The Beginners of a Nation / A History of the Source and Rise of the Earliest English Settlements in America, with Special Reference to the Life and Character of the People

CHAPTER THE SECOND.
SEPARATISM AND THE SCROOBY CHURCH.

I.

Importance of the Separatists. To the great brotherhood of Puritans who formed a party within the church there was added a little fringe of Separatists or "Brownists," as they were commonly called, who did not stop with rejecting certain traits of the Anglican service, but spurned the church itself. Upon these ultraists fell the merciless hand of persecution. They were imprisoned, hanged, exiled. They were mostly humble people, and were never numerous; but by their superior boldness in speech and writing, by their attempts to realize actual church organizations on apostolic models, they rendered themselves considerable if not formidable. From this advance guard and forlorn hope of Puritanism, inured to hardship and the battle front, came at length the little band of New England pioneers who made a way into the wilderness over the dead bodies of half their company. The example of these contemned Brownists led to the Puritan settlement of New England. Their type of ecclesiastical organization ultimately dominated the Congregationalism of New England and the nonconformity of the mother country. For these reasons, if for no other, Brownism, however obscure it may have been, is not a negligible element in history.

II.

Nonconformity in the Church. The great body of the Puritans seem to have agreed with Bishop Hall that it was "better to swallow a ceremony than to rend a church," and they agreed with him in regarding Separatism as criminal. They were, indeed, too intent on reforming the Church of England to think of leaving it. They made no scruple of defying ecclesiastical regulations when they could, but in the moral code of that day schism was the deadliest of sins.

In the early part of Elizabeth's reign, before the beginning of the rule of Whitgift and the High Commission Courts, Puritan divines slighted or omitted the liturgy in many parishes. This became more common after the rise of Cartwright and the Presbyterian movement, about 1570. Scrambler, Bishop of Peterborough, to Burghley, 13th April, 1573, in Wright's Elizabeth and her Times. For example, in the town of Overston, in 1573, there was no divine service according to the Book of Common Prayer, "but insteade thereof two sermons be preached" by men whom the bishop had refused to license. The village of Whiston was also a place of Puritan assemblage, "where it is their joye," writes the Bishop of Peterborough, "to have manie owte of divers parishes, principallie owte of Northampton towne and Overston aforesaid, with other townes thereaboute, there to receive the sacramentes with preachers and ministers to their owne liking, and contrarie to the forme prescribed by the publique order of the realme." Rogers's Preface to Articles. Parker Soc. ed., p. 10. Thomas Rogers says, "The brethren (for so did they style them-selves) would neither pray, nor say service, nor baptize, nor celebrate the Lord's Supper, nor marry, nor bury, nor do any other ecclesiastical duty according to law."

At this time some of the Puritan divines held high positions in the church. Whittingham, who had been on the Puritan side of the quarrels in Frankfort, and who had received only a Genevan ordination, succeeded in holding his deanery of Durham until his death, in 1579. In 1563 Dr. Turner was sneering at bishops as "white coats" and "tippett gentlemen," while himself Dean of Durham.

The Semi-Separatists. But Elizabeth after a while filled the bishoprics with men to her liking, whose heavy hands made the lot of Puritans in the church harder and harder. Many ministers were silenced, but there were many who, by evasion or by straining their consciences, held their benefices. Bancroft in Barlowe's Svmme and Svbstance. Some Puritan clergymen, when they were to preach, preferred "to walk in the church-yard until sermon time rather than to be present at public prayer." Some Puritan laymen had their own way of conforming to the church. Heresiography, p. 82. "There is a sort of Semi-Separatist," says Pagitt, as late as 1646, "that will heare our Sermons but not our Common-prayers; and of these you may see every Sunday in our streets sitting and standing about our doores; who, when Prayers are done, rush into our Churches to hear our Sermons."

III.

Causes of Separatism. The growth of Separatist churches was due to two causes. An almost incredible reverence for the letter of the Scriptures had taken the place of older superstitions. There was a strong tendency to revert to the stern spirit of the Old Testament and to adopt the external forms of the New. Religious idealists saw a striking contrast between the discipline of the primitive and almost isolated bands of enthusiastic believers in the apostolic time and the all-inclusive parishes of the hierarchical state church. And in that age of externalism the difference in organic form between the Anglican church and the little synagogues of Christian seceders founded by Paul in the Levant weighed heavily upon the minds of earnest people. It did not occur to them that this primitive organization was probably brought over from the neighboring Jewish congregations from which the converts had withdrawn, and that there might not be any obligation to imitate it under different skies and in a remote age. Thomas Scott in Pagitt, 80. The Separatist was an idealist. "He lives by the aire," said an opponent, "and there he builds Castles and Churches; none on earth will please him; ... he must finde out Sir Thomas More's Utopia, or rather Plato's Community, and bee an Elder there." But Separatism was undoubtedly promoted by persecution. Bradford says that the sufferings inflicted on them by the bishops helped some of the Puritans "to see further into things by the light of the word of God. Plimoth Plantation, p. 8. How not only these base and beggerly ceremonies were unlawfull, but also that the lordly and tiranous power of the prelats ought not to be submitted unto." Drawn thus by the letter of the biblical record, while stung by cruel oppression and galled by the opposition of the constituted authorities to what they deemed the truth divine, it is not strange that religious enthusiasts began to long for societies organized like those of the apostolic age, from which the profane should be excluded by a strict discipline.

