The Mayflower

by Rebecca Fraser

  Tradition has Josiah as a gentleman farmer who was devoted to Plymouth, serving the colony in many official capacities. But documents show he was also just as much a merchant involved with sugar plantations in the West Indies, as well as exporting iron and cloth on a large scale. His uncle John had paved the way, but being married to Governor Bellingham’s niece Penelope drew Josiah even more tightly into the heart of the Boston merchant elite, a financially innovative and daring community.

  Bellingham had taken the opposite view from Josiah’s father and the orthodox party on most of the issues of the past. He saw nothing wrong with the Child petition, and no reason to discriminate against non-church members and members of the Church of England. Unlike John Winthrop, who believed in the discretion of the magistrate, Bellingham wanted a body of laws, which he helped draw up in 1648. Josiah seems to have discreetly come over to Governor Bellingham’s side. While many Plymouth farmers proudly farmed their own land and were dependent on no one, especially not the slick city folks of Boston, Josiah had a more outgoing and ambitious stance. The fact that he was amongst the earliest students at the new Harvard College was another sign of the Winslows growing apart from the rest of the Old Colony. Since Plymouth did not have a proper grammar school until the 1670s, let alone a university, it was only natural to seek out education elsewhere.

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  Susanna got her money. At the bottom of her petition was written in Cromwell’s now shaky handwriting: ‘Oliver P. We refer this paper to a Council April 18 1656’. What was described as ‘compensation’ to Edward’s wife and children was paid forthwith.

  Cromwell had once stated he ‘had rather have a plain russet-coated captain that knows what he fights for, and loves what he knows, than that which you call a gentleman and is nothing else. I honour a gentleman that is so indeed.’ Edward had been such a man. However, Cromwell might have been less generous had he known about the Winslow connection to the Penruddock Uprising, the most important insurrection of the Republic. Josiah arrived to find his cousin William Wake in prison at Exeter, having been captured during the rebellion. Wake was part of the Royalist secret resistance movement, the Sealed Knot, and faced the possibility of execution for high treason.

  In the past, having Royalists for cousins could be shrugged off – almost everyone in the Civil War had relatives on different sides. But the Penruddock insurrection had been such a challenge to the regime that having William’s brother, Edward Wake, as a major investor in the Winslow business was potentially very embarrassing. So dangerous was the situation that Cromwell had brought in the Major-Generals. For the first and only time, England was ruled by martial law. Josiah had at least two ships in which Edward Wake had investments. The Winslows – now just Josiah – had been importing clothing to New England on a large scale, getting several hundred pounds of kersey, cotton, penistone, serge and linens by one ship alone. It seems likely that some was manufactured by William Wake and his wife Amie’s clothing business in the West Country, in which she ‘was a great help to him; and brought him a considerable portion in money to enable him to carry it on’. Josiah needed to fill those ships regardless of the cloth’s provenance.

  ‘Cuz Ed Wake’, as Josiah called him, may have been the middleman dealing with Josiah. Probably Edward Wake, as well as Josiah, thought William Wake was a damned fool. Certainly, the imprisonment of William didn’t stop the cousins doing business. A year later Ed was expecting a £30 return – that is interest on ventures – which may have originally been several hundred pounds (tens of thousands today). Josiah, like his father, simply ignored the potential difficulties of being linked to Royalists.

  The Sealed Knot had ordered their followers to seize power at the beginning of March 1655 when Edward Winslow had been in Barbados. William Wake was part of the little group captured at South Moulton in Devon. Colonel John Penruddock had his head cut off inside Exeter Castle on 16 May, and his gentlemen associates were hanged in the market square, which could have been William’s fate. Very fortunately for William, his captor, Captain Unton Croke, had offered articles of surrender that included his not being executed. Wake and six others were pardoned by Parliament and eventually released. William had a very narrow escape.

  But being married to a rebel took its toll on Amie. Her first son had been born when Wake was still in prison. Continuous anxieties through the Interregnum shortened her life, and ten years after the Restoration she was dead, aged just thirty-two. Captain Wake outlived her by thirty years.

