Chapter VII…

Chapter VII

THE RELIGIOUS ELEMENT IN THE SETTLEMENT OF NEW ENGLAND.—PURITANS AND SEPARATISTS IN ENGLAND.

BY GEORGE EDWARD ELLIS,

Vice-President of the Massachusetts Historical Society.

THERE is no occasion to offer any elaborate plea for making this theme the subject of a chapter of American history, however extended into detail or compressed in its dealing with general themes that history might be. In the origin and development, the strengthening and the triumph, of those agencies which transferred from the Old World to the New the trial of fresh ideas and the experiment with free institutions, the colonists of New England had the leading part. The influence and the institutions which have gone forth from them have had a prevailing sway on the northern half of this continent. Their enterprise—in its seemingly feeble, but from the first earnest and resolute, purpose—took its spring from religious dissension following upon the earlier stages of the Protestant Reformation in England. The grounds, occasions, and results of that dissension thus become the proper subject of a chapter in American history. It is certain that in tracing the early assertion in England of what may be called the principles of dissent from ecclesiastical authority, we are dealing with forces which have wrought effectively on this continent.

The well-established and familiar fact, that the first successful and effective colonial enterprises of Englishmen in New England found their motive and purpose in religious variances within the English communion, is illustrated by an incident anticipatory by several years of the period which realized that result. A scheme was devised and entered upon in England in the interest of substantially the same class of men known as Separatists and Nonconformists, who twenty-three years afterward established themselves at Plymouth, and ten years later in Massachusetts Bay. In the year 1597, there were confined in London prisons a considerable number of men known confusedly as Barrowists or Brownists, who had been seized in the conventicles of the Separatists, or had made themselves obnoxious by disaffection with the government, the forms, or the discipline of the English hierarchy. In that year a scheme was proposed, apparently by the Government, for planting some permanent colonists somewhere in the northern parts of North America. Some of these Separatists petitioned the Council for leave to transport themselves for this purpose, promising fidelity to the Queen and her realm. Three merchants at the time were planning a voyage for fishing and discovery, with a view to a settlement on an island variously called Rainea, Rainée, and Ramees, in a group of the Magdalen Islands, in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and they were to furnish two ships for the enterprise. Reinforcing the petition of the Separatists, they asked permission to transport with them “divers artificers and other persons that are noted to be Sectaries, whose minds are continually in an ecclesiastical ferment.” Permission was granted for the removal of two such persons in each of the two ships, the merchants giving bonds that the exiles should not return unless willing to obey the ecclesiastical laws. The four prisoners who embarked for the voyage, April 8, 1597, were Francis and George Johnson, brothers, who had been educated at Cambridge, and Daniel Studley and John Clarke, who shared with them their Separatist principles. One of the vessels was wrecked when near its destination, and the company took refuge on the other, which, proving unseaworthy and scantily provisioned, returned to England, arriving in the Channel, September 1. The four exiles found their way stealthily to a hiding-place in London, and by the middle of the month were in Amsterdam. Their history there connects with the subsequent fortunes of the Separatists in England, and with those of the Pilgrims at Plymouth.[443]

The facts, persons, and incidents with which we have to deal in treating of this special matter of religious contention within the English Church, give us simply the opening in series and course of what under various modifications is known as the history of Dissent. The strife then engendered has continued essentially the same down to our own times, turning upon the same points of controversy and upon contested principles, rights, and methods. The present relations of the parties to this entailed dissension may throw some light back upon the working of the elements in it when it was first opened. The result which has been reached, after the processes engaged in it for nearly four centuries, shows itself to us in a still existing National Church establishment in England, with authority and vested rights, privileges, and prerogatives, yet nevertheless repudiated by nearly, if not quite, half of the subjects of the realm. The reason or the right, the grounds or the justification, of the original workings of Dissent have certainly been suspended long enough for discussion and judgment upon their merits to help us to reach a fair decision upon them.

The indifference, even the strong distaste, which writers and readers alike feel to a rehearsal in our days of the embittered and aggravated strife,—often concerned too, with what seem to us petty, trivial, and perverse elements of scruple, temper, and passion,—in the early Puritan controversy in the Church of England, may be sensibly relieved by the spirit of fairness and consideration in which the subject is treated in the most recent dealing with it by able and judicious writers. There are even now in the utterances of pulpit and platform, and in the voluminous pages of pamphlet, essay, and so-called history, survivals and renewals of all the sharpness and acrimoniousness of the original passions of the controversy. And where this spirit has license, the lengthening lapse of time will more or less falsify the truth of the relation of either side of the strife. One whose sympathies are with either party may rightly claim that it be fairly presented, its limitations, excesses, and even its perversities being excused or palliated, where reasons can be shown. Nor is one who for any fair purpose undertakes a statement or exposition of the views and course of either of those parties to be regarded as also its champion and vindicator. But no rehearsal of the controversy will have much value or interest for readers of our day which does assume such championship of one party. As the Puritans, Nonconformists, or Dissenters, from the beginning up to this day, were substantially defeated, disabled, and made the losers of the object for which they contended, they may fairly claim the allowance of making the best possible statement of their cause.

Those who at this distance of time accede in their lineage and principles to the heritage of the first Dissenters from the English Church system, might naturally eulogize them for their noble service in laying the foundations of religious and civil liberty in the realm. But there are not lacking in these days Royalists and Churchmen alike who in the pages of history and in essays equally extol the English Nonconformists as the foremost champions, the most effective agents, in bringing to trial and triumph the free institutions of the realm. Making the fullest allowances for all the perversities and fanaticisms wrought in with the separating tenets and principles of individuals and sects, their protests and assertions, their sufferings and constancy under disabilities, all wrought together at last to insure a grand result. Boldly is the assertion now maintained, that the Church of England at several critical periods would have been unable to withstand the recuperative forces of the Roman Church, had it not been for the persistent action of the Nonconformists in holding the ground won by the Reformation, and in demanding advance in the same line. The partial schemes of toleration and comprehension which were hopefully or mockingly entertained by parties in the Government down to the period of the Revolution, were avowedly designed “to strengthen the Protestant interest.” The strength of Dissent, in all its forms and stages, lay in its demanding for the laity voice and influence in all ecclesiastical affairs. It was this that restrained the dominance of priestly power.

There is a very important consideration to be had in view when we aim to form a fair and impartial judgment of the spirit and course of those earnest, if contentious, men, scholars, divines, heads and fellows of universities, who in their Nonconforming or Separatist principles originated dissensions in the English Church, and withdrew from it, bearing various pains and penalties. Even in the calmer dealing with them in the religious literature of our own times coming from Episcopal writers, we find traces of the irritation, reproach, and contempt felt and expressed for these original Dissenters when they first came into notice, to be dealt with as mischief-makers and culprits. They were then generally regarded as unreasonable, perverse, and contentious spirits, exaggerating trifling matters, obtruding morbid scruples, and keeping the realm in a ferment of petty squabbles on subjects in themselves utterly indifferent. They withstood the hearty, harmonious engagement of the rulers and the mass of the people of the realm in the difficult task of securing the general principles and interests of the Reformation, when perils and treacheries of a most formidable character from the Papacy and from internal and external enemies threatened every form of disaster. To this charge it might be replied, that the Puritans believed that a thorough and consistent work of reformation within the realm would be the best security for loyalty, internal harmony, and protection from the plottings of all outside enemies.

The most interesting and significant fact underlying the origin and the principles alike of Nonconformity and of Separatism in England at the period of the Reformation, is this: the facility and acquiescence with which changes were made in the English ecclesiastical system up to a certain point, while further modifications in the same direction were so stiffly resisted. It would seem as if it had been assumed at once that there was a well-defined line of division which should sharply distinguish between what must necessarily or might reasonably be made a part of the new order of things when the Papacy was renounced, and what must be conserved against all further innovation. The pivot of all subsequent controversy, dissension, and alienation turned upon the question whether this sharply drawn line was not wholly an arbitrary one, not adjusted by a principle of consistency, but of the nature of a compromise. This question was followed by another: Why should the process of reformation in the Church, so resolute and revolutionary in changing its institution and discipline and ritual, stop at the stage which it has already reached? Could any other answer be given than that the majority, or those who in office or prerogative had the power to enforce a decision, had decided that the right point had been reached, and that an arrest must be made there?

We must indicate in a summary way the stage which the Reformation had reached in England when Puritanism, in its various forms, made itself intrusive and obnoxious in demanding further changes. We need not open and deal with the controverted point, about which English Churchmen are by no means in accord, as to whether their Church had or did not have an origin and jurisdiction independently of all agency, intrusion, or intervention of the Bishop of Rome, or the Pope. It is enough to start with the fact, that up to the reign of Henry VIII. the Pope asserted and exercised a supremacy both in civil and in ecclesiastical affairs in the realm. If there was a Church in England, it was allowed that that Church must have a head. The Pope was acknowledged to be that head. Henry VIII., with the support of his Parliament, renounced the Papal supremacy, and himself acceded to that august dignity. The year 600 is assigned as the date when Pope Gregory I. put Augustin, or Austin, over the British Church. The headship of the Pope was acknowledged in the line of monarchs till Henry VIII. became the substitute of Clement VII. In the twenty-sixth year of Henry’s reign his Parliament enacted that “whatsoever his Majesty should enjoin in matters of religion should be obeyed by all his subjects.” Some of the clergy, being startled at this exaltation of a layman to the highest ecclesiastical office, demanded the insertion of the qualifying words “as far as is agreeable to the laws of Christ.” The King for a time accepted this qualification, but afterward obtained the consent of Parliament for its omission. Whatever may be granted or denied to the well-worn plea that the King’s reformatory zeal was inspired by his feud with the Pope about his matrimonial infelicities, it is evident that, notwithstanding the unrestrained royal prerogative, the monarch could not have struck at the very basis of all ecclesiastical rule and order in his kingdom, had there not been not only in his Council and Parliament, but also working among all orders of the people, a spirit and resolve against the Papal rule and discipline, ready to enter upon the unsounded and perilous ventures of radical reformation. None as yet knew where the opened way would lead them. The initiatory and each onward step might yet have to be retraced. Not for many years afterward did the threat and dread of the full restoration of the Papal power cease to appal the people of the realm. The final and the impotent blow which severed the Papacy from the realm came in the Bull of Pope Pius V. in 1571, which denounced Elizabeth as a heretic, and, under pain of curse, forbade her subjects to obey her laws. The measures of reform under Henry were tentative and arbitrary on his part. They made no recognition of any defined aim and stage to be reached. We must keep this fact in view as showing that while the realm was ready for change, it was as yet a process, not a mark.

It is necessary to start with a definition of terms which are often confounded in their use. “Puritans,” “Separatists,” and “Nonconformists” might in fact be terms equally applicable to many individuals, but none the less they were distinctive, and in many cases indicated very broad divergencies and characteristics in opinion, belief, and conduct. Nonconformists and Separatists were alike Puritans,—the latter intensively such. Puritanism developed alike into Nonconformity and Separatism. The earliest Puritans came to be Nonconformists, after trying in vain to retain a ministry and communion in the English Church as established by royal and civil authority, and after being driven from it because of their persistent demands for further reform in it. As heartily as did those who remained in its communion, they believed in the fitness of an established nationalized Church. They wished to be members of such a Church themselves; and not only so, but also to force upon others such membership. It was not to destroy, but to purify; not to deny to the civil authority a legislative and disciplinary power in religious matters, but to limit the exercise of that right within Scriptural rules and methods. They had sympathized in the processes of reform so far as these had advanced, but complained that the work had been arbitrarily arrested, was incomplete, was inconsistently pursued, was insecure in the stage which it had reached, and so left without the warrant which Scripture alone could furnish as a substitute for repudiated Rome.

Who were the Separatists, whose utterances, scruples, and conduct seemed so whimsical, pertinacious, disloyal, and refractory in Old England, and whose enterprise has been so successful and honorable in its development in New England? When the unity of the Roman Church was sundered at the Reformation, all those once in its communion who parted from it were Separatists. It is an intricate but interesting story, which has been often told, wearisomely and indeed exhaustively, in explanation of the fact that this epithet came to designate a comparatively small number of individuals in a nation to the mass of whose population it equally belonged. The term “separatist” or “sectary” carries with it a changing significance and association, according to the circumstances of its application. It was first used to designate the Christians. The Apostle Paul was called “a ringleader of the sect of the Nazarenes” (Acts xxiv. 5). The Roman Jews described the Christians as a “sect” that was “everywhere spoken against” (Acts xxviii. 22). The civil power gave a distinctive limitation to the epithet. It is always to be remembered that every national-church establishment existing among Protestants is the creation of the civil authority. Its inclusion and its exclusion, the privileges and disabilities which it gives or imposes, its titles of honor or reproach, are the awards of secular magistrates. All ecclesiastical polity, outside of Scriptural rule and sanction, receives its authority, for those who accept and for those who reject it, from the extension of the temporal power into the province of religion. When King Henry VIII. and the English Parliament assumed the ecclesiastical headship and prerogative previously exercised by Pope Clement VII., all the loyal people of the realm became Separatists. All the Reformed bodies of the Continent substantially regarded themselves as coming under that designation, which might have been applied and assumed with equal propriety as the epithet “protestants.” The Curia of the hierarchy at Rome from the first until now regards English and all other Protestants as Separatists. An archbishop or bishop of the English Church is ranked by the Church of Rome in the same category of unauthorized intruders upon sacred functions with the second-advent exhorter and the field-preacher. The pages of English history, so diligently wrought, and the developments of ecclesiastical polity in the realm must be studied and traced by one who would fully understand the occasion, the grounds, and the justice of the restriction which confined the title of “separatists” to the outlawed and persecuted and exiled class of persons, many of them graduates of English universities, ordained and serving in the pulpits of the Church, who were represented in and out of English jails by the four men whose abortive scheme of planting a colony in North America has just been referred to. However, justly or unjustly, the epithet “separatists” came to be applied and accepted as designating those who would not only not conform to the discipline of the Church, as still members of it, but who utterly renounced all connection with it, kept away from it, and organized assemblies, conventicles, or fellowships, subject only to such discipline as they might agree upon among themselves.

A suggestion presents itself here, to which a candid view of facts must attach much weight. Nonconformity, Separatism, Dissent, are not to be regarded as factiously obtruding themselves upon a peaceful, orderly, and well-established system, already tried and approved in its general workings. The Reformation in England was then but in progress, in its early stages; everything had been shaken, all was still unsettled, unadjusted, not reduced to permanence and order. There was an experiment to be tried, an institution to be recreated and remodelled, a substitute Church to be provided for a repudiated Church. The early Dissenters regarded themselves as simply taking part in an unfinished reform. The Church in England, under entanglements of civil policy and complications of State, gave tokens of stopping at a stage in reform quite different from that reached, and allowed progressive advance and unfettered conditions among Protestants on the Continent. There the course was free. The French, Dutch, and Italian systems, though not accordant, were all unlike the English ecclesiastical system. In England it was impeded, leading to a kind of establishment and institution in hierarchical and ritual administration which had more regard for the old Church, and looked to more compromise with it. It was not as if yielding to their own crotchets, self-willed idiosyncrasies, and petty fancies that those who opened the line of the Dissenters obtruded their variances, scruples, and contentions in assailing what was already established and perfected. They meant to come in at the beginning, at the first stage, the initiation of what was to be the new order of things in the Church, which was then, as they viewed it, in a state of formation and organization for time to come. They took alarm at the simulation of the system and ritual of the Roman Church, which the English, alone of all the Reformed Churches, in their view evidently favored. They wished to have hand and voice in initiating and planning the ecclesiastical institutions under which they were to live as Christians. Individual conscience, too, which heretofore had been a nullity, was thenceforward to stand for something. It remained to be proved how much and what was to be allowed to it, but it was not to be scornfully slighted. Then, also, with the first manifestations of a Nonconforming and Separatist spirit, we note the agitation of the question, which steadily strengthened in its persistency and emphasis of treatment, as to what were to be the rights and functions of lay people in the administration of a Christian Church. Were they to continue, as under the Roman system, simply to be led, governed, and disciplined, as sheep in a fold, by a clerical order? Hallam gives it as his conclusion, that the party in the realm during Elizabeth’s reign “adverse to any species of ecclesiastical change,” was less numerous than either of the other parties, Catholic or Puritan. According to this view, if one third of the people of the realm would have consented to the restoration of the Roman system, and less than one third were in accord with the Protestant prelatical establishment, certainly the other third, the Puritanical party, might assert their right to a hearing.

While claiming and pleading that the strict rule and example of Scripture precedent and model should alone be followed in the institution and discipline of the Christian Church, there was a second very comprehensive and positive demand made by the Puritans, which,—as we shall calmly view it in the retrospect, as taking its impulse and purpose either from substantial and valid reasons of good sense, discretion, and practical wisdom, or as starting from narrow conceits, perversity, and eccentric judgments leading it on into fanaticism,—put the Puritans into antagonism with the Church party. From the first token of the breach with Rome under Henry VIII. through the reigns of his three children and the four Stuarts, the Reformation was neither accomplished in its process, nor secure of abiding in the stage which it had reached. More than once during that period of one and a half centuries there were not only reasonable fears, but actual evidences, that a renewed subjection to the perfectly restored thraldom of Rome might, in what seemed to be merely the cast of a die, befall the distracted realm of England. The Court, Council, and Parliament pulsated in regular or irregular beats between Romanism and Protestantism. Henry VIII. left the work of reform embittered in its spirit for both parties, unaccomplished, insecure, and with no settlement by fixed principles. His three children, coming successively to the crown, pursued each a policy which had all the elements of confusion, antagonism, inconsistency, and extreme methods.

The spirit which vivified Puritanism had been working in England, and had been defining and certifying its animating and leading principles, before any formal measures of King and Parliament had opened the breach with Rome. The elemental ferment began with the circulation and reading of parts or the whole of the Scriptures in the English tongue. The surprises and perils which accompanied the enjoyment of this fearful privilege by private persons of acute intelligence and hearts sensitive to the deepest religious emotions, were followed by profound effects. The book was to them a direct, intelligible, and most authoritative communication from God. To its first readers it did not seem to need any help from an interpreter or commentator. It is a suggestive fact, that for English readers the now mountainous heaps of literature devoted to the exposition, illustration, and extended and comparative elucidation of Scripture were produced only at a later period. The first Scripture readers, antedating the actual era of the English Reformation and the formal national rupture with the Roman Church, were content with the simple text. They were impatient with any glosses or criticisms. When afterward, in the interests of psalmody in worship, the first attempts were made in constructing metrical versions of the Psalms, the intensest opposition was raised against the introduction of a single expletive word for which there was no answering original in the text.

