Winslow, Edward (1713–84, son of Isaac Winslow, Loyalist general in Revolutionary Wars)
Winslow, Edward (senior)
Winslow, Edward (1669–1753, silversmith)
Winslow, Elizabeth (née Barker): death; ill-health; in Leiden; marries Edward Winslow; voyage on the Mayflower
Winslow, Gilbert; buried Ludlow, Shropshire (1631)
Winslow, Isaac (son of Josiah and Penelope Winslow); builds existing Isaac Winslow house, Marshfield (c. 1699); marriage to Sarah Wensley
Winslow, Dr Isaac (1739–1819, son of General John Winslow, Loyalist doctor)
Winslow, John (1597–1674, brother of Edward Winslow), 3, 24, 30, 87, 138, 210, 224, 242, marries Mary Chilton 104
Winslow, General John (1703–74): general in British army against French; settles two Acadian refugees in Plymouth
Winslow, John (son of John and Mary Winslow, sailor and merchant): 210; brings news of the Glorious Revolution from Nevis (1689); imprisoned
Winslow, Josiah: agent for Herbert Pelham; and the Atherton Company; childhood; as Governor of Plymouth Colony; home and family; hostility to Indians; illness and death; King Philip’s hostility to; and King Philip’s War; marries Penelope Pelham; merchant trading also business with Edward Winslow and Robert Brooks in England and West Indies; petitions Charles II for Mount Hope lands; portrait of; on the Quakers; standing in Plymouth after Edward Winslow’s death; will
Winslow, Josiah (brother of Edward Winslow)
Winslow, Kenelm (1599–1672, brother of Edward Winslow)
Winslow, Kenelm junior (son of Kenelm Winslow, nephew of Edward, Gilbert and Josiah Winslow, member of Scituate church)
Winslow, Kenelm (probable grandfather of Edward senior, Worcestershire cloth merchant); will (1607)
Winslow, Nathaniel
Winslow, Penelope (née Pelham): arrives in New England; chooses to stay in Boston; deaths of sister and brother; home and children in Marshfield; marries Josiah Winslow; nervous crisis; portrait of; removes to Salem during King Philip’s War; and Waldegrave inheritance
Winslow, Sarah (née Wensley, wife of Isaac Winslow)
Winslow, Susanna (formerly White): death; gives birth on the Mayflower; in Leiden; in London after Edward Winslow’s death; marries Edward Winslow; in Marshfield after Edward Winslow’s death; in Plymouth colony
Winthrop, Adam
Winthrop, John, Governor: and Anne Hutchinson; buried in Boston; church membership; the ‘City upon a Hill,’; death; decision to emigrate; disapproval of social distinction in the colonies; and execution of Miantonomo; influence on Edward Winslow; and the Pequot War; relations with Indians; visits Plymouth Colony
Winthrop, John (junior)
Winthrop, Lucy
Winthrop, Martha (née Rainborowe)
Winthrop, Wait Still
Wintour, Robert
witchcraft trials
Witherell, Reverend William
Wituwamat (Massachusett Indian)
Wolcott, Josiah
Wolcott, Penelope (née Curwen)
Wollaston, Captain
Wolstenholme, Sir John
Wood, Anthony
Wood, William
Woodcock, Thomas (College of Arms)
Wootonekanuska (wife of King Philip)
Worcester, England; Battle of Worcester (1651)
Wyatt, Sir Francis, Governor of Virginia
Wyeth family
Wyncop, John
Yarmouth, Plymouth Colony (now Massachusetts)
Young, Henry
ALSO BY REBECCA FRASER
Charlotte Brontë
A People’s History of Britain
About the Author
REBECCA FRASER has worked as a researcher, an editor, and a journalist, and has written for many publications, including Tatler, Vogue, The Times, and The Spectator. She is the author of The Brontës and The Story of Britain and lives in England. You can sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
List of Illustrations
List of Maps
Prologue: 1676
I: Droitwich
II: Leiden
III: Leaving Holland
IV: The Voyage
V: Land
VI: Massasoit
VII: The Building of ‘Our Town’
VIII: Good Farms
IX: Massachusetts Begins
X: The Pequot War
XI: The Pan-Indian Conspiracy
XII: Leaving for London, 1646
XIII: Republican England
XIV: Hercules
XV: Generational Change
XVI: The Coming of War
XVII: King Philip’s War
XVIII: Penelope Alone: the widow’s bed ‘not priced’
XIX: Penelope’s Final Actions
Photographs
Acknowledgements, and a note about the book and its sources
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Also by Rebecca Fraser
About the Author
Copyright
THE MAYFLOWER. Copyright © 2017 by Rebecca Fraser. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.stmartins.com
Maps © William Donohoe
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Fraser, Rebecca, author.
Title: The Mayflower: the families, the voyage, and the founding of America / Rebecca Fraser.
