pastor, and some others of best discerning, seeing how Mr. John Smith and his companie was allready fallen into contention with y'' church y* was ther before them, and no means they could use would doe any good to cure y^ same, and also that y'' flames of contention were like to breake out in y' anciente church it selfe (as afterwards lamentably came to pass) ; which things they prudently foreseeing, thought it best to remove, before they were any way engaged with the same, though they well knew it would be much to y^ prejudice of their outward estats, both at presente and in licklyhood in y" future ; as indeed it proved to be.' The capitals of modern Europe have been remodelled, as'well as rebuilt, during the last half-century, and in the process they have become very much alike. Rome, Paris, London, have lost a great deal of what in them was distinctively Italian, French, and English ; the connection between the history in literature and the architecture of the streets has gone. Crumbling stones, with mystery in their decay, have been removed by the cart-load : the nooks, where legend used to linger, are all thrown open in embankment, boulevard, and avenue. Probably Amsterdam has suffered less from this change than other cities, for the change itself began with the Dutch renaissance. The love of 'clear, square outline, of sunshine and tidiness, the sharp contrast between high light and deep shadow, the flat-frontedness which reveals every- thing at once — all this may be associated with that direct, strenuous working for an aim, of which Holland, in the seventeenth century, set Western Europe an example ; but the price we have to pay for it is the dislocation of all our ancient memories, the severance of the present from the past. Old Amsterdam is more like modern Amsterdam than old London is like new London, or old Paris than Paris Haussmanised. The fact, however, does not help the traveller wishing to see the homes of the Pilgrim Fathers in Holland. There are no dim haunts inviting you to enter ; in Amsterdam you do not wander, you go. And so we have to come back to our books, from which we learn something, if not all we wish to know. Henry Ainsworth, who pre- pared the metrical version of the Psalms, rough in rhythm, and set to rough music, which the Pilgrims used in New Plymouth, and whose translations and annotations of the Hebrew Scriptures the' revisers of the Old Testament, twenty years ago, were glad to consult, is said to have lived in Amsterdam on ninepence a week and some boiled roots, and to have carried a porter's knot for a bookseller, who found out that he was a Hebrew scholar, and gave him more congenial and profitable 94 Holland and John Robinson Almshouse, Site of Robinson's House, Leyden. 95 Homes and Haunts of the Pilgrim Fathers work. Some others, who had been students, ' were content to carde and spin, or to learn trades, thereby to maintain themselves ' — so George Johnson tells us, adding that he himself, for some time, had not above ' six or seven or eightpence the weeke to live upon.' The scanty earnings of the exiles had to be supplemented by money sent from England out of Henry Barrow's legacy, by gifts to the needy out of the little store a few had brought from home, and by charity from their Dutch neighbours. But the literary activity of the controversialists among them did not cease. Statements of their case were offered to Dutch leaders of religious thought in the pulpit and the university ; and printed memorials were sent to England, begging for permission to return and live in toleration at home. Small sympathy was felt for them in Amsterdam ; but some of their writings reached Leyden— so that the special doctrines to which they were testifying, as well as their general soundness in the faith, were already known when Robinson and his party reached that city, and only needed the added witness of godly and peaceful living to win appreciation and respect. The Amsterdam Separatists had to put up with a modified persecution even in the land of religious toleration. Influences were brought to bear to keep them to themselves, and hinder their free association with the citizens. They were restricted to a worship which was substantially private, not public. Their mode of worship was very much that which is adopted by the non-Episcopal Churches generally : free prayer, reading of the Scriptures with exposition, singing of the Psalms of David, a sermon, the observance of the two sacraments. A collection was made at each service for the support of their officers and for the poor. They were wonderfully faithful to their convictions ; few of them abandoned their Church, though their meetings were occasionally stormy and their lot so hard. The Amsterdam Church — the Bruinisten, as their Dutch neighbours called them — lingered on until the end of the century. In 1701 the remnant became a part of the English Reformed Church in Amsterdam. We are not to suppose that the Church life of this separated people was all unhappy. We know how pleasures spring up in unlikel)' places, — ' And disappointment's dry and bitter root, Envy 's harsh berries, and the choking pool Of the world's scorn are the right mother-milk To the tough hearts that pioneer their kind, And break a pathway to those unknown realms That in the earth's broad shadow lie enthralled.' William Bradford, whose disapproval of Smyth and his followers is manifestly heartfelt, and who shared Robinson's gladness to get away from Amsterdam, in his later remembrance looked lovingly back on his q6 Holland and John Robinson association with these brethren. For the sake of the young people of Plymouth, who wanted to know more of the life their fathers and grand- fathers had passed in Holland, he wrote his Dialogue. In it occurs this picture of the ' anciente church ' when at its best : ' Truly there were in them many worthy men, and if you had seen them in their beauty and order, as we have done, you would have been much affected therewith, we dare say. At Amsterdam, before their division and breach, they were about three hundred communicants, and they had for their teachers those two eminent men before named, and in our time four grave men for ruling elders, and three able and godly men for deacons, one ancient woman for a deaconess, who did them service many years, though she was sixty years of age when she was chosen. She honoured her place, and was an ornament to the congregation. She usually sat in a convenient place in the congregation, with a little birchen rod in her hand, and kept little children in great awe from disturbing the congregation. She did frequently visit the sick and weak, especially women, and as there was need called out maids and young women to watch and do them other helps as their necessity did require ; and if they were poor, she would gather relief for them of those that were able, or acquaint the deacons ; and , she'^rwas obeyed as a mother in Israel and an officer of Christ.' . 'f It is a mark of the hopefulness which distinguished this little band that they encouraged the married life. They favoured early marriages and the re-marriage of the widowed ; they were as confident as were the Hebrews that 'children are the heritage of the Lord,' and for the same reason — they were sure that they had a future before them. They welcomed trial, the temporary frustration of their hopes, hard living, change of employment, and severe toil, because they believed that by these things strenuous men were made — men whom God could use for the accomplishment of His purpose. In a letter written in 1617, by Robinson and Brewster, to Sir Edwin Sandys, supporting their request to be allowed to emigrate to Virginia, they say this : ' We veryly beleeve and trust y" Lord is with us, unto whom and whose service we The Academy, Leyden. 