With this, the years of thinking, planning, and explaining came to an end, and the project was put into operation. Though Plockhoy had contracted to transport only twenty-five adult males who would prepare the way for others, including families to follow, he had hoped for an initial shipment of one hundred colonists, but in this he was disappointed. On July 28, 1663, only forty-one souls disembarked from the St. Jacob at Whorekill, among them his own family, to launch the community that would usher in a new era in human history.
What happened in the months that followed, as the Dutch intellectual sought to realize his dreams and the hopes of his fellow Dutch and English utopians, is not known. If a record of their lives at Whorekill was kept, it has not survived. All that is known is that when in August 1664 Sir Robert Carr and his overwhelming English force assaulted the Dutch colony, D’Hinoyossa—as opposed to Stuyvesant, who surrendered Manhattan without a shot—decided to fight for the defense of New Amstel. As a result, blood was spilled in the colony’s main area, and when Carr swept south to Whorekill, he “there plundered and tooke possession of all effects belonging to the Citty of Amsterdam, and alsoe what belonged to the Quaking Society of Plockhoy to a very naile.” Stuyvesant gave a more lurid account of the fate of New Amstel: “they were invaded, stript bare, plundered, and many of them sold as slaves in Virginia.”63 What can be reconstructed from scattered sources is more commonplace and more in keeping with the general pattern of European population history in North America. The colony’s corporate identity was destroyed, but the people remained and gradually dispersed through the region, mingling with people of quite different backgrounds, settling into a thinly populated polyethnic farming district—Finns, Swedes, English, Germans, and north Europeans of every description—whose distinctive vernacular culture would only gradually form.
A Whorekill census of 1671, reconstructed from genealogical sources, shows, in the careers of Plockhoy’s immediate family members, the dispersal of his evanescent elysium. The leader himself died in his mid-forties, during that difficult first year or shortly thereafter. His wife, who remarried, also died before 1671. One of her daughters married an Englishman, as did Plockhoy’s sister. His brother Harmen, long familiar with this frontier world, survived another twenty-five years, became an Indian trader, and obtained land for himself and Plockhoy’s son, Cornelis, who was blind. It was this blind son who was the last survivor. In 1693 his stepfather, Willem Clasen, moved him to the Mennonite settlement in Germantown, Pennsylvania, where the blind young man was granted, as charity, a small house and a parcel of land. It was there that the last direct legacy of Plockhoy’s experiment lived out his life.64
The whole of Plockhoy’s adventure—from its origins in his euphoric vision within the intellectual ferment of metropolitan Europe to its squalid ending in the American woodlands—was a model for, an ideal type of, innumerable utopias to come. Like Plockhoy’s peculiar embodiment of The Truth, they would be cities on the hill; they would flare up brilliantly in people’s imaginations, take shape through bitter adversity, flourish briefly, and then as communities wither and die. But in this, Plockhoy’s project was unique. Though his utopian village was obliterated, his ideas lived on, to inspire generations of European reformers, from the Quakers of his own time to Robert Owen, Karl Marx, Eduard Bernstein, and Joshua Rountree in the nineteenth century, and to economists and students of cooperative movements in the twentieth century.65
A different, almost mythological renown would be the fate of a more famous conventicle that had been established with passion equal to Plockhoy’s some four hundred miles to the north. Its demise was more gradual than Plockhoy’s utopia, but for those most intimately involved, it was no less tragic and far more eloquently lamented.
* * *
* Amsterdam’s bay is shaped like a Y. On the Pythagorean Y emblematic of the choice between evil and virtuous ways, well known to European intellectuals of Plockhoy’s generation, see Frances A. Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (London, 1972), 56.
