THE DUTCH REPUBLIC WAS in the early years of what later generations would call its “Golden Age.” In the coming decades, a young nation would grow wealthy through textiles, trade, and banking, produce artists such as Rembrandt and Vermeer, and acquire an empire that stretched from Brazil and the Hudson River to present-day Indonesia. When the new wave of English separatists arrived, however, Dutch Protestants were still seeking to secure their independence. In 1609, half a century after the northern provinces of the Netherlands had revolted against Philip II, the Dutch Republic (or United Provinces) signed a twelve-year truce with Spain.1
The 1579 Union of Utrecht, which had formed the United Provinces, declared that “each individual enjoys freedom of religion and no one is persecuted or questioned about his religion.” At the same time, the republic maintained a single “public church.” Magistrates gave Reformed (Calvinist) congregations the exclusive use of church buildings, paid their ministers’ salaries, and exercised some oversight of church affairs. Consistories, comprised of a city’s ministers and elders, meted out church discipline, and magistrates enforced public morality. Obtaining and maintaining church membership hinged on an individual’s acceptance of this system of discipline. Much to the consternation of the Calvinists, only a small minority of Dutch men and women actually belonged to the Reformed churches. In the early years of the republic, there were as many Catholics as Calvinists, and there were sizeable Lutheran, Mennonite, and Jewish minorities as well.2
Dutch Calvinists were deeply committed to their “liberty” but, like English Protestants, they disagreed about its meaning. All cherished liberty from idolatry and superstition—Catholicism, in other words—and they stressed God’s sovereignty in saving his elect. There were many fault lines, however. Reformed ministers and many other Calvinists expected government support but opposed government interference, especially when it came to the selection of church officers. At the same time, “freethinkers” and “libertines” favored open church membership without consistorial discipline. For them, liberty meant freedom from any sort of ecclesiastical control, be that the papacy or the consistory.3
Despite the Union of Utrecht’s declaration of religious freedom, the situation for religious minorities and dissenters was uneven and uncertain. Most Dutch politicians and ministers defended “liberty of conscience,” but by that they meant private belief and practice, not public worship or dissent. Catholics thus could not hold processions and public celebrations, and many cities forbade the construction of non-Reformed church buildings and synagogues. Especially after the demise of Robert Harrison’s congregation, Dutch Reformed leaders in Middelburg and Amsterdam made plain their disapproval of Brownism. Even Lutherans sometimes found their liberties under assault. In other places, by contrast, officials tacitly permitted religious minorities to gather for worship, which they sometimes did in large private homes and buildings that functioned as churches without advertising themselves as such. It was toleration by connivance.4
Dutch toleration was good enough for most English exiles, but it did not satisfy those separatists who became the Mayflower Pilgrims. For them, the Dutch Republic’s liberty was both too fragile and too expansive. The Spanish might regain control of the northern Low Countries, or Dutch magistrates might restrict their liberties. In the meantime, they could worship according to their principles, but they feared that pluralism, libertinism, and licentiousness would corrode their church and lead their children astray. Leaving unwanted types of liberty behind, they decided to chart their own, more perilous course.
