The Mayflower

by Rebecca Fraser

  Edward had had enough. He very nearly got onto Captain Hawkins’s ship which was sailing for New England, but William Steele, who was now president of the New England Company, insisted he remain. Edward was ‘of absolute necessity for the carrying on of the work’. As it was acknowledged that ‘it is uncomfortable to him to be so long from his family and personal occasions’, it was agreed they ‘must see he be no sufferer’. The compromise seems to have been to get a member of his family to join him in London.

  It was probably at this point that arrangements were made to pay for his nineteen-year-old daughter, Elizabeth, to come over from New England and look after him. And thus Edward stayed on.

  CHAPTER XIV

  Hercules

  Reverend Wake, the husband of Edward’s sister Magdalen, was a great friend of the poet Mildmay Fane. The king was godfather to Fane’s eldest son, and Fane had married into the celebrated military Vere family. Despite six children and a life managing a great estate, Mereworth Castle in Kent, Fane (now Lord Westmorland) had not lost his affection for his old friend. Nor had the Reverend Wake lost his love of poetry. But now Wake had fallen on very hard times, and Fane was helping out his old friend by paying him to make fair copies of Fane’s poetry in his prison cell. Poignantly one such poem was Wake’s own Latin translation of the best known of Fane’s verses, ‘A Happy Life’.

  Magdalen was a spirited person who had the courage of her strongly anti-Puritan convictions. She had once been ‘a very active industrious woman’ who ‘did many services to the King in the time of the Civil Wars’. But now – despite the protection of Edward – she was perpetually anxious about her husband, who was in extremely poor health, and one of her sons, Captain William Wake, who had also been captured and imprisoned.

  Throughout Edward’s time in London the Wakes were at the centre of Royalist rebellions. Captain Wake boasted that he and his father had been imprisoned over twenty times. Twice Captain Wake could have been executed. Edward’s natural kindness came to the fore. The Royalist connection had the potential to embarrass Edward but he refused to let it – years later Captain Wake described how what he called a ‘rebel uncle’ saved him from the gallows. To his colleagues, Edward’s Wake relations were simply traitors, the enemy – in the term of the day, ‘delinquents’.

  Once Edward was employed by the well-paid Cromwellian bureaucracy as a member of the Committee for Compounding, his money worries eased for a time. His salary of £300 a year solved the issue of Plymouth or Massachusetts funding him in England. He was several times also appointed to committees to judge treasons against the Commonwealth. He could now support his daughter Elizabeth and his sister Magdalen Wake in pleasant lodgings, though the latter spent much time in the West Country tending to her imprisoned husband.

  * * *

  Elizabeth was a bright and determined character. She was amazed by London’s grandeur: despite the war the new squares and streets designed by Inigo Jones round Covent Garden and the Strand were still standing.

  And she enjoyed meeting her Wake cousins. Magdalen’s second son, Edward, was less hot-blooded than his brother, Captain William. Edward Wake was interested in business, perhaps because of seeing the effective ways of his uncle, whose City connections probably helped his nephew to set up the Corporation of the Sons of the Clergy in 1655. Existing to this day, it was begun by merchants of the City of London to raise funds for the children of indigent clergy, such as Edward Wake and his siblings, who had been dispossessed during the Commonwealth. Certainly his mother found him a great comfort. Many years later she would insist on being buried in his tomb, ‘as she had devised in her lifetime’.

  Magdalen and her family were Edward’s flesh and blood. With his own eyes he had seen how a whole generation was traumatised by being on the losing side.

  At the beginning of February 1654, on one of his outings from prison, Captain William Wake married the daughter of a rich Dorset farmer neighbour, Amie Cutler. Rather curiously the wedding took place in London in the Church of St Bartholomew the Less in Smithfield. This was almost next door to Edward’s office at Haberdashers’ Hall in Smithfield. Had it all been arranged by Edward? Normally Amie would have been married from her home parish, Stourpaine in Dorset, but these were not normal times. Perhaps her parents thought that, as she was marrying a dangerous Royalist, it was sensible to have the blessing of a government figure.