CHAPTER 11
God’s Conventicle, Bradford’s Lamentation
1
THERE ARE STRIKING SIMILARITIES between Plockhoy’s settlement at Whorekill on the Delaware and the Pilgrims’ village at Plymouth on the south shore of Massachusetts. Both had Anglo-Dutch origins; both were deliberate and complete removals from a corrupt metropolitan world; both were designed as communes of equal sharing in the initial years; both were convinced that they were the preservers, the protectors and promoters, of pristine Christianity; and in the end both were overtaken by forces they could not control, their people melding into a diverse population whose distinctive folkways had not yet formed.
There were differences too. Plockhoy, born the year of the Pilgrims’ settlement in America, was critical but tolerant of diversity within the Protestant confessions; the Pilgrim leaders feared toleration, which they correctly saw would destroy their entire project, both church and sanctified society.1 Plockhoy saw benefits in business enterprise; the Pilgrims feared its corrosive effect. Plockhoy’s program was elaborately articulated, the product of an intricate system of radical ideas expressed in enumerated rules and precepts; the Pilgrims lived in loose agreement on what they took to be the true and simple principles of primitive Christianity and apostolic purity. Plockhoy’s utopia ended in a sudden, fiery death that was barely recorded and entirely unlamented; the Pilgrims’ utopia faded gradually, its demise documented in lamentations that would become classic texts in elegiac prose. But however different, both were products of the great churnings and burnings in radical Protestantism that account for population displacements throughout the Atlantic world.
WILLIAM BRADFORD, the leader of the Pilgrims’ settlement in America and its great mythographer, would forever deny that his people were “Familists”—that is, devoted, like the notorious sixteenth-century German Family of Love, to the search for an ecstatic union with Christ—or that they were in any other way radical spiritists seeking exaltation that transcended the constraints of everyday life. They were much more earthbound, more pragmatic than that. Like other separatist groups, the Pilgrims, seeking to re-create what they believed had been the simple life of the earliest Christians, had despaired of the Church of England ever returning to that authentic spiritual state and had declared themselves independent of its discipline, its sacerdotal powers, and its secular sanctions. Following the lead of earlier separatists who had been forced into exile, they sought to narrow the distance between God’s invisible church of the truly blessed and the visible church here below, by limiting membership in their conventicles to those who formally professed the doctrines of reformed Christianity, lived blameless lives, and submitted to the congregation’s discipline. They shared much with the larger Puritan reform movement within the Church of England that was sweeping across England, but pressed on further, to deny any validity in the Episcopal establishment and to claim that their own small, independent congregation was the correct model of Christian organization. The demands on their members were simple—only a profession of faith, commitment to the covenant that bound the group together, and behavior appropriate for professing Christians. But in the context of the time, their views were considered to be not only defiant of church and state but subversive of social stability and likely to lead to the anarchic upheavals that had followed the original Reformation.2
In the face of Episcopal oppression on the one hand and the innate pressure toward even more radical and dangerous extremes, agreement within the group was essential. Solidarity was everything, and Bradford recorded with pride the Pilgrim leaders’ description of their conventicle as “knit together as a body in a most strict and sacred bond and covenant of the Lord … straitly tied to all care of each other’s good and of the whole, by every one and so mutually.”3 In fact, the emigrating community as a whole was never that. From the moment of its departure for America, it was a loose collection of people of many conditions, drawn from many places, with various degrees of devoti
on to the founding ideals. But the inner core, the central body of worshippers and the leadership, formed, as Bradford wrote, an independent church of true believers bonded together for their common good and the pursuit of pristine Christianity.