IV.

Robert Browne and Brownism. The beginning of Separatism has been commonly attributed to Robert Browne, a contentious and able advocate of Separatist doctrines. 1581 to 1586. After a brief and erratic career as an advocate of these opinions, and after suffering the penalty of his zeal and proving the sincerity of his belief in thirty-two different prisons, in some of which he could not see his hand at noonday, Browne at length began to waver—now inclined to return to the church, now recoiling toward dissent. Worn out in nerves by controversy and persecution, this eccentric man was so alarmed by a solemn sentence of excommunication from a bishop, that he repented and made peace with the English church. He accepted a benefice, but employed a curate to preach for him. Browne lingered on to an unhonored age, imperious and contentious, not able to live with his wife, and held in no reverence by churchmen, while he was despised by Separatists. He died at eighty, in Northampton jail, to which he had been carried on a feather bed laid in a cart. The old man had been committed to prison this thirty-third time in his life for striking a constable who sought to collect a rate. Note 1.

Rise of Separatism. Separatism in some form existed before Browne's zeal made it a thorn in the side of the bishops. Something like a separation existed in 1567. Barclay's Inner Life, pp. 13, 53. In 1571 there was an independent church of which we know little but the pastor's name. Dialogue of 1593 quo. by Waddington. Bradford even dates independency back to the reign of Mary. In truth, the rise of this sect, from which came the earliest New England colony, appears to be lost in obscurity. Bradford's Dialogue. Significant movements are usually cradled in rustic mangers, to which no learned magi think it worth their while to journey. Note 2. The beginning of Separatism was probably in the little conventicles held by devout Puritans who, in the words of one of their own writers, "met together to sing a psalm or to talk of God's word." Josias Nichols, The Plea for the Innocent, 1602, in Hanbury, i. 3. But Browne, so far as we know, was one of the earliest to organize independent churches, with officers named and classified after those of the petty hierarchies of the early Christian congregations, or rather according to such deductions regarding them as he was able to make from the Epistles of Paul. Separatism, though it owed something to Browne's activity, was not founded by him. Browne's labors began about 1581, and his fiery career as a Brownist had lasted only four or five years when he began to vacillate. A great part of this time was spent in exile, much of it in prison, and very little of it about London. Stephen Breadwell, 1588, in Dexter, 255. But before 1587 London seems to have been the center of the Separatists, from which they had "sparsed their companies into severall partes of the Realme."

It seems that their rise in London came from the devout meetings of those who had begun to repudiate the Church of England as antichristian. Without any officers or organization apparently, these people, when we first get sight of them, were wont to assemble in the summer time in the fields about London, sitting down upon a bank while the Bible was expounded now by one and now by another of the company. In the winter it was their custom to spend the whole Sunday together from five o'clock in the morning, eating dinner in company and paying for it by a collection. They responded in prayer only by spontaneous groans or sobs, much after the fashion of the early Quakers, Methodists, and other enthusiasts of a later time. H. M. Dexter's Congregationalism, 255-257. If one of their members returned to a parish assembly, they pronounced him an apostate and solemnly delivered him over to Satan until he should repent.

V.

Barrowism. When they began to organize themselves formally into a church the London Separatists in their turn resorted to the apostolic epistles. These had already been treated like the magician's bottle that is made to yield white wine or red at pleasure. From them whatsoever form of discipline was desired by Anglican, Presbyterian, or Brownist had been derived, and now a still different discipline was deduced, a mean betwixt Presbyterian and Brownist theories. This is known now as Barrowism. It was the form of church government brought by the Pilgrims to Plymouth, and substantially that which prevailed in New England throughout the seventeenth century.

The London Separatists suffered miserably from persecution. Many of them languished and died in prison. Barrow and Greenwood, their leaders, were hanged at Tyburn. A part of them migrated to Amsterdam, while the rest maintained a furtive church in London. Separatists in Amsterdam, 1593. Those in Amsterdam, having no lingering abuses of the English church to reform, set every man's conscience to watch his neighbor's conduct. Having seceded from the communion of the Church of England on account of scandals, they were scandalized with the least variation from their rigorous standard by any of their own church members, and they were soon torn asunder with dissensions as the result of this vicariousness of conscience. The innocent vanity of the pastor's wife who could never forego a "toppish" hat and high-heeled shoes was the principal stumbling-block.

Though Separatism had been almost extirpated from England by the close of Elizabeth's reign, there remained even yet one vigorous society in the north which was destined to exert a remarkable influence on the course of history.

VI.