97 Homes and Haunts of the Pilgrim Fathers have given ourselves in many trialls. . . . We are well weaned from y" delicate milke of our mother countrie, and enured to y" difficulties of a strange and hard land, which yet in a great parte we have by patience •overcome. The people are for the body of them industrious and frugall, we thinke we may safly say, as any company in the world. Lastly, it is not with us as with other men, whom small things can discourage, or small discontentments cause to wish them selves home againe.' A spirit like this is needed in men who are destined to be the Hoog Street, Leyden. founders of a nation ; but another strain is also needed to temper the strenuousness. The hardness of their discipline did not cease when they reached Leyden, but gradually there came to them peaceful conditions, congenial employment, modest prosperity, and the respect of their fellow-citizens. It was in Leyden their leaders gained largeness of sympathy, the catholic judgment, the unsuspicious habit in dealing with their fellows, which, equally with fearlessness, patience, and severe self-control, are found in manly character and a strong national life. 98 Holland and John Robinson 'A fair and beautiful city,' Bradford calls Leyden, 'and of a sweet situation.' Fair and beautiful it still appears, even to those who have looked on the cities of many peoples and learnt their ways. Seen from a distance, across the dreamy Holland flats, with their ground mists and glancing waters, its spires rise, like the palm-trees of the hot South, beckoning to repose. As you draw nearer, the peaked roofs of soft brown come into view, where the shadows linger among the high lights. Entering the city, you find yourself in a home of noiseless industry. The main street is narrow, with tall houses on each side. You tread on a somewhat irregular pavement, swept scrupulously clean. There are many open spaces, with the blue sky curving overhead — the squares of the churches, the waterways, the wide uncovered market ; and you are never out of sight of trees. Walk up the low steep of the burg, where is a ruined fort, — choose the morning for your walk, while the haze is still lifting from the two branches of the Rhine, — you will have glimpses of gardens and open streets to tempt you down for farther exploration. ' A fair and beautiful city,' truly, in which memories are slumbering, like echoes that do not fail to answer him who know how to awake them. The city was ' made more famous ' (again we are quoting Bradford), ' by the university wherewith it is adorned, in which of late had been so many learned men.' Junius and Lipsius, Grotius and Arininius, Scaliger and Vossius, Daniel Heinsius and the geographer Cluverius were in Leyden, or had recently died, when the Pilgrims entered it. A school of painting originated here, greatest in which was Rembrandt ; others whom we recall were Lucas van Leyden, Jan Steen, and Gerard Douw. The succession of great men has been kept up ; among them Boerhaave, the physician, in the seventeenth century, and Kuenen, the Biblical scholar of our own time. With so many priceless associations, Leyden has not forgotten John Robinson. His name is still held in reverence by the citizens. To Americans and Englishmen, Bradford's brief narrative is a good guide-book to the memories of the city. The Pilgrims had been here over eleven years when they gave up their new homes ; these were years of hard work, but they left a happy remembrance. The population of the city had been reduced from one hundred thousand to fifty thousand during the Spanish War, with its terrible siege, and was only beginning to recover itself Its special industry was the woollen manufacture, and in this the wool-growers from Notts and South Yorkshire found themselves able to take some part. Bradford became a fustian-cutter ; others were combers and carders, stocking-weavers, makers of blankets and baize and serge. The building trades, carpentering, brewing, and baking, even tobacco-pipe making, employed others. We may sum up their sojourn in two extracts from Bradford— the one recording his recollection of their entrance into Leyden, the other their feeling when they left. ' Wanting that traffike by sea which 99 H 2 Homes and Haunts of the Pilgrim Fathers Amsterdam injoyes, [Leyden] was not so beneficiall for their outward means of living and estats. But being now hear pitchet, they fell to such trads and imployments as they best could, valewing peace and their spirituall comforte above any other riches whatsoever. And at lenght they came to raise a comptente and comforteable living, but with hard and continuall labor.' ' So they lefte y' goodly and pleasante citie, which had been ther resting-place near 12 years; but they knew they werepilgrimes, and looked not much on those things, but lift up their eyes to y' heavens, their dearest cuntrie, and quieted their spirits.' We shall hardly be wrong if we say that Robinson and Brewster, with some others, were attracted hither by the fame of the university. There is a pleasant tale about its foundation, of parabolic, if not of historic, truth. 'According to a popular tradition, Prince William of Orange offered to reward the citizens for their gallant conduct in the defence of 1574 by exempting them from the payment of taxes for a certain number of years, or by the establishment of a University in their city. The latter alternative is said to have been preferred : at all events, the Prince founded the University in 1575.' Leyden has points of resemblance to Cambridge. It is a market place, with a business street, lying a little off which are comfortable residences, and especially the academic buildings, which stamp a character of thought and tranquillity on the city. A beautiful botanic garden spreads out behind the academy. The reputation of the university is high as a school of medicine and natural science. Brewster earned his living at first by teaching English, ' after the Latin manner,' that is to say, grammatically, not as a vernacular, and had many pupils, Danes and Germans as well as Dutch. The Elzevir Press made Leyden a centre for book publishing, and he left teaching for printing ; by these two employments he acquired some savings. Robinson, as the pastor, was exempted from the necessity of manual toil ; he spent his time in literary as well as pastoral work. In 1615 he was made an honorary member of the university ; he thus became free from military demands, and was allowed to buy his beer and wine without payment of duty to city or State. Another member of the Church, Thomas Brewer, was also a university man, and could plead privilege against summary arrest. Robinson's share in the Arminian controversy, then vexing the Faculty of Theology, is referred to in all the histories of the Pilgrims. No one has ever described it more vividly than quaint old Bradford. ' In these times allso were y" great troubls raised by y*" Arminians, who, as they greatly mollested y" whole state, so this citie in particular, in which was y" cheefe universitie ; so as ther were dayly and bote disputes in y" schooles ther aboute, and as y" studients and other lerned were devided in their oppinions hearin, so were y'" 2 proffessors or devinitie readers them selves, the one dayly teaching for it, y" other against it. 100 Holland and John Robinson Which grew to that pass, that few of the discipls of y" one would hear y' other teach. But Mr. Robinson, though he taught thrise a weeke him selfe, and writ sundrie books, besids his manyfould pains otherwise, yet he went constantly to hear ther readings, and heard y" one as well as y' other ; by which means he was so well grounded in y^ controvcrsie, and saw y'^ force of all their arguments, and knew y" shifts of y" adversarie, and being him selfe very able, none was fitter to buckle with them then him selfe, as apperd by sundrie disputs ; so as he begane to be terrible to y Arminians, which made Episcopius (y" Arminian professor) to put forth his best stringth, and set forth sundrie Theses, which by publick dispute he would defend against all men. Now Poliander, y" other profifessor, and y' cheef preachers of y" citie, desired Mr. Robinson to dispute against him ; but he was loath, being a stranger ; yet the other did importune him, and tould him y' such was y' abilitie and nimblness of y" adversarie, that y" truth would suffer if he did not help them. So as he condescended, and prepared him selfe against the time ; and when y" day came, y" Lord did so help him to defend y" truth and foyle this adversarie, as he put him to an apparent nonplus, in this great and publike audience. And y" like he did a 2 or 3 time, upon such like occasions. The which as it caused many to praise God y' the trueth had so famous victory, so it procured him much honour and respecte fi'om those lerned men and others which loved y' trueth.' The influence of his life in Leyden upon John Robinson was so pleasant and so important as to demand a little specific study. Persons