The Pilgrim fathers of New England and their Puritan successors

II

MING H. REVELL COMPANY

Chicago Toron

Religious Tract Society, Lottdon I 896

COPYRIGHT, 1895 BY

Fleming H. Revell Company

By transfer NOV 8 191^

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Introduction To The First American Edition

Every loyal American ought to know the principles and motives which led to the founding of this Republic. These cannot be understood without an acquaintance with the men and women who first came to New England. Their work was greater than beginning a nation. Dr. John Fiske says : " Among the most significant events which prophesied the final triumph of the English over the Roman idea, perhaps the most, significant — the one which marks most incisively the new era — was the migration of English Puritans across the Atlantic Ocean."

But the character of these pioneers of New England was largely formed in old England and in Holland ; and it can best be interpreted by a symphathetic student of their history who has lived long among the scenes of their earlier years. For this task no one living is better fitted than Dr. John Brown, of Bedford, England. For more than thirty years he has been the beloved minister of the church at Bunyan meeting, in that ancient town. The first edition of his elaborate biography of John

IV INTRODUCTION.

Bunyan, published about ten years ago, was exhausted in a few weeks, and successive editions since that time have not only greatly increased the interest in the life and works of the immortal dreamer, but have spread the fame of his biographer on both sides of the Atlantic.

Dr. John Brown is one of the best known and most honored of English Nonconformist ministers, and one of the most trusted authorities on the important historical topics he has treated. His broad sympathies with all honest men of every denominational name have made his judgment impartial, while his popular literary style and his enthusiasm as a student of history have clothed with life the facts he has discovered in many dry and dusty manuscripts. He is skillful in unraveling facts and fiction long woven together by custom, in showing how both have taken hold of present life, and in giving due weight to fact while he puts fiction aside. His address on the Historic Episcopate, which he delivered in London in 1891, as president of the Congregational Union in England and Wales, is one of the most incisive and convincing utterances yet made on that topic, and is still extensively quoted. He gave the first address at the reception of the International Congregational Council in London in the same year, and was one of the most prominent Englishmen in the deliberations of that body. His repeated visits to the United States have made him widely known and loved in this country. In October, 1892, he represented the Congregational Union of England and Wales at the National Council of Congregational Churches in Minneapolis.

During all his mature life Dr. Brown has been interested in the Pilgrims and Puritans who first settled New England, He has inherited and manifested their spirit, though with none of the intolerance which sometimes qualified the Puritans. Living within easy reach of the homes of the Pilgrims, he has familiarized himself with every nook and

INTRODUCTION. v

corner in which their conventicles used to be held. His access to both public and private libraries of England and Holland, and his extensive acquaintance with historians and antiquarians, have given him rare opportunities to learn the details of the lives of those once obscure men whose unselfish loyalty to great principles of religion and liberty were destined to make them famous to coming generations : and he has availed himself of these opportunities to make the Pilgrims of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries live anew, and to introduce them so fittingly to their descendants as to give fresh interest to their principles and new strength to the virtues they have bequeathed to us.

Dr. Brown has followed the Pilgrims eagerly to their earliest homes in America, and has studied their footprints and memorials along the shores of New England. He was an intimate friend and correspondent of Dr. Henry M. Dexter, the foremost authority in this country on Pilgrim history and life ; and he is hardly less familiar with the literature on this subject in our libraries than with that on the other side of the ocean.

The story of the Pilgrims has all the elements of a fascinating romance. When it is read in the light of what they have produced and in the spirit of sympathy which appreciates and enjoys the religious and civil liberty we inherit, it is fitted beyond most uninspired records, to kindle exalted ideas of citizenship and to stimulate young and old to selfdenying service of our country and of mankind. The years of perplexity and persecution in England during which honest yeomen and their families met in secret and worshiped God and entered into covenant to live worthy of him ; the escape to Holland and the experiences which there shaped their purpose to begin a new life in a new world ; the struggles with stormy seas, with the wilderness and winter cold ; the encounters with Indians ; the sturdy manhood which courted loneliness and defied starvation and death, esteeming

VI INTRODUCTION.

loyalty to God and to conscience above all other ambitions ; the wonderful providences which changed defeat into victory, which turned the wilderness into a garden, and made the humble Plymouth Colony the beginning of a great nation standing proudly in the forefront of Christian civilization — all these are materials which give to the beginnings of the youngest of the nations an interest unsurpassed by the ruins of the oldest.