The Scrooby and Gainsborough separatists first took refuge in Amsterdam. James Howell, who visited the city a decade later as an agent for a London glassworks, marveled that a rapid and “monstrous increase of commerce and navigation” had turned the low-lying city into “one of the greatest marts of Europe.” Churches proliferated nearly as quickly as merchant houses. After lodging with a Brownist who lived near a Jewish synagogue, Howell joked that “there’s no place so disunited” as the United Provinces.5
English separatists were disunity specialists. Even before all of the Scrooby and Gainsborough congregants reached Amsterdam, John Smyth and the leaders of Francis Johnson’s Ancient Church were at odds. Smyth’s initial complaint centered on the use of the Bible during worship. Like most puritans, Smyth objected to the Book of Common Prayer’s liturgy. Unlike them, he also wanted to banish written texts from psalm singing and teaching. “In neither of them the Spirit is at liberty,” he argued. The primitive Christians, Smyth believed, prayed, taught, and sang “merely out of their hearts” and in so doing allowed God’s Spirit to move their affections. Adam in Eden had worshipped God this way, and so would Christians in heaven. Outside of worship, Smyth and his followers used the Bible to edify themselves and to settle questions of doctrine, but when it was time to pray, sing, and preach, they “shut the book.” Any use of the Bible in worship was idolatry.6
The leaders of the Ancient Church found Smyth’s objections absurd. Most English Protestants cherished psalm singing. It was the one part of worship guaranteed to keep congregants awake, and it was precious to separatists who had discarded other liturgy. Henry Ainsworth, the Ancient Church’s teacher (a second minister alongside Francis Johnson), was a skilled Hebraist whom William Bradford later praised as “a man of a thousand.” Ainsworth made his own translation of much of the Old Testament, including a metrical psalter set to a number of tunes. The separatists who settled Plymouth Colony brought copies of Ainsworth’s psalter with them.7
There was a second point of contention as well. The Ancient Church vested disciplinary authority in its elders. Ainsworth defended the practice. “If the multitude govern,” he asked, “then who shall be governed?” Ainsworth argued that “Christian liberty (which all have) is one thing, the reins of government (which some have) is another thing.” Smyth insisted that the people held these reins. Drawing on classical republican models of mixed government, he understood Christ alone as the church’s king, the elders as an elected aristocracy, and the remaining members as “a democracy or popular government.” Smyth insisted that “the negative voice is in the body of the church, not in the elders.” Otherwise, the people surrendered their liberty to the arbitrary rule of their officers.8
As English Protestants had rejected Rome, and as the separatists had withdrawn from the Church of England, Smyth fled idolatry once more. Rather than joining his followers to Johnson’s church, he formed a “second English Church” in Amsterdam. Smyth next concluded that only baptisms received through true churches were valid. Thus, he considered himself unbaptized despite his infant baptism in the Church of England. So he baptized himself. Smyth’s critics mocked him as a “Se-Baptist,” or self-baptizer. Smyth then baptized Thomas Helwys and his other followers.
Smyth regretted his self-baptism after becoming acquainted with an Amsterdam congregation of Mennonites, descendants of the sixteenth-century reformer Menno Simons. Other Protestants referred to the Mennonites and like-minded churches as Anabaptists (meaning those who rebaptize) because of their rejection of infant baptism. Smyth concluded that because the Mennonites belonged to a true church, he should have asked them to baptize him. Smyth died before his followers completed their process of uniting themselves with the Mennonites. For most English Protestants, these events confirmed their suspicion that separatism was a byway to Anabaptism.9
Thomas and Joan Helwys followed Smyth in rejecting infant baptism, but they then returned to England instead of uniting with the Mennonites. In London, Thomas Helwys helped organize a church on Baptist principles. He also became a bold if impolitic defender of religious liberty, arguing in his A Short Declaration of the Mistery of Iniquity (1612) that the king had no “power to command men’s consciences.” Rulers should not punish heretics, Jews, Turks, or even Catholics. “Men’s religion to God, is betwixt God and themselves,” he wrote. On the inside cover of a copy of his book, Helwys inscribed an incendiary note addressed to King James: “The king is a mortal man, and not God, therefore hath no power over the immortal souls of his subjects.” King James disagreed. “Kings are not only God’s lieutenants upon earth,” he explained to Parliament, “and sit upon God’s throne, but even by God himself they are called gods.” Helwys died in prison.10
Back in Amsterdam, the Ancient Church endured a schism. George Johnson, the pastor’s brother, had complained for years about the haughty attitude and stylish, revealing fashions of his brother’s wife, Thomasine. The church finally excommunicated George Johnson and the brothers’ father, who had made a futile attempt to reconcile them. Several congregants then accused Elder Daniel Studley of beating his wife, seducing his stepdaughter, and committing adultery with a married woman. The less colorful issue of church government also caused a rift. Francis Johnson favored greater authority for the church’s elders than did Ainsworth. Eventually, Ainsworth’s faction gained control of the Ancient Church’s building, and Johnson took his followers to Emden in Friesland. Nottinghamshire separatist Richard Clyfton went with Johnson as his assistant. The Ancient Church members who remained in Amsterdam chose Ainsworth as their pastor.11
Richard Clyfton, John Smyth, and Thomas Helwys. All three were key leaders in the development of separatism in and around Scrooby and Gainsborough, and now all three had gone separate ways.