The cradle of the Pilgrims. On the southern margin of Yorkshire the traveler alights to-day at the station of Bawtry. It is an uninteresting village, with a rustic inn. More than a mile to the southward, in Nottinghamshire, lies the pleasant but commonplace village of Scrooby. About a mile to the north of Bawtry is Austerfield, a hamlet of brick cottages crowded together along the road. It has a picturesque little church built in the middle ages, the walls of which are three feet thick. This church will seat something more than a hundred people nowadays by the aid of a rather modern extension. In the seventeenth century it was smaller, and there was no ceiling. Then one could see the rafters of the roof while shuddering with cold in the grottolike interior. The country around is level and unpicturesque.

But one is here in the cradle of great religious movements. In Scrooby and in Austerfield were born the Pilgrims who made the first successful settlement in New England. A little to the east lies Gainsborough, from which migrated to Holland in 1606 the saintly Separatist John Smyth, who gave form to a great Baptist movement of modern times. A few miles to the northeast of Bawtry, in Lincolnshire, lies Epworth, the nest from which the Wesleys issued more than a hundred years later to spread Methodism over the world. Hunter's Founders of New Plymouth, 24, 25. Religious zeal seems to have characterized the people of this region even before the Reformation, for the country round about Scrooby was occupied at that time by an unusual number of religious houses.

The little Austerfield church and the old church at Scrooby are the only picturesque or romantic elements of the environment, and on these churches the Pilgrims turned their backs as though they had been temples of Baal. In the single street of Austerfield the traveler meets the cottagers of to-day, and essays to talk with them. They are heavy and somewhat stolid, like most other rustic people in the north country, and an accent to which their ears are not accustomed amuses and puzzles them. No tradition of the Pilgrims lingers among them. They have never heard that anybody ever went out of Austerfield to do anything historical. They listen with a bovine surprise if you speak to them of this exodus, and they refer you to the old clerk of the parish, who will know about it. The venerable clerk is a striking figure, not unlike that parish clerk painted by Gainsborough. This oracle of the hamlet knows that Americans come here as on a pilgrimage, and he tells you that one of them, a descendant of Governor Bradford, offered a considerable sum for the disused stone font at which Bradford the Pilgrim was baptized. But the traveler turns away at length from the rustic folk of Austerfield and the beer-drinkers over their mugs in the inn at Bawtry, and the villagers at Scrooby, benumbed by that sense of utter common-placeness which is left on the mind of a stranger by such an agricultural community. The Pilgrims, then, concerning whom poems have been written, and in whose honor orations without number have been made, were just common country folk like these, trudging through wheat fields and along the muddy clay highways of the days of Elizabeth and James. They were just such men as these and they were not. They were such as these would be if they were vivified by enthusiasm. We may laugh at superfluous scruples in rustic minds, but none will smile at brave and stubborn loyalty to an idea when it produces such steadfast courage as that of the Pilgrims.

And yet, when the traveler has resumed his journey, and recalls Scrooby and Bawtry and Austerfield, the stolid men and gossiping women, the narrow pursuits of the plowman and the reaper, and remembers the flat, naked, and depressing landscape, he is beset by the old skepticism about the coming of anything good out of Nazareth. Magnalia, Book II, chap. i, p. 2. Nor is he helped by remembering that at the time of Bradford's christening at the old stone font the inhabitants of Austerfield are said to have been "a most ignorant and licentious people," and that earlier in that same century John Leland speaks of "the meane townlet of Scrooby."

VIII.

Elder Brewster. But Leland's description of the village suggests the influence that caused Scrooby and the wheat fields thereabout to send forth, in the beginning of the seventeenth century and of a new reign, men capable of courage and fortitude sufficient to make them memorable, and to make these three townlets places of pilgrimage in following centuries.

Itinerary, i, 36, in Hunter's Founders, p. 20. "In the meane townlet of Scrooby, I marked two things"—it is Leland who writes—"the parish church not big but very well builded; the second was a great manor-place, standing within a moat, and longing to the Archbishop of York." This large old manor-place he describes with its outer and inner court. In this manor-place, about half a century after Leland saw it, there lived William Brewster. He was a man of education, who had been for a short time in residence at Cambridge; he had served as one of the under secretaries of state for years; had been trusted beyond all others by Secretary Davison, his patron; and, when Elizabeth disgraced Davison, in order to avoid responsibility for the death of Mary of Scotland, Brewster had been the one friend who clung to the fallen secretary as long as there was opportunity to do him service. Making no further effort to establish himself at court, Brewster went after a while "to live in the country in good esteeme amongst his freinds and the good gentle-men of those parts, espetially the godly and religious." Bradford, 410. His abode after his retirement was the old manor-place now destroyed, but then the most conspicuous building at Scrooby. It belonged in his time to Sir Samuel Sandys, the elder brother of Sir Edwin Sandys, whose work as the master spirit in the later history of the Virginia Company has already been recounted. Supra, Book I, chap. ii, iii. At Scrooby Brewster succeeded his father in the office of "Post," an office that obliged him to receive and deliver letters for a wide district of country, to keep relays of horses for travelers by post on the great route to the north, and to furnish inn accommodations. In the master of the post at Scrooby we have the first of those influences that lifted a group of people from this rustic region into historic importance. He had been acquainted with the great world, and had borne a responsible if not a conspicuous part in delicate diplomatic affairs in the Netherlands. At court, as at Scrooby, he was a Puritan, and now in his retirement his energies were devoted to the promotion of religion. He secured earnest ministers for many of the neighboring parishes. But that which he builded the authorities tore down. Whitgift was archbishop, and the High Commission Courts were proceeding against Puritans with the energy of the Spanish Inquisition. "The godly preachers" about him were silenced. The people who followed them were proscribed, and all the pains and expense of Brewster and his Puritan friends in establishing religion as they understood it were likely to be rendered futile by the governors of the church. Plimoth Plantations, 411. "He and many more of those times begane to looke further into things," says Bradford. Persecution begot Separatism. The theory was the result of conditions, as new theories are wont to be.

