by Rod Gragg
Copyright © 2014 by Rod Gragg
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, website, or broadcast.
Except where taken from the 1611 King James Bible, all scripture quotations are from the Geneva Bible, printed in London by Robert Barker in 1606.
First ebook edition © 2014
eISBN 9781621572787
Hardcover edition:
Library of Congress Control Number: 2014950137
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For
Kylah, Cody, Sophia, Jaxon,
Ashlyn, Gracie, and Jate.
May they all have Pilgrim hearts.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
“Who Shall Separate Us from the Love of Christ?”
CHAPTER TWO
“Rather than Turn, They Will Burn”
CHAPTER THREE
“They Resolved to Get Over into Holland”
CHAPTER FOUR
“Butter-Mouths,” “Lubbers,” and “Manifold Temptations”
CHAPTER FIVE
“They Knew They Were Pilgrims”
CHAPTER SIX
“They Put to Sea Again with a Prosperous Wind”
CHAPTER SEVEN
“They . . . Encountered . . . Many Fierce Storms”
CHAPTER EIGHT
“They Fell upon Their Knees and Blessed the God of Heaven”
CHAPTER NINE
“The Best They Could Find”
CHAPTER TEN
“It Was the Lord Which Upheld Them”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“By the Goodness of God We Are So Far from Want”
EPILOGUE
“One Small Candle”
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
CHAPTER ONE
“Who Shall Separate Us from the Love of Christ?”
In the soft fresh light of a new dawn they peered over the railing of their ship and studied the distant shoreline. Before them lay a long stretch of towering sand dunes and farther to the west they could see a long line of forested hills. “And the appearance of it much comforted us,” one of them would later recall, “it caused us to rejoice together and praise God. . . .” It was November 9, 1620. They were the people who would become known to history as the Pilgrims, and they were looking for the first time at their new home—America.
Almost ten weeks earlier they had left England aboard the Mayflower, bound for a new life in the New World. The voyage across the fierce Atlantic had been stormy and perilous. To some of them, the dangerous passage may have seemed symbolic of their history as Pilgrims—a stormy, perilous quest for freedom that had begun decades earlier in Old World England.1
In 1620, the Mayflower brought the Pilgrims to the forested shores of what would become New England. The voyage across the Atlantic had been stormy and perilous, much like their quest for freedom in England.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
“Many More Came Forward with Fresh Courage”
Early Pilgrim Attempts to Flee England Result in Arrest and Persecution
Soldiers hurried through the marshy lowlands toward the shore of England’s North Sea. It was a sizeable force, composed of horse dragoons and infantry. Some carried firelock muskets; others were armed with bills, deadly-looking polearms equipped with ax-style blades and spiked points. The troops presented a fearsome appearance to their target—a body of unarmed civilian men, women, and children huddled on the deck of a masted coal barque anchored in the shallows at water’s edge.
“The poor men already aboard were in great distress for their wives and children”
The advancing troops were English militia, dispatched by local authorities to stop the shipload of civilians from leaving England without an official license to travel. It would have been easy for authorities in the nearby town of Grimsby to learn of the group’s attempt to flee the country. Grimsby was located on England’s northeast coast at the mouth of the River Humber, and several days earlier the ship Francis, a fifty-ton masted coal hauler, had come downriver from the river port of Hull.
The Francis carried more than coal: aboard ship were approximately eighty men, women, and children desperately hoping to make passage from England across the North Sea to sanctuary in Holland. By the time the Francis had moved downriver to await the outbound sailing tide on the coast—May 12, 1608—news of a coal barque taking on so many passengers with their baggage had quickly reached English authorities in Grimsby.
The would-be exiles were Puritan Separatists—a sect of Christians who felt called to separate themselves from the Church of England, the official government denomination, which they believed was engaged in worldly ways they could not accept. As Separatists, they were deemed “dissenters” by the rule of England’s King James I, and they were forbidden to leave the country without official licensed permission—which they did not possess. Awaiting them just offshore was a Dutch ship—a sloop-like single-masted hoy—which was anchored in deep waters within easy sailing distance of the Francis. The coal barque, however, had gone aground at low tide, and the ship’s crew had begun to transfer passengers to the Dutch ship. The men had been sent first, and already more than a dozen had been rowed to the Dutch vessel aboard the Francis’s longboat.
With sails raised, Dutch hoys line the docks of a European port.
WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
More were preparing to board the longboat for transfer to their getaway ship when the militia appeared, hurrying through the coastal flats toward the grounded Francis. Seeing the troops approach, the captain of the Dutch ship ordered anchor up and sailed away—with the dozen Separatist husbands and fathers still aboard. On the Francis—probably by a prearranged plan—most of the male members among the passengers jumped ship to escape arrest and imprisonment. Left aboard the grounded coal ship to face the armed troops were the group’s women and children, who began to sob aloud as their men folk scattered or disappeared over the ocean horizon, bound for distant Holland.
They were ordered off the Francis, then marched into town and jailed until the local court could determine their fate. Most of them were members of illegal Separatist congregations in the town of Gainsborough and the village of Scrooby, which were located to the west in England’s East Midlands region. One of their principal leaders, Thomas Helwys, an affluent lawyer, landowner, and local Separatist, faced the authorities with them. While local authorities pondered their sentencing and sought advice from England’s Privy Council, an advisory body that administered the king’s policies, they were moved from jail to jail. Most had no other place
to live, because they had sold their homes to raise money for their escape to the Netherlands.
For many of them, it was not their first attempt to escape from England to Holland, where—unlike England—they could freely worship as they wished. Several months earlier, some of them had bought passage on a ship from the nearby port of Boston, Thomas Helwys among them, but the ship’s English captain betrayed them, keeping their money and belongings and turning them over to local authorities. English law ordered that all adult citizens who failed to worship in the Church of England for one month—or who attended a worship service outside the official Church—would be classified as a “non-conformists” and jailed. If they did not agree to conform to the Church of England within three months, they would be given the option of death or exile. Exile was what they were seeking, but non-conformists were forbidden to emigrate—so they were left in a legal no-man’s-land: expected to flee England, but denied official permission to do so.
Eventually, after months of imprisonment in various places, they were released. Meanwhile, the husbands and fathers who had sailed for Holland made their way back to England and rejoined their families. Undeterred, the Separatists from Scrooby and Gainsborough began to make new plans to escape to the Netherlands. Eighteen-year-old Separatist William Bradford, who would later become the most famous Pilgrim leader, recorded the group’s desperate, doomed attempt to obtain freedom of faith in 1608.
“What weeping and crying on every side”
They heard of a Dutchman at Hull who had a ship of his own belonging to Zeeland, and they made an agreement with him, and acquainted him with their plight, hoping to find him more reliable than the English captain [at Boston] had been; and he bade them have no fear. He was to take them aboard between Grimsby and Hull, where there was a large common a good way from any town. The women and children, with all their effects, were sent to the place at the time arranged in a small bark which they had hired; and the men were to meet them by land. But it so happened that they all arrived a day before the ship came, and the sea being rough, and the women very sick, the sailors put into a creek hard by, where they grounded at low water.
An early seventeenth-century infantry musketeer brandishes his matchlock musket. So armed, a company of English militia could present a fearsome appearance to civilians.
WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
The next morning the ship came, but they were stuck fast and could not stir till about noon. In the meantime, the captain of the ship, seeing how things were, sent his boat to get the men aboard whom he saw were ready walking about the shore. But after the first boatful was got aboard and she was ready to go for more, the captain espied a large body of horse and foot, armed with bills and guns and other weapons—for the country side had turned out to capture them. The Dutchman, seeing this, swore his country’s oath, “sacraments,” and having a fair wind, weighed anchor, hoisted sail, and away! The poor men already aboard were in great distress for their wives and children, left thus to be captured, and destitute of help—and for themselves, too, without any clothes but what they had on their backs, and scarcely a penny about them, all their possessions being aboard the bark, now seized.
It drew tears from their eyes, and they would have given anything to be ashore again. But all in vain, there was no remedy; they must thus sadly part. . . . But to return to the rest where we left them. The other men, who were in greatest danger, made shift to escape before the troops could surprise them, only sufficient staying to assist the women. But it was pitiful to see these poor women in their distress. What weeping and crying on every side: some for their husbands carried away in the ship; others not knowing what would become of them and their little ones; others again melted in tears, seeing their poor little ones hanging about them, crying for fear and quaking with cold. Being thus apprehended, they were hurried from one place to another, till in the end the officers knew not what to do with them; for to imprison so many innocent women and children only because they wished to go with their husbands, seemed unreasonable and would cause an outcry; and to send them home again was as difficult, for they alleged, as was the truth, that they had no homes to go to—for they had sold or otherwise disposed of their houses and livings. To be short, after they had been thus turmoiled a good while, and conveyed from one constable to another, they were glad to be rid of them on any terms; for all were wearied and tired of them. Though in the meantime, they, poor souls, endured misery enough. So in the end, necessity forced a way for them. . . .