John Robinson went his own way as well. He requested permission to bring one hundred men and women to Leiden, twenty-five miles to the southwest of Amsterdam. In a letter, Robinson informed Leiden’s magistrates only that they were “members of the Christian Reformed religion.” Ralph Winwood, the English agent at The Hague who recently had helped finalize the truce between Spain and the United Provinces, complained to Leiden’s city leaders. Why were they granting shelter to a group of sectarians that England’s government considered seditious? In response, a city official told Winwood that he had not known that Robinson’s congregants were “Brownists” but that all honest and law-abiding individuals were welcome in Leiden. In the spring of 1609, Robinson and his flock moved to what William Bradford later described as a “fair and beautiful city.”12
In 1573–74, Leiden had withstood two Spanish sieges. Half of the city’s twelve thousand residents perished, but Leiden itself recovered quickly. William of Orange established a university in Leiden for the purpose of training Reformed ministers; the institution lent the city intellectual and political prominence. Protestant refugees from the still-Spanish southern Netherlands flooded into Leiden. Flemish migrants in particular revived and remade the city’s textile industry, and Leiden became Europe’s foremost producer of “new draperies,” lighter types of woolen cloth such as serge. The growth was staggering. By 1620, Leiden’s population stood at nearly forty-five thousand.13
There are hundreds of references to the separatists in the Leiden archives: marriages, births, deaths, and property transactions. Such documents are terse, though. There are no diaries, no autobiographies, and precious few letters. Thus, we know that a couple married, but nothing about their marriage. We know that dozens of men, women, and children worked in the textile industry, and we know that their labor was difficult, but we do not know how individuals experienced it.
At least eleven of the English separatists worked as “drapers,” who produced the finished cloth and had workers underneath them. More were weavers and wool combers, who typically worked at home, which meant that their wives and older children spun yarn and knitted alongside them. Everyone worked who could work. Sons were typically apprenticed around the age of twelve, sometimes for terms as long as twelve years.14
William Bradford was around twenty years of age when he came to Leiden. Bradford at first worked for a French silk weaver. Then he sold his land in England and started his own enterprise weaving fustian, a cloth made from linen and wool. Although Bradford apparently encountered some setbacks and exhausted much of his inheritance, he soon had his own house. In 1613, he married Dorothy May, whose parents had lived in Amsterdam the past five years. She gave birth to a son a few years later.15
Robert Cushman, the Canterbury grocer, became a wool comber in Leiden. He purchased a house in 1611, albeit a residence worth one-third that of the more prosperous Bradford. In 1616, Sara Cushman died while giving birth to the couple’s second child, who perished two weeks after its mother. The next summer, Cushman remarried, to Mary Shingleton, the widow of a Sandwich shoemaker.16
Isaac van Swanenburg, The Removal of the Wool from the Skins and the Combing, ca. 1595. (Collection Museum De Lakenhal.)
The task of earning a living in drastically changed circumstances consumed much of their time and energy, but the separatists could gather together without the fear of arrest or imprisonment. At least for most of the 1610s, the congregation met in or near John Robinson’s home, a property in the shadows of Leiden’s imposing Pieterskerk. They chose their own officers: Robinson as pastor; William Brewster as ruling elder, assisting with everything except the sacraments; and Samuel Fuller and John Carver as deacons.