  Though Josiah had arrived back in England with cash and the expertise to deal with his father’s probate, the family still had a large hole to plug. The sums owed suggest that it was not only Edward’s lifestyle which was the problem – perhaps he had bought shares in other ships going out from London, and perhaps those investments had made losses. Whatever the reasons, Susanna had need of money. She also had the sudden expense of a wedding.

  In the way of the world when an energetic unattached female is in the vicinity of a successful male, her attractive and strong-willed daughter Elizabeth had formed an attachment to the Winslows’ London business partner, a substantial merchant named Robert Brooks. On 9 March 1656 they married at the tiny fifteenth-century City church St Olave’s in Hart Street near Tower Hill.*

  Brooks’ family was sufficiently eminent to have a coat of arms, and probably ran a cloth-manufacturing business. To be flourishing at this time they were most likely of Puritan sympathies. Brooks dealt in iron hardware and ammunition – he sent powder, shot, nails and scythes to New England – and he was also a considerable importer of sugar, arranged by Josiah’s contacts and paid for by Brooks, and of beaver fur, also sent by Josiah. Brooks was a tough-minded businessman who fought his corner to the last penny. There were the inevitable tensions between partners about charging interest and credits. In a memorandum to himself Josiah noted he must examine the accounts more closely to ‘find how my debt as by his account current the last year could be so much’.

  But Susanna approved of the wedding. Elizabeth also found her husband’s painstaking counting of the pennies and pounds sensible and reassuring. Enmeshing these various in-laws in a tight family net was very helpful for their commercial activities.

  Herbert Pelham sent the young married couple a silver candlestick to celebrate the birth of their child John Brooks. It was a handsome gift costing far more than pewter.† Elizabeth had a taste for material gifts, and lots of them, as a list of her special possessions shows. She had grown accustomed to sophisticated objects and the new luxuries of the period. She owned elegant furniture which would not be manufactured in Boston for another thirty years, including the wicker-backed chairs which were then fashionable. Her pomander baskets made with oranges and cloves kept away bad smells. Even in New England it was beginning to be the fashion to be more ostentatious. Before a wedding, bride gloves were often sent to new relations. Pieces of cake followed. Her wedding probably featured sugared almonds. Sack posset would have been served to jolly up spirits. Music played while the families got to know one another. Some New England weddings had psalms sung throughout the evening, but Elizabeth may have preferred a quartet. The Winslows did not want to be sneered at by Londoners for being uncouth. There were all kind of rumours about strange New England customs: in the Connecticut Valley, for example, young people whispered to one another in full view of the family through what were called courting sticks, and it was said that engaged couples were allowed to share beds divided by a bolster or a sheet, a custom known as ‘bundling’.

  In godly London the Puritan leaders enjoyed display. A wedding was a time to show off. Cromwell at his daughter Frances’s wedding in 1657 wore ‘a rich suit of uncut velvet’ made up of a doublet and breeches ‘of the Spanish fashion’, as well as ‘lace trimmed fine linen, silk stockings, black Spanish leather shoes and gold buttons’.

  Elizabeth’s ceremony was very different from what Susanna’s wedding on the shores of the Atlantic had been like, when a simple joining of her
hand to Edward’s had sufficed. It fitted the Pilgrims’ mood in the wooden meeting house they had built with their own hands. But this was a different era. The couple received lavish gifts: Elizabeth describes a ‘large tankard’ made of silver ‘with our arms’. The tankard sounds as if it was a present celebrating the union of the two families, as does what she described as a ‘plate sugar box given me per Governor Winslow’. Sugar boxes held personal portions cut off the big sugar loaves, which is how sugar was sold in the seventeenth century. They were a recent novelty, and proliferated amidst the wealthy merchants of New England because of their close links to the new West Indian sugar plantations and the sugar trade. An excuse for craftsmen to show off their talents, these boxes were pioneered by the celebrated Boston gold- and silversmith John Hull, who made the first coins in Boston in the safety of the Interregnum (it was illegal to make coins anywhere other than England).*

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  Susanna and Elizabeth probably kept the lodgings on where Edward, Elizabeth and Magdalen had lived reasonably well for the past few years. Magdalen was now in the West Country helping soothe her daughter-in-law’s fears. Much in London was more pleasing to Susanna than when she was last there decades before, especially its godliness: since 1642 the last Wednesday of every month was meant to be a fast day.