Description: New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017026873 | ISBN 9781250108562 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781250108586 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Pilgrims (New Plymouth Colony) | Massachusetts—History—New Plymouth, 1620–1691. | Winslow, Edward, 1595–1655. | Winslow, Josiah, 1629?–1680. | Winslow family. | Mayflower (Ship)
Classification: LCC F68 .F83 2017 | DDC 974.4/02—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017026873
Our e-books may be purchased in bulk for promotional, educational, or business use. Please contact the Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department at 1-800-221-7945, extension 5442, or by e-mail at [email protected].
First published in the United Kingdom under the title The Mayflower Generation by Chatto & Windus, an imprint of Vintage, a Penguin Random House company
First U.S. Edition: November 2017
eISBN 9781250108586
* Thomas Woodcock and Christopher Vane of the College of Arms believe that had Edward Winslow senior not suffered a financial setback which would make him flee to Ireland in 1620, he might well have crossed the threshold of gentility as so many did. But he did not have that sort of luck. A search of the records at the College of Arms has established that the Winslows did not feature in any Heralds’ Visitations to Worcestershire in the period. Nevertheless the Winslows were a rising yeoman family who mingled with the educated of the county. Many years later Edward Winslow junior, who was now working for Cromwell, would take great pleasure in getting a coat of arms commissioned from the College of Arms.
* Bellamy printed New World narratives and published the first report from the Plymouth Colony, Mourt’s Relation. As politics took a radical turn in the 1640s Bellamy became a colonel in the Civil War, publishing Puritan tracts in the propaganda battle between Royalists and Parliamentarians. Edward turned to Bellamy to publish news about New England in the 1640s to show that much of the millenarian promise of the New World was being fulfilled.
* Arminians were followers of the Dutch theologian Jacobus Arminius who disputed Calvinist doctrines, especially predestination. Known as the Remonstrants in 1619 after the Synod of Dortrecht, they were expelled from Holland.
* Historians have noted the prevalence of eastern England in seventeenth-century Puritan emigration. When Brewster was at Cambridge, Spanish policies designed to drive out Protestantism in the Netherlands brought Flemish and Dutch Protestant refugees to English eastern coastal towns.
* When her husband died, most unusually Elizabeth took her husband’s place as one of the underwriters of the colony’s debts. She died in 1673 aged ninety.
* A good strong ship was 300 tonnes (according to the Pilgrims’ contemporary Reverend Francis Higginson) and thus the Mayflower was quite small. Higginson called a ship of 120 tonnes ‘neat and nimble’.
* Few in the early seventeenth century reached their biblical three score years and ten. Average life expectancy for English people in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries was forty.
* In 1630, in a characteristic fit of anger, Billington was responsible for the first murder in New England when he killed another settler, John Newcomen.
* Twenty years later Edward Winslow and William Bradford became less democratic, defeating an attempt to pass a motion allowing freedom of religion to all who would ‘preserve the civil peace and submit unto government’. Edward was horrified at the thought of ‘Turk, Jew, Papist, Arian, Socinian, Nicholaytan, Familist’ or any other being tolerated. William Bradford, by then governor, agreed. He refused to allow the court to vote on it because most of Plymouth probably was in favour.
* Part of the Algonquian peoples, their cousins included the Narragansett, the Niantic, the Massachusett and the Wampanoag, whose nations spread deep into the mainland to the west. Descendants of these Nauset Indians still live on Cape Cod in Mashpee Village.
* Oceanus Hopkins was a less healthy child than Peregrine White, who lived into the eighteenth century, dying in 1704. In 1623, when some of the land acquired by Plymouth Colony was distributed to all the living colonists, Oceanus’s name is no longer among them. His parents went on to have seven more children.
* In fact it would be the fur trade that was their financial salvation.
* Edward was responsible for most of the Pilgrims’ first communication to England, Mourt’s Relation, which was published in 1622. This was followed by Good News from New England in 1624, of which he was sole author.
* Edward remarks here Indians could not pronounce the letter ‘l’ and said ‘n’ instead.
* In the early seventeenth century there were 60 million beavers in North America, which were hunted almost to extinction on the East Coast.
* Now designated a national historic landmark. The state capital, Augusta, is nearby, built on land once owned by Plymouth.
* Susanna and Edward did not move out of Plymouth to the house they built, named Careswell, until 1636. They founded a town called Marshfield. Edward received a very large land grant of between 800 and 1,000 acres. The area was a place ‘very well meadowed, and fit to keep and rear cattle, good store’, and took its name from wide acres of salt marsh. The original records describe it as ‘westward upon a marsh called Careswell Marsh follows a small ridge of hills to the great marsh on Green Harbour’s River’.
* In the end Edward took over from Allerton as the London agent of Plymouth Colony.
* Charles I suspended Parliament between 1629 and 1640, a period known as the Eleven Year Tyranny.
† Although Salem was part of the Massachusetts Bay Colony they operated as a separate entity. The second wave of Massachusetts Bay Colony settlers landed a year later in 1630 and settled at Boston and Charlestown. They had a different church to Salem.