Morning worship consisted of extemporaneous prayers by Robinson and Brewster, psalm singing, the reading of several chapters of scripture, a “preached” rather than “read” sermon, the Lord’s Supper, and a collection for the minister’s salary and the poor. When families such as the Bradfords and Cushmans had children, John Robinson baptized them without the sign of the cross or the liturgy of the Book of Common Prayer. When necessary, Sunday services included the censure or excommunication of members who had failed to walk in the ways of God as required by the church covenant.17
Families then ate their dinner before returning for prophesying in the afternoon. In this context, to “prophesy” did not mean to make predictions about the future. Rather, prophesying was the spiritual gift of expositing scripture’s meaning. During these afternoon gatherings, select laypeople as well as church officers could speak. “Ye men and brethren,” instructed the New Testament, “if ye have any word of exhortation for the people, say on” (Acts 13:15). While some puritans supported lay prophesying, others objected to this hallmark of separatist worship. Why would congregants want to listen to weavers or wool combers? Robinson countered that “the people’s liberty” included the “exercise of prophesy.” Teaching was not the sole privilege of ministers and lay elders. Robinson even defended the right of women to prophesy, at least under the unusual inspiration of the Spirit. That separatists debated this point among themselves suggests that some women claimed this gift.18
Despite their removal to Leiden, the separatists—and John Robinson in particular—remained engaged within the broader world of English Protestantism. In 1610, Robinson came to know William Ames, a renowned puritan minister who had recently fled England. The two men respected each other’s learning but disagreed about separation. At the time, Robinson’s position was that true Christians could not have “visible communion” with individuals who remained within the Church of England. They could not pray together, for instance. As far as Ames was concerned, Robinson’s stance was narrow and bitter. “Are you more holy than Christ?” an exasperated Ames asked.19
Robinson soon changed his mind. In 1614, he published a book in which he made a distinction between public church communion and private fellowship. He now allowed that regardless of church membership, Christians could meet privately and pray together, sing psalms together, and read the Bible together. Ames urged Robinson to discard public separation as well. Robinson would not go so far, but he soon allowed his congregants to hear sermons in Church of England parishes. The latter question arose whenever the separatists visited England.
For most separatists, attendance at Church of England services was tantamount to apostasy. Protestants would not go near a Roman Catholic mass. How could true Christians listen to sermons delivered in Antichristian English churches? The Ancient Church in Amsterdam customarily excommunicated individuals who went to hear Church of England preaching. “Our liberty is to them as rat’s bane [poison],” Robert Cushman commented, “and their rigor as bad to us as the Spanish Inquisition.” Even within the Leiden congregation, Robinson’s stance remained controversial.20
Robinson softened his rhetoric as the years proceeded, but he never repented of his separation. The Church of England, Robinson wrote, was a false church because it made every man a member, “will he, nill he, fit, or unfit, as with iron bonds.” Rather than a house of God, it was “more like a common inn, whose door stands wide open to all that pass by the high way.” The separatists would not accept all women and men, but they also forced no one to join them. Robinson drew a stark contrast between the ecclesiastical tyranny of the Church of England and his congregation’s liberty. Male church members—“women by their sex are debarred of the use of authority in the church”—elected their officers, admitted members, and excommunicated gross offenders. Robinson was quick to add that the church’s government was mixed rather than democratic. Christ was their king, and they deferred to the leadership of their chosen officers. Still, Robinson conceded that their church state was “after a sort popular, and democratic.” The people governed themselves and worshipped as the Bible instructed. They exercised their liberty.21
Critics of separatism, Robinson insisted, would change their minds if they could observe the “heavenly harmony, and comely order” of his congregation. “Never people upon earth lived more lovingly together,” wrote Edward Winslow, a printer’s apprentice who moved from London to Leiden. Other English exiles joined them, as did some Dutch and Walloon Reformed Protestants. The congregation numbered several hundred by the end of the decade. Especially in comparison to the schisms in the Ancient Church and among John Smyth’s followers, the Leiden separatist church enjoyed an unusual period of growth, stability, and concord. The true church was “heaven on earth,” Robinson enthused.22
