They were trouble from the start. Their leader was John Oldham, a “trader” from Derbyshire who brought with him his wife and sister and several London tradesmen, among them the Devonshire-born Conant brothers, one a London grocer, the other a salter. Prickly, rambunctious, “a mad jack in his mood,” Oldham, whose murder in 1636 would touch off the Pequot war, chafed at all restrictions and inspired a list of twelve charges against the Pilgrims that was carried to London by the “bad” newcomers whom Bradford sent back to England. The governor replied to all the charges, which ranged from religious heterodoxy to bad water, thievery, and too many mosquitoes. (Bradford: Those who cannot endure the biting of a mosquito “are too delicate and unfit to begin new plantations and colonies.… We would wish such to keep at home till at least they be mosquito-proof.”) But he could not stamp out Oldham’s discontents, which threatened to tear the colony apart when, in 1624, the Rev. John Lyford arrived.
An Irishman, once the Anglican minister of Loughgall in County Armagh, Lyford, his wife confessed to Bradford, had had “a bastard by another before they were married” and had never been able to keep his hands off the family maids. Later it emerged that he had been driven from Ireland after raping a young woman whose fiancé had sent her to him for religious counseling. In England Lyford had managed to worm his way into Puritan circles, and then “unhappily he was lit upon and sent hither.” There was nothing accidental in this. He was apparently selected, over Winslow’s and Cushman’s objections, by a faction of the colony’s financial backers opposed to transporting more of the pious Leideners to America, and especially opposed to sending over the powerful Reverend Robinson to lead the flock. Cushman was very apprehensive: be careful in electing Lyford preacher, he warned; “he knows he is no officer amongst you.”
At first, in Plymouth, Lyford was all piety and docility. His reverence and humility were so extreme, Bradford wrote, that he embarrassed the Pilgrims. “He so bowed and cringed unto them, and would have kissed their hands … yea, he wept & shed many tears … admiring the things they had done in their wants &c. as if he had been made all of love.” Moreover, he confessed his “former disorderly walking and his being entangled in many corruptions, which had been a burden to his conscience.” But it was all a sham, Bradford discovered. Lyford had no intention of submitting what remained of his Anglican pride to the peculiar doctrines of the separatists. Soon there were “private meetings and whisperings” between Lyford and Oldham and among the faction they gathered. Oldham began picking quarrels everywhere, refused all requests for public service, threatened the captain of the watch with a knife, and “ramped more like a furious beast than a man, and called them all traitors and rebels and other such foul language.” The climax came when the two attempted to introduce Anglican worship and sent off secretly to England a series of slanderous, accusatory letters, which Bradford intercepted. Confronted by these incriminating documents—calculated, Bradford believed, to bring about the Pilgrims’ “ruin & utter subversion”—Lyford burst into tears, confessed his sins, and condemned himself as “unsavory salt” and not worthy of God’s pardon. The two were tried and convicted in front of the entire colony, then expelled from the Pilgrims’ jurisdiction. When Oldham reappeared without permission in 1625, denouncing the separatists once again in a “mad fury,” he was confined and then forced to run a gauntlet of musketeers, each of whom gave him “a thump on the breech with the butt end of his musket.” Expelled from the colony once again, he began wandering and trading on the New England and Long Island shores, until his bloody demise in 1636. Lyford turned south to Anglican Virginia, where, in 1628, he died.25
5