We must assign to this early engagedness of love and devoted regard and fond estimate of the Bible the mainspring and the whole guiding inspiration of all the protests and demands which animated the Puritan movements. The degree in which afterward any individual within the communion of the English Church was prompted to pursue what he regarded as the work of reformation, whether he were prelate, noble, gentleman, scholar, husbandman, or artisan, and whether it drove him to conformity or to any phase of Puritanism, or even Separatism, depended mainly upon the estimate which he assigned to the Scriptures, whether as the sole or only the co-ordinate authority for the institution and discipline of the Christian Church. The free and devout reading of the Scriptures, when engaging the fresh curiosity and zeal of thoroughly earnest men and women, roused them to an amazed surprise at the enormous discordance between the matter and spirit of the sacred book and the ecclesiastical institutions and discipline under which they had been living,—“the simplicity that was in Christ,” constrasted with the towering corruptions and the monstrous tyranny and thraldom of the Papacy! This first surprise developed into all shades and degrees of protest, resentment, indignation, and almost blinding passion. Those who are conversant with the writings of either class of the Puritans know well with what paramount distinctness and emphasis they use the term, “the Word.” The significance attached to the expression gives us the key to Puritanism. For its most forcible use was when, in a representative championship, it was made to stand in bold antagonism with the term “the Church,” as inclusive of what it carried with it alike under the Roman or the English prelatical system. “The Church,” “the Scriptures,” are the word-symbols of the issue between Conformity and Puritanism. Christ did not leave Scriptures behind him, said one party, but he did leave a Church. Yes, replied the other party; he left apostles who both wrote the Scriptures and planted and administered the Church. The extreme to which the famous “Se-Baptist,” John Smyth, carried this insistency upon the sole authority of the Scriptures, led him to repudiate the use of the English Bible in worship, and to require that the originals in Greek and Hebrew should be substituted.[444] The fundamental distinguishing principle which is common to all the phases of Puritanism, Dissent, and Separatism in the English Church is this,—of giving to the Scriptures sole authority, especially over matters in which the Church claimed control and jurisdiction. There was in the earlier stage of the struggle little, if any, discordance as to doctrine. Discipline and ritual were the matters in controversy. The rule and text of Scripture were to displace canon law and the Church courts. The first representatives of the sect of Baptists resolved, “by the grace of God, not to receive or practise any piece of positive worship which had not precept or example in the Word.”[445] Nor were the Baptists in this respect singular or emphatic beyond any others of the Dissenting company. None of them had any misgiving as to the resources and sole authority of Scripture to furnish them with model, guide, and rule. It is remarkable that in view of the positive and reiterated avowal of this principle by all the Puritans, there should have been in recent times, as there was not in the first era of the controversy, any misapprehension of their frank adoption of it, their resolute standing by it. Archbishop Whately repeatedly marked it as evidence of the inspired wisdom of the New Testament writers, that they do not define the form or pattern of a church institution for government, worship, or discipline. The Puritans, however, believed that those writers did this very thing, and had a purpose in doing it. It was to strike at the very roots of this exclusive Scriptural theory of the Puritans that Hooker wrought out his famous and noble classical production, The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity. He admitted in this elegant and elaborate work that Scripture furnished the sole rule for doctrine, but argued with consummate ability that it was not such an exclusive and sufficient guide for government or discipline. The apostles did not, he said, fix a rule for their successors. The Church was a divinely instituted society; and, like every society, it had a full prerogative to make laws for its government, ceremonial, and discipline. He argued that a true Church polity must be taken not only from what the Scriptures affirm distinctly, but also “from what the general rules and principles of Scripture potentially contain.” Starting with his grand basis of the sanctity and majesty of Law, as founded in natural order, he insisted that the Church should establish such order in laws, rites, and ceremonies within its fold, and that all who have been baptized into it are bound to conform to its ecclesiastical laws. He would not concede to the Puritans their position of denial, but he insisted that Episcopacy was of apostolic institution. He was, however, at fault in affirming that the Puritans admitted that they could not find all the parts of the discipline which they stood for in the Scriptures. Dean Stanley comes nearer to the truth, in what is for him a sharp judgment, when he writes: “The Puritan idea that there was a Biblical counterpart to every—the most trivial—incident or institution of modern ecclesiastical life, has met with an unsparing criticism from the hand of Hooker.”[446] Indeed, it was keenly argued as against these Puritan sticklers for adhesion to Scripture rule and model, that they by no means conformed rigidly to the pattern, as they dropped from observance such matters as a community of goods, the love feast, the kiss of peace, the Lord’s Supper in upper chambers, and baptism by immersion.

It is, in fact, to this attempt of all Nonconformists to make the Scriptures the sole and rigid guide alike in Church discipline as in doctrine, that we are to trace their divergencies and dissensions among themselves, their heated controversies, their discordant factions, their constant parting up of their small conventicles into smaller ones, even of only two or three members, and the real origin of all modern sects. This was the common experience of such Dissenters from the Church, alike in England before their exile and then in all the places of their exile,—Holland, Frankfort, Geneva, and elsewhere. It could not but follow on their keen, acute, and concentrated searching and scanning of every sentence and word of Scripture as bearing upon their contest with prelacy, that they should be led beyond matters of mere discipline into those of doctrine. A very small point was enough to open a new issue. It is vexing to the spirit, while winning sometimes our admiration for the intense and awful sincerity of the self-inflicting victims of their own scruples, magnified into compunctions of conscience, to trace the quarrels and leave-takings of those poor exiles on the Continent, struggling in toil and sacrifice for a bare subsistence, but finding compensation if not solace in their endless and ever-sharpening altercations. But while all this saddens and oppresses us, we have to allow that it was natural and inevitable. The Bible, the Holy Scriptures, will never henceforward to any generation, in any part of the globe, be, or stand for, to individuals or groups of men and women, what it was to the early English Puritans. To it was intrusted all the honor, reverence, obedience, and transcendent responsibility in the life, the hope, and the salvation of men, which had but recently been given, in awe and dread, to a now dishonored and repudiated Church, against which scorn and contempt and hate could hardly enough embitter reproach and invective. With that Book in hand, men and women, than whom there have never lived those more earnest and sincere, sat down in absorbed soul-devotion, to exercise their own thinking on the highest subjects, to decide each for himself what he could make of it. Those who have lived under a democracy, or a full civil, mental, and religious freedom like our own, well know the crudity, the perversity, the persistency, the conceits and idiosyncrasies into which individualism will run on civil, social, and political matters of private and public interest. How much more then will all exorbitant and eccentric, as well as all ingenious and rational, manifestations of like sort present themselves, when, instead of dealing with ballots, fashions, and social issues, men and women take in hand a book which, so to speak, they have just seized out of a descending cloud, as from the very hand of God. It was easy to claim the right of private judgment; but to learn how wisely to use it was quite a different matter. It was, however, in those earnest, keen studies, those brooding musings, those searching and subtle processes of speculation and dialectic argument engaged upon the Bible and upon institutional religion, that the wit, the wisdom, the logic, and the vigor of the understanding powers of people of the English race were sharpened to an edge and a toughness known elsewhere in no other. The aim of Prelatists, Conformists, and clerical and civil magistrates in religion, to bring all into a common belief and ritual, was hopeless from the start. It made no allowance for the rooted varieties and divergencies in nature, taste, sensibility, judgment, and conscience in individuals who were anything more than animated clods. How was it possible for one born and furnished in the inner man to be a Quaker, to be manufactured into a Churchman? It soon became very evident that bringing such a people as the English into accord in belief and observance under a hierarchical and parochial system would be no work of dictation or persuasion, but would require authority, force, penalties touching spiritual, mental, and bodily freedom, and resorting to fines, violence, and prisons.

The consumptive boy-king, Edward VI., dying when sixteen years of age, through his advisers, advanced the Reformation in some of its details beyond the stage at which it was left by his father, and put the work in the direction of further progress. But “Bloody Mary,” with her spectral Spanish consort, Philip II., overset what had by no means become a Protestant realm, and made it over to cardinal and pope. Nearly three hundred martyrs, including an archbishop and four bishops, perished at the stake, besides the uncounted victims in the dungeons. No one had suffered to the death for religion in the preceding reign. After her accession, Elizabeth stiffly held back from accepting even that stage of reform reached by Edward. In the Convocation of 1562, only a single vote, on a division, withstood the proposal to clear the ritual of nearly every ceremony objectionable to the Puritans. The two statutes of supremacy and uniformity, passed in the first year of the reign of Elizabeth, brought the English Church under that subjection to the temporal or civil jurisdiction which has continued to this day. The firmness, not to say the obstinacy, with which the Queen stood for her prerogative in this matter has been entailed upon Parliament; and the ecclesiastical Convocation has in vain struggled to assert independency of it. Elizabeth exhibited about an equal measure of zeal against Catholics and Puritans. She frankly gave out her resolution that if she should marry a Catholic prince, she should not allow him a private chapel in her palace. About two hundred Catholics suffered death in her reign.

An important episode in the development of Puritanism and Separatism in the English Church brings to our notice the share which different parties came to have in both those forms of dissent during a period of temporary exile on the Continent in the reigns of Henry VIII. and Mary, and afterward of Elizabeth. The results reached by the two classes of those exiles were manifested respectively in the colonization, first by Separatists, at Plymouth, and next by Nonconformists in the Massachusetts Bay, and by other New England colonists.

In the thirty-first year of Henry’s reign, 1539, while the monarch was vacillating between the old religion and the new, was enacted what was called “The Bloody Statute.” This was of “six articles.” These articles enforced the dogmas of Transubstantiation, of Communion in One Element, of the Celibacy of the Clergy, of the Vows of Chastity, of Private Masses, and of Auricular Confession. An infraction of these articles in act or speech or writing was to be punished either by burning, as heresy, or by execution, as felony. The articles were to be publicly read by all the clergy quarterly. To escape the operation of this statute, many of the clergy went to Geneva. Returning on the accession of Edward, they had to exile themselves again when Mary came to the throne, to venture home once more under Elizabeth, in 1559. As early as 1528, there had been a small but earnest religious fellowship of devout scholars in Cambridge, meeting for exercises of prayer and reading. Three of its members—Bilney, Latimer, and Bradford—were burned under Mary. Afterward Travers and Cartwright, both of them men of eminent ability and religious fervor, had found refuge in Geneva; and to them, on their return, is to be ascribed the strength and prevalence of the spirit of Puritanism in Cambridge. The fact that so many men of parts and scholarship and distinguished position were thus principal agents in the first working of Puritanism, should qualify the common notion that Nonconformity in England had its rise through obscure and ordinary men. Some of the most eminent Puritans, and even Separatists, were noted university men and scholars,—like Cartwright, Perkins, Ames, Bradshaw, and Jacob, the last being of Oxford. Robinson, the pastor at Leyden, has been pronounced to have been among the first men of his time in learning and comprehensiveness of mind.[447] It was really in the churches of the English exiles in Holland that the ultimate principles of Independency and Congregationalism were wrought out, to be asserted and so manfully stood for both in Old and in New England. Indeed, the essential principles of largest toleration and of equality, save in civil functions, had been established in Holland in 1572, before the coming of the English exiles. Almost as real as ideal was the recognition there of the one all-comprehensive church represented by a multitude of independent elements. Greenwood and his fellow-student at Cambridge,—Barrow, a layman,—joined the Separatists in 1586. The Separatists in England might well, as they did, complain to King James that he did not allow the same liberty to them, his own subjects, as was enjoyed by the French and Walloon churches in London and elsewhere in England.

On the accession of Queen Mary, who was crowned in 1553, more than eight hundred of the English Reformers took refuge on the Continent. Among them were five bishops, five deans, four archdeacons, fifty doctors of divinity and famous preachers, with nobles, merchants, traders, mechanics, etc. Among the “sundrie godly men” who went to Frankfort, the Lutheran system gained much influence. Those who found a refuge in Zurich and Geneva were more affected towards the Calvinistic. Soon after a flourishing and harmonious church, with the favor of the magistrates, had been established at Frankfort, dissension about matters of discipline and the use of the Prayer-book of King Edward VI., with or without a revision, was opened by some new-comers. The advice of Knox, Calvin, and others, which was asked, did not prevent an acrimonious strife, which ended in division.[448] Carrying back their differences to England, we find them contributing to deepen the alienation and the variances between Conformists, Nonconformists, and Separatists. The intimacy and sympathy with Reformers on the Continent naturally induced the exiles, even the English bishops who had been among them, to lay but little stress on the exclusive prerogatives of Episcopacy, including the theory of Apostolic Succession.

The English bishops who were most earnest in the early measures of reform,—such as Cranmer, Ridley, and Latimer,—realizing that in the minds of the common people the strong ties of association connected with the emblems, forms, and vestments of the repudiated Church of Rome would encourage lingering superstitions in their continued use, would have had them wholly set aside. Especially would they have had substituted in the chancels of churches tables instead of altars, as the latter would always be identified with the Mass. The people also associated the validity of clerical administrations with priestly garments. The starting point of the Puritan agitation and protest as to these matters may well be found, therefore, in the refusal of Dr. Hooper to wear the clerical vestments for his consecration as Bishop of Gloucester in 1550. Having exiled himself at Zurich during the latter part of the reign of Henry VIII., Hooper had become more thoroughly imbued with Reforming principles, and withstood the compromising compliances which some of the Continental Reformers yielded. Even Ridley insisted upon his putting on the vestments for his consecration; and after being imprisoned for his recusancy, he was forced to a partial concession. This matter of habits, tippets, caps, etc., may be viewed either as a bugbear, or as representative of a very serious principle.

In an early stage of the Puritan movement as working in the progress of the Reformation in England, it thus appeared that what, as represented in men and principles, might be called a third party, was to assert itself. As the event proved, in the struggle for the years following, and in the accomplished result still triumphant, this third party was to hold the balance of power. There was a general accord in dispensing with the Pope, renouncing his sway, and retaining within the realm the exercise of all ecclesiastical jurisdiction. A Romanizing party was still in strength, with its hopes temporarily reviving, its agencies, open and secret, on the alert, and its threats bold, if opportunity should favor the execution of them. This Romanizing faction may represent one extreme; the Puritans may represent another. A third, and for a considerable space of time weaker, as already stated, than either of them, intervened, to win at last the victory. In ridding themselves of Rome, the Puritans aimed to rid the Church of everything that had come into it from that source,—hierarchy, ceremonial, superstition, discipline, and assumption of ecclesiastical prerogative,—reducing the whole Church fabric to what they called gospel simplicity in rule and order; the apostolic model. This, as we have noticed, was to be sought full, sufficient, and authoritative in the Scriptures. But neither of the Reforming monarchs, nor the majority of the prelates successively exercising ecclesiastical jurisdiction, were prepared for this reversion to so-called first principles. They would not allow the sufficiency nor the sole authority of the Scriptural model; nor would they admit that all that was wrought into the hierarchy, the ceremonial, the institution, and the discipline of the English Church came into it through Popery, and had the taint or blemish of Popery. The English Church now represents the principles then argued out, maintained, and adopted. It followed a principle of selection, sometimes called compromise, to some seeming arbitrary, to others reasonable and right. It proceeded upon the recognition of an interval between the close of the ministry of the apostles and the rise of the Papacy, with its superstitious innovations and impositions, during which certain principles and usages in the government and ceremonial of the Church came into observance. Though these might not have the express warrant of Scripture, they were in nowise inconsistent with Scripture. They might claim to have the real warrant and approval of the apostles, because they were “primitive,” and might even be regarded as essential, as Hooker so earnestly tried to show, to the good order, dignity, and efficiency of the Church of Christ. With exceeding ability did the Puritan and the Church parties deal with this vital issue. The Puritans brought to it no less of keen acumen, learning, and logic than did their opponents. They thoroughly comprehended what the controversy involved. When, fifty years ago, substantially the same issue was under vigorous discussion in the Oxford or Tractarian agitation, so far were the “Puseyites,” so-called, from bringing into it any new matter, that the old arsenal was drawn upon largely for fresh use.

The Puritans held loyally to the fundamental position asserted by their sturdy champion. Cartwright, in his Admonition, etc.,—“The discipline of Christ’s Church that is necessary for all time is delivered by Christ, and set down in the Holy Scripture.” The objection, fatal in the eyes of the Puritans, to receiving, as authoritative, customs and vouchers of the so-called “Primitive” Church and of the Fathers, was that it compelled to the practice of a sort of eclecticism in choosing or rejecting, by individual preference or judgment, out of that mass of heterogeneous gathering which Milton scornfully described as “the drag-net of antiquity.” Though the pleaders on both sides of the controversy succeeded in showing that “patristic” authority, and the usages and institutions which might be traced out and verified in the dim past, were by no means in accord or harmony as to what was “primitive,” both parties seem to have consented to hide, gloss over, or palliate very much of the crudity, folly, superstition, conceit, and discordancy so abounding in the writings of the Fathers. Nothing could be more positive than the teaching of St. Augustine,—not drawn from the New Testament, in which the rite was for adults, but from the then universal practice of the Church,—that baptism was to be for infants, and by immersion. That Father taught that an unbaptized infant is forever lost; and that, besides baptism, the infant’s salvation depends upon its receiving the Eucharist. Yet this has not hindered but that the vast majority of Christians, Roman Catholic and Protestant, save a single sect, administer the rite by sprinkling infants. How, too, could the Prelatists approve a quotation from Tertullian:[449] “Where there are only three, and they laics, there is a church”?

In consistency with this their vital principle of the sole sufficiency of the Scripture institution and pattern for a church, the work of purification led its resolute asserters to press their protests and demands against not only such superstitions and innovations as could be traced directly to the Roman corruption and innovation, but to a more thorough expurgation. Incident to the rupture with the Papacy, and in the purpose to repel what seemed to be its vengeful and spiteful devices for recovering its sway, there was developed among the most impassioned of the Reformers an intense and scornful hate, a bitter heaping of invectives, objurgations, and all-wrathful epithets against the old Church as simply blasphemous,—the personification of Antichrist. So they were resolute to rid themselves of all “the marks of the Beast.” The scrapings, rags, tatters of Popery, and everything left of such remnants, especially provoked their contempt. Having adopted the conviction that the “Mass” was an idolatrous performance, all its paraphernalia, associated in the minds of the common people with it as a magical rite, the priestly and altar habits, the cap, the tippet, the rochet, etc., were denounced and condemned. The very word “priest,” with all the functionary and mediatorial offices going with it, was repudiated. The New Testament knew only of ministers, pastors, teachers. While, of course, recognizing that the apostles exercised special and peculiar prerogatives in planting the Church, the Puritans maintained that they had no successors in their full authority. The Christian Church assembly they found to be based upon and started from the Synagogue, with its free, popular methods, and not upon the Temple, with its altar, priests, and ritual. It is an interesting and significant fact, that while the Reformation in its ferment was working as if all the elements of Church institution were perfectly free for new combinations, the edition of the English Bible called Cranmer’s, in 1539, translated the word ecclesia by “congregation,” not “church,”—thus providing for that Puritan principle of the province of the laity. Doctrine, discipline, and ritual, or ceremony, being the natural order in which ecclesiastical affairs should receive regard, there being at first an accord among the Reformers as to doctrine, the other essentials engrossed all minds. The equality of the ministers of religion, all of whom were brethren, with no longer a master upon earth, struck at the very roots of all hierarchical order. What would have been simply natural in the objections of the Puritans when they saw that Rome was to leave the prelatical element of its system fastened upon the realm, was intensified by the assumption of dangerous and, as they believed, unchristian and unscriptural power and sway by a class of the clergy of lordly rank exercising functions in Church and State, and taking titles from their baronial tenure of land. These lordly prelates had recently been filling some of the highest administrative and executive offices under the Crown, and holding places in diplomacy. In an early stage of the Reformation, the mitred abbots had been dropped out of the upper house of Parliament. While they were in it, they, with the twenty-one “Lord Bishops,” preponderated over the temporal peers. As their exclusion weakened the ecclesiastical power in the government, the prelates who remained seemed to believe and to act as if it fell to them to represent and exercise the full prerogative of sway which had belonged to the old hierarchy. Very marked is the new phase assumed by the spirit and course of the Nonconformists under this changed aspect of the controversy. The Puritans had begun by objecting and protesting against certain usages; they now set themselves resolutely against the authority of those who enforced such usages. To a great extent, the Roman Catholic prelates on those parts of the Continent where the Reformation established itself, deserted their sees. This left the way clear in those places for a church polity independent of prelacy. The retention of their sees and functions by the English bishops, and the addition to their number by the consecration of others as selected by the Crown, thus made the struggle which the Puritans maintained in England quite unlike that of their sympathizers on the Continent. The issue thus raised on the single question of the Divine right and the apostolic authority and succession of bishops was continuously in agitation through the whole contention maintained by Dissenters. In other elements of it, the controversy exhibited changing phases, as the process of the reform seemed at intervals to be advanced or impeded, while the kingdom, as we have noted, was pulsating between the old and the new régime,—as Henry VIII. and his three children, in their succession to his throne, sought to modify, to arrest, or to limit it. The distribution among the people of the Scriptures in the English tongue was favored and brought about by Thomas Cromwell and Cranmer. The privilege, however, was soon revoked, as the people were thus helped to take the matter of religion into their own hands. The mother tongue was first used in worship with the translated litany in 1542, which was revised in 1549. The new prayer-book, canons, and homilies were brought into use. It was by royal authority, and not either by Convocation or Parliament, that the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion were imposed. On Elizabeth’s accession there were nine thousand four hundred priests in England. About two hundred of these abandoned their posts rather than comply with the conditions exacted by the stage in innovation already reached. The more pronounced champions of the Church of England are earnest in pleading that the rupture with Rome was not the act of the King, but of what might be called the Church itself. The as yet unreformed bishops, we are told, had in Convocation, in 1531, denied the Papal supremacy; then Parliament, the universities, the cathedral bodies, and the monastic societies had confirmed the denial. But on all these points there are still open and contested questions of fact and argument not requiring discussion here.