If they had heaven on earth in Leiden, why did the Pilgrims leave? Some church members concluded that in order for their congregation to persist, they needed more than Christian liberty. When worship ended, there was heavy labor and, for many congregants, grinding poverty. In retrospective accounts, William Bradford and Edward Winslow stressed the hardships of their Dutch exile, which drained their wealth and wore out their bodies. Their economic dislocation discouraged English separatists (and puritans contemplating separation), who chose “bondage” in England rather than the “liberty of the gospel” in the Netherlands. More would join them if they coupled Christian liberty with greater prosperity.23
There were other considerations as well. While the separatists rejoiced in their Christian liberty, the Dutch Republic did not fit their model of a properly ordered Christian society. The Dutch were not strict in their Sabbath observance and, from the perspective of the separatists, they allowed heresy and libertinism to flourish. The separatists worried about the future of their children. Bradford reported that some children of the church became soldiers and sailors, professions associated with dissolute and ungodly living. Would they even remain English? “How like we were to lose our language, and our name of English,” Winslow wrote. Their children would become Dutch and perhaps lose their inheritance rights to property back in England. Some church members began contemplating emigration across the Atlantic.24
Other congregants countered that they would rather be Dutch than dead. Founding a colony was just about the most foolish thing a congregation or any other group of Europeans could do. French Huguenots (Calvinists) had colonized sites in Brazil and Florida, but Portuguese and Spanish troops, respectively, massacred them in the mid-1560s. (More successfully, Huguenots moved to Dutch and British North American colonies later in the seventeenth century.) As the Leideners contemplated emigration, other English separatists did so as well. Shortly after Francis Johnson’s 1618 death, members of his church sailed for Virginia. “Packed together like herrings” on an overcrowded ship with insufficient fresh water, scores died during a voyage prolonged by unfavorable winds and navigational confusion. Some members of the Leiden congregation worried that even if they made it to their destination alive, Natives would flay their skin and eat their flesh.25
While the congregation remained divided about the idea of “removal,” a majority of male members voted to at least explore options. In the fall of 1617 they dispatched Robert Cushman and John Carver to meet with members of the Virginia Company.
By this time, an ecclesiastical and political crisis had engulfed the Dutch Republic, a signal that the political tranquility the separatists had enjoyed in Leiden might come to an end. Everyone from the king of England to John Robinson waded into the controversy.26
It began as a theological argument between the Leiden professors Jacobus Arminius and Franciscus Gomarus. The two agreed that the human will was depraved and that God had decreed the salvation and damnation of all humans prior to his creation of the world. Arminius, though, carved out a small place for meaningful human choice and cooperation within this divine economy. God foresaw who would believe, elected to save them, and then created a world in which they would respond with faith to his grace. Perhaps these were minor distinctions, but to Arminius, they made clear that God was not the author of human sin. For Gomarus, God’s decrees were simply absolute and inscrutable. God gave faith to those he had elected and withheld it from everyone else. If God seemed to be the author of evil, that was only because humans could not understand God’s ways. The disagreement between Arminius and Gomarus festered for years and created deep fissures not only within Leiden’s university but within its churches as well.27
Arminius’s 1609 death did not put an end to the controversy. The next year, his supporters sent a remonstrance to the States of Holland, the provincial assembly. The petition repeated Arminius’s teachings on predestination, but it also called on the provincial government to resolve the disagreement and urged it to permit more theological latitude within the church. The Remonstrants had an ally in Johan van Oldenbarnevelt, the land’s advocate for the States of Holland and the most powerful politician within the United Provinces. Oldenbarnevelt favored greater state authority over the public church but also substantial freedom for dissenters and religious minorities. The Gomarists prepared a counter-remonstrance, which they presented at a disputation before the States. They were aghast at the idea of more state control over ministerial appointments, and they wanted less rather than more toleration.
