Making Haste from Babylon

by Nick Bunker

  We can also see why the trade in beaver skins might appeal to Beauchamp. Haberdashery, goatskins, and hardware might sell well, but the margins were narrow, and anybody could enter the trade. Silk, spices, and luxury goods lay within the protected domain of the monopolies, mainly the East India Company. Tobacco was out of the question, its import controlled by another monopoly, and the economics made it a waste of time. In 1620, Spanish leaf was far cheaper than Virginia’s: tobacco sold retail in London for less than it cost to grow the plant in Jamestown, while the Crown came close to banning tobacco altogether.18

  By contrast, the fur trade offered excellent prospects. Demand was strong. No bullion was necessary if the skins came from Native Americans, rather than difficult Russians. All they needed was a patent for settlement, from the Virginia Company or from Sir Ferdinando Gorges, both of whom were eager to help, since they needed settlers to colonize New England or to replace those who had died at Jamestown. The import duty was low, at sixpence per beaver skin, and the king smiled on the trade. Best of all was the wide gap between the cost of the skins at five shillings each and the market price of the hat, which fetched at least eight times as much. Within the tactile chain of manufacture lay a wide margin of profit. A North American venture offered an opportunity for Beauchamp to raise his commercial game, at the expense of the beaver king, Ralph Freeman.

  Thoughts like these must have passed through the minds of the investors, but so too did evangelism. London also contained the young John Milton, raised the son of a scrivener in Bread Street, at the mercantile heart of the city. Around the corner from the future author of Paradise Lost lived another young merchant, John Pocock. A Puritan like the Miltons, and an investor in the Plymouth Colony, Pocock definitely did not see the Mayflower simply as a chance to make money.

  Bradford did not care for Pocock, or so it seems, since his name surfaces rarely in the Pilgrim narratives. If so, the feeling was mutual. Pocock wished to remain inside the Church of England and reform it from within. During the first six years of the Plymouth Colony he and his friends viewed Bradford and the Leiden Brownists as unreliable extremists. Nevertheless, Pocock showed courage of his own, and Bradford was wrong not to acknowledge it.

  A political activist, later arrested as a tax rebel against the Crown, John Pocock supplied the link between the Pilgrims and the much larger migration led by John Winthrop in 1630. He invested in both, he financed the Atlantic trade in beaver fur, and he embodied the Puritan culture of London, the environment that went to shape the poet Milton. It was most probably Pocock who recruited Captain Miles Standish, a veteran of service with the Dutch, to act as the colony’s military commander in America. In his leisure hours, John Pocock served as a part-time soldier himself.

  THE PURITAN MILITIAMAN OF BREAD STREET

  If you wished to enter the City of London from the north, you came by way of Bishopsgate. Close to it you would find a patch of open ground called the Artillery Garden. Here, beginning in 1611, the young businessmen of the City drilled each week with their weapons, as members of the Honourable Artillery Company, a volunteer fraternity with a fine reputation for discipline and skill with arms. If war broke out, and the Spaniards invaded, they would supply the cadre of officers commanding the trained bands, raised from London and the surrounding counties. It was a privilege to be enrolled in the artillery company. John Pocock was a member, and apparently John Milton entered the regiment, too, in 1635.

  Pocock joined the artillerymen in 1619 and served alongside a young haberdasher called Owen Rowe, who was Edward Pickering’s apprentice and thirty years later signed the death warrant of Charles I. Their names appear together on the scroll that records the membership. Drawn up in 1635, it lists as soldiers in the company no fewer than nine investors in the Plymouth Colony, together with the printer who employed Edward Winslow, and another printer who published Mourt’s Relation. When the English Civil War began, the same company and the same kinds of men led the London militia for Parliament against the king.