THE CONGREGATION FIRST TOOK FORM in a gathering of religious dissidents scattered through obscure villages in northern Nottinghamshire and the adjacent areas of western Lincolnshire and southern Yorkshire, 150 miles from London. There, in what has been called “the Pilgrim Quadrilateral”—an area of approximately ninety square miles that included thirty parishes, from the boggy grasslands of the Trent River valley west to the low-lying meadows and pastureland of Nottinghamshire—dissent from the ritual formalities and ecclesiastical structures of the Church of England had taken deep root. In Scrooby, a minor manor of the Archbishop of York, the bailiff’s son, William Brewster, had brought back from the University of Cambridge something of the Puritan radicalism that was flaming through the colleges—especially Christ’s, Emmanuel, Corpus Christi, Trinity, and Brewster’s own Peterhouse. There, in the single year of his residence at age fourteen or fifteen, he had been singed by the fervent preaching of dissenters like William Perkins, Francis Johnson, John Udall, and John Greenwood, all of whom faced suppression and imprisonment, some of whom would die on the scaffold, martyrs to the reformist cause. And Brewster brought back to Scrooby also the worldly experience he had gained as an assistant to the chief English diplomat in the Netherlands, and a sense of that new nation’s toleration and of its possibilities as a refuge for English dissidents.4
Assuming his father’s positions and status—not quite of the gentry but above the rank of yeoman (he would acquire a personal library of 382 books, 64 in Latin)—Brewster drew to the modest Scrooby manor house some of the best known and most articulate opponents of the established church then living in retreat in villages within a radius of ten miles. Among these active and articulate dissenters were Richard Clifton, the dismissed rector of nearby Babworth; John Robinson, who had returned to his native Sturton-le-Steeple after stormy involvements in radical conventicles in Cambridge, London, and Norwich; and the notorious radical, already a formal separatist from the Church of England, John Smyth, of Gainsborough, a town six or seven miles north of Sturton-le-Steeple. Farther off but closely involved in a broad network of Puritan landowners and lawyers was the prosperous former law student Thomas Helwys, who had returned to his home, Broxtowe Hall, near Nottingham, where he assumed a leadership role in the spreading separatist movement. But however deeply involved he was with the work of Brewster, Robinson, Smyth, and the other dissident leaders, Helwys was yet unique in his secure gentry status. Almost all who came together to pray, to profess their convictions, and to debate the nature of the true church were ordinary farmers and artisans from the surrounding villages who were inflamed with the desire to worship “according to the simplicity of the gospel, without the mixture of men’s inventions.” Among these humble followers was the young William Bradford, an orphaned yeoman’s son from the village of Austerfield, adjacent to Scrooby. A sensitive, rather bookish teenager when he met the mature Brewster, he had defied his family’s practical expectations and had become Brewster’s and Robinson’s spiritual ward and ultimately the custodian of their memory and that of the enterprise they shared with a small, motley collection of their countrymen.5
By the time the clandestine congregation at Scrooby, Gainsborough, Austerfield, Sturton, and the other nearby villages had concluded that life was intolerable in England under what Bradford called the scoffing and scorn of the profane multitude and “the lordly and tyrannous power of the prelates” demanding conformity, they had become a company of about 125 souls. Depressed by recurrent waves of economic distress and the ordinary brutality of the world that surrounded their pious gatherings, as well as by the threatening demands of the overweening church, they were determined to defy the law and escape in secret to Amsterdam, where other Puritan radicals had preceded them. Their first, furtive effort, in 1607, to leave from an inlet near Boston, in Lincolnshire, was betrayed by the ship captain, and the entire group was taken into custody. A year later the community left Gainsborough on a coal barge for transfer to a small Dutch ship. The plan failed when the approach of the local militia forced them to sail off with only sixteen men aboard, leaving behind some eighty people, most of them women and children. Subjected to a long, stormy voyage across the North Sea, the men were badly “turmoiled” by the time they were reunited in Amsterdam with the rest of the devout “country village[r]s” they had left behind.6