who become acquainted with the Separatists only as controversialists, and see the intensity of the times reflected in Robinson's first published Roman Castle at Leyden. TOI Homes and Haunts of the Pilgrinri Fathers work, the Justification of Separation, sent out in 1610, are surprised at the mellowness and catholicity of his later writings. There was found in his study after his death, and published in 1634 by his grateful and admiring congregation, A Treatise of the Lawfulness of Hearing of the Ministers in the Church of England, and this, both by his opponents and some of his fellow-Independents, has been looked upon as a partial abandonment of his original position. It was not so : not at all are we to regard it as a dying recantation of the opinions fidelity to which had cost him so much ; nor does it imply that, if he had lived longer, he might have conformed. The practice of the Church in Leyden was catholic and eirenical. He had preached on the lawfulness of occasional attendance at such services as early as 1617, when Elder Brewster had been challenged for acting on this principle. If persons applying for Church membership, in the excess of their zeal, or to ingratiate them- selves with the congregation, would sometimes attack the Church of England, Robinson or Brewster would stop them, saying that this was no part of the confession of their faith as Christians. The Church at Leyden was in no sense a narrow Church. ' He favoured full communion with the Reformed Churches of France and Holland, received members from them, and welcomed their members to the Christian ordinances. He went so far as to offer communion to the Church of Scotland.' 'A godly divine,' says Edward Winslow, ' comming over to Leyden, being very conversant with our Pastor, Mr. Robinson, and using to come to hear him on the Sabbath, after sermon ended, the Church being to partake in the Lord's Supper, this Minister stood up, and desired hee might, without offence, stay and see the manner of his administration, and our participation in that Ordinance. To which our Pastor answered in these very words, or to this effect. Reverend Sir, you may not onely stay to behold us, but partake with us, if you please, for wee acknowledge the Churclies of Scotland to be the Churches of Christ, &c. The Minister also replyed to this purpose, if not also in the same words ; That for his part hee could comfortably partake with the Church, and willingly would, but that it is possible some of his bretliren of Scotland might take offence at his act; which he desired to avoid, in regard of the opinion the English Churches which they held communion withall had of us. However, he rendered thanks to Mr. Robinson, and desired in that respect to be onely a spectator of us.' The study of Robinson's life and writings reveals two characteristics, and we cannot say that either of them was in excess of the other the intensity of his conscience, the tenderness and breadth of his affections. This combination appears in his controversial books : he is direct in speech and strenuous in argument ; he is never bitter in invective ; he is indignant at misrepresentation, but his indignation has a profound sorrow at its heart : he meets railing, not with railing, but with remonstrance. His separation from the Churches of England, especially 102 Holland and John Robinson Hooglander Church (St. Pancras), Leyden. 103 Homes and Haunts of the Pilgrim Fathers the Puritan section of them, was never arrogant nor vaunting ; it is manifestly a grief to him to be cut off from men whose Christian character he admires. He tells us how long and painful was his struggle with the conviction that he ought to leave their fellowship. He was kept back by his ' over-valuation ' of their learning and holiness ; he blushed in himself to have a thought of pressing one hair's breath before them in this thing, 'behind whom I knew myself to come so many miles in all other things.' ' Had not the truth been in my heart as a burning fire shut up in my bones, I had never broken these bonds of flesh and blood, wherein I was so straitly tied, but had suffered the light of God to have been put out in my own unthankful heart by other men's darkness.' It is impossible for any one who has had experience of spiritual conflict to read his, posthumous treatise without a reverent sympathy with the struggle between a good man's conscience and his heart. He enumerates the various ways in which the association of Conformists and Nonconformists is not only lawful, but obligatory ; he speaks of the piety of very many Conformists, who may in some congregations be so numerous as to stamp a character of godliness on the congregation itself ; he dwells upon the preaching of the Gospel in their pulpits as being for the edification of Christians and the salvation of sinners, and as therefore to be recognised by occasional attendance on their worship ; he condemns no one for excessive attendance at these services, he rather rejoices to find opportunities for his own people to be present ; and then solemnly and sac^ly declares that their Church order is so radically contrary to Christ's ordnance that for himself he must remain aloof. Here is his conclusion : 'For myself, thus I believe with my heart before God, and profess with my tongue, and have before the world, that I have one and the same faith, hope, spirit, baptism, and Lord which I had in the Church of England, and none other ; that I esteem so many in that Church, of what state or order soever, as are truly partakers of that faith, as I account many thousands to be, for my Christian brethren, and myself a fellow-member with them of that one mystical body of Christ scattered far and wide throughout the world ; that I have always, inspirit and affection, all Christian fellowship and communion with them, and am most ready, in all outward actions, and exercises of religion, lawful and lawfully done, to express the same ; and withal, that I am persuaded, the hearing of the Word of God there preached, in the manner and upon the grounds formerly mentioned, is both lawful and, upon occasion, necessary for me, and all true Christians, withdrawing from that hierarchal order of Church government, and ministry, and appur- tenances thereof, and uniting in the order and ordinances instituted by Christ, the only King and Lord of His Church, and by all His disciples to be observed ; and lastly, that I cannot communicate with, or submit ■ unto the said Church order, and ordinances there established, either in 104 Holland and John Robinson state oi- act, without being condemned of my own heart, and therein provoking God, who is greater than my heart, to condemn me much more. And, for my faihngs, which may easily be too many, one way or other, of ignorance herein, and so for all my other sins, I most humbly crave pardon, first and foremost, at the hands of God ; and so of all men, whom therein I offend, or have offended, any manner of way, even as they desire and look that God should- pardon their offences.' Chapel in St. Anne's Almshouse, Leyden. It is surely easy to interpret a life which thus reveals itself without accusing the man of inconsistency of sentiment, or variableness of temper, or vacillation of will. In England, he was denied liberty of conscience, and so forced into controversy and an attitude of self- defence ; in Holland, he was allowed to worship as his judgment bade him, and the desire to vindicate himself gave way to his impulse of loving and trusting his fellow-Christians. 