* Higginson wrote that he and others had assumed that they would arrive to live in houses already built by the colony and felt they had been misled.
* In the next fifty years some of the most celebrated figures in early New England history would be interred there, including John Cotton, John Wilson and John Winthrop.
* This theory was of immense fascination to serious Puritans who believed in the Apocalypse because it fitted in with the prophecies of the Book of Daniel. The Second Coming was to be preceded by the conversion of the Jews. The theory had currency for around fifty years.
* The husband of Lucy Winthrop, Emmanuel Downing emigrated to New England in 1638. His son Sir George Downing was an important financial minister in the Restoration and built Downing Street in London.
* William Wood referred to Williams in New England’s Prospect as a clergyman who was very popular with the Indians because he could speak their language: ‘One of the English preachers in a special good intent of doing good to their souls, hath spent much time in attaining to their language, wherein he is so good and proficient, that he can speak to their understanding, and they to his; much loving and respecting him for his love and counsel. It is hoped that he may be an instrument of good amongst them.’
* Henry Vane the Younger became a Parliamentarian MP who helped draft the Root and Branch bill to get rid of bishops with Oliver Cromwell and Sir Arthur Hesilrige, a dedicated member of the pro-war party against Charles I. A close personal friend of Roger Williams, Vane supported freedom of conscience after the Civil War.
* Not all Puritans agreed with this analysis. John Wheelwright had a more commonsensical approach. He wrote that this was a ‘monstrous conception of his [Winthrop’s] brain’.
* New Haven, another theocratic state, had been founded in 1638 by 500 discontented settlers from Massachusetts, headed by Theophilus Eaton and Reverend John Davenport. The land on the Long Island Sound had been granted by the Quinnipiac Indians.
* Hesilrige and Pelham were further connected: Hesilrige’s wife, Dorothy Greville, was Lord Brooke’s sister. She and Pelham’s mother-in-law, Margaret Bossevile, were both half aunt, half niece, and close cousins. It seems one of Edward’s grandparents was probably a Greville. For some reason the families had lost contact in the past – perhaps because the Winslows had not flourished.
* They were officially exonerated, but their innocence was clearly taken with a pinch of salt. The year after their protector Edward died, they were slapped with the so-called Decimation Tax – ten per cent of their property – which was imposed to punish Royalist rebels. The Committee for Compounding, now minus the noble Edward, acidly noted that they were satisfied ‘that Lord Coventry is within the orders for the tax by the Major Generals, and instruct them to proceed accordingly’.
* St Olave’s was where Samuel Pepys worshipped when he was at the Navy Office, and he was buried there. The Winslows were probably living nearby.
† Silver objects were at a premium after the Civil War because so much family silver had been melted down to provide coins for the war, especially in Royalist families. In at least three sieges in the Civil War citizens were asked to bring in their silver spoons to be made into coins to pay the troops.
* One of New England’s first silversmiths, another Edward Winslow, born in 1669, was Elizabeth and Josiah’s first cousin once removed. His rare rococo trifles in silver, chocolate pots and sugar boxes are treasured by museums, especially one made in 1702 now at the Winterthur Museum in Delaware. Its elaborate chasing explores themes such as courtly love and chivalry, which would have been regarded as highfaluting by the earlier settlers.
* By the seventeenth century, capital punishment was the penalty for many felonies. One way round this was that a member of the clergy was defined as anyone who could read. Reciting the first verse of Psalm 51 was regarded as proof of this, even though it was easily memorised. It was known as the ‘neck verse’.
† Governor Bellingham left thirty acres of his land to Angola, a respected member of the small African community in Boston, who had saved Bellingham’s life when he had fallen into the Charles River.
* The Half-Way Covenant created new churches for those who felt unsure about their own reg
eneration experience. Mary Winslow was one of them. No longer the little girl who legend has it was first off the Mayflower, she was unsure whether she had experienced feelings of salvation. She was one of twenty-eight members of the First Church (along with her husband John Winslow) who retreated to become members of the Third Church of Boston.
* By 1675 there were around 60,000 English and 20,000 Indians.
* Since 1652, John Hull had been making shillings stamped with a pine tree. After 1660, in order to outwit the English government for whom the shillings were illegal, they were always dated 1652.
* Jeremy Bangs notes that Josiah’s draft revision of Plymouth’s laws soon afterwards made it ‘legal to attach real estate for the recovery of debts even if the real estate had not been previously identified as mortgaged to guarantee the repayment’. Bangs says that because of the inequality of the Indians’ financial position it was tantamount to confiscating land. As with the Atherton Purchase, by the 1670s the diminished fur trade and the demonetisation of wampum meant the Indians could never repay a debt made in European money. But the debts and resulting sales continued.
* In 1663 John Eliot published a translation of the Bible in Algonquian, a copy of which remains at Jesus College, Cambridge. He preached every two weeks at Natick, close to where Waban of Nonantum became his first Indian convert in the 1640s.
The Mayflower Page 45