The crisis took on international proportions when King James intervened on the side of the Counter-Remonstrants. Although James discouraged his own ministers from speculating on the finer points of predestination, he agreed with Gomarus on the matter. Moreover, the king associated dissent and calls for toleration with sedition and instability. When it came to the inner workings of Dutch politics, James favored the princely ambitions of the stadholder (governor-general) Maurits of Nassau against the parliamentary authority of Oldenbarnevelt. James made it clear that he wanted Remonstrant literature suppressed and Remonstrant leaders themselves imprisoned or banished, if not executed. The English king treated the United Provinces like a mistress he would cast aside if she no longer pleased him. If the Dutch did not do his bidding, he would marry his son Charles to a Spanish Habsburg princess.28
John Robinson and William Brewster were also partisans in the controversy, ironically on the same side as the king whose bishops and officials had once persecuted them. When Robinson came to Leiden, he moved into a house only fifty yards away from Arminius’s residence. Robinson attended lectures at the university, sampling the opinions of both factions. According to Bradford, Robinson was “terrible to the Arminians” because he disagreed with their understanding of predestination. He took part in a disputation with Simon Episcopius, an Arminian professor at the university. Although Episcopius probably assessed the outcome differently, Bradford trumpeted his pastor’s “famous victory.” Brewster, meanwhile, published an abridgment of William Ames’s rebuttal of a Remonstrant author. As English exiles in the Netherlands, it was risky for Robinson and Brewster to insert themselves into the crisis.29
Leiden remained at the epicenter of the national controversy. The city’s ministers and university faculty were divided, but the Counter-Remonstrants had more supporters among the populace. By 1617, it had come to a de facto schism. The two factions worshipped separately. Mobs attacked Remonstrant services, and all attempts by the magistrates to suppress rioting only fanned the flames of violence. In October, the magistrates hired new guards and ordered the construction of barricades to protect the town hall from the Counter-Remonstrant mobs.30
One of those mobs attacked James Chilton, who with his wife and family had moved from Sandwich to Leiden. After he and his daughter Ingle came home from church one Sunday, a crowd gathered outside of their house. About twenty boys and young men shouted that the Chiltons were allowing “Arminians” to meet in their home. James Chilton opened his door and confronted the mob. No, there had not been an Arminian at his house, he said. Nor had he hosted any other meeting. Go home, he told the toughs. Most of them began to disperse, but one boy picked up a cobblestone and hurled it at Chilton’s head. It struck him just above his left eye. Chilton collapsed to the ground, unconscious. The sixty-three-year-old tailor was lucky to survive.31
The Arminian Redoubt at Leiden, ca. 1617–18. (Courtesy of Prentenkabinet, University of Leiden.)
Given the mounting political and ecclesiastical chaos in the Dutch Republic, it was only prudent that the English separatists surveyed other options for their future. As Bradford noted, the twelve-year truce between the United Provinces and Spain would expire in 1621. Especially given the unpredictability of English policy, war might return. “The Spaniard might prove as cruel as the savages of America,” Bradford reasoned. As Leiden’s magistrates barricaded the city’s town hall, Cushman and Carver went to London.32
The congregation’s representatives met with Sir Edwin Sandys, a principal director of the Virginia Company. A longtime power in the House of Commons, Sandys had shaped the 1593 legislation against conventicles. Twenty-five years later, Sandys still did not like Brownists, but he was desperate for anyone willing to work in Virginia’s tobacco fields. Even so, the Pilgrims knew that their reputation for schism and dissent was a problem, especially when it came to securing legal protection for a colony. Therefore, congregational leaders began a long and never fully successful campaign of obfuscation, of portraying themselves as something other than the separatists they were.33
In a list of seven articles sent with Cushman and Carver, Robinson and Brewster stated that they assented to the Church of England’s “confession of faith” and that they kept “spiritual communion” with those true Christians within the national church. The pair also professed their loyalty to the king and acknowledged that it was lawful for him to appoint bishops to “oversee the churches and govern them civilly.” Robinson and Brewster left unsaid that they understood the Church of England as a false church and did not accept the spiritual authority of its bishops. It was good enough for the Virginia Company, but some members of the Privy Council wanted more information before they lent their support to a bunch of schismatics.34
Robinson and Brewster sent clarifications to Sir John Wolstenholme, a member of the Virginia Company council. English Protestants sympathized with persecuted Huguenots in France, so Robinson and Brewster stated that their system of church government and administration of the sacraments conformed in nearly all ways to those of the French Reformed churches. It was a way for the Pilgrims to showcase their Reformed bona fides while again remaining silent on their rejection of England’s church. In their most blatant attempt to mollify the king, Robinson and Brewster expressed a willingness to take the oath of supremacy, which declared that James was the “supreme governor of the realm,” including in “all spiritual or ecclesiastical things.” This was yet another dodge. Robinson and Brewster meant only that James was the supreme governor of a church they had rejected. Finally, Robinson and Brewster provided some details about their congregation’s practices of baptism and discipline. Wolstenholme was wise to the situation and realized that to share the additional material would “spoil all.” He kept it to himself.35
By now it was February 1618. The Virginia Company arranged for Sir Robert Naunton, who had just become secretary of state, to present the plan to the king. James was no fool when it came to English puritans in exile. He may have known about Brewster’s fines from a decade earlier, and it would have been easy to learn about John Robinson. The king did not mind shipping religious dissidents to colonies, however. The Leiden congregants told the king that they intended to make profits in Virginia by fishing. According to Edward Winslow’s later secondhand report, the king loved the idea. “So God have my soul,” the king laughed, “’tis an honest trade, ’twas the apostles’ own calling.” Separatists who thought they had reconstructed the primitive church would follow the occupation of Jesus’s first disciples! Still, while James said he would “not molest them,” he also would not give the group his public blessing. Negotiations with the Virginia Company stalled.36
While Carver and Cushman were in England, a political earthquake shook the Netherlands. Maurits of Nassau, the stadholder of Holland and most of the republic’s other provinces, became Prince of Orange after his brother’s death in 1618. The accession increased Maurits’s power and stoked his monarchical aspirations. Egged on by King James, Maurits arrested Oldenbarnevelt and other leading Remonstrants, neutered the power of local magistrates, and called a national Reformed synod. The next spring, after a show trial, Oldenbarnevelt was beheaded.