Within a year they fled again, this time from the “grisly face of poverty coming upon them like an armed man” in the enterprising port city and from the sectarian controversies that developed with Smyth’s people and other expatriated separatist groups that had long been settled there. The smaller, inland university city of Leiden was more congenial to them, and there, where they settled in 1609, they lived for a decade in what Bradford later recalled was “peace and love and holiness” under the tactful and humane leadership of Brewster and Robinson. But as the years passed and the demand for conformity increased in England, the Puritan diaspora spread, and the Leiden exiles were joined by so many others “from divers parts of England” as well as from the nearby French-speaking Walloon communities that their once-minuscule community grew to four or five hundred. The geographical sources of the newcomers to the Leiden congregation, a reflection of the spread of radical Puritanism in Jacobean Britain, were diverse. Of 123 members whose origins have been established, four came from the far north (Durham and Scotland), 68 from the eastern counties (eastern Yorkshire, Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, and Kent), 24 from the middle counties (mid- and western Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire, Cambridgeshire, Leicestershire, Berkshire, and Wiltshire), 24 from the south (Somersetshire, Dorsetshire, Sussex, and Hampshire), and 17 from London. Contention within a group so large and so diverse was inevitable, as was the advent of people so alien to the Scrooby leaders, so “incurable and incorrigible” in their views and behavior, that after suitable warnings and counseling they had to be “purged off.”7
By 1617 the Scrooby exiles and their new associates had settled into the daily life of the city as semiskilled and unskilled workers in some fifty-seven trades. There were among them tobacco workers and tobacco sellers, pipe makers, shoemakers, masons, silversmiths, cabinetmakers, brewers, coopers, lock makers, engravers, candle makers, and jewelers; but the great majority were workers at the lowest level in the production and retail sale of textiles—wool, fustian, say, bombazine, linen, baize, and camlet—or made small objects of them: gloves, ribbons, stockings, bunting, or hats. Few attained a modest prosperity (the well-educated Brewster taught English privately to highly placed locals and set up as a printer of polemical tracts); but most, having exhausted their savings, were desperately poor. And other problems began to appear. The Dutch language posed difficulties, especially for the adults, and it was not clear how best to educate the children. Occasionally there were riotous clashes with Dutch religious conservatives. The temptations of the enterprising world about them were pervasive, as was the tendency of their children to join in the pastimes and group life of the Dutch and be “drawn away by evil examples into extravagant and dangerous courses” as soldiers, sailors, or casual sinners. Increasingly it seemed that they would lose not only their language but their “name as English.” A deepening erosion could be seen in their integrity as a separated conventicle, and with it came the fear that they would fail to become “stepping stones unto others for the performing of so great a work.” Some lost heart and returned to England, but even the most committed came to believe that there was little hope that under these circumstances their desperate project in the service of God would survive into a second generation. It was the part of wisdom to consider migrating once again, to a more isolated, less worldly, less contaminating place.8
Guyana, for example. They knew about Guyana—the Wild Coast of South America at the Orinoco e
stuary, said by Raleigh and others to be a rich, fruitful place where nature produced such abundance that human effort was unnecessary. Some of the most prosperous among them favored a move to that exotic location, but others objected that the hot climate there “would not so well agree with our English bodies” and would breed grievous diseases—a caution that their Walloon neighbors in Leiden, who would settle in Guyana two years later, ignored at the cost of their lives. And if they prospered there, they feared that the Spanish would attack them and take over their settlement. They had offers from the Dutch to resettle in nearby Zeeland, and they knew of their predecessors’ earlier efforts to relocate on the Magdalen Islands in the Gulf of the St. Lawrence River. But they knew most about Virginia, which, they had been told, had a more livable climate than Guyana and was safe from the Spanish and French. But there, in that English territory, they might once again be persecuted for their religion. That point was cleared up, however, when a patent for a private plantation in Virginia became possible and when the Crown assured them that they would be left in peace there to worship as they pleased.
But did they really wish to migrate to “those vast and unpeopled countries of America … where there are only savage and brutish men which range up and down, little otherwise than the wild beasts of the same”? They had to consider the unendurable length of the voyage, with its “unconceivable perils and dangers,” and they had to consider too the likely miseries of the land (“famine and nakedness and the want … of all things”). And there was always the
The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675 Page 40