105 Homes and Haunts of the Pilgrim Fathers And this happy change came to him in his Leyden Hfe. The peaceable spirit longs for a peaceful home ; because they could not have it in Amsterdam, the Scrooby Church came on to the university city. When they applied for leave to settle here, they were frankly bidden come ; only they were reminded that citizens of Leyden must obey the laws and ordinances. Something was already known of the principles of the Separatists by the university authorities and the clergy of the city ; something also was known of the unfortunate reputation for quarrel- someness of the earlier English settlers in Amsterdam. Doubtless, their coming was awaited with curiosity, and some suspicion, as to whether they would prove as inoffensive as their doctrines seemed to enlightened Hollanders. They soon acquired a reputation for honesty, industry, and peaceableness. Their Dutch neighbours trusted them as they did not trust the Walloons. Then came the knowledge of Robinson's ability and soundness in the faith. It was a new experience for him to be treated as an orthodox divine of learning and spiritual insight, to whom might safely be com- mitted the public maintenance of the truth of God. The invitation implies much private friendship between Robinson and the Dutch clergy, which must have led to an increasing sense of the true Christian fellow- ship of their respective Churches. How gladly Robinson followed the dictates of his own heart any kindly Christian person may well imagine. In those later days he remembered his former conflicts : how he would never have left the Church of England if he might have exercised his ministry without the' use of ' the ceremonies ' which he, and all the Puritans, loathed as idolatrous ; and though he never regretted the hard discipline which had given him freedom to constitute a Church according to Christ's own order, his old tenderness toward his early religious home came back tO' him. This narrative is an abiding Christian admonition. Religious asperities are softened, and at length die out, in an atmosphere of freedom. Give liberty to heretics ; by-and-by, both the heretic and the orthodox learn how worthy each is of the other's trust and love. There will be no revival of the wish for uniformity among and within the Churches ; nor perhaps will men ever come to think alike on the points at issue in the seventeenth century. English and American Protestants have given up the hope, have lost even the desire, to see their own systems of Church government adopted by all Christians ; but they have learned that Christian brotherhood is not destroyed by these distinctions, nor even endangered where there are liberty and friendliness. When Christians are free to act as conscience bids them, mutual good understanding and faith in one another's fidelity are sure to come. We owe much to John Robinson for teaching us this lesson, and much to the ' fair and beautiful city ' where he himself learnt it. lOb Holland and John Robinson St. Peter's Church, from Bell Lane side, Leyden. The church of St. Peter, in Leyden, is a lofty building, consisting ot nave and transepts. The windows are pointed ; but the spacious interior, the whole of which is visible at one view, is more like a basilica than a Gothic church. It is divided by tall columns into five portions, and has the cold, utilitarian look which marks Teutonic churches. The rich colours of the Catholic building are wanting ; so, too, are tawdry decorations and the flaring altar-lights. It has not the dim and low recesses of an English cathedral, nor ' Storied windows richly dight, Casting a dim religious light.' A small portion of the broad centre, capable of seating three or four hundred people, is arranged for worship; and here, in July, 1891, there was a touching ceremonial. An engraved slab, in memory of John Robinson, had been, by permis'^ion of the authorities, inserted in the southern outside wall, at the charge of a committee appointed by the National Council of the Congregational Churches of the United States of America. When the International Council of Congrega- tionalists finished its sessions in London, a deputation of Americans and Englishmen went across to unveil the slab. The deputation passed, in short procession, between a guard of honour of the city police, and through the crowding citizens, to the church, where they were met by the burgomaster and other distinguished representatives of the university, the clergy, and the corporation. After the slab was uncovered, the 107 Homes and Haunts of the Pilgrim Fathers assembled people entered the church, and were addressed by Dr. Charles Ray Palmer, the burgomaster, in Dutch, Professor Kuenen, who spoke in admirable English, and Dr. Fairbairn. The service was Puritanically simple, but it was full of heart. England and Holland and America were uniting to commemorate the service rendered to the Church of God, and to the freedom of humanity, by this plain man, so devout, so conscientious, so broadly sympathetic. Almost facing this slab is a smaller one, on the wall of a private :lS^SS^S^^^^j'^^^iia£i^:^'-^^' - School on St. Peter's Church Canal, Leyden. house, informing the passer-by that 'On this spot lived, taught, and died John Robinson. 1611-1625.' The original house has long since been removed, but the present modest structure, in its general arrangements, may well suggest Robinson's own dwelling-place. The front contains the living-rooms, and a large chamber used as a place of business lor the committee now managing the property ; this answers to the parsonage and the meeting-house of the Church. Behind it is a quadrangle, with a garden, the three other sides of which are made up of small, neat 108 Holland and John Robinson almshouses, set apart for decayed Protestant foreigners, speaking the French language. It is a happy accident that these tenements are devoted to godly charity ; for Robinson, who had secured a large piece of land for the purposes of the Church, erected in his garden twenty-one cottages, for the use of its poorer members. In the committee-room of this property was held on Sunday afternoon, July 5, 1896, a religious service, attended The Academy, Leyden. by about a hundred American and half-a-dozen English pilgrims. ' The place,' says an American reporter, ' was hot and crowded to excess, so that we stood in a double row around the walls, there being no seats. But we came to worship and to thank God for His wonderful mercy, and the thoughts of all present naturally reverted to the time when Robinson here preached to his devoted followers. They must have looked upon the same huge church which towered over us ; and we could easily imagine what sad forebodings filled their minds, for the 109 Homes and Haunts of the Pilgrim Fathers loftiest faith never dreamed of the glorious development awaiting their cause. Dr. Robinson, the worthy descendant of his pious ancestor, led us in prayer, and the exercises closed by singing — "My country, 'tis of thee." The hymn was sung to the tune of the English National Anthem. The English preacher took for his text 2 Cor. iv. 7 : " But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of God, and not of us." ' The religious life of the exiled community was of a singularly winning character ; indeed, but for the peace of their fellowship, and the exaltation of their spiritual purpose, their secular life would not have had the tranquillity which marked it. Bradford has recorded it for us, and has told us how much of its prosperity was due to Robinson. ' They grew in knowledge and other gifts and graces of y" spirite of God, and lived togeather in peace, and love, and holines ; and many came unto them from diverse parts of England, so as they grew a great congregation. And if at any time any differences arose, or offences broak out (as it cannot be, but some time ther will, even amongst y'^ best of men), they were ever so mete with, and nipt in y" head betims, or otherwise so well composed as still love, peace, and communion was continued ; or else y" Church purged of those that were incurable and incorrigible, when, after much patience used, no other means would serve, which seldom came to pass. . . . His love was greate towards them, and his care was all ways bente for their best good, both for soule and body ; for besids his singulier abilities in devine things (wherein he excelled), he was also very able to give directions in civill affaires, and to foresee dangers and inconveniences ; by w"^'' meanes he was very helpfull to their outward estats, and so was every way as a commone father unto them. And none did more offend him than those that were close and cleaving to them selves, and retired from y^ commone good ; as also such as would be stiffe and riged in matters of outward order and invey against y*^ evills of others, and yet be remisse in them selves and not so careful! to expresse a vertuous conversation.' In his later Dialogues Bradford speaks again of the harmony of the Church, and unites the Elder, William Brewster, with the Pastor in his grateful remembrance. Edward Winslow, who had joined them in Leyden, in a quotation already given, confirms this testimony as to their living lovingly together and their parting in 'sweetness' of mind, 'not rashly in a