These two were gone, but still there was no peace or quiet. When the Lyford episode exploded, Plymouth was reported to have a population of only about 180 souls living in a village of thirty-two small, flimsy houses enclosed in a palisade and protected by a fort and watchtower. But the area was becoming better known. At least fifty English fishing vessels appeared annually off the coast, and small settlements were beginning to appear here and there on the islands and shores of Maine, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts. Plymouth itself had built trading stations at Aptucxet (modern Bourne) to the south, on Buzzard’s Bay, on the Kennebec and Penobscot rivers in Maine, and on the Connecticut River north of Hartford. From all of these rough, unstable settlements, alien people were beginning to drift into the colony and to settle there, though under more restrictive conditions than the first “particulars.” At the same time the English sponsors continued to send over in occasional shipments people more useful to themselves than to the Pilgrims, and indicated that they had little interest in transporting to the colony the remainder of the Leiden congregation. That community in any case was dwindling. Many of the original congregants, Bradford wrote, “being aged, began to drop away by death,” and the survivors, “though their wills were good to come to them, yet they saw no probability of means how it might be effected.” In 1625 two of the remaining lines of communication with the European sources of the Pilgrims’ strength, spiritual and material, were severed with the deaths of both Robinson and Cushman. The likelihood increased that the remnants of the Leiden community would soon disappear into the Dutch population, while the Plymouth conventicle would be overwhelmed by profane influences.26
It was against such a fatal outcome that Winslow, on a return visit to England, fought in his Good Newes from New England, published in London in 1624. He warned those with unrealistic dreams of instant affluence against joining the colony, while welcoming those who “seriously, upon due examination, set themselves to further the glory of God, and the honor of our country.” People who embarked for the colony “with too great lightness,” he wrote, will be doomed upon arrival to see “their foolish imagination made void.” They would soon despair and would gladly pay ten times the passage cost to get back home. For,
can any be so simple as to conceive that the fountains should stream forth wine or beer, or the woods and rivers be like butchers’ shops, or fishmongers’ stalls.… If thou canst not live without such things … rest where thou art; for as a proud heart, a dainty tooth, a beggar’s purse, and an idle hand, be here [in England] intolerable, so that person that hath these qualities there, is much more abominable.
But if one had the heart to bear the difficulties of the search for God’s glory, against which all other things in life are mere “accessories,” he would be received with thanks in the colony.27
Nothing, however, in Winslow’s plea or otherwise, could divert the demographic trend. Gentiles, dangerous spiritually if not physically, seemed to be everywhere. The colony’s young artisans and laborers who had been sent by the merchant backers were beginning to gain their freedom from commitments and to seek independence from both religious and secular authorities. But there were more immediate threats. The most dramatic erupted in a strange commercial settlement that suddenly appeared thirty miles to the north, on the near side of Boston Bay.
The original group of some thirty or forty workers that settled there in 1625 under a Captain Wollaston had been a potential danger until Wollaston became disillusioned and turned south to make what profit he could by selling his servants in Virginia. But a small rump remained at Mount Wollaston (modern Quincy) under one of the strangest, most flamboyant, and most belligerently impious people ever to wander into the coastal scene.
Thomas Morton had probably been in New England once before, with Weston’s group, and seems to have fallen in love with the region’s landscape, its flora and fauna—and also with its commercial possibilities. His English background is vague. At one point, he had probably been a lawyer of sorts—at least he claimed some association with one of London’s Inns of Court—and as such his reputation, perhaps gained in the West Country, was said to be rather shady. What is certain is that he prided himself on being, if not a sportsman, at least a nature lover, a pleasure seeker, and a Rabelaisian celebrant of secular rites. Uninhibited, capable of high-spirited mockery of precisely
such solemn pieties as those of the Pilgrims (whom he would lampoon in his New English Canaan in 1637), he was also a ruthless profiteer eager to squeeze every penny from the people and land around him.