  Amie had been brought up in a conventional and genteel fashion. But at the wedding ceremony, out of earshot of the guests – including her distinguished uncle by marriage – she gave a vow to her husband: ‘if there should be any opportunity given or methods used to restore the King, my father should be at liberty to return to his arms for that purpose’. He soon did.

  When Captain Wake came out of the king’s army, he used her dowry to help set up his family in the clothing and stapling trade. This was business which brought raw wool from the Dorset countryside to towns such as Wareham and Dorchester which had exclusive royal charters for sale and export – trade with which Edward most likely helped. But Wake was soon back in prison.

  Whatever Edward’s fondness for his sister, helping the Wakes over and over again was a big ask.

  * * *

  Edward’s meteoric rise continued, however, as did his friendship with Herbert Pelham, whose daughter Penelope had married Edward’s son Josiah, probably in New England sometime around 1651–2. Edward also resumed his friendship with Sir Arthur Hesilrige (who had reconciled with Cromwell and taken his seat in the Rump Parliament and on the Council of State). Fortunately, in what seems to have been a genuine love match in New England, Josiah now ticked all the boxes as far as the Pelhams were concerned. Josiah was doing well in business with his father, exporting iron along with beaver and sugar from Barbados to England, and importing clothing.

  Edward was riding high in his own right, a considerable figure in London. His work on the Commmittee for Compounding involved eyesight-destroying paperwork determining who owned what sequestrated estates. People queued to beg for their property. Defeated Royalists appeared amazed to be asked to lay out their possessions and plead for them, paying a fine which was generally a year’s assessment of a third of the estate’s annual worth. The concentrated work it required – going through petitions, land deeds, subsidiary leases, women’s portions, minors’ trusts – might have killed anyone who was less of a workhorse than Edward. It may have contributed to the loss of the ox-like strength which had taken him through years of deprivation in New England.

  Edward enjoyed the perks of office, but also continued to run up debts, including celebrating his new importance by commissioning a coat of arms. That was not cheap. Arthur Squibb the Younger, who was related to one of the heralds at the College of Arms, was also on the Committee for Compounding. Perhaps Squibb arranged for the coat of arms to be commissioned. Edward was evidently very proud of his new status, having his coat of arms engraved on a gold signet ring used to seal documents, including his will. In future years Josiah united the new Winslow arms (seven silver lozenges on a red background) with his wife’s aristocratic Pelham arms, adding the Pelham strap and buckle on the crest, which were then engraved on pewter plates by the English pewterer at Bristol, John Batchelor.

  Edward’s thoughts could not be on the Second Coming all the time. The lure of luxury shops reopening in the West End could not be resisted. By the early 1650s the seas were clear for ships from the East India Company to berth in the London Docks. The East India factories had produced cotton, silk, tea and saltpetre (a crucial element in gunpowder), food preservatives and fertiliser since the beginning of the century. Now they could be landed again.

  Edward enjoyed spending money in places such as the reopened New Exchange, with its dazzling textiles. It is no surprise that Edward also had his portrait painted. Not only was it another symbol of his status, it may have been prompted by his new alliance with the Pelham family. To mark the occasion, either Edward or Herbert Pelham, in a spirit of lavish celebrati
on, also commissioned portraits of Josiah and Penelope in what may have been their wedding finery. Penelope wore a green satin dress with a salmon pink stole while Josiah had a festively gilded necktie similar to his father’s. They must have had these likenesses painted in Old England and subsequently shipped over to New England to hang on the walls of their home at Marshfield. (Today they are in the Pilgrim Hall Museum.)

  There is no evidence that Josiah’s sister Elizabeth, now living in London as her father’s companion, was ever painted, which may indicate the grand portraits were Herbert Pelham’s idea to ensure his daughter did not forget the position she had been born to in England.