IX.

The Scrooby Church. Here, as elsewhere, the secession appears to have begun with meetings for devotion. By this supposition we may reconcile two dates which have been supposed to conflict, conjecturing that in 1602, when Brewster had lived about fifteen years in the old manor-house, his neighbors, who did not care to attend the ministry of ignorant and licentious priests, began to spend whole Sundays together, now in one place and now in another, but most frequently in the old manor-house builded within a moat, and reached by ascending a flight of stone steps. Magnalia, Book ii, c. i, 2. Here, Brewster's hospitality was dispensed to them freely. They may or may not have been members of the Separatist church at Gainsborough, as some have supposed. It was not until 1606 that these people formed the fully organized Separatist church of Scrooby. It was organized after the Barrowist pattern that had originated in London—it was after a divine pattern, according to their belief. Brewster, the nucleus of the church, became their ruling elder.

The ruling elder. It was in these all-day meetings at the old manor-house that the Separatist rustics of Scrooby were molded for suffering and endeavor. The humble, modest, and conscientious Brewster was the king-post of the new church—the first and longest enduring of the influences that shaped the character of these people in England, Holland, and America. Bradford's Plimoth Plantation, 408-414. Hunter's Founders, passim. Winsor's Elder William Brewster, a pamphlet. F. B. Dexter in Narrative and Crit. Hist., iii, 257-282. Brewster could probably have returned to the court under other auspices after Davison's fall, but as master of the post at Scrooby, then as a teacher and as founder of a printing office of prohibited English books in Leyden, and finally as a settler in the wilderness, inuring his soft hands to rude toils, until he died in his cabin an octogenarian, he led a life strangely different from that of a courtier. But no career possible to him at court could have been so useful or so long remembered.

X.

John Robinson. But Brewster was not the master spirit. About the time the Separatists of Scrooby completed their church organization, in 1606, there came to it John Robinson. He had been a fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and a beneficed clergyman of Puritan views. He, too, had been slowly propelled to Separatist opinion by persecution. For fourteen years before the final migration he led the Pilgrims at Scrooby and Leyden. Wise man of affairs, he directed his people even in their hard struggle for bread in a foreign country. He was one of the few men, in that age of debate about husks and shells, who penetrated to those teachings concerning character and conduct which are the vital and imperishable elements of religion. Even when assailed most roughly in debate he was magnanimous and forbearing. He avoided the bigotry and bitterness of the early Brownists, and outgrew as years went on the narrowness of rigid Separatism. He lived on the best terms with the Dutch and French churches. He opposed rather the substantial abuses than the ceremonies of the Church of England, and as life advanced he came to extend a hearty fellowship and communion to good men in that church. Had it been his lot to remain in the national church and rise, as did his opponent, Joseph Hall, to the pedestal of a bishopric or to other dignity, he would have been one of the most illustrious divines of the age—wanting something of the statesmanly breadth of Hooker, but quite outspreading and overtopping the Whitgifts, Bancrofts, and perhaps even the Halls. Robert Baillie, who could say many hard things against Separatists, is forced to confess that "Robinson was a man of excellent parts, and the most learned, polished, and modest spirit that ever separated from the Church of England"; and long after his death the Dutch theologian Hornbeeck recalls again and again his integrity, learning, and modesty. Note 3.

Shall we say that when subjected to this great man's influence the rustics of Scrooby and Bawtry and Austerfield were clowns no longer? Perhaps we shall be truer to the probabilities of human nature if we conclude that Robinson was able to mold a few of the best of them to great uses, and that these became the significant digits which gave value to the ciphers.

Elucidations.

CHAPTER THE THIRD.
THE PILGRIM MIGRATIONS.

I.