When word reached Plymouth of his exploits, Bradford and the other leaders were appalled. The Lord of Misrule, as Bradford called him, was conducting, it was said, not only tumultuous revelries, perhaps orgies, together with the Indians both male and female, but also drunken, pagan, May Day celebrations performed around a huge beribboned maypole topped with antlers. (“Inviting the Indian women,” Bradford wrote, “for their consorts, dancing and frisking together like so many fairies, or furies, rather; and worse practices … of the mad Bacchanalians.”) Beyond that, he was “inveigling of men’s servants away from them.” And beyond even that, and more important, he had begun a trade with the Indians that threatened to destroy them all.28
His sale of liquor to the natives—proscribed in the formal regulations of every settlement—was dangerous enough, but his exchange of guns for furs threatened the very survival of the fragile European communities on New England’s shores. Further, the position of his encampment, at the mouth of Boston Bay, was perfect for deflecting the outward flow of furs away from the Pilgrims. And finally there was the danger that Merrymount, as Morton called his profitable playground, would become a refuge for all sorts of profane characters—runaway servants and criminals, a “wicked and debauched crew” that would be more of a threat to respectable people than the Indians themselves.
Word of the physical danger of guns in the hands of the Indians and the economic danger of furs in the hands of this threatening entrepreneur came into Plymouth from a number of the scattered fishing and trading stations. It became clear, after negotiations with Morton failed, that drastic action would be necessary. In May 1628 Standish and eight armed men were sent to the offending settlement to take Morton by force. There, after a comic-opera escape which Morton related with exuberant embellishments (“he’s gone, he’s gone, what shall we do, he’s gone! The rest … like rams ran their heads one at another full butt in the dark”), the half-drunken “host” at Merrymount was captured and carried off to Plymouth, then to the Isle of Shoals, where a passing vessel took him back to England. With him went a full bill of particulars and the assurance that if Morton had not been stopped, his group would have grown “by the access of loose persons” to such size that it would have been impossible to restrain them, living, as they did, “without all fear of God or common honesty, some of them abusing the Indian women most filthily, as it is notorious.”29
SO MORTON WAS GONE, at least temporarily, as were Oldham and Lyford, but the stain of corrupting influences could not be wiped clean. The colony’s ideal image of itself as a community of pious believers dedicated to recovering the simple purity of pristine Christianity, and separated from the unregenerate world with all its churchly clutter, was becoming blurred, while those left behind in Leiden increasingly despaired of ever being able to join the church in exile. We are very weak, they wrote Bradford in 1625, and feared that reunion was “now as far off or farther than ever.” Without Robinson they had no powerful leader to voice their concerns and focus their activities. And the majority of the backers were refusing to advance more funds to make further emigration possible. “If we come at all unto you, the means to enable us so to do must come from you.” Everywhere, they felt, there was “frustration and disappointments.” Vicious reports of life in Plymouth—“the passionate humors of some discontented men”—were circulating in England, discouraging any help they might receive. “Some say you are starved in body and soul; others, that you eat pigs and dogs that die alone; others, that … the goodness of the country are gross and palpable lies; that there is scarce a fowl to be seen or a fish to be taken.” Above all, it was believed that no profitable returns would ever come from Plymouth. Those who were fit, it was said, were lazy, and those who were willing were weak.30
In 1626 the company of adventurers that had financed the colony finally broke up. None were very wealthy, and most felt that they could no longer sustain the losses and delays in profits; some were convinced that the colonists were “Brownists, condemning all other churches and persons but yourselves … contentious, cruel and hard hearted among your neighbors … And that you are negligent, careless, wasteful, unthrifty … and spend your time in idleness and talking and conferring.” But a small core of the group—three in all—did remain faithful to the cause. Investing heavily again, they joined with eight of the colony’s leaders as joint “undertakers” to buy out the company’s assets and debts for £2,400, to be paid off by shipments of goods from Plymouth, especially furs, of which the new company had monopoly control for six years. Hoping to complete the emigration from Leiden, the London investors warned Bradford that his people must remain above reproach, avoid disputation over trivial points, work hard, and send over everything of possible value that would help reduce their debt. They should behave “so circumspectly” and “so uprightly … that no man may make just exceptions against you,” and they should not be too strict and rigid in religion: “let all that fear God amongst you join themselves thereunto without delay.” The faithful supporters still believed, they said, that the Pilgrims were in a position to “begin a new world and lay the foundation of sound piety and humanity for others to follow.” They alone could “make a plantation and erect a city in those remote places when all others fail and return.” And the still-devoted backers were prepared to do what they could to help.