  Sponsored by the Lord Mayor, the Honourable Artillery Company had a paid commander in Captain John Bingham, a soldier who had served for many years in the Netherlands under Prince Maurice. It seems sensible to assume that Miles Standish came to the Mayflower project by way of a recommendation from Bingham to Pocock. Like the artillerymen, Standish saw no conflict between soldiering and godliness. In fact, the artillery company commissioned sermons on the connection between the two, such as one they heard in 1617. “We are all Souldiers, as wee are Christians,” said the preacher. “You beare both Spirituall Armes against the enemies of your Salvation, and Materiall Armes against the enemies of your Countrey.”19 Standish could not have asked for a better summary of his own philosophy, and we may assume that Pocock endorsed it too.

  He lived within the core of the City, in an environment that combined commerce, learning, and religion, where all the elements that went to create the Plymouth Colony could be found in close proximity. Pocock spent his adult life in the shadow of St. Paul’s Cathedral, at the London end of Watling Street, in Bread Street Ward. If Puritan London had a nucleus, you would find it here, at the crossroads where Watling Street and Bread Street met.

  When news arrived from America, it came here first, because four doors away from the intersection was the Star Inn, used by carriers from the western ports of Barnstaple and Plymouth. If they were godly, visitors might pause for a Calvinist sermon at the church of All Hallows, Bread Street, where Milton was baptized in 1608. And if they had sons to educate, they need only turn the corner and walk to the end of Watling Street. There they would see St. Paul’s School, a charitable institution that charged no fees. At the school Milton read Homer and Virgil during the day, while in the evening he studied music with his father, an amateur composer who published settings of biblical texts for the voice and viol.20

  Here a visitor would also find the center of the cloth trade. Watling Street housed “wealthy Drapers, retailors of woollen cloathes both broad and narrow,” said a contemporary. Among them at the King’s Arms lived a merchant taylor called John Harrison. Childless, John Harrison employed the young John Pocock. The boy came from a village called Chieveley in Berkshire, west of the capital, an area where under the Tudors local drapers had begun to grow rich from the mass production of textiles in workshops in the towns of Newbury and Reading. Among them, it seems, were the Pococks, who bought their own small estate in 1566. Comfortably off, the family found John his niche with Harrison, whose firm he joined in 1607 as an apprentice.21

  From the King’s Arms, Harrison ran a network of “chapmen,” small retail dealers in provincial market towns, from Exeter in the south to Preston in Lancashire in the north. They distributed drapery made by Harrison’s cloth workers, and the business flourished. Pocock served his time as an apprentice alongside another boy called Ralph Longworth, and after Pocock finished his training in 1615, they went into business together, with a loan of two thousand pounds from Harrison as capital. When Harrison died in 1619, and Longworth in 1620, John Pocock took over the operation as a whole.

  He also shared Harrison’s evangelical religion. “Puritan” is a word that must be used carefully to speak about Londoners in the 1620s, because times had changed, definitions had become less clear-cut, and men and women did not always tell the truth about their beliefs. Puritan or not, Harrison belonged to a group of merchants who clustered around evangelical Calvinists in city parishes. One such man was the spiritual leader of Bread Street Ward, Richard Stock, the rector of All Hallows who baptized the poet.

  Richard Stock belonged to a network of ministers who inherited the name “forward preachers” from the old Elizabethan Presbyterians of the 1590s. A few of these survivors of the old Puritan movement were still alive, and they found shelter and support with men such as Stock. He had made his name as a verbose anti-Catholic, but he was also a diligent pastor and no respecter of persons—it was said that he would denounce sin “even to the faces of the greatest, both
in publike and private”—and he built a loyal following.22

  Among the merchants who listened to Stock was another draper, Nathaniel Wade, who lived around the corner at the sign of the Bear in Friday Street. At his death Wade left thirty pounds to his “loving friend” Richard Stock, and the bulk of his fortune, including the Bear, to his widow. In 1623, Mary Wade married John Pocock, the rising young merchant from only two hundred yards away. This must have cemented Pocock’s standing as one of the neighborhood’s most substantial citizens. An evangelical ally of Richard Stock’s, he worked with him on a project that closely resembled the Plymouth Colony, in motivation at least. It was aimed not at America but at Lancashire, in northwestern England, where Harrison’s family had originated.