  Susanna now had the melancholy task of sorting through Edward’s things and taking what she could home to America. She left most of his household goods with Elizabeth to form the basis of her new married life. Edward’s will gave his linen, ‘which I carry with me to sea, to my daughter Elizabeth’. The heavy, expensive suits were sent back to New England, one to each brother. The rest of the goods went to Josiah.

  It seems likely Josiah took Susanna to stay with his father-in-law, Herbert Pelham, before she began her long journey back to Marshfield. It would have been a relaxing sojourn at a time of grief. When the New England Winslows visited the manor house Ferriers, the peace of East Anglia formed a striking contrast to their own beautiful but dangerous countryside. The sixteenth-century Waldegrave memorial in St Mary’s in Bures was a marvellous sight: a kneeling Sir William Waldegrave with his six sons behind in descending order of size, and Dame Elizabeth with their four daughters. Susanna may have been shocked to see that the arms of all the figures had been sliced off during a visit from the Puritan soldier and iconoclast William Dowsing. He went to over 200 churches in East Anglia carrying out the Parliamentary army’s order that ‘all Monuments of Superstition and Idolatry should be removed and abolished’.

  Herbert Pelham had slotted back into a society in which a number of the Puritan gentry had links with New England. Susanna knew many of them. She probably visited the Gurdons, cousins of the Waldegraves who lived at the magnificent Assington Hall nearby, where Cromwell had stayed during the siege of Colchester. It was now inhabited by the MP for Suffolk, John Gurdon, who knew Edward from the Council of State. The family had considerable interest in the Puritan experiment in New England. Gurdon’s half-sister Muriel had married a Saltonstall and lived in Ipswich, Massachusetts.

  Funeral sermons did not become fashionable reading matter in New England until later in the century but they were beginning to have a vogue in Old England. Susanna’s hostess, Herbert Pelham’s wife Elizabeth, may have given the bereaved Susanna Ralph Josselin’s poignant sermon on the recent death of Mrs Smithea Harlakenden. William Harlakenden – who was a cousin of Elizabeth’s first husband, Roger Harlakenden, whom Susanna had known twenty years previously in Boston – had the sermon printed at his own expense in 1652. He and Josselin had thought the words might also be a comfort to other bereaved and ‘their damped, grieved spirits’. Such was its success it was published in a pamphlet containing John Donne’s great funeral sermon on the death of Lady Danvers, the mother of George Herbert. That had become a staple of mourning literature in England over the twenty-five years since it was printed.

  Perhaps Susanna was comforted by Josselin’s idea that it was God’s Providence that allowed people to forget the dead, so that time digested ‘those bitternesses of Spirit that are like death itself’. The forgetfulness was not of the ‘graces and virtues of the dead’. In that respect saints lived, ‘but it is of their persons which in time pass from us, and we scarce retain their image in our mind; and indeed how should we, when we forget our own face even before the glass is set aside’. God allowed men to mourn, but He also put a limit to their mourning: it must be remembered ‘your friends shall return again, they are not buried in the dust for ever, believe it, dwell upon it’. The bereaved must ‘but consider they are but gone before on the same way, in the same journey thou art travelling, and all the Saints are following’.

  It was indeed a very long time since Susanna had seen her own dear traveller. She would never see him again, on this earth at least. For Josselin the Resurrection made the dead ‘our comforts, so that when others go to the Tombs and Graves to mourn, Christians go to the graves to rejoice’. Alas, poor Susanna could not visit a tomb for Edward; she could only think of him lying offshore hundreds of feet below the surface of the sea.

  But now it was back home for her. With her dead husband’s possessions in the ship’s hold, she made the long and uncomfortable journey back to America. She could have remained in England with her daughter but – despite all its dangers and difficulties – New England was her home. Her three sons lived there. Elizabeth, meanwhile, was so homesick for tastes of New England that Josiah sent her a barrel of cranberries which he called ‘a token to my sister’. As early as the 1650s, to the first generation born in America the sour taste of the unique New England fruit had become the taste of home.