distracted humour,' but deliberately, 'often seeking the mind of God by fasting and prayer . . . from that time until now.' Robinson's own words, having the grace and elevation which came so easily to his pen are well known. Rebuking Bernard for his ' contemptuous upbraiding 1 10 Holland and John Robinson of God'-s people,' as if they were inconstant, proud, unstable, contentious, and especially indignant with him for nicknaming poor Christians — Symon the saddler, Tomkin the tailor, Billy the bellows-maker — he gives this personal testimony : ' But for ourselves, Mr. B., and that whereof we take experience in this our popularity, as you term it ' (meaning their practical acquaintance with popular government in the Church), ' I tell you, that if ever I saw the beauty of Sion, and the glory of the Lord filling his tabernacle, it hath been in the manifestation of the divers graces of God in the church, in that heavenly harmony, and comely order, wherein by the grace of God we are set and walk ; wherein, it your eyes had but seen the brethren's sober and modest carriage one towards another, their humble and willing submission unto their guides, in the Lord, their tender compassion towards the weak, their fervent zeal against scandalous offenders, and their long-suffering towards all, you would, I am persuaded, change your mind, and be compelled to take up your parable, and bless, where you purposed to curse, as Balaam did.' It has been afSrmed that the little community was so far honoured as to have the use of one of the large city churches ; but this could have been, at most, only a special, an exceptional incident. The Leyden custom was to extend to foreign religious bodies settling in the city permission to worship in their own houses, in which, however, they were allowed to erect large rooms ; and as there was no restriction on attendance in these rooms, considerable congregations might gather. Robinson's pastoral labours were carried on, in the dwelling in the Klok-Steeg (Bell Lane), under the shadow of St. Peter's belfry. Twice he and his sadly crossed the street to bury a child under the pavement of the church ; and here at last his own body was laid. Winslow alludes, in the quotation given above, to the ultimate ' parting ' of the Church. After long and anxious discussion, not as to whether they should go to America or remain in Holland, but as to who should go now and prepare the way for the rest, it was determined to put the question to the vote. If a majority resolved on immediate departure, the pastor was to accompany them : if a minority, he was to remain behind. The result was that not quite so many were ready to go as were bent on staying, and Elder Brewster led them on their second migration. It was clearly understood that the majority only awaited good news from the settlers to rejoin them ; and Robinson longingly and lovingly awaited the summons. It did not come. Before his family set out for America, another call had come to him, and he went on a farther journey. After a short sickness, amid prayers and sobbings, and to the lifelong regret of his people, he died, early in March, 1625, not yet fifty years old, and was buried in St. Peter's Church.' ' If either prayers, tears, or means would have saved his life, he had not gone hence.' ' The University, and Ministers of the city, accompanied him to his grave with all their -II I Homes and Haunts of the Pilgrim Fathers accustomed solemnities ; bewayling the great losse that not onely that particular Church had, whereof he was Pastor ; but some of the chief of them sadly affirmed, that all the Churches of Christ sustained a losse by the death of that worthy Instrument of the Gospel.' His grave is not shewn. In St. Peter's they used to remove from the earth under the pavement the bodies which had been longest interred, to make room for others, and no one knows where Robinson's remains lie. We have not been told what he was like in bodily aspect ; his writings, and the impressions he made on those that knew him, alone remain, fragments of his personality. We cannot rightly be sorry for this ; so he himself would have had it. Undue regard for the persons of men was one of the generous weaknesses which he bewailed as dangerous, and contrary to the will of God, vv^ho would have His children more alive to the future than to the past. But he is not forgotten, nor is the remembrance of him barren. His influence is seen in the religious life of two great nations ; and he is better understood to-day than at any time since Hollanders laid his body in the ground, and Brewster, and Bradford, and Winslow, and honest Myles Standish sorrowed because they would never welcome him to the colony of which he was the spiritual founder. %^ * * \\''\:^''''z- ^ ;- ".-.£ £;,\C_.£.-. C.-...%C.-.\\C.\S.-...-..\; C\ X.l Aiv.\£'." ." r-.z/.tzi-Msy'r-sszi at .-..s ?.t;.v..-",Nc \\'£.\": ."c.v.".-. 7 rZ ?:-;^.V' h^KERS 1 11 -^s: .Z?: 7.-..S .-.CSi :." \\:.=£:-:.'. A- M}A.\&2i. A£-X_.XVlA Departure of the Mayflower from Delft. 124 Southampton From an Early Print. CHAPTER X SOUTHAMPTON IN the Saxon Chronicle we read that this place was called Hamtune and Suth-Hamtun ; and it is interesting, as shewing the conservative character of the local dialect, that to this day the railway porter bawls this same name into the ears of the intelligent visitor, though it is permissible to doubt whether he knows that he is using good Anglo- Saxon. It is pleasant to visit a town which has so venerable a history, and the way in which the civic authorities are shewing appreciation of the treasures of accumulated centuries that are entrusted to their keeping is a matter which should be gratefully acknowledged by all to whom the past is dear. The lot of an enlightened modern alderman in one of these old towns is not always happy ; he is ever being scolded and pulled hither and thither by opposite factions. The earnest social reformer says : ' My dear sir, those narrow streets and courts of yours are a disgrace ; the overcrowding in these low-pitched rooms which have stood unaltered since good Queen Bess's time, is abominably insanitary. Pull the whole lot down, sir, widen the street, and build a modern block of artisans' dwellings on that ancient site.' The cultured antiquarian and lover of the picturesque breathes threats and scorn at the said alderman's mildest suggestion to move one single stone : ' Touch not the ancient landmarks ; remove thy interfering hand from the venerable pile.' The alderman has to hear all this, or something like it, continuously ; and it says much 125 Homes and Haunts of the Pilgrim Fathers for the wisdom of the corporation of this quaint old town, that they have brought their old Saxon, then Norman, wall-entrenched city right up to the days of the twentieth century, without either calamity on the one side, or needless, ruthless desecration on the other. These thoughts came to our mind as we walked along the front on the newly made Corporation Road, and noticed with what care all the old city walls had been preserved, and only where it was absolutely necessary had they repaired or pointed, and nowhere, as far as we could see, had they put new work on to old. So when at last we got actually to the West Quay, we felt certain that what met our eyes had also certainly met those of the Pilgrim Fathers, who had to wait weary days here on board the Mayflower. In our reproduction of the old 1611 map of Southampton, P is the only part of the water-side which has a true quay at all ; for a quay, it must be remembered, is an artificial landing-place or stage, built out, and not the natural boundary of land and water. Tradition has it that it was at the West Quay the Mayflower \3.y. And even if there had been no tradition to guide us, we should have selected this spot, as it is clearly one of the old quiet corners of the place, and not too near the official and military side. It is not known how long they stayed at Plymouth, or even exactly when the Pilgrim Fathers arrived there ; but the date of their arrival at Southampton is fixed and certain. On July 22, 1620, the Speedwell ■a.