It was a political coup with significant implications for Dutch religious affairs and the country’s relations with Spain and England. The resulting Synod of Dordrecht (Dort) declared that God chose without any conditions certain individuals for salvation and others for damnation. Jesus had died only for those predestined for salvation. The English delegation at the synod encouraged stern measures to extinguish the alleged heresy of the Remonstrants. Arminian ministers could submit to the synod’s precepts or face deposition and banishment. So much for what Bradford termed “freedom of religion for all men.”
Although John Robinson wrote a book defending the Synod of Dort, the recent developments threatened his own congregation. The States-General outlawed private religious gatherings, and lawmakers also required that printers send copies of their books to state officials. Robinson’s congregants realized that they might enjoy less liberty going forward.
As the political crisis crested, the publishing activities of William Brewster and Thomas Brewer attracted the attention of English officials. Brewer was a gentleman and a prosperous merchant, dubbed by Amsterdam English puritan John Paget as the “special patron” of the English separatists abroad. After he moved to Leiden, he enrolled at the university and bought a house next door to John Robinson’s. Brewster and Brewer sought to advance the cause of true Christianity by publishing books that were then smuggled back into England. For the separatist printers, books were weapons. In his Acts and Monuments, John Foxe had described how brave reformers would fight “not with sword and tergate [shield]” but with “printing, writing, and reading.” Printing was “the secret operation of God” that would subdue Antichrist’s kingdom. Brewer poured his wealth into that operation.37
The separatist pair acquired type but did not own their own printing press, relying instead on several Leiden printers to bring out their titles. They published separatist works by John Robinson, Francis Johnson, and Robert Harrison, but also books by puritan luminaries such as William Ames. Two of their titles in particular attracted the ire of the English government. They printed David Calderwood’s anonymous broadside against King James’s plan to impose the episcopal hierarchy of the Church of England on the Scottish Kirk. Brewster and Brewer also published Calderwood’s anonymous Perth Assembly, which similarly criticized a meeting of the Kirk called by James in 1618. Calderwood accused the king of ecclesiastical and political tyranny. Not surprisingly, the king deemed the books seditious.
In his long campaign against the Remonstrants, James and his officials had made it clear that they would pursue their opponents in the Netherlands. Hunting for the publisher of Calderwood’s books, English ambassador Dudley Carleton came to Leiden in July 1619 and learned that Brewster and Brewer had printed them. Carleton reported to Robert Naunton—who had supported the separatists’ interest in moving to Virginia—that “their practice was to print prohibited books to be vended underhand in his majesty’s kingdoms.” For months, James’s officials pressured Dutch officials to capture and extradite the printers. English exiles in the Low Countries could not feel assured of their safety.38
As it turned out, the separatists reaped the benefits of their leaders’ friendship with Leiden’s faculty and magistrates. City officials moved as deliberately as they could without needlessly antagonizing Carleton. They let Brewster get away but arrested Brewer and kept him in the university’s prison. The authorities seized type, books, and papers from Brewer’s house. Because Brewer was a member of the university, its officials refused to simply turn him over to the English. Political negotiations eventually sent Brewer to London with the promise that he would not be arrested. While Brewer and Brewster avoided serious consequences, the long arm of the English crown had suppressed separatist publishing efforts. Brewster was lucky to escape with his life.