But progress in uniting the Leiden and Plymouth congregations was painfully slow. In November 1625 the merchants repeated that only valuable goods shipped from Plymouth would make possible the realization of Robinson’s dream that all of the remaining Leiden brethren, with their wives and children, would find their way to Plymouth. Goods were in fact shipped from Plymouth—furs and other local products—but not nearly enough to repay the colony’s debt, let alone finance further emigration. Yet such was the “willing mindedness” of the colony’s remaining backers in London that finally, in 1629—six years after the arrival of the Anne and the Little James—“divers of our friends of Leiden came to us,” Bradford recorded, “as had been desired both of them and us.” A second Mayflower carried most of the Leideners who left that year, followed by the Talbot with thirty-five servants. In 1630 the Lyon carried a few more of the original group, and the Handmaid perhaps sixty more—bringing the total population of Bradford’s elysium to just under three hundred.31
Most of the arrivals of 1629–30 proved to be “the weakest and poorest” of the remaining Leideners, sent at this point on the assumption that those “of note and better discretion and government amongst them” would manage later on their own. And though they sailed on vessels of the Massachusetts Bay Company and bound themselves to repay their expenses, “some upon one condition and some upon another, as they could agree,” the final costs of their transportation and supplies turned out to be fearfully high—a total of over £500. Further, since they brought nothing of value with them and arrived too late for planting, they were certain to be a net burden to the colony for at least a year—Bradford estimated their maintenance at another £500. Nevertheless, though most of these new arrivals were poor, and while in transit in London some found them annoyingly irritable at the treatment they felt they had received, they were the Pilgrims’ own God-fearing people, Bradford wrote, hence welcome and useful—“for the most part.”
Not all, however, were indigent or otherwise weak members of the congregation. Among the new householders and their families were some of the most spiritually gifted and most reliable of the “ancient friends” from the Dutch years. Thomas Blossom, originally from Cambridge, had been one of the Speedwell’s passengers of 1620 who had been left behind in the transfer to the Mayflower. For nine years thereafter, back in Leiden, he had been hoping to be able to complete the interrupted voyage, explaining to Bradford how it was that the Lord, “for reasons best known to himself” and app
arently in anger, had not only thwarted their efforts but snatched Robinson away, “whom if tears could have held, he had remained to this day.” Once finally in Plymouth, Blossom was immediately made a deacon of the church, and in the three remaining years of his life he would achieve the status in the eyes of the church of “a holy man and experienced saint,…competently accomplished with abilities.” Richard Masterson, another of the arrivals of 1629, was a wool carder, originally from Sandwich, Kent, who had given part of his worldly goods for the community’s welfare. In Plymouth he also became a deacon and not only a saint and holy man but something more than that. Masterson, they felt, was a second Saint Stephen. Like that first martyr of the primitive Christian church who had been so full of faith, wisdom, and spirit, Masterson defended the truth “by sound argument, grounded on the scriptures of truth.” And also among the newcomers was Kenelm Winslow, Edward’s brother, a cabinetmaker from their hometown in Worcestershire. He would contribute, not spiritual but artisanal virtuosity to the colony, becoming Plymouth’s most accomplished crafter of fine furniture.32
So there were now a few more true saints in the leadership of the Pilgrims’ small world, and more men of artisanal accomplishment. In all, in the decade of the 1620s, after which there were very few direct shipments of emigrants from Europe to Plymouth, the colony had received an estimated total of 362 people, of whom fewer than a third were members of the church.33 By the early 1630s Bradford was beginning to record, and lament, the problems that were eroding the community’s purpose and distinction: the difficulty of perpetuating a proper ministry, the constant danger of profane influences, and the first, portentous signs of the geographical dispersal that he knew would destroy the community’s cohesion.
The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675 Page 43