-nA the Mayflower both arrived, and there they remained till the afternoon of August 5, when they turned away once again to sea. These poor voyagers waited and watched exactly fourteen days, and we can easily picture them walking up and down on the quay, or strolling into the town under one or other of the massive gateways that remain to this day, to get their last peeps at the busy streets and bright shops and stalls — sights which they knew full well they would never again see after they had emigrated to the new and lonely land. Some authorities have urged that both ships lay near what is called the Platform — an open space on which certain cannon then, as now, were mounted ; and in one early history of the Pilgrim Fathers, published in London, we remember seeing a picture of this very spc^ shewn as the place ; but no historic authority was given for the assertion. The old 161 1 map, which we reproduce, materially helps us. If there had been no other quay or place where they could have moored, they would probably have had to lay near the Platform ; but as we now see by this map there was at this date a convenient spot a little farther up the Water, we may be sure they would go there, rather than moor their vessels amidst the military and official life that would crowd and jostle by the Water Gate. We could, however, wish that there were more certainty about the whole matter, but no stone tablet can here mark the spot, as it is marked 126 Southampton FACSIMILE or THE 1611 MAP OF SOUTHAMPTON Suliilo Gate The CdiU CaflW Caflh Sarr Gak En^UjkJIriC Srcktr tunc Eiji Gnu ^Sialtnthout Canjhut tonf IhcSuitr Seyinijwdt SS^aryfiret OrchimilaM •S . Maryer "The ChAtjtrgff Salt Marjhe 12'; Homes and Haunts of the Pilgrim Fathers farther along the coast in Devonshire's beautiful port of Plymouth ; and we can only suggest that there is useful and needed investigation open to some local antiquarian in this question of solving exactly where the first American liner lay in the Port of Southampton. The incidents which happened at this port are deeply interesting. We are indebted largely to William Bradford's narrative for our knowledge of these. ' Thus,' he writes, on leaving Delfshaven, ' hoisting sail, v/ith a prosperous wind, they came, in short time, to Southampton, where they found the bigger ship come from London, lying ready, with all the rest of their Company. After a joyful welcome and mutual congratulations, with other friendly entertainments ; they fell to parley about their business, How to despatch with the best expedition .'' as also with their Agents, about the alteration of the Conditions. ' Master Carver pleaded, He was employed here at Southampton ; and knew not well what the others had done at London. Master Cushman answered, He had done nothing but what he was urged to do, partly by the grounds of equity ; and more especially by necessity ; otherwise all had been dashed, and many undone. And in the beginning, he acquainted his fellow Agents John Carver and Christopher Martin herewith : who consented unto him, and left it to him to execute ; and to receive the money at London, and send it down to them at Southampton ; where they made the provisions. The which he accord- ingly did : though it was against his mind and some of the Merchants, that they were there made. And for giving them notice at Leyden of this change; he could not well, in regard of the shortness of time. Again he knew it would trouble them, and hinder the business ; which was already delayed over long, in regard of the season of the year ; which we feared they would find to their cost. But these things gave not content at present. 'Master Weston likewise came up from London, to see them despatched ; and to have the Conditions confirmed. But they refused, and answered him, That he knew right well that these were not according to the first Agreement. Neither could they yield to them without the consent of the rest that were behind : and indeed they had special charge, when they came away, from the Chief of those that were behind, not to do it. At which he was much offended ; and told them. They must then look to stand on their own legs. So he returned in displeasure ; and this was the first ground of discontent between them. And whereas there wanted well near ^^ i oo to clear things at their going away ; he would not take order to disburse a penny ; but let them shift as they could. So Ihey were forced to sell off some of their provisions to stop this gap ; which was some three or four score firkins of butter ; which commodity they might best spare, having provided too large a quantity of that kind.' 128 Southampton While lying at the West Quay, Southampton, the following letter was received from John Robinson : — 'Loving and Christian friends. I do heartily, and in the Lord, salute you all : as being they with whom I am present in my best affection and most earnest longings after you ; though I be constrained, for a while, to be bodily absent from you. I say, constrained : God knowing how willingly and much rather than otherwise, I would have borne my part with you in this first brunt ; were I not, by strong necessity, held back for the present. Make account of me, in the mean while, as of a man divided in myself, with great pain ; and as, natural bonds set aside, having my better part with you. The West Gate, Southampton. 129 Homes and Haunts of the Pilgrinn Fathers ' And though I doubt not but, in your goodly wisdoms, you both foresee, and resolve upon, that which concerneth your present state and condition ; both severally and jointly : yet have I thought [it] but my duty to add some further spur of provocation unto them who run already ; if not because you need it, yet because I owe it in love and duty. 'And first, as we are daily to renew our repentance with our God ; special, for our sins known ; and general, for our unknown trespasses : so doth the Lord call us, in a singular manner, upon occasions of such difficulty and danger as lieth upon you, to a both more narrow search, and careful reformation, of our ways in his sight ; lest he (calling to remembrance our sins forgotten by us, or unrepented of) take advantage against us ; and, in judgement, leave us for the same to be swallowed up in one danger or other. Whereas, on the contrary, sin being taken away by earnest repentance, and pardon thereof from the Lord sealed up unto a man's conscience by his Spirit ; great shall be his security and peace in all dangers ; sweet, his comforts in all distresses ; with happy deliverance from all evil, whether in life or in death. ' Now next after this heavenly peace with God and our own consciences we are carefully to provide for peace with all men, what in us lieth ; especially with our associates : and, for that end, watchfulness must be had, that we neither at all in ourselves do give ; no, nor easily take, offence, [it] being given by others. Woe be unto the World for offences! For though it be .necessary (considering the malice of Satan, and man's corruption) that offences come : yet woe unto the man, or woman, by whom the offence cometh ! saith Christ, Matthew xviii. "j . And if offences, in the unseasonable use of things in themselves indifferent, be more to be feared than death itself, as the Apostle teacheth, I Cor. ix. 15: eow much more in things simply evil ; in which neither honour of God, nor love of man, is thought worthy to be regarded. ' Neither yet is it sufficient that we keep ourselves, by the grace of God from giving offence[s] ; except withal we be armed against the taking of them, when they are given by others. For how unperfect and lame is the work of grace in that person who wants charity [wherewith] to cover a multitude of offences, as the Scriptures speak. ' Neither are you to be exhorted to this grace, only upon the common grounds of Christianity ; which are. That persons ready to take offence, either want charity to cover offences ; or wisdom duly to weigh human frailty ; or lastly, are gross, though close, hypocrites, as Christ our Lord teacheth, Matthew vii. 1-3. As indeed, in mine own experience, few or none have been found, which sooner give offence, than such as easily take it : neither have they ever proved sound and profitable members in societies, which have nourished in themselves that touchy humour. ' But, besides these, there are divers special motives provoking you, above others, to great care and conscience this way. I.