The congregation briefly explored leaving under Dutch auspices. After Henry Hudson sailed up the river that would receive his name, Dutch fur traders had established a fort near present-day Albany. In early 1620, officials of the New Netherland Company petitioned the States-General to bring “a certain English minister … living at Leiden” and four hundred families to what would later become New Amsterdam and later still New York. The company also asked for “two ships of war” to protect Dutch interests in the region. The company’s proposal gained no traction. Recruiting English colonists was probably not the best means of securing Dutch interests in the region, and the Prince of Orange did not want to antagonize King James by lending assistance to Brownists. Maurits said no.39
At this point, an English merchant and smuggler named Thomas Weston came to Leiden and offered to raise financing for the frustrated separatists. Over the past several years, Weston had shipped English textiles to France and the Netherlands. In 1618, he was reported for violating a crown-granted monopoly on the export of undyed, unfinished white woolens to the Netherlands. Now he gathered a group of investors (known as “Adventurers” for their willingness to venture their capital) to back the planned colony. Weston did not care either way about separatism. His previous enterprises had brought him indebtedness rather than riches. Colonies were very risky propositions, but Weston and his partners envisioned high rewards.40
Adam Willaerts, The Departure of the Pilgrims, 1620. (Private collection, courtesy of Jeremy D. Bangs.)
Cushman and Carver went back to London to finalize arrangements. John Peirce, one of Weston’s prospective investors, obtained a patent from the Virginia Company on behalf of the separatists. Those involved in the planning also had word that a new group (known as the Council for New England) led by Sir Ferdinando Gorges would soon receive English jurisdiction over a vast swath of land from present-day Philadelphia to nearly the mouth of the St. Laurence River. The colonists might need to get a new patent after they crossed the Atlantic. Meanwhile, the congregation remained divided and unsettled about its future. Most families either did not want to go or had no means to do so. Since the majority would at least for a time stay in Leiden, they prevailed upon Robinson to remain with them. Elder Brewster would go.
In July 1620, the colonists took their leave. The congregation held what Bradford termed a “day of solemn humiliation.” They fasted. Robinson preached. They feasted. They sang psalms, which Edward Winslow called “the sweetest melody that ever mine ears heard.”41 They wept.
Robert W. Weir, Embarkation of the Pilgrims, 1843. (Courtesy of the Architect of the Capitol.)
A quarter-century later, Winslow recalled his pastor’s parting message. Robinson expressed confidence that “the Lord had more truth and light yet to break forth out of his holy Word” and urged the colonists to be receptive to what God revealed to them. He criticized other Protestants for stopping short of the more thorough-going reformation he and his congregants had accomplished. Robinson’s words were not a plea for toleration or open-mindedness. Christians should test any idea against the firm rule of scripture. At the same time, he warned his departing congregants against self-satisfaction and complacency. Even true churches, those that resembled heaven on earth, fell short of the purity and perfection revealed in the Bible.42
Those who were staying accompanied the departing to the port of Delfshaven. Friends from Amsterdam came as well. According to Bradford, John Robinson and the others fell to their knees, prayed, and wept again. On or around July 22, the Speedwell’s crew hoisted its sails.
Bradford explained that despite their sorrow at leaving, “they knew they were pilgrims, and looked not much on those things, but lift[ed] up their eyes to the heavens, their dearest country, and quieted their spirits.”43 The words alluded to the eleventh chapter of the New Testament epistle to the Hebrews, which lauds exemplars of faith as “strangers and pilgrims on the earth.” Among them is Abraham, who in obedience to God’s call “went out, not knowing whither he went” and reached “the land of promise.” These Pilgrims also did not know their precise destination, nor did they have any assurance of earthly success. They went by faith, secure in the knowledge that even should their earthly pilgrimage end in prisons or wildernesses, they would reach their eternal home.