Accession of James I. The accession of James of Scotland to the English throne in 1603 raised the hopes of the Puritans. James had said, in 1590: "As for our neighbour kirk of England, their service is an ill-said masse in English; they want nothing of the masse but the liftings." Neal, ii, 28. Compare Burns's Prel. Diss. to Wodrow, lxxiv. Later, when the prospect of his accession to the English throne was imminent, James had spoken with a different voice, but the Puritans remembered his lifelong familiarity with Presbyterian forms, and his strongly expressed satisfaction with the Scottish Kirk. They met him on his way to London with a petition for modifications of the service. This was known as the Millinary Petition, because it was supposed to represent the views of about one thousand English divines.

Hampton Court conference. In January, 1604, the king held a formal conference at Hampton Court between eleven of the Anglican party on one side, nine of them being bishops, and four Puritan divines, representing the petitioners. Assuming at first the air of playing the arbiter, James, who dearly loved a puttering theological debate, could not refrain from taking the cause of the churchmen out of their hands and arguing it himself. Svmme and Svbstance, passim. The reports of the conference are most interesting as showing the paradoxical qualities of James, who, by his action at this meeting, unwittingly made himself a conspicuous figure in the history of America. The great churchmen were surprised at the display made by the king of dialectic skill. They held Scotch learning in some contempt, and were amazed that one bred among the "Puritans" should know how to handle questions of theology so aptly. Prel. Diss. to Wodrow, lxxiv. James, though he had declared the Church of Scotland "the sincerest kirk in the world" because it did not keep Easter and Yule as the Genevans did, now had the face to assure the prelates that he had never believed after he was ten years old what he was taught in Scotland. His speeches in the conference are marked by ability, mingled with the folly which vitiated all his qualities. Quick at reply and keen in analysis, he even shows something like breadth of intelligence, or at least intellectual toleration, but without ever for a moment evincing any liberality of feeling. His manifest cleverness is rendered futile by his narrow and ridiculous egotism, his arrogance in the treatment of opponents, and his coarse vulgarity in expression. Ch. Hist., x, vii, 30. "In common speaking as in his hunting," says Fuller, "he stood not on the cleanest but nearest way." The Puritans were no more able to answer the arguments of the king than was Æsop's lamb to make reply to the wolf. Laying down for his fundamental maxim "No bishop, no king," he drew a picture of the troubles that would beset him when "Jack and Tom and Will and Dick" should meet and censure the king and his council. He would have no such assemblage of the clergy until he should grow fat and pursy and need trouble to keep him in breath, he said. It could not occur to his self-centered mind that so grave a question was not to be settled merely by considering the ease and convenience of the sovereign. "He rather usede upbraidinges than argumente," says Harrington, who was present. Nugæ Antiquæ., i, 181. He bade the Puritans "awaie with their snivellinge," and, in discussing the surplice, made an allusion that would be deemed a profanation by reverent churchmen of the present time.

The king and the bishops. With characteristic pedantry he spoke part of the time in Latin, and his clever refutation of the hapless Puritans sounded like the wisdom of God to the anxious bishops. In spite of the downright scolding and vulgar abuse with which the king flavored his orthodoxy, the aged Whitgift declared that undoubtedly his Majesty spoke by the special assistance of God's Spirit; but one of the worldly bystanders ventured, in defiance of the episcopal dictum, to think that whatever spirit inspired the king was "rather foul-mouthed." Bancroft, Bishop of London, theatrically fell on his knees and solemnly protested that his heart melted within him with joy that Almighty God of his singular mercy had given them such a king "as since Christ's time the like hath not been seen." Note 1. The king in his turn was naturally impressed with the sagacity of a bishop who could so devoutly admire his Majesty's ability, and, when soon afterward a fresh access of paralysis carried off Whitgift, it was not surprising that Bancroft should be translated from London to Canterbury over the heads of worthier competitors. Compare Nugæ Antiquæ, ii, 25, 26. From the moment of Bancroft's accession to the primacy the lot of the Puritans and Separatists became harder, for he plumed himself doubtless on being the originator of the high-church doctrine, and he was a man whose harsh energy seems not to have been tempered by an intimate piety like that of Whitgift.

Results. Svmme and Svbstance, 35. When James rose from his chair at the close of the debate on the second day he said, "I shall make them conform themselves, or I will harry them out of this land, or else do worse"; and he wrote to a friend boasting that he had "peppered the Puritans soundly." Compare Bacon's Certain Considerations touching the better Pacification of the Church of England. But the king had missed, without knowing it, the greatest opportunity of his reign—an opportunity for conciliating or weakening the Puritan opposition, and consolidating the church and his kingdom. James could think of nothing but his own display of cleverness and browbeating arrogance in a dispute with great divines like Reynolds and Chaderton. The conference had been for him a recreation not much more serious than stag-hunting. That it was pregnant with vast and far-reaching results for good and evil in England and the New World he, perhaps, did not dream. By his narrow and selfish course at this critical moment he may be said to have sealed the fate of his son, if not the doom of his dynasty; and his clever folly gave fresh life to the bitter struggle between Anglican and Puritan which resulted in the peopling of New England a quarter of a century afterward.