^O Southam pton ' As, first, you are, many of you, strangers as to the persons, so to the infirmities, one of another : and so stand in need of more watchfulness this way, lest when such things fall out in men and women as you suspected not, you be inordinately affected v;ith them : which doth require, at your hands, much wisdom and charity for the covering and preventing of incident offences that way. ' And, lastly, your intended course of Civil Community will minister continual occasion of offence, and will be as fuel for that fire ; except you diligently quench it with brotherly forbearance. And if taking offence causelessly, or easily, at men's doings be so carefully to be avoided : how much more heed is to be taken that we take not offence at God himself; which yet we certainly do, so oft as we do murmur at his Providence in our crosses, or bear impatiently such afflictions as wherewith he pleaseth to visit us. Store we up therefore patience against the evil day ! without which, we take offence at the Lord himself in his holy and just works. ' A fourth thing there is carefully to be provided for, to wit. That with your common employments, you join common affections, truly bent upon the general good : avoiding (as a deadly plague of your both common and special comfort) all retiredness of mind for proper advantage, and all singularly affected any manner of way. Let every man repress in himself; and the whole body, in each person (as so many rebels against the common good), all private respects of men's selves ! not sorting with the general convcniency. And as men are careful not to have a new house shaken with any violence before it be well settled, and the parts firmly knit : so be you, I beseech you brethren, much more careful that the House of God, which you are and are to be, be not shaken with unnecessary novelties, or other oppositions, at the first settling thereof ' Lastly, whereas you are to become a Body Politic, using amongst yourselves Civil Government ; and are not furnished with any persons of special eminency above the rest, to be chosen by you into Office of Government : let your wisdom and godliness appear, not only in choosing such persons as do entirely love, and will diligently promote, the common good ; but also in yielding unto them all due honour and obedience in their lawful administrations. Not beholding in them, the ordinariness of their persons ; but God's ordinance for your good : nor being like unto the foolish multitude ; who more honour the gay coat, than either the virtuous mind of the man, or [the] glorious ordinance of the Lord. ' But you know better things : and that the image of the Lord's power and authority, which the Magistrate beareth, is honourable in how mean persons soever. An this duty you both may the more willingly, and ought the more conscionably to perform ; because you are, at least for the present, to have only them for your ordinary Governors; which yourselves shall make choice of for that work. K 2 Homes and Haunts of the Pilgrim Fathers ' Sundry other things of import- ance I could put you in mind of, and of those before mentioned, in more words ; but I will not so far wrong your godly minds, as to think you heedless of these things :, there being also divers among you so well able to admonish both themselves and others, of what concerneth them. ' These few things therefore, and the same in a kw words, I do earnestly commend unto your care and conscience : joining therewith my daily incessant prayers unto the Lord, that he (who hath made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all rivers of waters ; and whose Providence is over all his works, especially over all his dear children for good) would so guide and guard you in your ways (as inwardly by his Spirit ; so outwai'dly by the hand of his power) as that both you, and we also for and with you, may have after matter of praising his name, all the days of your, and our, lives. ' Fare you well in him ! in whom you trust, and in whom I rest 'An unfeigned well-wisher ' of your happy success ' in this hopeful voyage, ' I. R.' [John Robinson. J The Old City Walls, Southampton. 'All things being now ready and every business despatched, the Company was called together ; and this letter read amongst them : which had good acceptation with all, and after fruit with many. Then they ordered and distributed their Company for either ship, as they conceived for the best : and chose a Governor, and two or three Assistants for each ship, to order the people by the way ; and see to the disposing of the provisions, and such like affairs. All which was not only with the liking of the Masters of the ships : but according to their desires. Which being done, they set sail from thence, about the 5th of August.' Southampton thus became associated with the hidden epic of 1620. Some fifty years later — in 1674 — in a Nonconformist home in that town, a child was born who also, like the Pilgrim Fathers, helped and still helps to bring together many peoples and all the Evangelical Churches of the world. This was Isaac Watts, the father of English hymnody. There are many verses and whole hjmns written by him which express I ^2 Southampton the Men of the Mayfloivers spirit, and carry their appeal across the centuries : ' Must I be carried to the skies On flow'ry beds of ease, While others fought to win the prize, And sail'd through bloody seas?' ^to^ 133 Homes and Haunts of the Pilgrim Fathers 134 Plymouth CHAPTER XI PLYMOUTH N the last chapter we have followed the deeply interesting experiences of the Pilgrim Fathers associated with Southampton. Their visit to that place was inevitable. The Speedivell from Le3-den had to meet the Mayflower from London at the Hampshire seaport. But Plymouth they had no intention of visiting, and greatly against their will did they put in there. Incompetence on the part of the outfitters of the Speedwell, and rascality on the part of her captain, were the chief reasons why Devonshire has direct associations with the great emigration of 1620. In discovering exactly how this came about, we cannot do better than again follow the guidance of William Bradford. ' Being'thus put to sea, they had not gone far ; but Master Reynolds the master of the lesser ship, complained that he found his ship so leaky as he durst not put further to sea till she was mended. So the Master of the bigger ship, called Master Jones, being consulted with ; they both resolved to put into Dartmouth, and have her there searched and mended : which accordingly was done, to their great charge ; and loss of time, and a fair wind. She was here thoroughly searched from stem to stern. Some leaks were found and mended : and now it was conceived by the workmen and all, that she was sufficient; and they might proceed without either fear or danger. ' So with good hopes, from hence they put to sea again, conceiving they should go comfortably on ; not looking for any more lets of this kind : but it fell out otherwise. For after they were gone to sea again, above 100 leagues without Land's End ; holding company together all this while : the Master of the small ship complained his ship was so leaky, as he must bear up, or sink at sea ; for they could scarce free her with much pumping. So they came to consultation again : and resolved both ships to bear up back again, and put into Plymouth : which accordingly was done. But no special leak could be found ; but it was judged to be the general weakness of the ship, and that she would not prove sufficient for the voyage. 