Another radical question concerned the rights and province of the laity in all that entered into the institutional part of religion, and the oversight and administration of discipline in religious assemblies. There certainly could be no complaint that lay or civil power as represented by the monarch had not exhibited sufficient potency in fettering the ecclesiastical or clerical usurpation. An already quoted Act in the twenty-sixth year of Henry’s reign affirmed that “whatsoever his Majesty should enjoin in matters of religion should be obeyed by all his subjects.” The Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity in the first year of Elizabeth made the Church subordinate to, and dependent upon, the civil power. Thus ecclesiastical authority was restrained by the prerogative of the Crown, while ceremonial and discipline, as approved by the monarch, were left at the dictation of Parliament.

But this substitution of the lay power as represented by King or Queen and the Houses of Parliament for the Papal sway, by no means satisfied the Puritan idea and conviction as to the rightful claims of the laity in their membership of the reconstructed Church. Barrow described in the following sharp sentence the summary way of proceeding so far as the laity were concerned: “All these people, with all their manners, were in one day, with the blast of Queen Elizabeth’s trumpet, of ignorant Papists and gross idolaters, made faithful Christians and true professors.” It was said that the people, divided and classed in local territorial parishes, were there treated like sheep in folds. Illiterate, debauched, incompetent, “dumb” ministers or priests assumed the pastorate in a most promiscuous way over these flocks. Membership in the Church came through infancy in baptism. The Puritans wished to sort out the draught of the Gospel net, which gathered of every kind. They claimed that the laity should themselves be parties in the administration of religion, in testing and approving discipline. They believed, too, that ministers should be supported by their congregations, and that the tithes and the landed privileges of the clergy were bribes and lures to them, making them independent and autocratical. Church lands and endowments, they insisted, should be sequestered, as had been the abbeys, nunneries, and monasteries. As soon as Separatist assemblies were associated in England or among the exiles on the Continent, altercations and divisions occurred among them as to the functions and the powers of the eldership, the responsibility and the authority of pastor and covenanted members in discipline.

Our space will admit here of only a brief recognition, conformed however to its slight intrinsic importance, of an element entering into the Puritan agitation, which at the time introduced into it a glow of excitement and a marvellously effective engagement of popular sympathy. The controversy between the Puritans and the Prelatists had in the main been pursued, however passionately, yet in a most grave and serious spirit, with a profound sense of the dignity and solemnity of its themes and interests. But from the time and occasion when Aristophanes tossed the grotesque trifling of his Clouds around the sage and lofty Socrates, down to this day, when Mr. Punch finds a weekly condiment of mischief and fun for the people of England in their own doings and in their treatment by their governors, it would seem as if no subject of human interest, however exalted its moment, could escape the test of satire, sarcasm, and caricature. Experimental ventures of this sort are naturally ephemeral, but they concentrate their venom or their disdain upon their shrinking victims. Some of Ben Jonson’s plays and Butler’s Hudibras have now alone a currency, and that a by no means extended one, out of a vast mass of the printed ridicule which was turned upon the Puritans. But the matter now in hand is the skill and jollity with which one or more Puritans, with the gift of the comic in his stern make-up, plied that keen blade in his own cause. Erasmus, though he never broke from the communion of the Papal Church, engaged the most stinging power of satire and sarcasm, not only against mean and humble monks, but against all the ranks of the hierarchy, not sparing the loftiest. Helped out with Holbein’s cuts, Erasmus’s Encomium of Folly drew roars of mirth and glee from those who winced under its mocking exposures. Even the grave Beza, in Geneva, tried his hand in this trifling. But the venture of this sort which cunningly and adroitly intruded itself at a peculiarly critical phase of the Puritan agitation, was of the most daring and rasping character. Under the happily chosen pseudonym of “Martin Mar-Prelate,” there appeared in rapid succession, during seven months of the years 1588 and 1589, the same number of little, rudely printed tracts, the products of ambulatory presses, which engaged the full power of satire, caricature, and sarcasm, with fun and rollicking, invective and bitter reproach and exposure against the hierarchy, especially against four of the most odious of the bishops. The daring spirit of these productions was well matched by the devices of caution and secrecy under which they were put in print, and in the sly methods by which they were circulated, to be caught up, concealed, and revelled over by thousands who would find keen enjoyment in them, as in the partaking of the sweets of stolen food and waters. They may be said to have stopped only at the very edge of ribaldry, indecency, and even blasphemy. But they were free and trenchant, coarse and virulent. As such, they testify to the smart under the provocation of which they were written, and to the scorn and contempt entertained for the men and measures to which were committed for the time the transcendent interests of religion and piety. The more dignified and serious of the Puritans, like Greenham and Cartwright, frowned upon and repudiated these weapons of bitter gibe and contumely. But there was a constituency from which they received the heartiest welcome, and, as is usual in such cases, their circulation and efficiency were vastly multiplied by equally bitter and malignant replies to them from the pens or from the instigation of bishops. The whole detective force of the kingdom was put on the search for the writers and the printers. So adroit and cunning was the secret of their authorship and production at the time, that up to this day it has not been positively disclosed. Never has the investigation been so keenly or intelligently pressed for clearing the mystery investing the Martin Mar-Prelate tracts as by the indefatigable researches and the sharpened inquisition of Dr. Dexter. In his Congregationalism he gives his readers an exhaustive sketch and summary, in detail and analysis, of all the facts and documents. His conclusion, which cannot be hopefully contested or invalidated, is that they were written by Barrow, a prisoner in the Fleet, and carried through the press by the agency of Penry. There is abundant evidence in the appearance, publication, and circulation of tracts known to have come from the hands of imprisoned Puritans, that the bars of jails and dungeons offered no sufficient barriers to prevent the secret intercourse and interchange of intelligence between those whom they enclosed and friends outside, who dared all risks in their zeal and fidelity.

* * * * *

We must now close this narration of the issues raised in the Puritan controversy, whether by Nonconformists in the Church or by Separatists withdrawing from it, that we may note the concentration of forces and witnesses which were drawn together in assemblies or fellowships prepared in Old England to transfer and establish their principles in New England. Many of the clergy whose views and sympathies were warmly engaged in the further work of reform and purification within the Church, and who at the same time were moderate and conciliatory in their spirit, contrived to remain in their parochial fields, perhaps in this way accomplishing the most for all that was reasonable and good in the cause which they had at heart. When occasionally molested or challenged, they might contrive to make their peace. But the crisis and its demands called—as has always been the case in such intense agitations of religious passions—for patient, steadfast, and resolute witnesses in suffering, for those who should be hounded and tracked by judicial processes, who should be deprived of subsistence and liberty, and be ready not only for being hidden away in prisons or exiled beyond the seas, but for public execution as martyrs. The emergency of time and occasion found such as these; and it was of such as these that there were men and women in training for wilderness work on this soil. And the combination of materials and persons was precisely such as would meet the exactions of such an enterprise. There were university men, scholars, doctors in divinity, practised disputants in their cherished lore, and with gifts of zeal, fervor, and tender eloquence in discourse and prayer. There were gentry likewise,—men and women lifted in the social scale, with furnishings of mind and worldly goods. To these were joined, in a fellowship which equalized many distinctions, yeomen, small traders, artisans, and some of every place and grade, save the low or mean or reckless, in the make-up of the population of the realm. Governor Bradford says that the first Separatist or Independent Church in England was that of which John Rough, the minister, and Cuthbert Symson, the deacon, were burned alive by Bonner, in the reign of Queen Mary. The laborious and faithful pages of Dr. Dexter, in his Congregationalism, must be closely studied for the results of the marvellous diligence and keen research by which he has traced every vestige, memorial, and testimony that can throw light on the little assemblies of those outlawed Puritans. It is a curious and engaging occupation in our peaceful and lethargic times of religious ease, to scan the make-up, the spirit, and methods of those humble assemblies in their lurking-places, private houses, barns, or the open fields, frequently changing their appointments under risks from spies and tipstaves, with their secret code of signals for communicating intelligence. Their religious exercises were of the intensest earnestness, and above all things stimulating. Their conferences about order and discipline bristled with individualisms and scruples. Many of these assemblies might soon resolve themselves into constituencies of single members. There was scarce one of those assemblies, either in England or in exile on the Continent, that did not part into two or three. There was a stern necessity which compelled variance and dissension among the members. They had in hand the Bible, and each was trying what he could draw out of it, as an oracle and a rule. They had to devise, discuss, and if possible agree upon and enforce ways of church order and discipline, a form of worship, rules of initiation into church membership, of suspension, expulsion, and restoration. It was brain work, heart work, and soul work with them. It would be difficult to reduce to any exact statements the numbers of persons, or even of what may in a loose sense be called assemblies, of Nonconformists or Separatists who remained in England, or who were in refuge on the Continent at the period just preceding the colonization of New England. What was called the Millenary Petition, which was presented to James I., as he came in from Scotland, was claimed to represent at least eight hundred Nonconforming ministers.

The way is now open for connecting the principles and fortunes of the earnest and proscribed class of religious men, whose course has been thus traced in England and Holland, with the enterprise of colonization in New England. It is but reasonable to suppose that, dating from the time and the incident referred to in the opening of this chapter, such an enterprise was latent in conception or desire in the thoughts of many as a possible alternative for the near future. A resolve or purpose or effort of such a nature as this involves much brooding over by individuals, much private communing, balancing of circumstances, conditions, gains, and losses, and an estimate of means and resources, with an eye towards allowance by a governmental or noble patronage, or at least to security in the venture. We have but fragmentary and scattered information as to all these preliminaries to the emigration. We must trace them backward from the completion to the initiation of the enterprise.

And here is the point at which we should define to ourselves, as intelligently and fairly as we can from our abounding authentic sources of information, precisely what was the influence or agency of religion in the first emigration to New England. We are familiar with the oft-reiterated and positive statement, that the enterprise would neither have been undertaken, nor persisted in, nor led on to success, had not religion furnished its mainspring, its guiding motive, and the end aimed at, to be in degree realized.

We may safely commit ourselves to these assertions, that religion was the master-motive and object of the most earnest and ablest leaders of the emigration; that they felt this motive more deeply and with more of singleness of purpose than they always avowed, as their circumstances compelled them to take into view sublunary objects of trade and subsistence which would engage to them needful help and resources; and that some of these secondary objects very soon qualified and impaired the paramount importance of the primary one. I am led to make this allowance of exception as to the occasional reserve in the avowal of an exclusively religious motive, because of a fact which must impress the careful student of their history and fortunes for the first hundred years. That fact is, that in multitudes of occasional utterances, sermons, journals, and historical sketches, many of the descendants of the first comers laid more exclusive and emphatic stress upon the prime agency of religion in the enterprise than did the first movers in it. When ministers and magistrates in after years uttered their frequent and sombre laments over the degeneracy of the times, the decay of zeal and godliness, and the falling from the first love, the refrain always was found in extolling the one, single, supreme aim of the fathers as that of pure piety. The pages of Cotton Mather’s Magnalia and of his tracts of memorial, rebuke, and exhortation, and the Century Sermon of Foxcroft, minister of the First Church, are specimens of masses of such matter in our old cabinets pitched in that tone. Nor need we conclude that, as a general rule, the most fervent of those laments or the most positive of those statements were exaggerated. Only what such writers and speakers recognized as the degeneracy of their own later times, must be traced to seeds and agencies which came in with the most select fellowship of the fathers themselves. We cannot go so far as to claim that the whole aim, the all-including purpose of every member, or of even of a majority of the colonists, was religion, after the pattern of that of the leaders, or of any style of religion. But we have to conclude that the smaller the number of those among whom we concentrate the religious fervor in its supreme sway, the more intensified must have been its power to have enabled them, as it did, to give direction to the whole enterprise. And this was not only true at the first, but proportionately so as the original centre of that enterprise for a long period sent off its radii successively to new settlements in the woods. There were always found men and women enough to copy the original pattern and to keep the motive force in action. Sir Henry Maine does not state the whole of the truth when he writes thus: “The earliest English emigrants to North America, who belonged principally to the class of yeomanry, organized themselves in village communities for purposes of cultivation.”[450]

The stream of exile to New England in the interest of religion was first parted into one small and one large rill, which, however, soon flowed together and assimilated, as it appeared that they started substantially from the same source, with similar elements, and found more that was congenial than discordant in their qualities. The company of exiles whom residence in Holland, with its attendant influences and results, had confirmed and stiffened in their original principles of rigid Separatism, had the start by nearly a decade of years in transferring themselves to Plymouth. Their fortunes are traced in the next chapter.

The colonists in Massachusetts Bay, and those who, in substantial accord with them, struck into several other settlements in the wilderness of New England, were mainly those who in the land of their birth had remained steadfast to their principles of Nonconformity, and who had borne the penalties of them when avowed and put in practice. They had not turned in disdain and temper from the institution which they called their “mother church.” Their divided relation to it they regarded as rather caused by such harsh conditions as excluded them from its privileges than by any wilfulness or hostility of their own. They professed that they still clung to its breast, and wished to be nourished from it. It was not strange, however, that partial alienation should, under favoring opportunities, widen and stiffen into seeming antagonism to it. They regarded themselves as having been subjected to pains and penalties because of their protest against objectionable and harmful, as well as unscriptural, exactions in its discipline and ceremonial. So they were content to be known as Nonconformists, but repelled the charge of being Separatists. They kept alive a lingering tenderness, in a reminder of their early membership and later disturbed affiliation with it. Some few of the sterner spirits among them—and Roger Williams was such, as he appeared here in his youth—demanded a penitential avowal of sin from Winthrop’s company, on account of their having once been in fellowship with the English Church. An agitation also arose upon the question whether the members of the Boston Church, who on visits to the old home occasionally conformed, should not be put under discipline on their return here. Happily the dispute was disposed of by forbearance and charity.

Still, while there was a slight manifestation at first of an antipathy or a jealousy on the part of the Nonconformists at the Bay of being in any way confounded with the Separatists at Plymouth, there never was a breach or even a controversy, beyond that of a friendly discussion, between them; and there is something well-nigh amusing, as well as interesting, in following the quaint narration[451] of the establishment of immediate harmony and accord between their respective church ways. Endicott’s little company at Salem, heralding the great emigration to the Bay, “entered into church estate” in August, 1629, having sought what we should now call the advice, help, and sympathy of their Plymouth brethren. This fellowship was extended through Governor Bradford and other delegates, and the example was afterward followed in like recognition of other churches. The covenanted members of the Salem Church ordained their pastor and teacher, notwithstanding that they had previously been under the hands of a bishop. It soon appeared, however, that the church was to be emphatically Nonconformist. Two brothers Brown, at Salem, set up separate worship by the Common Prayer. On being “convented” before the Governor, his Council and the ministers, and accusing the church of Separatism, they were told that the members did not wish to be Separatists, but were simply Nonconformists with the corruptions of the Church; and that having suffered much for their principles, and being now in a free place, they were determined to be rid of Common Prayer and ceremonial.[452]

The First Boston Church, in 1630, was organized under its covenant, with its appointed and ordained teacher, ruling elder, and deacons. In ten years after the landing at Plymouth there were five churches after this pattern, and in twenty years thirty-five, in New England.

This instantaneous abandonment, as it may be called, of everything in the institution of a church, followed by an immediate disuse of everything in ceremonial and worship in the English usage which the Nonconformists had scrupled at home, is of itself very suggestive, even in the first aspect of it. Followed into detail, it presents some surprises and very rich instruction. In full result, it exhibits to us principles and institutions in the highest interests of religion, in civil, social, and domestic life, which had been repudiated and put under severe penalties in England, crossing the ocean to plant themselves in a wilderness for the training and guidance of successive generations of men and women in freedom, virtue, piety, worldly thrift, and every form of prosperity. There must have been nobleness in those principles, as well as in the men and women who suffered for them, put them on trial, and led them to triumph.

The work of preference, of conviction and conscience, had been wrought in behalf of those principles, in old English homes and byways, in humble conventicles, in fireside and wayside musings and conferences. Enough persons had been brought to be of one mind, purpose, and resolve, in the spirit of a determined heroism, to make a beginning of such a sort that it would be more than half of the accomplished work. There may have been debates, warm variances, hesitations, and conciliatory methods used among those who entered into covenant as the First Church of Boston. If there were such, we know nothing of them. There is no surviving record or intimation of them. The pattern and model which the exiled colonists followed, needed no study or shaping on the wilderness soil. It was an old-home product. What might seem to be extemporized work was prepared work. It was as if they had brought over timbers cut in their native woods all framed and matched for setting up in their transferred home. Their initiated teachers had been ordained by Episcopal hands. But this was neither help nor hindrance. When they needed more and new ones, they had a method of qualifying them. Surplice, tippet, cap, rochet, and prayer-book are not missed or mourned over. Simply not a word is said about them. The fabric which they set up was of a new and peculiar style. No! They would not have owned it to be new; they regarded it as the oldest, because the original,—that which was established by the first generation of the disciples of Jesus Christ.