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  Susanna was a woman who embraced the new. Like her daughter-in-law Penelope, she never became disenchanted with the colonial life. Even if she occasionally found fault with New England severity there was satisfaction in the orderly ways of the tiny God-fearing piece of civilisation that was seventeenth-century Marshfield. The marsh was full of creeks, channels of water. Edward and the rest of the community had deepened them into what they called Green Harbour Canal, thereby creating a continuous waterway from Plymouth to Marshfield. One of the creeks came up to the house and a boat was kept there. The branches and delicate leaves of silver birch trees today almost hide the spot, but the mighty view ahead remains spectacular.

  Susanna had helped forge it. By the end of the century the town had two grist mills, one saltworks, by the North and South Rivers, and a herring fishery. Cordwood was being exported to Boston by the Winslow and Baker families. The North River became important for shipbuilding owing to the oak trees in the area.

  Susanna was not lonely because Penelope and Josiah lived across the way. She and Penelope felt safe at Marshfield surrounded by the many Winslows and their multiplying offspring on neighbouring farms up amongst the green hills where the forests had been cleared. She was proud of Josiah, who from a young age had demonstrated a strong service ethic.

  On the whole Plymouth Colony was a kinder place than Massachusetts. It lacked Boston’s harshness and what today we would think of as misogyny. Ever since the Anne Hutchinson episode, it was a given that sensible women in Boston guarded their tongues. But Anne Hibbens – the wife of William Hibbens, the Massachusetts ambassador to the Long Parliament – refused to do that. A dispute with lazy workmen who were defended by a church member resulted in her being called before her church for criticising Brother Davis. The case segued into criticism of her dominating her husband. She was expelled from her church for refusing to apologise for her remarks and for being a contentious woman.

  Once her husband was dead, the sharp-tongued ill-tempered Mrs Hibbens was easy prey for the malicious. Old age made her angry and not quite in control of her emotions. Hibbens had lost a great deal of money through bad investments. Accused of witchcraft, she was executed against the will of the Court of Assistants around the time of Susanna’s return from London. Years later John Norton, the minister who succeeded John Cotton as t
eacher at the First Church of Boston, said privately that Mrs Hibbens was ‘hanged for a witch only for having more wit than her neighbours’. The horrible treatment of a respectable old woman was a terrible warning to young women like Penelope and Elizabeth about the dangers of being outspoken. It may have been a reason for Elizabeth to enjoy London. Despite the Interregnum it was a less rigid society.

  Anne Hibbens’s punishment contrasted with attitudes to Susanna’s old friend, the assertive Elizabeth Warren. Force of personality, and the need for funds, meant that after her husband’s death she became a Purchaser of Plymouth Colony’s debts. A woman who brought her servant to court for profanity, she defeated her own son Nathaniel and his manipulative mother-in-law, who had tried to obtain land she had gifted to her two sons-in-law. Nathaniel was told to ‘forever cease all other or further claims’.

  Yet Susanna was all too conscious that the older generation were passing, that the once boisterous male comrades of the Mayflower were fading away. Stephen Hopkins had been in his grave for thirteen years. Loara Standish, Myles’s daughter who made the first sampler at Plymouth, had grown up, but never married. She died in 1655, as did her new sister-in-law, soon after her wedding. A heartbroken Myles asked to be buried beside the both of them. A year later he was.

  On 9 May 1657 William Bradford suddenly fell down dead in his garden. To the inhabitants of Plymouth he had been a revered, fragile old man for a number of years. But Susanna had known him in his passionate youth. He had played a fatherly role in Edward’s absence. Susanna was pleased that Josiah wrote a tender acrostic poem on Bradford’s death.

  Generational change even affected the extraordinarily youthful Massasoit. Two of his children, Wamsutta and Metacom, who had been boys at Edward’s departure, were now strong young men. In the time-honoured way of aristocratic elites, by the mid-1650s Massasoit had married them to the daughters of the head of an important local family, the Pocasset chief, Corbitant. Corbitant had been hostile in the early days of Plymouth and his eldest daughter, Weetamoo, who married Massasoit’s eldest son, Wamsutta, was a strong independent personality. She was an Indian princess who was said to have too much character for her own good. She was not happy with the increasing land sales. A very formidable young woman who married five times, she was anxious to protect land opposite Rhode Island at Pocasset. She succeeded her father Corbitant as chief as there was no male heir.