  When Harrison died, he made John Pocock an executor of his will, while Stock supervised Pocock’s work. With no children to provide for, Harrison bequeathed his fortune to charity. In 1620, therefore, Pocock carried out Harrison’s scheme to build a new Merchant Taylors’ School near Liverpool, with no fees for the boys beyond an initial shilling, supported by an endowment of rents from houses in Bread Street Ward.

  Godly Puritans still saw the north as a backward wasteland of popery and ignorance, and Harrison’s school was one of many founded with the aim of putting this right. They compared this with the work of taking the Gospel to the New World. As a politician put it, “There were some places in England which were scarce in Christendom, where God was little better-known than among the Indians.”23 As the Mayflower crossed the Atlantic, and Pocock signed off the bills for the school, the Merchant Taylors commissioned verses in honor of Harrison, resonating with the sense of mission that we find in Bradford as well. Harrison’s bequest, the Latin says, was inspired by “love of Country, love of Virtue, love of Learning, and the love of Religion.”

  This sort of thing was hardly subversive. Nobody could object to an educational charity. However, the motives that lay behind the Mayflower or the school might one day spill over into politics, if circumstances changed. If men like Pocock came to believe that the Crown and the Church of England were outright enemies of the work of godliness, rather than simply idle or inadequate, then a more radical maneuver might be needed. Stock, for example, helped to lead a group of London merchants and clergymen, the so-called Feoffees for Impropriations, who bought rectories around the country, and used the tithe revenues to pay the salaries of Puritan preachers, as a means to create an evangelical church within a church. One day this sort of thing might lead to a clash with the authorities, if the archbishop of Canterbury tried to forbid it.*

  For the time being, events had not reached a moment of decision requiring outright civil disobedience, or exile, for mainstream Puritans such as John Pocock. For him, and for young Whittingtons like Beauchamp, the Mayflower’s voyage was an experiment, a shrewd gamble by means of the fur trade to thrust themselves into the front rank of commerce. At the same time, the new colony would fulfill evangelical goals by bringing the Sermon on the Mount to a land that had not heard it. Even so, New England was not yet a desperate necessity, since ways and means such as education could still be found to do the Lord’s work in abundance at home.

  Within less than a decade of the Mayflower’s voyage, a crisis occurred in which New England suddenly became just such a necessary option. At that point, Pocock and his neighbors in Bread Street Ward would have to take their stand as political rebels. In 1620, however, that moment still lay very far in the future. Instead, informed men and women were mostly looking not west but east, across the North Sea toward a continent sliding into war and economic calamity.

  THE KIPPER AND THE WIPPER

  In January, King James issued the usual secret instructions to an English diplomat on his way to Madrid. “Informe yourselfe of all such Preparations as there be made, which wil be of three sorts: Mony, Men and Shipping,” wrote the king, in case another Spanish Armada was in preparation. Then he turned elsewhere, to a more urgent source of anxiety: the ambassador, he said, needed to monitor “the present affaires of Germany: wherof the Eye of the Christian world is like cheifely to be fixed.”24

  And so it was. As the Thirty Years’ War began to escalate, the effects of the conflict in Germany rapidly spilled across frontiers. In the fourth week of July, as the Pilgrims left Delftshaven on the Speedwell, heading for Southampton to meet the Mayflower, the Spanish and Bavarian armies began to march toward Protestant Bohemia. Long before they reached Prague, the economic damage done by the hostilities had already begun to take its toll in England, despite the nation’s neutrality.

  The war caused a chaos of hyperinflation, which came to be known in German as the Kipper und Wipperzeit, the “time of the Kipper and the Wipper.” Kipper meant “tilting” and Wipper meant “wagging,” and the words referred to deception, practiced by goldsmiths who played tricks with their scales, swapping sound coins for lightweight or counterfeit duds. Hundreds of mints debased their coinage as a way for local rulers to raise funds to pay for armies and weapons. At its worst, the process became a panic of competitive devaluation, as mints fought each other to attract bullion and then to coin it into as much currency as possible. As money lost its value, prices soared, increasing six-or sevenfold. Wages lagged far behind, and in southern Germany the real incomes of manual workers fell by two-thirds.25