One hundred university men from the grand old nooks and shrines of consecrated learning in Old England were the medium for the “Gospel work” in New England, till it could supply its needs from its own well-provided resources. But there was not a prelate among them. English magistrates of various grades and authority, governors, judges, spies, collectors, and commissionaries were here to represent the mother country, till she became so stingy that we were forced to wean ourselves from her; but never did an English bishop as a functionary set foot on the soil of what is now the territory of the United States. And when after our Revolution the virtue which comes from episcopal hands was communicated to the possessors of it here, it had parted with what was most offensive or objectionable in its claim or efficacy to the Old and the New English Puritans. Town and rural parishes, colleges and schools, had the faithful services of that hundred of university men. For a long time, the books that were imported here were almost exclusively the Puritan literature of the old home, and had a perceptible influence in stiffening, rather than relaxing, the stern spirit of Dissent, and throwing new vitality into the hard work which it had to do in the wilderness. One consideration of the highest practical weight is presented to us in the fact that the Puritanism of New England originated and fostered the free and radically working instrumentalities and forces which neutralized its own errors, restrained its own bigotry and severity, and compelled it to develop from its own best elements something better than itself. There were other plantations on this virgin soil, of which religion was in no sense the master-impulse, and others still in which the mother church sought to direct the movement. New England was never affected for evil or for good by them. But if over the whole land, in radiations or percolations of influence, the leaven of any one section of the country has wrought in the whole of it, it is that of the New England Puritanism.

* * * * *

CRITICAL ESSAY ON THE SOURCES OF INFORMATION.

THE original authorities and sources of information, in manuscript and print, relating to the agitations and controversies arising within the real or assumed membership of the Church of England after the Reformation, are to be distinguished into two great classes,—those of a public character, as records of the proceedings of government, of the courts, and of all bodies or individuals in office charged with authority; and those of a private nature, coming from voluntary bodies, or from single members of them, or from writers and authors whose works were published after the usual method, or sent forth and circulated surreptitiously. Both these classes of original authorities, constituting together an enormous mass of an infinitely varied elementary composition, are alike widely scattered, and, so far as they have not been gathered into local repositories, could be directly consulted only by one whose travel, investigation, and research were of the most extended comprehensiveness. England, Holland, and Switzerland have in keeping contemporary records and documents relating to minute and trivial, or to most important and vital, points in one or another stage, or concerning one or another prime party in the controversy. Perhaps, even after all the keen investigation and diligent toil of the most recent inquisitors, such original papers have not been exhaustively detected and examined. But one who is familiar with the stores already reported to us, unless his taste and interest in them run to morbidness, will hardly desire more of them. It is certain that whatever obscurity may still invest any incidental point in the controversy, the matter is of such comparatively slight importance, that the substance and details of any information as to persons or events which may be lacking to us would hardly qualify the general narratives of history.

The expense, diligence, and intelligent illustration which within the last thirty or forty years have been devoted to the collection and arrangement and calendaring of such masses of the State and other public papers of Great Britain, have aided as well as prompted the researches of those who have been zealous to trace out with fidelity and accuracy every stage, and the character and course of each one, lofty or obscure, as an actor in the larger and the lesser bearings of the struggle of Nonconformity and Dissent. As a general statement, it may be affirmed that the developments and the more full and minute information concerning the substance and phases of early Puritanism, as they have been studied in the mass of accumulated documents, have set forth the controversy in a dignity of interest and in a disclosure of its vital relations to all theories of civil government, church establishments, and the institutional administration of religion, far more fully and in a much more comprehensive view than was recognized by contemporary actors.

There are two extensive and exceedingly rich collections of tracts, books, and manuscript documents of a most varied character well-preserved and easily accessible in London, which furnish well-nigh inexhaustible materials for the study of the Puritan, the Nonconformist, and the Separatist movements in all their phases. One of these is in the British Museum, the other in Dr. Williams’s Library. In the times with which we are now concerned, the motive, perhaps but vaguely comprehended by himself, which led George Thomason to gather his marvellous collection, now in the British Museum, would have been called a providential prompting. He was a modest man in private life, and, so far as we know, took no part in public agitations. As a Royalist bookseller, at “The Rose and Crown, in St. Paul’s Churchyard,” he had opportunities favoring him in the scheme which he undertook. It was in 1641 that he began a laborious enterprise, and one not without very serious risks to himself, which he continued to pursue till just before his death in 1666. This was to gather up, preserve, and bind in volumes,—though without any system or order of arrangement except chronological,—a copy of each of the publications in tract, or pamphlet, or fly-leaf form which appeared from the press, licensed or surreptitiously printed, during a period teeming with the issue, like the dropping of forest leaves, of a most extraordinary series of ephemeral works, quickened with all the vitality of those times. Though he began his collection in 1641, he anticipated that date by gathering similar publications previous to it. He copied during Cromwell’s time nearly a hundred manuscripts, mainly “on the King’s side, which no man durst venture to publish here without the danger of his ruin.” He took pains to write upon most of the publications the date of its appearance, and when anonymous, the name of its author if he could ascertain it. Besides the risks of fire and the burden of such a mass of materials filling his house from cellar to garret, this zealous collector exposed himself to severe penalties from the authorities on either side of the great civil and religious conflict. He was compelled once at least to remove his collection to a safe hiding-place. It fills now 2,220 volumes, and counts to 34,000 separate publications, from folio downward. It is difficult to say what may not be found there, and nearly as difficult to find exactly what one wishes. After various exposures through which the collection passed safely, it now rests in the British Museum, under the general title of the “King’s Pamphlets,” having been purchased and presented by King George III. in 1762, at a cost of £300. A mine of most curious matter is there ready for search on every subject, serious or comic, sacred or secular, illustrative of high and low life during the period. Probably the two most zealous delvers in that mine for its best uses have been Professor Masson, for the purpose of The Life of John Milton: narrated in connexion with the Political, Ecclesiastical, and Literary History of his Time, in six volumes; and Dr. H. M. Dexter, in his Congregationalism of the Last Three Hundred Years, etc. Both authors have turned these pamphlets to the best account in clearing obscurities or filling gaps in the history or writings of men prominent in the cause of Nonconformity.

The other comprehensive and extensive collection of pamphlets, volumes, and original papers for illustrating the whole history of Puritanism and Dissent, is in what is known as Dr. Williams’s Library, in London. Dr. Daniel Williams, an eminent Presbyterian divine, possessed of means, had purchased the library of the famous Dr. William Bates. Adding to it from his own resources, he founded in 1716 the library which bears his name, committing it, with a sum of money for a building (to which additions were made by a subscription), to the hands of trustees in succession. The library edifice—long standing in Red-Cross Street, now removed to Grafton Street—has been ever since a favorite place for the assembling of meetings and committees in the Dissenting interest (of late years Presbyterians and Unitarians acceding to their trust), for the transaction of business, for preparing addresses to successive sovereigns, and managing their cause in Parliament. Those who in former years have sat in one of the ancient chairs of the library in Red-Cross Street have hardly escaped feeling profoundly the influence of the place and of its associations,—the walls hung with the portraits of venerable divines and scholars learned in all ancient lore; the cabinets filled with laboriously wrought manuscripts, histories, diaries, and letters, some of them dating in the first half of the sixteenth century; the crowded shelves of folios and smaller tractates composed of brain-work and patient toil, without the facilities of modern research and study, and the many relics and memorials connected with the daily ministerial and domestic life of men of self-denying and honorable service. Harvard College holds and administers a fund of over sixteen thousand dollars, left by Dr. Williams in 1711, as a trust for the benefit of the aborigines.

Here is the fitting place for appropriate and most grateful mention of the results of a labor of devoted zeal and love given by the Rev. Henry Martyn Dexter, D.D., to the historic memorial of a cause of which he inherits the full spirit, and in the service of which he has spent his mature life. It may safely be said that not a single person, at least of those born on the soil of New England, of the lineage of the Fathers has so “magnified” their cause and work as he has done. Holding with such a rooted conviction, as is his, that the Congregational polity of the Christian Church has the warrant of Scripture and of the Primitive Church, and that it best serves the sacred interests of soul-freedom and of associated religion in its institutions, works, and influence, the earliest witnesses, confessors, and martyrs in its behalf have seemed to him worthy of the most lavish labor for their commemoration. Repeatedly has he crossed the seas and plied his most diligent scrutiny of tracing and searching, as he got the scent of some tract or record in its hiding-place of private cabinet or dim old parchment. With hardly eye or thought for the usual attractions of foreign travel, his valuable leisure has been spent in following any clew which promised him even the slightest aid to clearing an obscure point, or setting right a disputed fact, or completing our information on any serious matter relating to the early history of what is now represented by Congregationalism. The Introduction to his volume, The Congregationalism of the last Three Hundred Years, as seen in its Literature, with Special Reference to Certain Recondite, Neglected, or Disputed Passages,[453] tells in a vigorous and hearty tone what was his aim, his course, and its method.

The principal text of his volume disposes the treatment of his subject under twelve lectures, delivered by the author in the Theological Seminary at Andover, in 1876-1879. This text is elaborately illustrated by notes, with references and extracts, largely drawn from the recondite sources and the depositories already referred to. The author is careful to authenticate all his statements from prime authorities; and where obscurity or conflict of views or of evidence adduced makes it necessary, his patience and candor give weight to his judgment or decision. The extraordinary and unique element of his work is presented in his Collections towards a Bibliography of Congregationalism, which with the Index to its titles covers more than three hundred royal octavo pages, in close type. This contains an enumeration of 7,250 titles of publications, from folios down to a few leaves, dating between the years 1546 and 1879, which have even the slightest relation in contents, authorship, or purpose with the most comprehensive bearings of his subject in its historical development.

I have mentioned this elaborate work among the primary, instead of classing it with the secondary, sources of information on the history of Nonconformity, because it is something more than a link between the two. It takes its flavor from the past. Its abounding extracts from the quaint writings, and its portraitures and relations of the experiences, of the old-time worthies transfer us to their presence, make us sharers of their buffeted fortunes and listeners to their living speech. The work may be regarded as a summary of monumental memorials, more frank and true than are such generally on stone or brass of those who fought a good fight and trusted in promises.

The natural desire of a dispassionate reader of the original documents dealing with the heats of the Puritan controversy, or pursuing it in the pages of historians who may relate it either with a partisan or an impartial spirit, is that he might have before him the words and impressions of some contemporary or observer of profound wisdom and of well-balanced judgment, as he viewed this turmoil of affairs. The nearest approach made to the gratification of this wish is found in two brief but very comprehensive essays from the pen of the great Lord Bacon, as with an evident serenity and poise of spirit he studied the scenes before him, and the characters, aims, excesses, and shortcomings of the various actors, monarchs, prelates, zealots, enthusiasts, and earnest, however ill-judging, extremists on either side. The first of these essays in publication, whenever it may have been written, is entitled Certain Considerations touching the better Pacification and Edification of the Church of England. The date of its imprint is 1640. But in this reference is made, in the address to King James, to an earlier essay, which appeared anonymously with the imprint of 1641, under the title of An Advertisement touching the Controversies of the Church of England. This was evidently written in the time of Elizabeth. In it, Bacon sagaciously traces the origin of the controversy to four main springs,—namely, the offering and the accepting occasions for variance; the extending and multiplying them; passionate and unbrotherly proceedings on both parts, and the recourse on either side to a stiffer union among its members, heightening the distraction. His most severe stricture is upon the Church, for its harsh measures, as the strife advanced, in enforcing with penalties what had previously been allowed to be matters of indifference, thus driving some discontents into a banded sect. He regards it as a grave error that some of the English Church zealots had spoken contemptuously of foreign Protestant Churches. Though Bacon affirms that he is himself no party to the strife, and aims only for an impartial arbitration in it, his judgment and sympathy evidently incline him to the Puritan side as against the bishops. A fair-minded Puritan of the time might well have contented himself with this wise man’s statement of his side and cause. Of the second of these essays, it being addressed to King James on his accession, it may be said that it would be difficult to find any piece of writing of equal compass, on the themes with which it deals, more crowded with sound, solid good sense, better balanced in its allowances and limitations, more moderate, judicious, and practical in its principles, or more likely to harmonize all reasonable differences, and to repress and discountenance extreme and perverse individualisms. Bacon justifies innovations and reconstructions. He tells the King that the opening of his reign is the opportune time for making them. He protests against modelling all reformation after one pattern. Then he utters words of eminent wisdom about the government of bishops, about the liturgy, ceremonies, and subscription, about a preaching ministry, the abuse of excommunication, and about non-residence, pluralities, and the maintenance of the ministry. Here, again, moderate men of both parties might well have been content with the great philosopher’s judgment.

DOCUMENTS IN FOREIGN REPOSITORIES.—In connection with the exile of so many prelates, clergy, and other members of the English Church on the accession of Queen Mary in 1553, the relations established between them and many eminent Reformers on the Continent resulted in the production of a large number of documents of the highest historical authenticity and value, as throwing light upon the aims and methods of the Puritans in England during the whole period from 1553 to 1602. Several of these exiles settled at Zurich, and there formed intimate friendships with many magistrates and ministers of the Reformed religion. On the return of the exiles, on the accession of Elizabeth, many of them kept up a constant correspondence with their friends. The letters have been preserved in the archives of Zurich, and it has been only within the last forty years that the wealth of information in them has been revealed in England. There are nearly two hundred folio volumes of these letters. Strype and Burnet had obtained copies of some of them, which they put to use in their histories.[454] A descendant of one of the Swiss correspondents had before 1788 copied eighteen thousand of the letters with his own hand, arranged chronologically. In 1845 and 1846, “The Parker Society” in England published,[455] in four octavo volumes, a large number of these “Zurich Letters,” translated and carefully edited, with annotations. The general titles are The Zurich Letters, comprising the Correspondence of Several English Bishops, and Others, with Some of the Helvetian Reformers, during the reigns of Henry VIII., Edward VI., and Queens Mary and Elizabeth. In the collection are several letters to royal personages. One of these, by Rodolph Gualter, who in his youth had resided at Oxford, to Queen Elizabeth, dated Zurich, Jan. 16, 1559, is a long epistle, written in a dignified, courteous and earnest strain, counselling the Queen to have two things in her supreme regard: “First, that every reformation of the Church and of religion be conducted agreeably to the Word of God;” and second, that she restrain her counsellors from hindering or reversing the good work. Better than from the best-digested pages of history, one may learn from these fresh and admirable letters, down to the most minute detail and incident, the cross-workings, the entanglements, the progressive advance, the obstructions, the retrograde and opposing forces and influences connected with the oscillations of the reform in England. Nowhere else in our abounding literature on the subject are the Puritans and Nonconformists presented more faithfully and intelligently in their conscientious, scrupulous, and certainly well-meant efforts, within the Church itself, to have its institutions, ceremonial, and discipline disposed after a pattern which should have regard equally to discountenance the impositions and superstitions of the Papal system, which had been nominally renounced, and to make the purified Church a power to advance the best interests of true religion. The intelligent American visitor to Zurich, if his attention is drawn to this highly valued and admirably arranged collection in its library, can hardly fail of the impression that he has before him most sincere evidences of the depth of thought and the nobleness of spirit of men who were working out the principles of wisdom and righteousness.

Considering the influence exerted upon some of the English Puritans by their residence on the Continent, and their frequent reference afterward to the different ecclesiastical system and discipline adopted there, an interesting phase of the controversy is presented in the two following works. At the opening of the eighteenth century, Dr. William Nichols,—as he says, at the prompting of others, though, it was intimated, of his own motion,—wrote a Defence of the Doctrine and Discipline of the Church of England, addressed especially to foreign divines and churches. This was replied to by James Peirce in his Vindication of the Dissenters; or, an Appeal to Foreign Divines, Professors, and all other Learned Men of the Reformed Religion. In this volume, originally written and published in Latin, afterward translated by the author and published in English, there is in the main a thorough and candid review of the rise and the conduct of the cause of Nonconformity, and a searching examination of the principles of the Church of England. Peirce quotes with care the original authorities, and puts them to a good use. He follows the history into the fortunes of those who had taken refuge and established their religion in New England, and while he says he differs with Mr. Cotton, of Boston, “in many of his opinions,” defends him and all the “Independents” from the charge of being “Brownists.”

The historians Bancroft and Motley and Dr. H. M. Dexter have, after diligent research in Holland, discovered many little scraps of curious information relating to the residence, mode of life, social and domestic experiences, and way of conducting their religious affairs, of the earliest English exiles there associated in churches and assemblies. These slight memorials indicate that the Puritans and Separatists in refuge there, though their circumstances were modest, if not obscure, were respected for their characters and for the sincerity of their purposes. They found conveniences from the presses in Holland for putting into print their own fertile productions in the setting forth of their principles, while the busy commerce between the ports of Holland and those of England and Scotland furnished ready means for conveying these publications, as well as private letters, secretly and surreptitiously if it were necessary, to the safe hands of friends. Nor, if the occasion was urgent, would one of these refugees hesitate, taking in his hands the risk of his liberty or life, to pass the seas on some secret errand in his own behalf or in the interest of his fellows. Such scraps of information from Dutch repositories as the explorers above named have gathered have all been duly valued as filling gaps in our previous knowledge, or clearing up some obscure passages. The results have been so gratefully recognized and at once incorporated in the many modern rehearsals of the old history, that they need not be referred to more specifically here.[456]

ENGLISH AUTHORITIES.—All such periods of intense controversy and struggle upon themes of the highest concern to man, as that of the internal commotions in England immediately following and consequent upon the Reformation, leave behind them some memorial in literature of so conspicuous and rare an excellence as to insure perpetual freshness, and to acquire interest and attractions even beyond that of the particular subject with which it deals. When the Press in such periods is pouring its outflow of ephemeral tracts and books, vigorous, intense, effective, as they may be for a temporary end or for the circle of a sect or party, genius or scholarly culture, or a philosophical and comprehensive spirit, penetrating below the surface and rising above the details of a controversy, will engage itself upon the product of what we call an immortal work. Such a work[457] is that which came from the pen of “the judicious Hooker,”—Richard by baptismal name. His eight books constitute one of the richest classics of the English tongue. It finds delighted readers among those who care little, if at all, for the mere issues of the questions under controversy. Its generally rich and stately style, its logic and rhetoric, its wealth of learning, and its occasional play of satire or contempt, engage the interest of many a reader who would turn listlessly from most pages of polemics. There is so much in it of a manly, free courage and self-asserting spirit, that at times it is difficult to believe that it was written by one who, according to the quaint biography of him by Isaack Walton, was so cowed and subjugated by his domestic partner, the mother of his children. English Churchmen may well boast themselves on this majestic work, dealing with the nucleus of the whole Puritan controversy, the question of Church authority. Of course, its argument in its whole sum and detail, in its array and estimate of original vouchers, has been traversed and brought under dispute by champions on the other side. But it will always hold its supreme place while the cause which it upholds shall need a classic.

Hallam[458] says that, “though the reasonings of Hooker won for him the surname of ‘the Judicious,’ they are not always safe or satisfactory, nor, perhaps, can they be reckoned wholly clear or consistent. His learning, though beyond that of most English writers in that age, is necessarily uncritical; and his fundamental theory, the mutability of ecclesiastical government, has as little pleased those for whom he wrote, as those whom he repelled by its means.” The same writer, in another work,[459] passes a high encomium upon Hooker’s Polity, as finding a basis for its argument in natural law.

The first four of the books of Hooker’s work were published in 1594, the fifth in 1597. As the other three had been left in manuscript, and did not appear in print till many years after his death in 1600, suspicions were raised that they might have been interpolated. As the Narrative of this chapter has given place to an exposition of Hooker’s fundamental position against the Nonconformists, it need not be repeated here.