  Edward’s portrait is the only one that exists of any of the Mayflower passengers. To their contemporaries in Plymouth, portraits would have seemed an extraordinary extravagance. But Puritan London was less austere. There has been much discussion about how the Roundheads and Cavaliers differentiated themselves through dress. Black is always assumed to be a Puritan colour, but in fact it was popular to be painted in black at court before the Civil War as it gave the subject status, since black dye was the most costly. Puritanism was a demanding way of life, but the court Cromwell presided over exulted in the display of magnificence, which made his regime seem legitimate and confident.

  Edward’s new friends’ houses were full of portraits. In response to the elegant life of the English gentry perhaps he thought he too should have a portrait made of himself to hang in his own home at Careswell. There had been many letters from Careswell asking him what he thought about the price of cattle, how he was doing, when he was returning. But it is tempting to believe that Edward’s choice to be painted holding a tenderly signed letter from Susanna was a symbol that his wife was never far from his thoughts.

  * * *

  Despite earning around £300 a year for at least five years, Edward’s debts amounted to £500. Many of Herbert’s letters warn about Edward’s carelessness: Edward must not use his ‘own credit’ on behalf of New England when he should be demanding supplies from the Massachusetts government. But Edward not only had a fatal but good-natured inability to separate his personal finances from business expenses but also rather extravagant tastes and not much interest in balancing his account book, if such a book existed.

  Although he was fitted by temperament and belief to be part of the Puritan revolutionary cadre after the Civil War, ideological purity did not trump his human qualities of loyalty and friendship. He used his position to do a good deed to the children of his old benefactor Lord Coventry.

  Lord Coventry’s son and grandson were Royalists. The final battle of the Civil War in 1651 was a close-run thing and alarming for the Parliamentarians. The future Charles II and his army of Covenanter Scots marched to the West Midlands and met no opposition until they came to Worcester, where battle was engaged amongst Edward Winslow’s boyhood scenes. Charles commanded operations from the top of Worcester Cathedral Tower, next to Edward’s old school. He was eventually defeated and went into exile.

  The republican victory at Worcester was an event of the greatest providential magnitude for Edward. He personally superintended a hundred narratives of the battle to be sent to New England with ‘Acts for a day of thanksgiving’.

  However, Lord Coventry’s son and grandson were accused of having sent £1,000 in gold, horse and arms to Charles II shortly before the battle. Their entire estates, even their lives, could have been forfeited for treason. But the case against them mysteriously collapsed. In a strange twist of history, Edward was able to repay his old patron Coventry for all his help over the years. A key event was Edward’s interrogation of the Royalist general Edward Massey in the Tower of London as part of a deputation from the Committee for Compounding. Massey’s interrogation was supposed to strengthen the case against Lord Coventry, but in a dramatic development on 25 February 1653, the Committee for the Advance of Money, of which Edward was also a member, declared ‘on hearing the depositions, it is resolved, nem. con., that he [Coventry] is not guilty of the charge’. They ordered ‘that the seizure of all his estates in cos. [counties] Worcester, Gloucester, Warwick, Oxford, &c., be taken off, and his bonds and securities restored’. John Lyne, the secretary who had informed against him, was arrested instead. Coventry’s sons, whom many a witness had seen riding by the side of Charles II before the Battle of Worcester, also got off scot-free. By March 1655 all the Coventrys’ estates had been returned to them.*

  * * *

  Edward did not slacken doing what he could for the New England colonies in the continuous battle to establish land rights in the great American continent. He was the go-to person for colonists with contacts in London to promote claims, whether in contentious Rhode Island, or Maine or New Hampshire. Despite his grand life in London he never bought any property in England, assuming he would soon return to Careswell. He kept in close touch with Plymouth. William Bradford still entrusted him with attempting to obtain Plymouth’s claim to the whole Kennebec River. In 1653 he once again put to Parliament the point of view of the congregational churches, which was beginning to be known as the New England Way. He proudly published the Cambridge Synod’s Platform of Church Discipline in New England.

  Edward continued to fight his friend Roger Williams in London. They had a new disagreement: the need for the Praying Towns, intended for converted Indians. In letters Williams talks of the Indians’ fear at being oppressed into becoming Christian. Williams was always fond of those he disagreed with and Edward was warm-hearted, even if disapproving. Williams met Cromwell several times to discuss the Indians and the millennium.