II.

The storm of persecution. Every proscription of the Puritans within the church was accompanied by a crusade against the Brownists without, who were counted sinners above all other men. Though Ralegh in 1593 had estimated the Brownists at twenty thousand, they were by this time in consequence of oppression "about worn out," as Bacon said. Bacon's Observation on a Libel. Upon those who remained the new persecution broke with untempered severity. Badgered on every side by that vexatious harrying which King James and his ecclesiastics kept up according to promise, the little congregation at Scrooby in 1607 resolved to flee into Holland, where they would be strangers to the speech and to the modes of getting a living, but where they might worship God in extemporary prayers under the guidance of elders of their own choice without fear of fines and prisons.

Toleration in the Low Countries. That which is most honorable to the Low Countries, from a historical point of view, namely, that their cities were places of refuge for oppressed consciences, was esteemed odious and highly ridiculous in the seventeenth century. In one of the plays of that time there is a humorous proposition to hold a consultation about "erecting four new sects of religion in Amsterdam." The Dutch metropolis was called a cage of unclean birds, and a French prelate contemned it as "a common harbor of all opinions and heresies." At a later period Edward Johnson, the rather bloodthirsty Massachusetts Puritan, inveighs against "the great mingle mangle of religion" in Holland, and like a burlesque prophet shrieks, "Ye Dutch, come out of your hodge podge!" Errours and Induration, p. 27. Robert Baylie, in a sermon before the House of Lords as late as 1645, says of the toleration by the Dutch, that "for this one thing they have become infamous in the Christian world."

Flight of the Pilgrims. To the asylum offered by the Low Countries the Scrooby Separatists resolved to flee. The pack of harriers let loose by James and Bancroft were in full cry. The members of the Scrooby church found themselves "hunted and persecuted on every side," having their houses watched night and day, so that all their sufferings in times past "were but as flea bitings in comparison." But the tyranny that made England intolerable did its best to render flight impossible. In various essays to escape, the Separatists were arrested and stripped of what valuables they had, while their leaders were cast into prison for months at a time.

The Pilgrims in Amsterdam. At length by one means or another the members of this battered little community got away and met together in Amsterdam. To plain north country folk this was indeed a strange land, and one can see in the vivid and eloquent language of Bradford of Austerfield, who was a young man when he crossed the German Ocean, the memory of the impressions which these cities of the Low Countries made on their rustic minds. Bradford's Plimoth Plantation 16. But "it was not longe before they saw the grimme and grisly face of povertie coming upon them like an armed man, with whom they must bukle and incounter."

III.

Removal to Leyden. Robinson discovered that he was not of a piece with those Separatists who had preceded him to Amsterdam. In one division of these, questions of whalebone in bodices, of high-heeled shoes and women's hats, distracted scrupulous minds. In the other, which came from the same part of England as Robinson's church, the agitations were of a theological nature. Questions about the baptism of infants and the inherent righteousness of man and the portion of his nature that Christ derived from his mother, with discussions of the right of a man to be a magistrate and a church member at the same time, were seething in the heated brain of the scrupulous but saintly pastor. Robinson saw that these controversies would involve the Scrooby church if it remained in Amsterdam. In Robinson the centrifugal force of Separatism had already spent itself, and his practical wisdom had set bounds to the course of his logic. To leave the Dutch metropolis for a smaller place was to reduce the Scrooby exiles to still deeper poverty, but nevertheless the Pilgrims fled from discord as they had fled from persecution, and removed to the university city of Leyden, called by its admirers "the Athens of the Occident." After their departure English Separatism in Amsterdam went on tearing itself to pieces in a sincere endeavor to find ultimate theological truth, but Robinson's people in spite of their poverty were united, and were honored by those among whom they sojourned. Bradford's Plimouth Plantation. Winslow's Relations. Others, hearing of their good report, came to them from England, and the exiled church of Leyden was fairly prosperous.

IV.

Danger of extinction. But when ten years of exile had passed the outlook was not a pleasant one. The life in Leyden was so hard that many chose to return to their own land, preferring English prisons to liberty at so dear a rate. The "tender hearts of many a loving father and mother" were wounded to see children growing prematurely decrepit under the weight of hard and incessant toil; "the vigor of Nature being consumed in the very bud as it were." Some of the young people were contaminated by the dissoluteness of the city, others joined the Dutch army or made long voyages at sea, acquiring habits very foreign to the strictness of their parents. The result of a contest between the rigid Puritanism of the little church and the laxity prevalent in Holland was not to be doubted. Human nature can not remain always at concert pitch. Intermarriages with the Dutch had already begun, and all that was peculiar in the English community was about to be swallowed up and lost forever in the great current of Dutch life which flowed about it.