For a long period, the well-known work[460] of Daniel Neal, in its successive editions, was the only one written from an historical point of view by an author not contemporary with its whole subject, which had appeared from the press, was widely circulated and generally accredited for its fidelity, its ability, and its trustworthiness. Mr. Neal, born in London in 1678, was a Dissenting minister in that city, and died in 1743. His history was published in portions between 1731 and 1738. The editions of it now in general circulation are those edited with valuable notes by Dr. Toulmin, the first of which appeared in London in 1793, and the last in 1837. The editor continued the history after the English Revolution. Mr. Neal made diligent research, in order to verify his statements from all the original sources which were open to him. He relied largely on the laborious Memorials gathered by the painstaking Strype, while owing much to Fuller and Burnet. Mosheim accepted Neal’s work as of the highest authority. Dr. Kippis commends it highly in the Biographia Britannica. After the publication of his first volume, Neal made public his answer to an anonymous work by Dr. Maddox, Bishop of St. Asaph, vindicating the Church of England “from the injurious reflections cast upon it in that volume.” Similar animadversions were cast upon the later volumes by Dr. Zachary Grey. Bishop Warburton, in some Notes to Mr. Neal’s history which he published in 1788, even brings in question the author’s veracity. Dr. Toulmin meets and answers such charges. Mr. Neal sought to give his pages authenticity by full quotations, citations, and references to his original authorities. In a few instances in which Burnet or others denied his fairness or accuracy, Dr. Toulmin has vindicated him against all aspersions, if not from all charges of error. The author wrote when the Dissenters were relieved by legislation of the severe impositions, fines, and inflictions of an earlier period, but were by no means brought into an equality in social and civil rights and privileges with the favored and patronized members of the Church Establishment. So Mr. Neal’s pages are free from the asperity and bitterness provoked into indulgence by his predecessors under the smart of humiliating wrongs. Still, he is loyal to the memory and steadfastness of those earlier sufferers. There was much on which the Dissenters of his time might pride themselves as won by the constancy of those who had fought for them the battles with lordly arrogance and hierarchical assumptions and prerogatives. There was a palmy age for Dissent in England which Lord Macaulay describes very felicitously, when, as he says, there were Dissenting ministers whose standing and condition in life compared favorably with those of all the clergy of the Establishment below those of the bishops. Among the Dissenting laity were men of wealth and of commercial consequence, as a high and honored social class, whose munificent endowments were bestowed on some of the noblest institutions of the realm.

Mr. Hallam devotes the second, third, and fourth chapters of his Constitutional History of England to the development of the history of Nonconformity, both among Roman Catholics and Protestants, during the reigns of Henry VIII., Edward VI., Mary, and Elizabeth. Among the many reviews and critical estimates of this history, that in the Edinburgh Review, vol. xlviii., is especially able and satisfactory. Mr. Hallam brought to the presentation of this part of his whole subject, not only his habitually thorough and conscientious fulness of research among authorities and documents, public and private, but also that spirit of candor, moderation, and equitable impartiality which, if not already cherished in the purposes and motives of one intending the task of an historian, may or may not be acquired and exercised in dealing with themes engaging so much of temper, strife, and intenseness of polemical animosity. From his point of view, reading backwards along the line of historical development, he recognized that the early Nonconformists were dealing with fundamental principles in religious affairs which, though not at the time fully apprehended, would necessarily involve immunities and rights of a political character. It is because of this, now clearly exposed and certified to us, that such lofty tributes are rendered to the Puritans as the exponents and champions of English liberty.

The Inner Life[461] of Robert Barclay, not completely, though substantially, finished and supervised by its author, is an admirable example of the more wise, just, and considerate tone and method adopted in quite recent years for dealing with times and subjects of once embittered religious agitation and controversy. It is calm and judicial in its temper, inclusive and well-digested in its materials and contents. The author’s research was most wide and comprehensive. He spared no labor in the quest of original documents, in manuscript or print, all over England and on the Continent, of prime use and authority for his purpose, whether in public repositories or in private cabinets. For some very important matters which entered into the full treatment of his theme he has used for the first time many records that had been lying in undisturbed repose, and he has enlisted the valuable aid of many friends.

The author, after defining the idea and object of a visible church, makes an elaborate effort to trace to its sources and in its course the development of religious opinion in England previous to 1640. He marks the rise of Barrowism, Brownism, of the Johnsonists, the Separatists, the Presbyterians, the early Independents, the two parties of Baptists, and the Friends, or Quakers. Some of the views, habits, and principles adopted by these parties he traces in their connection with the Mennonites on the Continent. He distinguishes, as far as possible, the various shades of opinion, the introduction of new points of controversy or discussion, the individualisms, extravagancies, eccentricities, and erratic excesses of individuals or parties, and he keeps distinct the two main currents of the development, as they favored or rejected the connection of civil and ecclesiastical authority. He draws the line distinctly between the Episcopalians and Presbyterians, on the one side, as according in favoring a state church and a national establishment, and the original ideas gradually developed into positive principles of individuals and societies among the Separatists, which involved the complete separation of the administration of religion from the civil power.

The central subject of Mr. Barclay’s volume is the early history of the Friends, or Quakers. Two chief points are specially dealt with: First, many of the distinctive principles in their teaching and conduct which have been generally regarded as original with them are traced as in full recognition by other parties previous to the preaching of George Fox. Second, the author presents many facts, new, or in a new light, which disclose how earnest were the efforts of the early Friends for a very careful and even elaborate inner organization and discipline of their membership, after the manner of a visible Church,—the appointment and oversight of a qualified ministry, the sending out of authorized missionaries, and the inquisition into the private affairs, the home life, habits, and business of members, carried out into very minute and annoying details. He reveals to us the embarrassments met by them in deciding upon the question of “birthright membership.” Manuscript documents, records, minute-books, etc., preserved in many places where the early Friends had their meetings, are found very communicative.[462]

Mr. Skeats, in his Free Churches[463] has in view as his general purpose, to trace “the part which English Dissent has played in the history of England.” Following this comprehensive design, he presents the various phases of Nonconformity and Separatism through denominational organizations among Presbyterians, Baptists, Quakers, Independents, and Congregationalists, noting the attitude of opposition assumed towards them by the civil and ecclesiastical authorities. He regards the Toleration Act, passed in 1689,—which even then excluded the Unitarians from its terms,—as drawing the line between the efforts which had been made up to that time to extinguish Dissent, and the leaving it simply under a stigma, as lacking social standing and Government recognition. Only the first chapter, covering a hundred of the six hundred pages of the volume, is concerned with the subject directly in our hands. The author is in full sympathy with the principles and the cause, the attitude and the persistency, of the resolute and buffeted men whose views he sets forth, as developed from the earliest stage of the Reformation in England. He cites and quotes original authorities to authenticate his statements and his judgments. In some instances, where they bear hard upon the conduct of the archbishops of Canterbury under Queen Elizabeth, Curteis, in his Bampton Lectures, challenges their fairness. More than four hundred Dissenting societies, Congregationalist and Baptist, are now existing in England, which date their origin before the passage of the Toleration Act under William.[464] To these are to be added many societies of Presbyterians and Quakers.

The Congregational Union of England and Wales is an organized body devoted to the interests of the fellowship to which it succeeds as representing the original single and associated Nonconformists from the date of the English Reformation. Its magazines, its annual reports, and various publications issued under its patronage, keep in living interest and advocacy the principles first stood for by faithful witnesses, sufferers, and martyrs. One of these publications, of especial importance, bears the following title: Historical Memorials relating to the Independents, or Congregationalists, from their Rise to the Restoration of the Monarchy, 1660, London, 1839. The distinctive value and authority of this work, which is in four octavo volumes, attach to its being almost exclusively composed of the original writings, of various kinds, from the pens of the first Nonconformists, and the answers or arguments brought against them. These have been gathered by keen and extended investigation, carefully authenticated, and, where it is necessary, annotated. The motive which inspired this undertaking was to remove the obscurity and contumely which had been threatening to settle over the memory and principles of men whose own writings prove them to have been equal in learning, acumen, argumentative power, and heroic constancy of purpose to defend a cause by them thought worthy of their devotion. Many important papers which elsewhere are found only in quotations, extracts, or fragments, are here given in full.

The Bi-Centennial commemoration of the ejectment of all Nonconforming ministers from the parish churches of England, on St. Bartholomew’s Day, 1662, was made the occasion, after modern usage for such observances, of the delivery of a multitude of addresses, and the preparation and publication of numerous pamphlets and volumes, of local or general interest, with historical retrospect and review of the origin and development of English Nonconformity. Curteis[465] has a very pregnant note on the “bicentenary rhetoric” connected with this occasion. He alleges that “incredible exaggerations” were exposed, as founded upon the lists given in Calamy’s famous Nonconformist Memorial (edited by Palmer) of the ejected ministers, as being in number two thousand. Curteis says it was proved that instead of there being 293 such in London parishes, there were by count only 127, and that from the whole alleged number of two thousand, there should be struck off no less than twelve hundred.[466]

There are three very admirable works[467] covering much of the matter of this chapter, from the pen of John Tulloch, D.D., Principal of St. Mary’s College in the University of St. Andrew’s.

Though these three works are from the pen of a clergyman of the Church of Scotland, they are written in a spirit of the most broad and comprehensive catholicity. They set forth with keen discernment and with generous appreciation the advances made by highly gifted individual minds in the several stages and phases of the development of a protracted controversy upon the principles involved in an attempted adjustment of the rights of conscience and free thought, in asserting themselves against traditional and ecclesiastical proscriptions. It required the contributions from many such minds and spirits, with their fragments of certified truth, to insure the substitution of reason for authority.

CHURCH OF ENGLAND AUTHORITIES.—Among the recently published works, the authors of which have aimed with moderation and impartiality to treat a theme of embittered relations and rehearsals so as to present readers with information of facts and the means of judging fairly between violent contestants in their once angry issues, is one already referred to as Curteis’s Bampton Lectures.[468] Assuming that the English Church had an origin and existence independent of the ecclesiastical authority of the Pope, the author relates the process by which it reformed itself, by renouncing his interference and impositions, and establishing its own discipline and ritual. After this he regards and treats the Romanists as but one class of Dissenters, taking their place as such with the Independents, the Baptists, the Quakers, the Unitarians, and the Wesleyans. Of these divided elements of the common Christian fold, the author traces the rise, the leading principles, and the distinct institutions and methods which they adopted. His treatment of his large and tangled subject is as fair, considerate, and judicious as could be expected from an earnest and heartily loyal minister of the English Church. He makes many strong statements to commend and urge a national establishment of religion as far more dignified, consistent, and desirable than the scattering and fragmentary multiplication, indefinitely increasing under petty variances, of independent religious organizations. But he does not work out a practicable method for his suggested scheme when those concerned in it prefer their own ways. Mr. Curteis is very severe (p. 62) in his rebuke upon the harshness of terms in which Mr. Skeats[469] deals with Archbishop Parker, in the course pursued by him towards the Puritans. But the view presented by Mr. Skeats is more than justified by Hallam,[470] in his calm dealing with the original documents.

In the same connection may be mentioned The Church and Puritans,[471] a small and compact volume, written in the best spirit of moderation and candor. In but little more than two hundred open pages, the author traces the whole course of Dissent,—its rise, aims, principles, and methods, and its struggles, buffetings, and discomfitures, from its manifestations under Elizabeth to the failure of “a glorious opportunity of reconciling all moderate Dissenters to the communion of the Church of England, under William and Mary.” By the judicious restraint upon what might naturally be his promptings, as a clergyman of the Church of England, to criticise with some sharpness what has so generally been represented as the perversity and weak scrupulosity of the Puritans, he is eminently fair and considerate in presenting their side of the controversy, and in dealing with their more conspicuous men. The abounding citation of original authorities on both sides in his notes authenticates, for nearly every sentence of the work, the statement made in it.

Two works of a remarkably liberal and scholarly character which have quite recently appeared from the pens of eminent divines of the English Church, would have been gratefully welcomed by the Nonconformists in the period of their sharpest conflict, on account of their generous spirit and their contents. They would have been especially noteworthy in the liberal concessions which they make upon all the points involved in the controversy, as to the simple authority and pattern of Scripture in the constitution and discipline of the Christian Church, as against the hierarchical claims based upon traditions and usages subsequent to the age of the apostles, and traceable in the so-called Primitive Church. These books are Mr. Edwin Hatch’s Organization of the Early Christian Churches,[472] and Dean Stanley’s Christian Institutions.[473]

Mr. Hatch has also published articles of a similar tenor to the contents of his Bampton Lectures, in the Dictionary of Christian Antiquities. In these lectures, the author aims to trace the facts of ecclesiastical history in the same way as those of civil history are usually dealt with. His aim is to investigate the framework of the earliest Christian societies. He says these societies in their formation adjusted themselves to previously existing methods of association. The philanthropic element in them suggested the sort of officers needed, their provinces and functions. A president of the society and one or more distributors of alms were the requisite officers. Then as increasing numbers in a society, and of societies, made necessary a distribution of functions, with centralization and subordination of duty and authority, an ecclesiastical system was developed by like methods to those of a civil or political system. Convenience and adaptation thus originated the elements of a hierarchy, the regulation of which was watched over and disposed by a system of councils.

Dean Stanley’s volume is a collection of essays, previously published separately. They are liberal in tone and tenor, and by no means in harmony with, or even quite respectful toward, any high-church principles, or any demands of “divine right” for ecclesiastical authority. He adopts a rational point of view for marking the accumulation of sentiments and usages around the original substance of Christianity. He exhibits the entire unlikeness of conditions and needs between the early days of the religion and our own. He recognizes the vast superstructure of fable reared upon original simple verities, and, like Mr. Hatch, identifies the development of ecclesiastical with that of civil forms and usages.

An Essay on the Christian Ministry, by Bishop Lightfoot, treats after a like unconventional method, the themes which in the days of early Nonconformity were dealt with in so different a tone and method.

NEW ENGLAND AUTHORITIES.[474]—The authorities concerning every detail in the institution and disposing of church affairs in New England are abundant and well-nigh exhaustive. They may be consulted as digested and set in order in the more recently published works to be here named by title, or they may be traced fragmentarily in chronological order in the writings of the Fathers themselves. The organization of the New England churches came to be best described under the term “Congregational.” It was in substance a modification of Barrowism. While there seems to have been but little discordancy here among those who followed the pattern, they were soon challenged by some of their brethren in England most nearly in sympathy with them, as to doubtful or debated principles and methods in their institution and discipline of churches. There were two chief points which came under discussion: first, the respective rights of all the brethren composing a church fellowship in administering discipline, and those of the pastor, teacher, and elders. Should the whole church, or only its officers, be primarily and ultimately invested with executive and administrative power? The second point covered all the considerations which would come into prominence in deciding upon the relations of churches to each other,—whether each should maintain an absolute independency, or qualify it in any way by seeking sympathy, fellowship, and advice, and heeding remonstrances or interference from “sister churches,” through their teachers and elders.

Contemporary references to these matters as they presented themselves to the attention of those who here first entered into a “church estate,” are scattered over Governor Winthrop’s journal. John Cotton, minister of the First Church of Boston, diligently and earnestly, in successive writings and publications, set himself to answering all questioning and challenging friends abroad. He evidently had to work out clear and consistent views of his own on a subject which, besides being novel in many of its relations, was embarrassed by local difficulties, and by some conscientious or practical diversities of judgment among his associates. Richard Mather, of Dorchester, also contributed his help in the exposition of the Congregational polity, which was to be defended alike from extreme Barrowism and from Presbyterianism, which was soon found to have some sympathizers in the colony. By a sort of general consent, recourse was had to a succession of “synods,” or councils of the representatives of the churches, first those of the Bay Colony alone, then with some of the other New England colonies. These synods resulted in the formation of a “Platform,” which laid out in form and detail the system of the Congregational polity.

It is not necessary here to indicate the titles, contents, and authors of the several publications, preserved in our cabinets of relics, which contributed either to the dissension or to the pacification of the sometimes eccentric and heated, and of the always scrupulous, earnest, and independent parties in this work of ecclesiastical reconstruction. They have been so faithfully, admirably, and impartially digested by Dr. Dexter in the eighth of the lectures in his Congregationalism, as to present to the reader a full and intelligent view of the whole subject in its development and its results, while relieving him of what save to the fewest possible of historical students would be a repelling task. If, however, zeal or curiosity should dispose any one to peer through those dried and withered relics of the old polemics of a generation that drew its honey from the rocks, he will find much occasion to respect the acuteness and the persistency of men who, having taken the interests of their creed and piety into their own hands, determined to build on what was to them the only sure foundation. That foundation was “the Word.” If the Scriptures, as their prelatical foes insisted, were not intended to afford, and would not afford, a complete pattern of a method of institution and government of a Christian Church, the reader of those patiently wrought tractates will often be amazed as he notes how rich and fertile, how apt and facile, the contents of the sacred books were found to be, in furnishing the requisite material for argument and authority.

A controversial discussion was opened in 1861 by Hon. D. A. White, of Salem, by the publication of his New England Congregationalism in its Origin and Purity, illustrated by the Foundation and Early Records of the First Church in Salem, and Various Discussions pertaining to the Subject. To this work Rev. J. B. Felt, in the same year, made an answer: Reply to the New England Congregationalism of Hon. D. A. White. The principal interest of the matter of these two publications consists in their arguments upon the question whether Congregationalism as a system of polity in the constitution and government of churches carries with it, as an essential organic part, the doctrinal creed held by those who first adopted it. Dr. Dexter offers some suggestions on this point, arguing that the creed of the first Congregationalists belongs continuously to their system of polity. Of course, only constructive and inferential arguments can be brought to bear on this point. As we have seen, from the first manifestations of Nonconformity and Dissent in England, doctrinal themes did not at all enter into the controversy, it being taken for granted that there was accord upon them. But there certainly is no absolute, vital connection between a form of polity and a doctrinal system. There have come to be very many organizations and fellowships among Protestants which are substantially Congregational in their order, while widely diverse in their creeds.

In 1862, Mr. Felt published The Ecclesiastical History of New England.

Very full and curiously interesting information about the principles, persons, and events connecting the Puritan controversy in the Old World with the settlement of New England, may be found in the now well-nigh innumerable volumes containing the history of our oldest towns and churches. In their earlier pages or chapters these histories find the town and the church a common theme. Grateful occasions have been found in commemorations of bi-centennial or longer periods, from the settlement of municipalities or the foundation of parishes, to review the past, and to trace in the old land the men who brought here in their exile, for free and successful enjoyment, principles for which they had there suffered. The history of the Reformation and of Nonconformity might indeed be largely written from the pamphlets and the volumes called out by these local commemorations, so numerous during the last decade of years. Traces of matter of a similar character may also be found in the personal and historical references, in text or note, of the first volume of the Biographical Sketches of the Graduates of Harvard University, by John Langdon Sibley. In connection with the public and formal observance of the Two Hundred and Fiftieth Anniversary of the Founding of the First Church of Boston,—in the fifth in order of the edifices in which it had worshipped,—a son of the present pastor (the seventeenth in the line of succession) prepared and published a work with the following title: History of the First Church in Boston. 1630-1880. By Arthur B. Ellis. With an Introduction by George E. Ellis. Illustrated. Boston, 1881. Pages lxxxviii + 356.

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VIII. THE PILGRIM CHURCH AND PLYMOUTH COLONY

BY FRANKLIN B. DEXTER,

Professor of American History in Yale College.

THE preceding chapter has outlined the growth of Separatism in England, and prepared the way for the story of the fortunes of that remarkable congregation which has given a new significance to the name “Pilgrim.”