  There were other New Englanders in town with whom Edward was more in sympathy, such as Edward Hopkins. Hopkins was a good friend whom Edward particularly admired because he was ‘a man that makes conscience of his words as well as his actions’. One of the earliest settlers of Connecticut, a governor and United Colonies commissioner, Hopkins returned to London in 1652 and became a navy commissioner and an MP. Living without his wife, not always satisfied with the company of his daughter and her youthful friends, Edward had found solace with Hopkins.

  Hopkins’ wife Ann suffered from appalling depression. It was Mrs Hopkins of whom John Winthrop wrote in his diary – to what many regard as his shame – that this ‘godly young woman of special parts’ was ‘fallen into a sad infirmity, the loss of her understanding and reason, which had been growing upon her divers years, by occasion of her giving herself wholly to reading and writing … Her husband, being very loving and tender of her, was loath to grieve her; but he saw his error, when it was too late. For if she had attended her household affairs, and such things as belong to women, and not gone out of her way and calling to meddle in such things as are proper for men, whose minds are stronger, etc., she had kept her wits, and might have improved them usefully and honourably in the place God had set her.’

  It is hard to believe Edward or indeed his feisty daughter Elizabeth agreed with this narrow view of women. In the future Elizabeth would show she was afraid of no man, including her stepson, the Salem Witch Trial judge Jonathan Curwen, who tried to bully her into handing over guardianship of her younger daughter after her husband’s death. Since we know Susanna could read and write, she too must have found Winthrop’s view of the education of women preposterous.

  * * *

  In 1652 a trade war between Holland and the Commonwealth broke out, making the Dutch and English official enemies in New England. Many of the exiled English royal family were living in Holland, which lent the struggle additional importance. That July, ships including a ketch named John’s Adventure (which may have been owned by John Winslow – there was a ship by that name in his will) were sent to New England carrying one tonne of shot, 156 barrels of powder and 1,000 swords, ‘for increase of their present store’. Edward was pleased to note the damage done to the Baltic trade in masts, as he had long suggested that Baltic pines could be replaced with those from New England.

  Cromwell dissolved the Rump Parliament in Ap
ril 1653. Edward bravely joined Thomas Andrewes and forty other City figures in a petition to recall Parliament. Rumours went around New England that Edward had been imprisoned. This is unlikely, but Edward did lose the office that gave him his very pleasant income. Nevertheless within a year he was back in favour, reappointed to the Committee for Compounding and named by Cromwell as a member of his new High Court of Justice for treason.

  Many thought revolution had gone far enough. The forced dissolution of the Rump by Cromwell and the army was a sticking point for Arthur Hesilrige. He became a leading member of the opposition to Cromwell’s Protectorate, which he regarded as a dictatorship.

  Edward and Hesilrige came to a second parting of their ways – this time a permanent one. Edward had approved of the new version of Parliament at Westminster, an assembly nominated from members of congregational churches – the Praise-God Barebone’s Parliament, as it was nicknamed.

  Its elevated agenda of godly reformation was what Edward wanted. Cromwell told the Barebone’s Parliament in July 1653: ‘You are as like the forming of God as ever people were … you are at the edge of promises and prophecies.’ Such a speech was balm to Edward’s soul.

  Letters show Edward’s admiration for Oliver Cromwell. He always had a tendency to hero-worship, and here was a man after his own heart, strenuously trying to make a better world. In his tongue-in-cheek poem ‘An Horation Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland’, Andrew Marvell wrote of ruining the great work of time and casting the ‘kingdom old / Into another mould’. But for Edward that was a worthy aim.

  * * *

  As part of the Anglo-Dutch peace treaty, Edward, who had excellent Dutch, was tasked with assessing the price of English ships taken by the king of Denmark. Amongst the Winslow family papers lies a certificate, showing Cromwell and the Dutch States General had made him a member of the arbitration committee created by the Treaty of Westminster to agree on issues arising after the First Anglo-Dutch War.