Emigration planned. Puritanism was in its very nature aggressive, even meddlesome. It was not possible for a Puritan church, led by such men as Robinson, and Brewster, and Carver, and Bradford, and Winslow, to remain content where national prejudices and a difference in language barred the way to the exertion of influence on the life about them. Compare Winslow in Young, 387. With destruction by absorption threatening their church, these leaders conceived the project of forming a new state where they "might, with the liberty of a good conscience, enjoy the pure Scripture worship of God without the mixture of human inventions and impositions; and their children after them might walk in the holy ways of the Lord."

V.

Puritans and American settlements. What suggested in 1617 the thought of migration to America we do not know. Just twenty years earlier, in 1597, some imprisoned Brownists had petitioned the Privy Council that they might be allowed to settle "in the province of Canada," an indefinite term at that time. Waddington's Cong. Hist., ii, 113, 114. Francis Johnson with three others went out in that same year to look at the land. The voyage was an unlucky one, and the settlement of Johnson as pastor of the church in Amsterdam was the result. The persecutions which followed the accession of Bancroft to the archbishopric had started as early as 1608 a widespread agitation among the Puritans in favor of emigration to Virginia, but, when only a few had got away, the primate secured a proclamation preventing their escape from the means of grace provided for them in Courts of High Commission. Note 2.

Condition of Virginia. The year 1617, in which the agitation for emigration began among the Pilgrims, was the year after Dale's return with highly colored reports of the condition of the Virginia colony. It is noticeable that among the books owned by Elder Brewster at his death was a copy of Whitaker's Good Newes from Virginia, published in 1613. Whitaker was minister at Henrico in Virginia, and was the son of a Puritan divine of eminence who was master of St. John's College, Cambridge. It is possible that he was known to Brewster, who had been at Cambridge, or to Robinson, who had resigned a fellowship there to become a Separatist. Whitaker himself was Puritan enough to discard the surplice. His Good Newes is an earnest plea for the support of the colony for religious reasons. "This plantation which the divell hath so often troden downe," he says, "is revived and daily groweth to more and hopeful successe." Note 3. At the very time when the Pilgrims first thought of migrating there was beginning a new and widespread interest in Virginia. This was based partly on religious enthusiasm, such as Whitaker's book was meant to foster, and partly on the hope of new and strange commodities, particularly silk. Inventory of books. Winsor's pamphlet on Elder Brewster. Even this silk illusion may have had its weight in a secondary way with the Leyden people, for Bradford, afterward governor at Plymouth, was a silk-weaver in Leyden, and there were two books on silkworms in Brewster's library at his death.

Alternatives. To European eyes all America was one; even to-day the two Americas are hardly distinguished by most people in Europe. The glowing account of Guiana given by Ralegh helped to feed the new desire for an American home; and it was only after serious debate that North America was chosen, as more remote from the dreaded Spaniard and safer from tropical diseases. One can hardly imagine what American Puritanism would have become under the skies of Guiana. Not only did the Pilgrims hesitate regarding their destination, but there was a choice of nationalities to be made. England had not been a motherly mother to these outcast children, and there was question of settling as English subjects in America, or becoming Dutch colonists there.

VI.

Application to Sandys. The Pilgrims preferred to be English, notwithstanding all. But they wished to stipulate with England for religious liberty. In this matter they had recourse to Sir Edwin Sandys, the one man who would probably be both able and willing to help them. Brewster had lived, as we have seen, in an old episcopal manor at Scrooby. Hunter's Founders of New Plymouth, pp. 22, 23. Sandys, Archbishop of York, had transferred this manor by a lease to his eldest son, Sir Samuel Sandys, who was Brewster's landlord and brother of Sir Edwin Sandys. Of Sir Edwin the great liberal parliamentary statesman, Fuller says, "He was right-handed to any great employment." In 1617 he was already the most influential of the progressive leaders of the Virginia Company, its acting though not yet its nominal head, and in 1619 he was elected governor of the Company. Brewster's fellow-secretary under Davison was a chosen friend of Sandys, and, in view of both these connections, we may consider it almost certain that the two were not strangers. To Sir Edwin Sandys was due much of the new interest in Virginia. He and his group seem to have been already striving to shape the colony into a liberal state.

Failure to secure formal toleration. To meet the views of the Leyden people, Sandys endeavored by the intervention of a more acceptable courtier to gain assurance from the king, under the broad seal, that their religion should be tolerated if they migrated to Virginia. But James's peculiar conscience recoiled from this. He intimated that he would wink at their practices but he would not tolerate them by public act. And, indeed, the Pilgrims reflected afterward that "a seale as broad as the house flore would not serve the turne" of holding James to his promise. At the king's suggestion the archbishops were applied to, but neither would they formally approve such an arrangement. Nor can one wonder at their unwillingness, since the most profound, liberal, and far-seeing thinker of that age, Lord Bacon himself, was so far subject to the prejudices of his time that he could protest against allowing heretics to settle a colony, and could support his position by a mystical argument fit to be advanced by the most fantastic theologian. "It will make schism and rent in Christ's coat, which must be seamless," he says. Bacon's Advice to Villiers. He even goes so far as to group Separatists with outlaws and criminals, and to advise that if such should transplant themselves to the colonies they should be "sent for back upon the first notice," for "such persons are not fit to lay the foundation of a new colony." Much more fit than is a speculative philosopher to draw the lines on which practical undertakings are to be carried forward. The transplanting of English speech and institutions to America would have languished as French colonization did, if none but orthodox settlers had been allowed to fell trees and build cabins in the forest. Ever since the age of stone hatchets colony planters have been drawn from the ranks of the uneasy. Archdale's Carolina, 26. An early Quaker governor of South Carolina puts the matter less elegantly but more justly than Bacon when he says: "It is stupendious to consider, how passionate and preposterous zeal, not only vails but stupefies oftentimes the Rational Powers: For cannot Dissenters kill Wolves and Bears as well as Churchmen?"