Elizabeth’s policy of Uniformity, so sternly pursued by her last Archbishop of Canterbury, Whitgift (1583-1604), was ostentatiously adopted by her successor, James I., at the Hampton Court Conference held in his presence by learned men of the Puritan and High Church parties in the first year of his reign; and when this conference was quickly followed by the elevation of Bancroft, a more arbitrary Whitgift, to Whitgift’s vacant place, those who were earnest in the opposite opinions were forced to choose between persecution and exile.

There were doubtless other neighborhoods where the Separatists maintained thriving congregations for a longer or shorter time after the King’s policy became known; but by far the most zealous company of which accounts remain was one formed by residents “of sundry towns and villages, some in Nottinghamshire, some of Lincolnshire, and some of Yorkshire, where they border nearest together.” In 1602, or thereabout, these people, from places at least eight or ten miles apart, gathered themselves into a church,—probably at Gainsborough, a market-town in Lincolnshire, on the Trent; at least we know that when the original congregation divided, in 1605 or 1606, into two,—perhaps for greater security, as well as for local convenience,—it was at Gainsborough that one branch remained, which soon chose John Smyth, a Cambridge graduate, who had been some time with them, to be its pastor, and that with him many of this portion of the parent stock migrated in 1606 to Amsterdam.

The western division of the original company appears to have been formed into a distinct church in the summer of 1606, and, according to the testimony of Governor Bradford, in his notice of Elder Brewster, “they ordinarily met at his [Brewster’s] house on the Lord’s day (which was a manor [i. e. manor-house] of the Bishop’s), and with great love he entertained them when they came, making provision for them, to his great charge.”

William Brewster, the chief layman of this congregation, was postmaster, or “post,” as the usual term was, at Scrooby, a small village in the northern part of Nottinghamshire, ten miles west of Gainsborough. Though Scrooby was a mere hamlet, its station on the London and Edinburgh post-road gave Brewster full occupation, especially after the two capitals were united under one king, as it was his duty to provide food and lodging for all travellers by post on Government business, as well as relays of horses for them and for the conveyance of Government despatches. He was a native of the village, and had matriculated in 1580 at the University of Cambridge, where he came under Puritan influence; he soon, however, quitted his books to enter the service of William Davison, Elizabeth’s upright and Puritan Secretary of State, whose promising career was sacrificed to her duplicity in the matter of the execution of Mary Stuart. Under Davison, Brewster had experience both at court and in foreign embassies; he remained with his master for a year or two after the fall of the latter in 1587, and then retired to his native village. There he assisted his father, who was then postmaster, until the latter’s death in 1590; and after a brief interval the son, then about twenty-three years of age,[475] succeeded to the father’s place through the intercession of his old patron, Davison.[476]

In 1603 his annual stipend from the Government was raised from £30 to £36, the two sums corresponding in present values to perhaps six and seven hundred dollars respectively. The manor-house of Scrooby, built originally as a hunting-seat for the Archbishops of York, though in Brewster’s time “much decayed,”[477] had been occupied for many years by his father as bailiff for the archbishops, and as representative of their vested interests in the surrounding property, which was leased to Sir Samuel Sandys, of London.

The clerical leaders of the church, meeting in the great hall or chapel under Brewster’s roof, were Richard Clyfton and John Robinson. The former had been instituted in 1586, at the age of thirty-three, rector of Babworth, a village six or seven miles southeast of Scrooby, and had continued there until the undisguised Puritanism of his teachings caused his removal, probably in connection with Archbishop Bancroft’s summary proceedings against Nonconformist ministers at the end of 1604. His associate, Robinson, apparently a native of the neighborhood, had entered Cambridge University in 1592, and after gaining a Fellowship had spent some years in the ministry in or near Norwich; but about 1604 he threw up his cure on conscientious grounds, and returning to the North, allied himself with Separatists in Gainsborough. He was, by the testimony of an opponent (Robert Baillie), “the most learned, polished, and modest spirit among the Brownists.”

The other members of the Scrooby congregation were of humble station, and have left little trace even of their names; most notable to us is young William Bradford, born in 1590 in Austerfield, a hamlet two and a half miles to the northward, within the limits of Yorkshire.

After they had covenanted together in church relations, “they could not long continue in any peaceable condition, but were hunted and persecuted on every side.... For some were taken and clapped up in prison; others had their houses beset and watched night and day, and hardly escaped their hands; and the most were fain to fly and leave their houses and habitations. ... Seeing themselves thus molested, and that there was no hope of their continuance there, by a joint consent they resolved to go into the Low Countries, where they heard was freedom of religion for all men.”

The remedy of exile was not new to a generation that could remember the emigration of Robert Browne’s followers from Norwich to Zealand in 1581, and had witnessed the transfer of their Gainsborough neighbors to Holland shortly after their own organization. “So, after they had continued together about a year, and kept their meetings every Sabbath in one place or other, ... seeing they could no longer continue in that condition, they resolved to get over into Holland as they could.” A large number attempted, in the latter part of the year 1607, to embark at Boston in Lincolnshire, the most convenient seaport for them, though fifty miles distant from Scrooby. But emigration, except with a license, was in general prohibited by an early statute (A. D. 1389), and the ship’s captain, who had engaged to take them, found it to his interest to betray them in the act of embarking; so that the only result for most of them was a month’s detention in Boston jail, and the confiscation of their goods, while seven of the leaders, including Brewster, were kept in prison still longer. In a new attempt the following spring, an unfrequented strip of sea-coast in northeastern Lincolnshire, above Great Grimsby, was selected, and a bargain made with a Dutch captain to convey the party thence to Holland; then, perhaps, taking advantage of the Idle, a sluggish stream flowing near their doors, tributary to the Trent, and so to the Humber, the women and children, with all the household goods, were in that case despatched by water, while the men marched some forty miles across country to the rendezvous. But after a part of the men (who arrived first) had embarked, on the appearance of armed representatives of the law the captain took alarm and departed; some of those left on shore fled, and reached their destination by other means; but the women and children, with a few of the men and all their valuables, were captured. Another season of suspense followed; but at length the absurdity of detaining such a helpless group began to be felt, the magistrates were glad to be rid of them, and by August, 1608, the last of the straggling unfortunates got safely over to Amsterdam.

They found there the church of English Separatists transplanted under Francis Johnson upwards of twenty years before, as well as that of John Smyth and his Gainsborough people; but the church from Scrooby appears to have kept its separate organization, and their experience is calmly recounted by their historian, Bradford, as follows: “When they had lived at Amsterdam about a year, Mr. Robinson, their pastor, and some others of best discerning, seeing how Mr. John Smyth and his company was already fallen into contention with the church that was there before them, and no means they could use would do any good to cure the same; and also that the flames of contention were like to break out in the ancient church itself (as afterwards lamentably came to pass),—which things they prudently foreseeing, thought it was best to remove, before they were anyway engaged with the same; though they well knew it would be much to the prejudice of their outward estates, both at present and in likelihood in the future,—as, indeed, it proved to be.”

For these, with other reasons, in the winter after their arrival they asked the authorities of Leyden, an inland city, twenty miles or more southwest from Amsterdam, and the next in size to it in the province, to allow their congregation, of about one hundred English men and women, to remove thither by May 1, 1609.[478] The application was granted, and the removal to that beautiful city was accomplished, probably in May; but their senior pastor, Clyfton, being oppressed with premature infirmity, preferred to remain in Amsterdam.

In Leyden they were forced to adapt themselves, as they had begun to do hitherto, to conditions of life very unlike those to which they had been trained in their own country; and so far as we can trace them, a majority of the flock seem to have found employment in the manufacture of the woollen goods for which the city was famous. Upon the public records the church appears as an organized body early in 1611, when Robinson with three others purchased for 8,000 guilders (corresponding in our currency to perhaps $10,000 or $12,000) a valuable estate in the centre of the city, including a spacious house for the pastor, used also for Sunday worship, and at the back of the garden an area large enough for the subsequent erection of twenty-one small residences for church members.

Among additional reasons which had led the studious Robinson to favor the removal to Leyden, may be counted the fact that it was the site of a university already famous, and so furnished ample opportunities of intercourse with learned men and of access to valuable libraries. The sharp controversy between the occupants of the chair of theology, Gomarus and Arminius, involving no personal risk to the English spectators, was an added attraction; and before long Robinson himself appeared as a disputant on the Calvinist side in the public discussions, and so successfully that by Bradford’s testimony “the Arminians stood more in fear of him than [of] any of the University.” This perhaps opened the way for his admission to membership of the University, which took place in September, 1615, and secured him valuable civil as well as literary privileges. Such an honor was justified also by the activity of his pen while in exile. Between 1610 and 1615 he published four controversial pieces, of nearly seven hundred quarto pages, the most important being a popularly written Justification of Separation from the Church of England. In the same field of argument were the other treatises; while in 1619, when public attention was absorbed with the Synod of Dort, he brought out in Latin a brief but telling Apologia, or Defence of the views of the Separatists, in distinction from those of the Dutch churches.

These outside discussions, in which their pastor took such interest, left undisturbed the steady growth of the Pilgrim church, in the government of which Brewster, as ruling elder, was associated with Robinson, after the removal to Leyden. In these years “many came unto them from divers parts of England, so as they grew a great congregation,” numbering at times nearly three hundred communicants. Among these new-comers were some who ranked thenceforth among their principal men: John Carver, an early deacon of the church, and leader of the first migrating colony; Robert Cushman, Carver’s adjutant in effecting that migration; Miles Standish, the soldier of the company; and Edward Winslow, a young man probably of higher social position than the rest, who shared with Bradford, after Carver’s death, the main burden of sustaining the infant colony.

But though some recruits were attracted by Robinson’s gifts and by a prospect of freedom from prelatical oppression, yet the condition of the Leyden people was in general one of struggling poverty, with little hope of amendment. It were vain to expect that their language or their peculiarities of religious order could gain a secure foothold on Dutch soil, or that a Government on friendly terms with England could show active good-will to a nest of outcasts which England was anxious to break up. The increase of numbers had come in spite of the hardships attending the struggle for a livelihood in a foreign city; but as the conditions of the struggle were better understood, the numbers fell off. Time was also bringing a new danger with the approaching expiration of the twelve years’ truce (April, 1609-April, 1621) between Spain and the Netherlands.

As years passed, the older generation among the exiles who clung loyally to the English name and tongue began to realize that a great part of their aims would be frustrated if their children should, by intermarriage with the Dutch and other outside influences, wander from their fathers’ principles, and be absorbed in the Dutch people. These dangers being recognized, and the major part of the company being agreed that it was best to avoid them by a removal, it became necessary to select a new asylum, where Englishmen might preserve their nationality undisturbed. To the new continent of America, which best satisfied the conditions, all thoughts turned as early as the summer of 1617; and the respective claims were weighed of tropical Guiana on the one hand, which Raleigh had described in 1595 as the true Eldorado, and Virginia on the other, conspicuous as the seat of the first successful English colony. A little consideration excluded Guiana, with its supposed wealth of gold tempting the jealousy of the Spaniard; and so the choice was limited to the territory somewhat vaguely known as Virginia, within the bounds assigned to the two companies chartered by King James in 1606. The objection was duly weighed “that if they lived among the English which were there planted [i.e. on the James River], or so near them as to be under their government, they should be in as great danger to be troubled or persecuted for the cause of religion as if they lived in England; and it might be worse. And if they lived too far off, they should neither have succor nor defence from them.”

There were risks either way; but they decided, under the advice of some persons of rank and quality at home,—friends, perhaps, of Brewster’s when at court, or of Winslow’s,—to dare the dangers from wild beasts and savages in the unsettled parts of Virginia, rather than the dangers from their own bigoted countrymen, and to ask the King boldly for leave to continue as they were in church matters.

Their first care was for the regular sanction of the Virginia Company in London to the settlement of the proposed colony on their territory; and with this object Carver and Cushman were despatched to England as agents, apparently in September, 1617. They took with them, for use in conciliating the sentiments which any petition from a community with their history would awaken at court, a memorable declaration in seven articles, signed by the pastor and elder, which professed their full assent to the doctrines of the Church of England, as well as their acknowledgment of the King’s supremacy and of the obedience due to him, “either active, if the thing commanded be not against God’s Word, or passive [i.e. undergoing the appointed penalties], if it be.” The same articles, in carefully guarded language, recognized as lawful the existing relations of Church and State in England, and disavowed the notion of authority inhering in any assembly of ecclesiastical officers, except as conferred by the civil magistrate. In any estimate of the Pilgrims, it is necessary to give full weight to this deliberate record of their readiness to tolerate other opinions.

The two messengers found the Virginia Company in general well disposed, and gained an active friend in Sir Edwin Sandys (a prominent member of the Company and brother of Sir Samuel Sandys, the lessee of Scrooby Manor), who, though no Puritan, was a firm advocate of toleration; but as he was also a leader of the Parliamentary Opposition, his friendship was a doubtful recommendation to royal favor. Their report, on their return in November, was so encouraging that Carver and another were sent over the next month for further negotiations with the Virginia Company and with the King. But the former business still halted, because of the prejudice in official minds against their independent practices in church government. Sir Edwin Sandys, Sir Robert Naunton (one of the Secretaries of State), and other friends labored early in 1618 with the King for a guarantee of liberty of religion; but the ecclesiastical authorities were strong in their opposition, there was a suspicion abroad that the design was “to make a free popular State there,”[479] and the delegates returned to Leyden to propose that a patent be taken on the indirect assurance of the King “that he would connive at them and not molest them, provided they carried themselves peaceably.” It seemed wisest to proceed, and Brewster (now fifty-two years of age, one of the oldest and most experienced of the congregation) and Cushman were commissioned in the spring of 1619 to procure a patent from the Virginia Company, and to complete an arrangement with some London merchants who had partially agreed to advance funds for the undertaking. The business was delayed by a crisis in the Virginia Company’s affairs, connected with the excited canvass attending the election (April 28 [May 8], 1619) of Sir Edwin Sandys as Governor; but at length the patent was granted (June 9/19, 1619), being taken by the advice of friends, not in their own names, but in that of Mr. John Wincob (or Whincop), described by Bradford as “a religious gentleman then belonging to the Countess of Lincoln, who intended to go with them.”[480]

When the patent was secured, Brewster appears to have returned to Leyden at once, leaving Cushman for a time to negotiate with the merchants; but so little was done or perhaps hoped for in this direction, that an entirely new project was started the next winter under Robinson’s auspices. Certain Amsterdam merchants, already interested in the rich fur-trade on and near the Hudson River, presented a memorial to the States-General, Feb. 2/12, 1620, from which it appears that Robinson had signified his readiness to lead a colony of over four hundred English families to settle under the Dutch in New Netherland, if assured of protection. The memorial asked for assurances on this last head, and for the immediate despatch of two ships of war to take formal possession of the lands to be reserved for such a colony.

While this memorial was awaiting its (unfavorable) answer, Thomas Weston, one of those London merchants with whom there had already been consultations, came to Leyden as their agent, to propose a new arrangement for a settlement in North Virginia. For some reason, not now clear, the Pilgrims showed peculiar deference to his advice; and accordingly the negotiations with the Dutch were broken off and articles of agreement with the London merchants drawn up, embodying the conditions propounded by Weston. By these conditions a common stock was formed, with shares of ten pounds each, which might be taken up either by a deposit of money or of goods necessary for the undertaking; and Carver and Cushman were sent to England to collect subscriptions and to make purchases and preparations for the voyage. In this service, while Carver was busy with the ship in Southampton, Cushman took the responsibility of conceding certain alterations in the agreement, to please the “merchant adventurers,” as they were styled, whose part in the scheme was indispensable. The original plan was for a seven years’ partnership, during which all the colonists’ labor—except for two days a week—was to be for the common benefit; and at the end of the time, when the resulting profits were divided, the houses and improved lands in the colony were to go to the planters: but the changes sanctioned by Cushman did away with the reservation of two days in the week for each man’s private use, and arranged for an equal division, after seven years, of houses, lands, and goods between the “merchant adventurers” and the planters. Dr. Palfrey has well observed that “the hardship of the terms to which the Pilgrims were reduced shows at once the slenderness of their means and the constancy of their purpose.” About seventy merchants joined in the enterprise, of whom only three—William Collier, Timothy Hatherly, and William Thomas—became sufficiently interested to settle in the colony.

Notwithstanding discouragements, the removal was pressed forward, but the means at command provided only for sending a portion of the company; and “those that stayed, being the greater number, required the pastor to stay with them,” while Elder Brewster accompanied, in the pastor’s stead, the almost as numerous minority who were to constitute a church by themselves; and in every church, by Robinson’s theories, the “governing elder,” next in rank to the pastor and the teacher, must be “apt to teach.”

A small ship,—the “Speedwell,”—of some sixty tons burden, was bought and fitted out in Holland, and early in July those who were ready for the formidable voyage, being “the youngest and strongest part,” left Leyden for embarkation at Delft-Haven, nearly twenty miles to the southward,—sad at the parting, “but,” says Bradford, “they knew that they were pilgrims.” About the middle of the second week of the month the vessel sailed for Southampton, England. On the arrival there, they found the “Mayflower,” a ship of about one hundred and eighty tons burden, which had been hired in London, awaiting them with their fellow-passengers,—partly laborers employed by the merchants, partly Englishmen like-minded with themselves, who were disposed to join the colony. Mr. Weston, also, was there, to represent the merchants; but when discussion arose about the terms of the contract, he went off in anger, leaving the contract unsigned and the arrangements so incomplete that the Pilgrims were forced to dispose of sixty pounds’ worth of their not abundant stock of provisions to meet absolutely necessary charges.

The ships, with perhaps one hundred and twenty passengers, put to sea about August 5/15, with hopes of the colony being well settled before winter; but the “Speedwell” was soon pronounced too leaky to proceed without being overhauled, and so both ships put in at Dartmouth, after eight days’ sail. Repairs were made, and before the end of another week they started again; but when above a hundred leagues beyond Land’s End, Reynolds, the master of the “Speedwell,” declared her in imminent danger of sinking, so that both ships again put about. On reaching Plymouth Harbor it was decided to abandon the smaller vessel, and thus to send back those of the company whom such a succession of mishaps had disheartened. Those who withdrew were chiefly such as from their own weakness or from the weakness of their families were likely to be least useful in the hard labor of colonization; the most conspicuous desertion was that of Cushman, smarting under criticism and despairing of success. The unexpected parting between those who disembarked and those who crowded into the “Mayflower” was sad enough. It was not known till later that the alarm over the “Speedwell’s” condition was owing to deception practised by the master and crew, who repented of their bargain to remain a year with the colony, and took this means of dissolving it.

At length, on Wednesday, September 6/16, the “Mayflower” left Plymouth, and nine weeks from the following day, on November 9/19, sighted the eastern coast of the flat, but at that time well-wooded, shores of Cape Cod. She took from Plymouth one hundred and two passengers, besides the master and crew; on the voyage one man-servant died and one child was born making 102 (73 males and 29 females) who reached their destination. Of these, the colony proper consisted of 34 adult males, 18 of them accompanied by their wives and 14 by minor children (20 boys and 8 girls); besides these, there were 3 maid-servants and 19 men-servants, sailors, and craftsmen,—5 of them only half-grown boys,—who were hired for temporary service.

Of the thirty-four men who were the nucleus of the colony, more than half are known to have come from Leyden; in fact, but four of the thirty-four are certainly known to be of the Southampton accessions. The ruling motive of the majority was, therefore, that which had impelled the church in Leyden to this step, modified, perhaps, to some small extent by their knowledge of the chief reason, as Bradford alleges, in the minds of Weston and the others who had advanced them money, “for the hope of present profit to be made by the fishing that was found in that country” whither they were bound.