The characteristics of New England life and the impress it has given to the whole country cannot be rightly appreciated without a knowledge of the first settlers and the sources whence they drew the inspiration to turn from the civilization of Europe and to make for themselves a higher civilization in a new land. The genius of American self-government was born in the minds of the Pilgrims, began to be realized in Plymouth Colony, and joined itself to men of like spirit and love of liberty controlled by law, as they faced the difficulties of organizing a new nation and overcame its foes ; till they became fitted for the great struggle by which they separated themselves from their mother country and established themselves a people free and independent. It is a most welcome evidence of the strong ties that bind England and America together that an Englishman has here chronicled the noblest chapter in our early history, with so genuine an insight into its character and dignity that in both nations it will be read with equal interest. The Pilgrim spirit has reproduced itself in mountain and valley and on the prairie all the way from Massachusetts Bay to the Golden Gate. It has helped to unite in high aims people of widely different histories and languages, as they have together laid foundations in new lands for this rapidly growing Republic. This same spirit is ever bringing nearer the two peoples which once were one, which drew apart for a time, but which can never forget that they have the same ancestry, the same language and literature, the same

INTRODUCTION. vii

inherent love of liberty, the same purpose to serve mankind, and that the hand of divine Providence is directing them to the same ways of fulfilling that purpose. May this book help to cement more closely these ties of kindred and service between two great nations which rejoice in the same inheritance.

A. E. Dunning.

Boston, October, 1895.

DE MINIMIS MAXIMA.

Great things from small, for God works ever so, That so behind all causes he may stand Revealed omnipotent.

Well worthy to be magnified are they

WTio, with sad hearts, of friends and country took

A last farewell, their loved abodes forsook,

And hallowed ground in which their Fathers lay ;

Then to the new-found World explored their way,

That so a Church, unforced, uncalled to brook

Ritual restraints, within some sheltering nook

Her Lord might worship and His Word obey

In Freedom.

Wordsworth. — Ecclesiastical Sonnets.

Preface

Placing in the forefront of this work, what an Elizabethan writer called ' a brief ingresse to the Christian reader,' it may be well to state that it is now more than forty years since the latest previous history of the Pilgrim Fathers, printed on this side of the Atlantic, was given to the public. Therefore, as might be expected, since the appearance of Mr. Bartlett's book in 1853, important contributions have been made to the literature of the subject, which have had the effect of placing it in clearer light and giving it fuller meaning. Notably the discovery in 1855 of the original manuscript of Governor Bradford's History of Plymotith Plantation may be regarded as a matter of prime importanca.

It was known that such a history had been written, although never published, for it was freely used by Nathaniel Morton in his New England's Memorial, published in 1669 ; Thomas Prince, in the preface to the first volume of his Annals, printed in 1736, had cited it as one of his manuscript authorities ; and Governor Hutchinson had also used it in the preparation of the second volume of his History of Massachusetts in 1767, he being the last man who, till the present century, was known to have seen it. While in the possession of Prince, who died in 1758, the manuscript was deposited in the New England Library in the tower of the Old South Church in Boston, from which,

6 PREFACE,

after the siege of the city, it mysteriously disappeared, and as time went on, was given up as hopelessly lost.

The next step in the history brings us to the year 1845, when Samuel Wilberforce, afterwards Bishop of Oxford, published a History of the Protestant Episcopal Ch urch in America. In the preparation of this work he made researches for original documents in the library of the Bishop of London's palace at Fulham, from one of which he made several extracts, the references for which were given in the footnotes. The book became fairly well known, and passed through other editions, but no one seems to have taken special note of it for about ten years after its first publication. At length, in the month of February, 1855, the Rev. John S. Barry happened to consult it when engaged upon the first volume of his History of Massachusetts, when he was struck again and again by reading in the extracts from the Fulham MS. passages he remembered to have seen cited as from Bradford's History by Morton and Prince. He at once took the volume to his friend, Charles Deane, Esq., of the Massachusetts Historical Society, to whom he communicated his suspicion that Wilberforce's extracts were taken from the manuscript which had been so long missing, and which, after all, might possibly still be found in the Bishop of London's library. This turned out to be the case. Here at last was the History of Plymouth Plantation, written by William Bradford, one of the Pilgrim Fathers, and afterwards largely used by Morton and Prince. How it came to be transferred from the library in the tower of the Old South Church to that in the episcopal palace at Fulham can only be matter of conjecture, but the probability is that it was brought over by the English soldiers when the Revolutionary War was ended.

This invaluable and interesting record being thus, happily, once more brought to light, I have made use

PREFACE. 7

of it in all those portions of the history for which it is the sole authority, supplementing it by such State Papers, Domestic and Colonial, as throw light on the subject, and also by such other MSS. as have in recent years become available for historical purposes.

I have been greatly helped also by many of the numerous works issued in recent years both in this country and in America on the history of New England. To the more important of these I have acknowledged my obhgations in the references given ; but where one has been making notes extending over a lengthened period it is not always easy to remember the source from which many points of detail were taken. If, therefore, I have not always made due acknowledgment, I can only crave lenient indulgence beforehand.

In the hope that the re-telling of an old story, under the new lights of a later time, may not be without interest, instruction, and stimulus for ourselves, I leave these pages to the kindly judgment of such readers as love to linger over the record of brave deeds wrought by brave men in bygone days.

JOHN BROWN.

The Manse, Bedford, July 25, 1895.

BOSTON. {From a sketch by Charles Whymper.)

Massachusetts Bay and Connecticut Valley . . 295