VII.

Relations with the Virginia Company. The liberal and practical mind of Sir Edwin Sandys harbored none of the scruples of Bacon, and his more wholesome conscience knew nothing of the fine distinctions of James and the archbishops between formal toleration and a mere winking at irregularities. He embraced the cause of the Pilgrims and became their steadfast friend, passing through the Virginia Company successively two charters in their behalf, and the general order which allowed the leaders of "particular plantations"—that is, of such plantations as the Leyden people and others at that time proposed to make—to associate the sober and discreet of the plantation with them to make laws, orders, and constitutions not repugnant to the laws of England. MS. Rec. Va. Co., Feb. 2, 1620. This was a wide door opening toward democratic government. The patent given to the Pilgrims was also a liberal one, and it was even proposed to put into their hands a large sum of money contributed anonymously for the education of Indian children, but to this it was objected that the newcomers would lack the confidence of the savages. One of the Virginia Company, possibly Sandys himself, lent to the Leyden people three hundred pounds without interest for three years. Winslow's Briefe Narration, Young, 383. When we consider that the Pilgrims had to pay in their first year of settlement thirty and even fifty per cent, interest on their debts, and that this three hundred pounds, the use of which they received without interest, would be equal in purchasing power to five or six thousand dollars of our money, we may readily believe that this loan and the semi-independence offered them under their "large patent" from the company, were the considerations that decided them in favor of emigration after the English Government had refused a guarantee of toleration, and the Dutch Government had declined to assure them of protection against England.

Authors of the Plymouth Government. That group of liberal English statesmen who were charged with keeping "a school of sedition" in the courts of the Virginian Company founded the two centers of liberal institutions in America. The Earl of Southampton, the Ferrars, Sir John Danvers, and above all and more than all, Sir Edwin Sandys, were the fathers of representative government in New England by the charter of February 2, 1620, as they had been of representative government in Virginia by the charter of November 13, 1618. When the Pilgrims found themselves, upon landing, too far north to use their "large patent" from the Virginia Company, they organized a government on the lines laid down in the general order of the company. The government established by them in their famous Compact was precisely the provisional government which the Virginia Company in the preceding February had given them liberty to found "till a form of government be here settled for them." Note 4. Under this compact they proceeded to confirm the election of the governor, already chosen under the authority derived from the charter, now invalid.

Charges against Sandys. The enemies of Sir Edwin Sandys did not fail to make use of his friendship for the Leyden people to do him injury. It was afterward charged that he was opposed to monarchical government, and that he had moved the Archbishop of Canterbury "to give leave to the Brownists and Separatists to go to Virginia, and designed to make a free popular state there, and himself and his assured friends were to be the leaders." Duke of Manchester, papers, Royal Hist. MSS. Comm. viii, II, 45. That Sandys thought of emigration is hardly probable, but he succeeded in establishing two popular governments in America which propagated themselves beyond all that he could have hoped to achieve. Note 5.

VIII.

The farewell to Europe. "Small things," wrote Dudley to the Countess of Lincoln in the first months of the Massachusetts settlement—"small things in the beginning of natural or politic bodies are as remarkable as greater in bodies full grown." The obscure events we have recited above are capital because they had a deciding influence on the fate of the Pilgrim settlement. It is not within our purpose to tell over again the pathetic story of that brave departure of the younger and stronger of the Pilgrims from Leyden to make the first break into the wilderness, but courage and devotion to an idea are not common; courage and devotion that bring at last important results are so rare that the student of history, however little disposed to indulge sentiment, turns in spite of himself to that last all-night meeting in Pastor Robinson's large house in the Belfry Lane at Leyden. Plimoth Plantation, 59. "So," says Bradford, as if penning a new holy scripture, "they lefte that goodly and pleasante citie, which had been ther resting place near 12 years; but they knew they were pilgrimes and looked not much on those things, but lift up their eyes to the heavens, their dearest cuntrie and quieted their spirits." Nor is it easy to pass over the solemn parting on the quay at Delft Haven, where, as the time of the tide forced the final tearful separation, while even the Dutch spectators wept in sympathy, the voice of the beloved Robinson in a final prayer was heard and the whole company fell upon their knees together for the last time.