And whither were they bound? As we have seen, a patent was secured in 1619 in Mr. Wincob’s name; but “God so disposed as he never went nor they ever made use of this patent,” says Bradford,—not however making it clear when the intention of colonizing under this instrument was abandoned. The “merchant adventurers” while negotiating at Leyden seem to have taken out another patent from the Virginia Company, in February, 1620, in the names of John Peirce and of his associates; and this was more probably the authority under which the “Mayflower” voyage was undertaken. As the Pilgrims had known before leaving Holland of an intended grant of the northern parts of Virginia to a new company,—the Council for New England,—when they found themselves off Cape Cod, “the patent they had being for Virginia and not for New England, which belonged to another Government, with which the Virginia Company had nothing to do,” they changed the ship’s course, with intent, says Bradford, “to find some place about Hudson’s River for their habitation,” and so fulfil the conditions of their patent; but difficulties of navigation and opposition from the master and crew caused the exiles, after half a day’s voyage, to retrace their course and seek a resting-place on the nearest shore. Near half a century after, a charge of treachery was brought against Mr. Jones, the master of the “Mayflower,” for bringing the vessel so far out of her course; but the alleged cause, collusion with the Dutch, who desired to keep the English away from the neighborhood of New Netherland, is incredible.

But their radical change of destination exposed the colonists to a new danger. As soon as it was known, some of the hired laborers threatened to break loose (upon landing) from their engagements, and to enjoy full license, as a result of the loss of the authority delegated in the Virginia Company’s patent.

The necessity of some mode of civil government had been enjoined on the Pilgrims in the farewell letter from their pastor, and was now availed of to restrain these insurgents and to unite visibly the well-affected. A compact, which has often been eulogized as the first written constitution in the world, was drawn up, as follows:—

“In the name of God, amen. We whose names are underwritten, the loyal subjects of our dread sovereign lord King James, by the grace of God of Great Britain, France, and Ireland King, Defender of the Faith, etc., having undertaken, for the glory of God and advancement of the Christian faith, and honor of our King and country, a voyage to plant the first colony in the northern parts of Virginia, do by these presents solemnly and mutually, in the presence of God and one of another, covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil body politic, for our better ordering and preservation and furtherance of the ends aforesaid; and by virtue hereof to enact, constitute, and frame such just and equal laws, ordinances, acts, constitutions, and offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general good of the Colony, unto which we promise all due submission and obedience. In witness whereof we have hereunder subscribed our names at Cape Cod the 11th of November, in the year of the reign of our sovereign lord King James, of England, France, and Ireland, the eighteenth, and of Scotland the fifty-fourth. Anno Dom. 1620.”

Of the forty-one signers to this compact, thirty-four were the adults called above the nucleus of the colony, and seven were servants or hired workmen; the seven remaining adult males of the latter sort were perhaps too ill to sign with the rest (all of them soon died), or the list of signers may be imperfect.[481]

This needful preliminary step was taken on Saturday, November 11/21, by which time the “Mayflower” had rounded the Cape and found shelter in the quiet harbor on which now lies the village of Provincetown; and probably on the same day they “chose, or rather confirmed,” as Bradford has it (as though the choice were the foregone conclusion of long previous deliberation), Mr. John Carver governor for the ensuing year. On the same day an armed delegation visited the neighboring shore, finding no inhabitants. There were no attractions, however, for a permanent settlement, nor even accommodations for a comfortable encampment while such a place was being sought. After briefer explorations, an expedition started on Wednesday, December 6/16, to circumnavigate Cape Cod Bay in search of a good harbor, and by Friday night was safely landed on Clark’s Island (so called from the ship’s mate, who was of the party), just within what is since known as Plymouth Bay. On Saturday they explored the island, on the Sabbath day they rested, and on Monday, the 11th,[482] they sounded the harbor and “marched also into the land, and found divers cornfields and little running brooks, a place very good for situation.”[483]

Prepared to report favorably, the explorers returned to the ship, which by the end of the week was safely anchored in the chosen haven. The selection of a site and the preparation of materials, in uncertain weather, delayed till Monday, the 25th, the beginning of “the first house, for common use, to receive them and their goods.” Before the new year, house-lots were assigned to families, and by the middle of January most of the company had left the ship for a home on land. But the exposures incident to founding a colony in the dead of a New England winter (though later experience showed that this was a comparatively mild one) told severely on all; and before summer came one half of the number, most of them adult males, had fallen by the way.[484] Yet when the “Mayflower” sailed homewards in April, not one of the colonists went in her, so sweet was the taste of freedom, even under the shadow of death.

An avowed motive of the emigration was the hope of converting the natives; but more than three months elapsed before any intercourse with the Indians began. Traces of their propinquity had been numerous, and at length, on March 16/26, a savage visited the settlement, announcing himself in broken English as Samoset, a native of “the eastern parts,” or the coast of Maine, where contact with English fishermen had led to some knowledge of their language. From Samoset the colonists learned that the Indian name of their settlement was Patuxet, and that about four years before a kind of plague had destroyed most of the inhabitants of that region, so that there were now none to hinder their taking possession or to assert a claim to the territory. They learned also that their nearest neighbors were the Wampanoags, the headquarters of whose chief sachem, Massasoit, were some thirty miles to the southwestward, near the eastern shore of Narragansett Bay. The next week Samoset brought in Squanto, formerly of Patuxet, who had been taken to England in 1614 by Hunt, and who was now willing to act as interpreter in a visit from Massasoit; the latter followed an hour later and contracted unhesitatingly a treaty of peace and alliance, which was observed for fifty-four years.

With the beginning of a new civil year (March 25) Carver was re-elected governor, and some simple necessary laws were established; on Carver’s sudden death the following month, Bradford was chosen his successor, under whose mild and wise direction the colony went on as before. As Bradford was then enfeebled by illness, Isaac Allerton was at the same time appointed Assistant to the Governor.

After a summer and autumn of prosperous labor and harvest, they were cheered, November 11/21, by the arrival of the “Fortune” from London, bringing as a visitor Robert Cushman, their former associate, and thirty-five additions to their feeble number, twenty-five of them adult males,—the majority, however, not from Leyden. The ship brought also a patent, granted June 1/11,[485] by the President and Council of New England—within whose territory the new settlement lay—to the same John Peirce and his associates in whose names the merchants fathering this venture had secured a patent the year before from the Virginia Company for the use of the “Mayflower” colonists. Without fixing territorial limits, the new grant allowed a hundred acres to be taken up for every emigrant, with fifteen hundred acres for public buildings, and empowered the grantees to make laws and set up a government.

By the delivery of this patent a sufficient show of authority was conferred for immediate need and for eight and a half years to come. It is true that in April, 1622, Peirce obtained surreptitiously for his private use a new grant with additional privileges, to be valid in place of the grant just described; but the trick was soon discovered, and the associates were reinstated by the Plymouth Company in their rights.

Taking these eight and a half years under the first patent as a separate period, the progress made in them may be briefly stated.

The settlement is first called “New Plymouth” in a letter sent back to England by the “Fortune” in December, 1621, and printed in the second edition of Captain John Smith’s New England’s Trials, in 1622. That it was so called may have been suggested as much by the name Plymouth on Smith’s map of this region (1614) as by the departure of the “Mayflower” from Plymouth, England, or by the knowledge that the colony was the first within the limits of the newly incorporated Plymouth Company. Later, the town was called simply Plymouth, while the colony retained the name New Plymouth.

In numbers they increased from less than fifty at the arrival of the “Fortune,” to near three hundred on the reception of the second charter in May, 1630. The most important accessions were in July, 1623,—about sixty persons, a few of them from Leyden; and about as many more—all from Leyden—in 1629-30.

In the second year at New Plymouth, because of threats from the Narragansett tribe of Indians about Narragansett Bay, the town was enclosed with a strong palisade, and a substantial fort (used also on Sundays as a meeting-house) was erected on the hill which formed so conspicuous a feature of the enclosure. The mode of life which John Smith described in his Generall Historie in 1624,—that “the most of them live together as one family or household, yet every man followeth his trade and profession both by sea and land, and all for a general stock, out of which they have all their maintenance,”—was modified the same year, to the great advantage of all, by the assignment to each head of a family of an acre of ground for planting, to be held as his own till the division of profits with the London merchants. While this taste of proprietorship tended to increase the restlessness of the planters, the vanishing prospect of large returns was simultaneously disheartening the “merchant adventurers,” so that many withdrew, and the remainder agreed to a termination of the partnership, in consideration of the payment of £1,800, in nine equal annual instalments, beginning in 1628. This arrangement was effected in London in November, 1626, through Isaac Allerton, one of the younger of the original Leyden emigrants, who had been commissioned for the purpose; and to meet the new financial situation, the resident adult males (except a few thought unworthy of confidence) were constituted stockholders, each one being allowed shares up to the number of his family. Then followed an allotment of land to each shareholder, the settlement of the title of each to the house he occupied, and a distribution of the few cattle on hand among groups of families,—all these possessions having hitherto been the joint, undivided stock of the “merchant adventurers” and the planters. At the same time eight leading planters (Bradford, Standish, Allerton, Winslow, Brewster, Howland, Alden, and Prince), with the help of four London friends, undertook to meet the outstanding obligations of the colony and the first six annual payments on the new basis, obtaining in return a monopoly of the foreign trade.

In these arrangements, which proved eminently wise for the public interests, one object was to facilitate further emigration from Leyden. The management of the London merchants had been unfavorable to this end, and it was a special grief that during this period of delay the beloved pastor, Robinson, had ended his life in Leyden,—Feb. 19 (March 1), 1625. The heavy expenses of transporting and providing for such as came over in 1629-30 were cheerfully borne by the new management.

The same temper in the London merchants which had hindered Robinson’s coming,—a conviction that the religious peculiarities of the Pilgrims interfered with the attractiveness and financial success of the colony,—led them to send over in 1624 a minister of their own choosing (John Lyford), who was not merely not in sympathy with the wants of the Plymouth men, but even tried to serve his patrons by false accusations and by attempting to set up the Church of England form of worship. He was expelled from the colony within a year from his arrival, and the church continued under Elder Brewster’s teaching. In 1628 Mr. Allerton on a voyage from England, without direction from the church, brought over another minister, but mental derangement quickly ended his career.

The colony began within these first years to enlarge its outlook. In 1627, to further their maritime interests, an outpost was established on Buzzard’s Bay, twenty miles to the southward; in the same year relations of friendly commerce were entered into with the Dutch of New Amsterdam, and as soon as the nearer plantations of the Massachusetts Company were begun, Plymouth was prompt to aid and counsel as occasion offered. In 1628 the attempt was made to establish more firmly the existing trade with the Eastern Indians, by obtaining a patent for a parcel of land on the River Kennebec.

These outside experiences were all in the way of encouragements: the most serious annoyances came, not directly from the savages, but from neighbors of their own blood. Thus in 1623 the wretched colonists sent out the year before by Thomas Weston to Weymouth, twenty miles northwest from Plymouth, had to be protected from their own mismanagement and the hostility of the natives, by which means came about the first shedding of Indian blood by the Pilgrims; and thus again, five years later, the unruly nest of Morton’s followers at Merry Mount, just beyond Weymouth, had to be broken up by force.

Of the progress of civil government in this first period we have scanty memorials. Few laws and few officials answered the simple needs of the colony. Bradford was annually elected governor, and in 1624, at his desire, a board of five Assistants was substituted for the single Assistant who had hitherto shared the executive responsibility. The people met from time to time in General Court for the transaction of public business, and in 1623 a book of laws was begun; but three pages sufficed to contain the half-dozen simple enactments of the next half-dozen years.

The next period of the colony history extends from Jan. 13/23, 1629-30, when the Council for New England granted to Bradford, his heirs, associates, and assigns, a useful enlargement of the patent for Plymouth and Kennebec, to March 2/12, 1640-41, when Bradford in the name of the grantees conveyed the rights thus bestowed to the freemen of New Plymouth in their corporate capacity.

The most striking feature of this period was the growth from a single plantation to a province of eight towns, seven of them stretching for fifty miles along the shore of Cape Cod Bay, from Scituate to Yarmouth, and Taunton lying twenty-five miles inland,—in all containing about twenty-five hundred souls. With this growth there was also some extension of trade on the Kennebec and Penobscot, and in 1632 a beginning of exploration, and in 1633 of settlement, in the Connecticut Valley; but the appearance of numerous emigrants from Massachusetts Bay defeated the contemplated removal of the entire colony to the last-named location.

The establishment of towns led necessarily to a more elaborate system of civil government, and in 1636 it was found expedient to revise and codify the previous enactments of the General Court, and to prescribe the duties of the various public officers. In 1638 the inconveniences of governing by mass-meeting led to the introduction of the representative system already familiar to Massachusetts Bay. The number of Assistants had been increased in 1633 from five to seven.

In 1629 an acceptable minister of the gospel—Ralph Smith, a Cambridge graduate—for the first time took charge of the church in Plymouth; and by 1641 the eight towns of the colony were all (except Marshfield, which was but just settled) supplied with educated clergy, of whom perhaps the most influential was Ralph Partridge, of Duxbury.

The half-century (1641-91) which completed the separate existence of Plymouth Colony, witnessed no radical changes, but a steady development under the existing patent, though repeated but unsuccessful attempts were made to obtain a charter direct from the English Government. At the outset (in 1641), by a purchase of the remaining interests of the English partners of 1627, the last trace of dependence on foreign capital was wiped out.

Notwithstanding the discontinuance of English emigration after 1640, and the enormous devastation of Philip’s war in 1675-76, the population of the colony increased to about eight thousand in these fifty years, being distributed through twenty towns, of which Scituate had probably the largest numbers and certainly the most wealth, the town of Plymouth having lost, even as early as 1643, its former prominence. That this growth was no greater, and that expansion beyond the strict colony limits was completely checked, resulted inevitably from the more favorable situation of the neighboring colony of the Bay.

The civil administration continued as before, the Governor’s Assistants and the Deputies sitting in General Court as one body. Deputies were elected in each town by the resident freemen, the freemen being the original signers of the compact on board the “Mayflower,” with such persons as had been added to their number by a majority vote of the general court. Public sentiment was so trustworthy that no qualifications were named for the estate of freemen until 1656, when it was merely provided that a candidate must have been approved by the freemen of his own town. Two years later, when the colony was overrun by Quaker propagandists, persons of that faith, as well as all others who similarly opposed the laws and the established worship, were distinctly excluded from the privileges of freemen, and in the new revision of the laws in 1671 freemen were obliged to be at least twenty-one years of age, “of sober and peaceable conversation, orthodox in the fundamentals of religion,” and possessed of at least £20 worth of ratable estate in the colony. By the Code of 1671 a Court of Assistants was created to exercise the judicial functions hitherto retained by the General Court; but in 1685, with the constitution of three counties, most of these duties were transferred to county courts.

Two interdependent circumstances conspired with the poverty of the settlers and the unattractiveness of the soil,—even as compared with Massachusetts Bay,—to retard seriously the progress of the colony; and these were, their inability to keep up a learned ministry, and the enforced delay in providing for public education. The first of these facts was so patent as to call forth public rebukes from Massachusetts, and it may be enough to recall that in 1641 seven of the eight townships constituting the colony were served by ministers of English education; but in the next half-century these same pulpits stood vacant on the average upwards of ten years each, and the new towns which were formed in the colony had no larger amount of ministerial service. As to the other point, it is sufficient to note that neither from tradition nor from public records is there evidence of any opportunity or provision for education before 1670,—except, of course, in the private family. Their poverty no doubt chiefly occasioned this.

Yet while the resources of Plymouth and the education of her public men were distinctly inferior to those of the Bay, she bore herself in her relations with the other colonies with a certain simple dignity and straightforward reasonableness which won respect; and in matters of general interest she was content to share the sentiments of her comrades without controlling them. She joined in the New England Confederation of 1643; and though the idea sprang from another quarter, it is probable that the form was influenced by suggestions from the Plymouth men, derived from their experience in the United Netherlands.

Plymouth’s treatment of the Quakers, in 1656 and the following years, illustrated in part the contrast with Massachusetts Bay. At the outset public sentiment was much the same in the two colonies, in view of the extravagances and indecencies of these intruders; but the greater mildness of administration in Plymouth bore its appropriate fruit in lessening the evil characteristics which developed by opposition, and gradually the dreaded sectaries gained a foothold, until finally their principles were widely adopted in certain localities with only good results.

Plymouth’s treatment of the Royal Commissioners in 1665 indicated fairly her consistent attitude towards the mother country; in receiving the King’s mandates with respect, and in promising conformity, she held the course which had produced the seven articles at Leyden in 1617.

The most serious misfortune to visit the colony was the Indian war which broke out early in 1675. Up to that time the Plymouth men had been careful to acquire by bonâ fide purchase a title to all new lands as they were occupied; they had endeavored also (with fair success, as compared with like efforts in Massachusetts Bay) to spread the knowledge of Christianity; and in 1675 there were perhaps six or seven hundred “praying Indians” within the colony bounds.

But Wamsutta and Metacomet (otherwise Alexander and Philip), the sons and successors of the sachem Massasoit, were hostile to the whites and unaffected by Christian influences; and after Alexander’s death, in 1662, the colonists found that only by constant watchfulness could they prevent a breach with the savages. Finally under Philip’s lead they rose and began a war of extermination. The exciting cause and the earliest operations were within the territory claimed by Plymouth; on her fell successively the heaviest blows (in proportion to her population) and the most pressing responsibilities for defence. When the war ended with Philip’s death, in August, 1676, more than half her towns had been partially or wholly destroyed, and the colony’s share (about £15,000) of the expense incurred by the New England Confederacy in suppressing the Indians was a very serious burden on a feeble agricultural community. Before the slow process of recovery from these desolations could be accomplished, the ancient customs of self-government were invaded by James II.; and when the arbitrary exactions under Andros, as Governor of all New England, were ended in the Revolution of 1689, the return to the old conditions of freedom was but temporary; the new monarchs followed James’s policy of consolidation, and Plymouth found herself fated to be included either in the charter of New York or in that of Massachusetts. Better a known than an unknown evil; and accordingly the London agent of Plymouth was authorized to express a preference for union with Boston, and the provincial charter of Massachusetts in October, 1691, put an end to the separate existence of the colony of New Plymouth. Of the original “Mayflower” company but two members survived,—John Cooke, of Dartmouth, who died in 1695, and Mary (Allerton) Cushman, of Plymouth, who died in 1699. The younger generation were accustomed to the leadership of Massachusetts Bay, and accepted the union as a natural and fitting step.

CRITICAL ESSAY ON THE SOURCES OF INFORMATION.

THE earliest printed volume treating of the origin of Plymouth Colony was New England’s Memorial; ... with special Reference to the first Colony thereof, published by Nathaniel Morton in 1669. As he states in his “Epistle Dedicatory,” the most of his intelligence concerning the beginnings of the settlement came from manuscripts left by his “much-honored uncle, Mr. William Bradford.” Morton’s parents had emigrated in 1623, when he was a boy of ten, from Leyden to Plymouth, with a younger sister of Mrs. Morton, who had been sent for to become the wife of Governor Bradford. This connection and his own position as secretary of the General Court of the Colony from 1645, gave peculiar opportunities for gathering information; but his book preserves nothing on the earliest portion of the Pilgrim history, beyond the date (1602) and the place (“the North of England”) of their entering into a church covenant together.