In May of 1608, Separatist families attempting to flee England were overtaken on the coast by armed militia troops.
A POPULAR HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
I must not omit, however, to mention the fruit of it all. For by these public afflictions, their cause became famous, and led many to inquire into it; and their Christian behavior left a deep impression on the minds of many. Some few shrank from these first conflicts, and no wonder; but many more came forward with fresh courage. . . .2
“Their Christian behavior left a deep impression on the minds of many”
“The Person So Offending . . . Shall Suffer Imprisonment”
Dissenters from the Church of England Face Severe Punishment
A Puritan was “a Protestant frayed out of his wits.” So declared a crude but common joke among England’s ruling class in the early 1600s, which referred to the brutal beatings sometimes administered to dissenters from the Church of England. Why did so many English leaders dislike Puritans and, especially, the Puritan Separatists who would become America’s Pilgrims? The answer: many in power viewed the Puritans, and especially the Separatists, as threats to authority. Originally a term of ridicule, the name “Puritan” was given to English Christians who wanted to purify the Church of England of practices they considered to be unbiblical. Their concerns were rooted in the Protestant Reformation.
If caught and arrested, English Separatists who tried to flee England in search of religious freedom could be imprisoned as dissidents from the Church of England.
WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
English Puritans—including the future Pilgrims—were influenced by sixteenth-century German theologian Martin Luther, the Catholic priest who sparked the Protestant Reformation.
WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
In 1517, Martin Luther, a Roman Catholic priest in Germany, had ignited the Reformation by calling for the Church to return to key biblical doctrines that many believed had been distorted or abandoned in the early Middle Ages. Personal salvation came through God’s grace through faith in Jesus Christ alone, Luther and other Reformers proclaimed, rather than by a combination of faith and human works. They preached the “priesthood of believers,” which held that any believer should be allowed to read the Bible without the oversight of a minister or priest. They upheld the authority of the Bible over Church tradition and papal rulings, and they denounced the Church for “selling indulgences”—a practice that promised less punishment for sin in the afterlife in exchange for a donation.
In this satirical engraving, King Henry VIII, who broke with the Roman Catholic Church, sits on the throne of England with his foot atop Pope Clement VII.
NATIONAL AND DOMESTIC HISTORY OF ENGLAND
Although Church leaders in Rome rejected Luther’s call for reform and excommunicated him, the Reformation had flooded western Europe, producing both a spiritual revival as well as dramatic political change. While the renewed emphasis on the Gospel transformed hearts and minds and produced countless believers, it also promoted the belief that everyone was of equal value to God, whether a pauper or a prince, and that all people were subject to the Higher Law of God as revealed by the Bible—even royalty. The poorest peasant felt empowered as a child of God. This Bible-based notion of equality unnerved many European monarchies, perhaps even more than the Reformation’s challenge to the theology and practices of the Catholic Church. At the orders or acquiescence of the monarchy, tens of thousands of Protestants were executed in Spain, Portugal, and France—but in England
, the Reformation flourished.
“The whole nation became a church”
It came to England during the reign of King Henry VIII, who initially persecuted the Protestants as a Catholic ruler. Then in 1534, after being refused a marriage annulment by Pope Clement VII, he broke with the Church in Rome, and set up the Church of England with himself as its head. His motives were self-serving, not faith-based, but many people in England were ready for a change, seized the opportunity, and embraced the Reformation. After years of attempting to suppress the printing of the Bible in English, King Henry begrudgingly reversed course, and officially sanctioned an English language Bible. Following his death in 1547, the English Reformation flourished during the reign of his young son and successor, Edward VI, who assumed the throne at age nine under the oversight of Protestant advisors. Despite the opposition of devout Catholics, the Church of England and Reformation theology appeared to be generally accepted in England—until 1553, when Edward grew ill and died at age fifteen.
Queen Mary I attempted to restore Catholicism as England’s official state denomination, but she sickened and died before she could succeed. Her persecution of Protestants earned her the nickname “Bloody Mary.”
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
After a foiled attempt by Edward’s advisors to have him succeeded by his young Protestant cousin, Lady Jane Grey, King Henry’s daughter Mary became Queen of England. Devoted to Catholicism, she aggressively attempted to roll back the English Reformation, executing Lady Jane Grey and several hundred other Protestants, and earning the nickname “Bloody Mary” from her opponents. After only five years of rule, however, Queen Mary I also sickened and died. She was succeeded by her half sister, Queen Elizabeth I, who would establish England’s national identity as a world power—and who was a professing Protestant. To bring stability to the nation, she established what became known as the Elizabethan Religious Settlement.