  When their truce with the Netherlands ended, in 1621, the Spanish Crown imposed an embargo on Dutch shipping; and since the Dutch were the principal carriers between the Baltic and the Mediterranean, this caused the depression to deepen still further. England had begun to feel its effects far earlier than that, in the spring of 1620, as a result of the inflationary crisis in Germany and Poland. London merchants who traded to Gdansk found that English cloth simply would not sell. The rising value of the pound killed their exports, and they were soon petitioning the Crown for help. This was why, six months before the Mayflower set sail, the Shrewsbury drapers were already in difficulties, as cloth piled up unsold at Blackwell Hall.26

  The price of wool began to drop sharply. So did the price of grain, because of a series of excellent harvests. As the Mayflower gathered her supplies, a bushel of wheat fell to its cheapest price in fourteen years. Even this had its darker side, as tenant farmers found their incomes collapsing while their costs did not. As farm incomes fell, farm rents, which had been rising steeply in England for fifty years or so, at last began to stabilize, but not quickly enough to bring relief.

  Against this background, between June and August, the Pilgrims made their final preparations and closed their deal with Thomas Weston. It is easy to see why the negotiations took place in a fraught, bad-tempered atmosphere. Along with the families recruited in England with no Leiden connections, Pocock and his colleagues insisted on sending with the colonists a Puritan merchant from Essex, Christopher Martin. A man with a record of minor clashes with the local church authorities, Martin apparently joined the expedition in order to reduce the influence of the Separatists. He also acted as supply officer, purchasing provisions but quarreling with John Carver about their cost and where to buy them.

  Meanwhile, Weston was determined to strike the hardest bargain he could. He insisted that in the New World the colonists should work seven days a week for the joint-stock company, with even their houses treated as company assets for division after seven years. As for the Pilgrims, in the conditions of 1620 it was impossible for them to borrow in order to complete their purchase of supplies. In June, they had about £350 less than they needed, a very substantial shortfall, severely reducing their resources for the first winter in America: in the summer of that year, one pound sterling bought either forty pounds of butter, or sixty candles, or a dozen geese, or more than one hundred gallons of beer.27

  When Bradford came to write about their final weeks in England, he said nothing about the economic collapse that was occurring around them. As we shall see, it nearly caused the destruction of the colony, because it wrecked the finances of Thomas Weston, which had always been
fragile. But another Separatist who traveled to New Plymouth gave his own, less famous account of the motives that might lead an immigrant to America. He laid heavy stress on the hardships of the period.

  The author was Robert Cushman. He did not sail on the Mayflower: instead, worried about the lack of supplies and the lateness of the season, Cushman was one of a group who turned back with the Speedwell when her skipper refused to proceed. He eventually went to New England in 1621, and preached a sermon at New Plymouth. Published in London the following year, his text was an appeal for new settlers to follow the Pilgrims. Cushman kept a grocer’s shop in England before combing wool in Leiden, and his sermon went straight to the economic point.

  In England, he said, “the rent-taker lives on sweet morsels, but the rent-payer eats with a dry crust and often with watery eyes.” Unemployment rose and vagrant beggars multiplied in a fractious, divided country beset by “envy, contempt and reproach,” and by the malaise of litigation. He blamed all this on poverty and overcrowding. “The straitness of the place is such, as each man is fain to pluck his means, as it were, out of his neighbour’s throat,” he said. “There is such pressing and oppressing in town and country, about farms, trades, traffick etc; so as a man can hardly any where set up a trade, but he shall pull down two of his neighbours.”

  This was language much harsher than Bradford’s. The two men fell out before the Mayflower left England, when Cushman mishandled negotiations with Weston, accepting his terms too readily. And yet in Cushman’s language perhaps we find a rare, authentic echo of the speech of Jacobean men and women in streets, in taverns, and in market squares during these years of destitution.

  For Cushman, a refuge from sin and strife lay in what he called “a spacious land, the way to which is through the sea.” There we must follow the Mayflower, as she rounded the Provincetown Hook and entered the wide, calm haven behind the sand hills, where Christopher Jones let his anchor slip at last on the morning of November 11, 1620.