The manuscripts of Governor Bradford passed at his death (1657) to his eldest son, Major William Bradford, of Plymouth, and while in his possession a few particulars were extracted for Cotton Mather’s use in his Magnalia (1702), especially in the “Life of Bradford” (book ii. chap. i.). A minute, but very efficient typographical error, however (A_n_sterfield for A_u_sterfield), kept students for the next century and a half out of the knowledge of Governor Bradford’s birthplace, and of the exact neighborhood whence came the Leyden migration. From Major William Bradford, who died in 1704, the manuscripts descended to his son, Major John, of Kingston (originally a part of Plymouth), by whom the most precious were lent or given, in 1728, to the Rev. Thomas Prince, of Boston.[486] Prince made a careful use of this material in the first volume of his Annals (1736), fixing the locality whence the Pilgrims came as “near the joining borders of Nottinghamshire, Linconshire, and Yorkshire,” and lodged the originals in the library which he bequeathed, in 1758, to the Old South Church in Boston. Governor Thomas Hutchinson, while writing his History of Massachusetts Bay, found these manuscripts in the Prince Library, and printed in the Appendix to his second volume (1767) a valuable extract describing the exodus to Holland. In the troublous times which followed, the Bradford papers disappeared.

Another extract from Bradford, however, soon after came to light in the records of the First Church in Plymouth, where Secretary Morton had transcribed, in 1680, most of his uncle’s account of the transatlantic history of the Pilgrims. This was printed, in part and somewhat inaccurately, by Ebenezer Hazard, in vol. i. of his Historical Collections (1792), and in full by the Rev. Alexander Young, in his Chronicles of the Pilgrims (1841).

The clews furnished by Mather and Prince to the Pilgrim cradle-land attracted no special attention until 1842, when the Hon. James Savage, during a visit to England,[487] submitted the problem to the Rev. Joseph Hunter, author of a history of South Yorkshire, of which region he was also a native. Mr. Hunter, though the evidence was incomplete, suggested that Austerfield was the place wanted; and the attention of this accomplished antiquary being thus enlisted, the result appeared in a tract, published by him in 1849, entitled Collections concerning the Founders of New Plymouth, which identified the meeting-place of the Separatist Church before their removal to Holland. This tract was reissued, in 1852, in the Mass. Hist. Soc. Coll., vol. xxxi., and again in London, in an enlarged form, in 1854.[488] The author’s careful examination of local records made plain the position of the Brewsters in Scrooby, and of the Bradfords in Austerfield (with the entry of Governor Bradford’s baptism), and traced their families, as well as the families of other early members of the Scrooby flock, in the neighboring parishes. The importance of Mr. Hunter’s labors may be seen in the fact, that, besides Brewster and Bradford, none of the “Mayflower” passengers (except the two Winslows) have even yet been surely traced to an English birthplace.[489]

Mr. Hunter’s success soon attracted the attention of other investigators. The earliest visit to Scrooby which has received notice in print was one made in July, 1851, by the Rev. Henry M. Dexter, of Boston, described by him in The Congregationalist of Aug. 8, 1851. Mr. W. H. Bartlett’s Pilgrim Fathers, p. 35, published in 1853, added nothing to Hunter’s researches, except some interesting engravings of the church in which Bradford was baptized, and of Scrooby village. In his enlarged edition of 1854, Hunter gave a better view of the remains of the palace inhabited by Brewster. Mr. Palfrey visited the neighborhood in 1856, and records his impressions in a note on p. 134 of vol. i. (1858) of his History of New England. In 1860 the Rev. John Raine, vicar of the parish of Blyth, in which these hamlets were formerly included, printed a valuable account of that parish’s history and antiquities.[490]

In January, 1862, the Rev. H. M. Dexter published, in the Congregational Quarterly, an article on “Recent Discoveries concerning the Plymouth Pilgrims,” summarizing conveniently what had been learned regarding the place where, and the time when, the church was gathered. In March, 1867, he contributed to the Sabbath at Home magazine an illustrated article on the “Footprints of the Pilgrims in England,” which is still the most vivid and the fullest description extant of the Scrooby neighborhood. With this should be compared, for additional facts, a letter from Dr. Dexter in the Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc. (xii. 129) for July, 1871; the early pages of the chapter on Robinson, in the same author’s Congregationalism as seen in its Literature (1880); and the record of a visit in 1860, in Professor James M. Hoppin’s Old England. The Scrooby episode is also told, more or less fully, in the Rev. Ashbel Steele’s Life of Elder Brewster (1857), in Dr. John Waddington’s Track of the Hidden Church (1863), and in chap. vi. of the second volume of his Congregational History (1874), in the Rev. George Punchard’s History of Congregationalism, vol. iii. chap. xi. (1867), in chap. vii. of vol. ii. of S. R. Gardiner’s Prince Charles and the Spanish Marriage (1869), and in chap. x. of Dr. Leonard Bacon’s Genesis of the New England Churches (1874).[491]

Scrooby village is about one hundred and forty miles N.N.W. from London, and eighty miles due east from Liverpool. It lies on the Great Northern Railway; but as its population numbers only some two hundred, it is practically a mere suburb of Bawtry, a small market-town a mile and a quarter to the north, of perhaps a thousand inhabitants. Austerfield, a little larger than Scrooby, and at about the same distance from Bawtry in a northeasterly direction, is included, as well as much of the other two localities, in the patrimony of Lord Houghton (Richard Monckton Milnes), whose family have held it since 1779.

* * * * *

Of the life in Holland and the preparations for removal to America, the first connected account in print was that appended by Edward Winslow (who had joined the company at Leyden in 1617, at the age of twenty-two) to his Hypocrisy Unmasked, in 1646, which was reprinted in 1841, in Dr. Young’s Chronicles of the Pilgrims. Winslow’s object in this brief appendix was to refute an unjust charge of schism in the Leyden church, and to explain the reasons for the removal and the course of the accompanying negotiations; he also reviewed Robinson’s doctrinal position, and incidentally preserved the substance of the pastor’s farewell address to the departing portion of his flock.[492] Morton’s Memorial, in 1669, gave from Bradford’s manuscripts a fuller account of the events in question; and Mather’s Magnalia (1702), and Prince’s Annals (1736), added a few touches to the picture. Prince has also the distinction of being the first of those who have retraced the steps of the Pilgrims on Dutch soil, his Annals (vol. i. p. 160) recording his visit to Leyden in 1714, and his supposed identification of the church which Robinson’s congregation used, and in which he was buried.[493]

The extracts from Bradford published by Hazard in 1792, with those included in the notes to Judge John Davis’s edition of Morton’s Memorial in 1826, all of which were reprinted by Dr. Young in 1841, set forth in a more orderly way the story of the removal. But there was no inquiry in Holland until Leyden was visited by Mr. George Sumner, a younger brother of Senator Sumner, who communicated the results of his researches to the Massachusetts Historical Society, in 1843, in a paper which was published separately at Cambridge in 1845, and in the Society’s Collections, vol. xxix. (1846). Mr. Sumner threw much light on the actual condition of the Pilgrims in Holland, while investigating Prince’s report of a church lent them by the city, and Winslow’s account of the respect paid Robinson at his funeral. He showed that Prince had confused this congregation with one founded contemporaneously by English Presbyterians in Leyden, for whose use a chapel was granted, while Robinson’s company received no such favor. He also printed the record of Robinson’s admission to the University,—a fact not before recovered,—and the entry of his burial in St. Peter’s cathedral, just across the way from his house.[494]

In 1848 another item of interest,—the application of Robinson and his people for leave to come to Leyden,—was printed for the first time in a Memoir of Robinson, by Professor Kist, in vol. viii. of the Nederlandsch Archief voor Kerkelijke Geschiedenis.[495] A fuller memoir, prefixed to a collected edition of his writings, was published in London three years later (1851), by the Rev. Robert Ashton, and reprinted in the Mass. Hist. Coll., vol. xli. (1852).

Next in chronological order comes the publication of the most important of all known sources of information respecting the Pilgrims from 1608 to 1646,—the History of Plymouth Plantation, by William Bradford, second governor of the colony. We have seen that this history was used, in manuscript, by various writers, but disappeared after 1767. In 1844 a History of the Protestant Episcopal Church in America, by the Bishop of Oxford (Dr. Samuel Wilberforce), was published in London, in which quotations embodying new information were made from an otherwise unknown “Manuscript History of the Plantation of Plymouth, etc., in the Fulham Library.” The Bishop’s volume passed to a second edition in 1846, and was reprinted in New York in 1849; while in 1848 there appeared in London the Rev. J. S. M. Anderson’s History of the Colonial Church, in which reference was distinctly made to “Bradford’s MS. History of Plymouth Colony ... now in the possession of the Bishop of London.” But the significance of these allusions was ignored by American students, until February, 1855, when Mr. John Wingate Thornton, of Boston, called the attention of the Rev. John S. Barry, who was then engaged on the first volume of his History of Massachusetts, to the Bishop of Oxford’s book. Taking up the clew thus given, Mr. Barry conferred with Mr. Charles Deane, who sent at once to London for information, and by the replies received, was enabled to announce at the meeting of the Massachusetts Historical Society, April 12, 1855, that the complete manuscript of Governor Bradford’s history had been found in the Library of the Bishop of London’s Palace at Fulham, and that an accurate copy had been ordered for the Society’s use. This transcript reached Boston in August, and was issued, under Mr. Deane’s able editorship, in the spring of 1856, both as a separate publication and as volume xxxiii. of the Society’s Collections.[496]

How the manuscript came to be in the Fulham Library is uncertain; most probably it was taken from the Prince Library, upon the evacuation of Boston by the British in March, 1776, and was preserved and finally deposited in a public collection by those who perceived it to be of value. The desirability of its return to America has been repeatedly suggested; but as an individual bishop has no power to alienate the property of his See, nothing has yet been accomplished.

The next special contribution to the history of the Pilgrims in Holland was the publication of the “Seven Articles which the church of Leyden sent [in September, 1617] to the Council of England, to be considered of in respect of their judgments occasioned about their going to Virginia, anno 1618.” A contemporary transcript of this paper was found in the British State-Paper Office by the Hon. George Bancroft, and communicated by him, with an introductory letter, to the New York Historical Society, in October, 1856. It was included, in 1857, in vol. iii. of the second series of their Collections.[497]

In 1859-60 the Hon. Henry C. Murphy, of Brooklyn, N. Y., United States Minister at the Hague from 1857 to 1861, published in the Hist. Mag. (iii. 261, 335, 357; iv. 4) a series of four “Contributions to the History of the Pilgrim Fathers, from the Records at Leyden.” These valuable papers presented much new information (derived especially from the marriage records) as to the full names, ages, occupations, and English homes of Robinson’s congregation; they determined also the site and dimensions of his house, and the details of its purchase. Another fact, which was already known, that Elder Brewster during the last three years of his stay in Leyden was a printer and publisher, especially of books on ecclesiastical matters, both in Latin and English,[498] which it would not have been safe to print at home, received new illustration from Mr. Murphy.

The labors of Sumner and Murphy in Holland have been supplemented by the diligent researches of Dr. H. M. Dexter, whose work at Scrooby was mentioned above. In the Congregational Quarterly for January, 1862 (vol. iv.), he gave an account of the recent additions to our knowledge; and in the notes to his invaluable addition of Mourt’s Relation, in 1865, he traced the personal history of the Pilgrims, so far as an exhaustive examination of the Leyden records made that possible. In 1866, in company with Professor George E. Day, of Yale College, who had shared in the previous investigations, Dr. Dexter superintended the erection of a marble tablet, with appropriate inscription, on the front of the Home for Aged Walloons, which now occupies the site of Robinson’s house. In the Sabbath at Home for April, 1867, he published a graphic account of the “Footprints of the Pilgrims in Holland,” and in the Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc. for January, 1872 (xii. 184), suggested some valuable corrections of Mr. Sumner’s Memoirs, respecting Robinson’s death and burial. The Leyden pastor’s influence and doctrinal position may be best studied in Dr. Dexter’s Congregationalism as seen in its Literature (1880), and in vol. iii. of the Rev. George Punchard’s History of Congregationalism (2d ed. 1867).[499]

For various contributions to fuller knowledge than Bradford affords of the negotiations in London, after removal to America had been decided on, great credit is due to the researches of the Rev. Edward D. Neill, especially in his History of the Virginia Company (1869) and his English Colonization of America (1871). Cf. Hist. Mag., xiii. 278. The same writer has investigated the personal history of Captain Thomas Jones, master of the “Mayflower,” in the Historical Magazine (January, 1869), xv. 31-33, and in the N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg. (1874), xxviii. 314-17. The charge that Jones was bribed by the Dutch in 1620, is considered by Mr. William Brigham in the volume of lectures published by the Massachusetts Historical Society on the Early History of Massachusetts, and in the Society’s Proceedings for December, 1868.[500]

For the colony’s affairs from the sailing of the “Mayflower” to 1646, the prime source of knowledge is Bradford’s History. At the time of emigrating, the author was in his thirty-first year, and his book was written at various dates, from 1630 to 1650, when he was from forty to sixty years of age. Less than four months after landing he became Governor, and for the remaining quarter-century covered by his History he held the same office, except during five years, when excused at his own urgent request. The foremost man in the colony for this long period, nature and opportunity equally fitted him to be its chronicler from the beginning. No one could speak with more authority than he of the inner motives and guiding policy of the original colonists,—fortunately, also, no one could exemplify more clearly in written words the ideal Pilgrim than does Bradford, with his grave, homely, earnest style, not unsuggestive of the English of the Bible. Between his style and that of Winthrop, the contemporary historian of the Bay, there is something of the same difference that existed between the two emigrations; and yet Bradford’s simple story, standing as it does as the earliest piece of American historical composition, possesses a peculiar charm which the broader, more philosophic page of Winthrop cannot rival.[501]

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The special contributions by others to the history of Bradford’s period began in 1622 with the publication of Mourt’s Relation, a daily journal of the first twelve months (Sept. 1620, to Dec. 11, 1621), so called from the name, “G. Mourt,” subscribed to the preface, but doubtless written by Bradford and Winslow. The standard edition is that of 1865, with notes by Dr. H. M. Dexter.[502] A few facts may also be gleaned from a Sermon (by Robert Cushman) preached at Plymouth, Dec. 9, 1621,[503] and from the second edition of Captain John Smith’s New England’s Trials,—both published in London in 1622. Winslow’s Good News from New England appeared in 1624, continuing the narrative of events from November, 1621, to September 10, 1623.[504] Next came, after a long interval, New England’s Memorial, by Nathaniel Morton, printed at Cambridge in 1669, which professed to give the annals of New England to 1668; beyond the part supplied from Bradford and Winslow, however, there was little of value. Judge John Davis’s[505] edition of 1826 is still the best.[506]

To these materials the next sensible addition was in the “Summary of the Affairs of the Colony of New-Plimouth,” appended, in 1767, to vol. ii. of Governor Hutchinson’s History of Massachusetts Bay, and containing some personal items not before collected. In 1794 a fragment of a letter-book, preserving copies of important letters written and received by Governor Bradford from 1624 to 1630, having lately been found in Nova Scotia, was printed in the Massachusetts Historical Collections, vol. iii.[507] In 1798 Dr. Jeremy Belknap included in vol. ii. of his American Biography sketches of the leading Pilgrims (Robinson, Carver, Bradford, Brewster, Cushman, Winslow, and Standish), which put in admirable form all then known of early Plymouth history.

The next quarter of a century added nothing to the existing stock of knowledge, unless by the publication in 1815 of the General History of New England to 1680, by the Rev. William Hubbard (born 1621, died 1704), which, so far as Plymouth was concerned, was little more than a compilation from sources already named. But with the issue, in 1826, of a new edition of Morton, and in 1830 of An Historical Memoir of the Colony of New Plymouth, by the Hon. Francis Baylies,[508] and in 1832 of a History of the Town of Plymouth, by Dr. James Thacher, was introduced the new era of modern research.[509]

The Legislature of Massachusetts gave fresh impulse to this spirit of investigation by publishing in 1836, under the editorship of Mr. William Brigham, the Laws passed in Plymouth Colony from 1623 to 1691, with a selection of other permanent documents. In 1841 the Rev. Alexander Young[510] collected, under the title of Chronicles of the Pilgrim Fathers from 1602 to 1625, the principal writings of that period, and, enriching them with a body of useful notes, made a volume which still retains a distinct value. In 1846 and 1851 a local antiquary, Mr. William S. Russell,[511] brought out two small volumes,—A Guide to Plymouth and Pilgrim Memorials,—which are not yet superseded; Mr. William H. Bartlett’s Pilgrim Fathers[512] (1853) added something to these local touches. Between 1855 and 1861 the Records of the Colony of New Plymouth were printed in extenso, by order of the State Legislature, under the editorship of Dr. N. B. Shurtleff[513] and Mr. David Pulsifer.

The year 1856 was made memorable by the printing of Bradford’s manuscript, and two years later appeared the initial volume of Dr. John G. Palfrey’s History of New England, which comprehends by far the best of modern narratives of the complete career of Plymouth Colony. Only in subsidiary literature have the more recent years added anything. Valuable bibliographical notes on Pilgrim history, by the editor of the present volume, were printed in the Harvard College Library Bulletin for 1878, nos. 7 and 8; and the “Collections toward a Bibliography of Congregationalism,” appended to Dr. H. M. Dexter’s Congregationalism as seen in its Literature (1880), are indispensable to future students. In 1881 General E. W. Peirce published a useful volume of Civil, Military, and Professional Lists of Plymouth and Rhode Island Colonies to 1700.

Apart from strictly historical composition, the theme has inspired some of the greatest oratorical efforts of the sons of New England in the present century,—especially in connection with the stated annual celebrations of the Pilgrim Society,[514] formed at Plymouth in 1820 (a successor of the earlier Old Colony Club,[515] founded in 1769). Most deservedly conspicuous in this series are the orations delivered in 1820 by Daniel Webster, in 1824 by Edward Everett, and in 1870 by Robert C. Winthrop; of similar note are several of the orations before the New England Society of New York, founded in 1805. The Pilgrim Society has also fostered local sentiment by erecting (in 1824) Pilgrim Hall in the town of Plymouth, and by gathering within it a valuable collection of memorials of the early settlers and of portraits of historical interest.[516]

A portrait of Edward Winslow (engraved on a previous page) is in Pilgrim Hall at Plymouth, and is the only undoubted portrait of any of the Pilgrims now existing.[517] Of the many attempts to depict on canvas signal events of Pilgrim history, the most important is a painting by Robert W. Weir of the embarkation at Delft Haven, executed in 1846, and occupying one of the panels in the Rotunda of the Capitol at Washington.[518] The most imposing works of architecture and sculpture in commemoration of the same events are the canopy recently erected over the rock in Plymouth on which the Pilgrims are believed to have landed, and the monument on a neighboring hill-top.[519]

In poetical literature the most serious and sustained effort to represent the Pilgrim spirit is in Longfellow’s “Courtship of Miles Standish” (1859);[520] while in briefer compass Old England, through Lord Houghton (Prefatory Stanzas to Hunter’s Founders of New Plymouth) and Mrs. Hemans (“Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers”), and New England through Pierpont (“The Pilgrim Fathers”) and Lowell (“Interview with Miles Standish”), have vied in celebrating the character and deeds of the exiles of 1620.[521]

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