135 Homes and Haunts of the Pilgrim Fathers Mayflower Ttihlet in the Wall, Plymouth. ' Upon which, it was resolved to dis- miss her, and part of the Company ; and proceed with the other ship. The which, though it was grievous and caused great discourage- ment, was put in execution. So after they had took out such provision as the other ship could well stow, and concluded what number, and what persons, to send back ; they made another sad parting : the one ship going back for London ; and the other was to proceed on her voyage. ' Those that went back were, for the most part, such as were willing so to do ; either out of some discontent, or fear they conceived of the ill success of the Voyage : seeing so many crosses befallen, and the year time so far spent. But others, in regard of their own weakness and charge of many young children, were thought least useful, and most unfit to bear the brunt of this hard adventure : unto which work of God and judgement of their bretheren, they were contented to submit. And thus, like Gideon's army, this small number was divided : as if the Lord by this work of his Providence, thought these few too many for the great work he had to do. ' But here, by the way, let me show, how afterwards it was found that the leakiness of this ship was partly by being overmasted, and too much pressed with sails. For after she was sold, and put into her old trim ; she made many voyages, and performed her services very sufficiently ; to the great profit of her owners. But more especially, by the cunning and deceit of the Master and his company ; who were hired to stay a whole year in the country : and now fancying dislike, and fearing want of victuals, they plotted this stratagem to free themselves ; as afterwards was known, and by some of them confessed. For they apprehended that the greater ship, being of force and in which most of the provisions were stowed ; she would retain enough for herself, whatsoever became of them or the passengers : and indeed such speeches had been cast out by some of them. And yet, besides other incouragements, the Chief of them that came from Leyden went in this ship, to give the Master content. But so strong was self love and his fears, as he forgot all duty and former kindnesses, and dealt thus falsely with them ; though he pretended otherwise. 136 g 2 5 < 3; Plymouth 'Amongst those that returned was Master Cushman and his family: whose heart and courage was gone from him before, as it seems ; though his body was with them till now he departed. As may appear by a passionate letter he writ to a friend in London from Dartmouth, whilst the ship lay there a mending : the which, besides the expressions of his own fears, it shows much of the Providence of God working for their good beyond man's expectation ; and other things concerning their condition in these straits : I will here relate it. And though it discover some infirmities in him (as who under temptation is free .') : yet after this, he continued to be a special Instrument for their good ; and to do the offices of a loving friend and faithful brother unto them, and partaker of much comfort with them. The letter is as followeth : ' " Loving friend. My most kind remembrance to you, and your wife, with loving E. M. ; whom in this world I never look to see again. For, besides the eminent dangers of this Voyage which are no less than deadly, an infirmity of body hath seized me which will not, in all likelihood, leave me till death. What to call it, I know not. But it is a bundle of lead, as it were crushing my heart more and more these 14 days, as that, although I do the actions of a living man, yet I am but as dead. But the will of God be done ! ' " Our pinnace will not cease leaking ; else, I think, we had been half way at Virginia. Our voyage hither has been as full of crosses as ourselves have been of crookedness. We put in here to trim her ; and The Spot where the Mayflower lay on the Barbican, Plymouth. Homes and Haunts of the Pilgrim Fathers I think, as others also, if we had stayed at sea but three or four hours more, she would have sunk right down. And though she was twice trimmed at Southampton ; yet now she is as open and leaky as a sieve : and there was a board, two feet long, a m.an might have pulled off with his fingers ; where the waters came in as at a mole hole. ' " We lay at Southampton seven days, in fair weather, waiting for her : and now we lie here waiting for her in as fair a wind as can blow, and so have done these four days ; and are like to lie four more, and by that time the wind will happily turn, as it did at Southampton. Our victuals will be half eaten up, I think, before we go from the coast of England ; and, if our voyage last long, we shall not have a month's victuals when we come in the country." ' The writer of this letter, who was not only troubled with bodily illness, but had also lost either courage or nerve, or both, turned back at Plymouth, and returned to London. Unfortunately, we have far fewer details of the stay at Plymouth than of that at Southampton. They left Dartmouth on August 23. Again compelled to return, the two vessels made for Plymouth ; but the date of their arrival is unknown. The Speedwell was abandoned, and all who were fearful or in the judgment of the leaders unsuited to the enterprise were left behind. The Mayflower took in all extra stores that she could, and on September 6, 1620, with a freight of one hundred and two souls all told, started on her adventurous voyage. The spot where the Mayflower actually lay is now marked by a stone tablet bearing the simple words, ' Mayflower, 1620 ' ; and it is clear that the present projecting quay could not have been there at that day. But we hardly grudge the alteration, as it enables one to stand comfortably over the very spot — once water — where this historic craft was moored ; and we appreciate, too, the kindly forethought of those who have marked so interesting a place. Let into the adjacent wall is a metal memorial tablet, recording in the following words the incident, in 1620 apparently so insignificant, but fraught with consequences of such incalculable importance : — 'On the 6th of September, 1620, in the Mayoralty of Thomas Fownes, after being " kindly entertained and courteously used by divers The Barbican from Coxside. 138 Plymouth A bit behind the Barbican, Plymouth. Friends there dwelling," the Pilgrim Fathers sailed from Plymouth in the Mayfloiver, in the Providence of God to settle in New Plymouth, and to lay the Foundation of the New England States. The ancient Causey whence they embarked was destroyed not many Years afterwards, but the Site of their Embarkation is marked by the Stone bearing the name of the Mayflower in the pavement of the adjacent Pier. This Tablet was erected in the Mayoralty of J. T. Bond, 1891, to com- memorate their Departure, and the visit to Plymouth in July of that Year of a number of their Descendants and Representatives.' Here, as elsewhere, we could wish that more had been told us of their days in Plymouth — their last English days. What scenes they visited, what friends they met, we now may not know. But they remembered in after years the hospitality of Plymouth people, and make grateful 139 Hbnries and Haunts of the Pilgrinn Fathers mention of it ; when they landed on the other side, they gave the name of Plymouth Rock to their landing-place. They never forgot their English homes ; indeed, as always with the human heart, distance and time deepened their love for the land they had left, for the haunts of childhood, for the green fields and headlands that faded last out of view. But they were architects of the future ; regrets made way for endurance and achievement. The men and women on board the Mayfloiver were exiles of freedom — the noblest freedom of all, the free communion of the human spirit with the Spirit of God. They were human, like all their fellows of all time ; but they loved liberty for others as well as lor themselves, as far as ever their light led them. Many followed them across the sea in after years, with less toleration for others ; sometimes readers in haste to find ground of censure have inflicted on these first pioneers blame that just belongs to later emigrants who came in another spirit. It will be well, if, forgetting much that divides Christian churches, Old Palace, St. Andrew's Street, Plymouth. 140 Plymouth The Mayflower Stone. Christ's own on both sides of the Atlantic should seek, as from 1920, to draw nearer each other in heart and spirit. And still more that these two peoples, lifted into such supreme responsibility in the guidance of the world's future, may together, as in another mightier Mayflower, through, it may be, more stormy seas, bring the whole of our human world into a safe haven of peace and good-will. Cottage built on the Old City Wall, Plymouth. 141 Homes and Haunts of the Pilgrim Fathers ,;-.js":.-.-^.:-.^/ki-;r- . W^ *«^■*4^.^ Doorway in the Priesten House, Plymouth. 142 Plymouth ' There were men with hoary hair Amidst that pilgrim band : — Why had they come to wither there Away from their childhood's land ? ' There was woman's feai'less eye, Lit by her deep love's truth ; There was manhood's brow serenely high, And the fiery heart of youth. ' What sought they thus afar ? Bright jewels of the mine? The wealth of seas, the spoils of war ? They sought a faith's pure shrine ! ' Mrs. Hemans : The Landing of the Pilgrim Fat tiers in New Engtand. Plymouth, U.S.A., Memorial to commemorate the landing of the MayfJovt-er passengers. H3