Edward went back to London several times in the 1620s. When the colony found itself in dire economic straits, with its backers in England threatening to pull out, he came to the fore as a negotiator. His deft handling of New England life including Indian relations had charged an already energetic nature with new conviction: bonhomie linked to serious-mindedness won him the confidence of most members of the colony. Increasingly he was looked to for decision-making and was perhaps more sure of himself than many of his fellow settlers. The terrible lives they were enduring made it hard for some less robust personalities to think about anything except whether their fires had gone out.
A great many practical things were needed. It was hoped that the investors would pay for draught animals to till the ground; at present everything still had to be done by hand. They had only goats for milk until Edward returned – after six months of arguing with the wary investors – with the colony’s first cattle, a bull and three cows. Horses were supposed to follow but there are no references to them in early colony records. They were either too expensive to send at all or did not survive the ocean voyage.
Many of the Merchant Adventurers were not wealthy. They often had relatively ordinary ways of earning their livings (Weston, for example, was an ironmonger). Although the Adventurers were blamed at the time (and since) for their parsimoniousness, these were agreed terms of what they regarded as a financial investment. The Adventurers did not actually owe the colonists any more funds, but some of them decided to help additionally for humane and charitable reasons.
* * *
On 10 September 1623 Edward left for London, though Susanna was pregnant. Her first child with Edward had died not long after it was born, but neither of them saw it as essential that Edward was back for the birth of this baby. It was regarded as the curse of Eve (for her sin) that women endure childbirth, and travelling with him to London and back would have been even more dangerous, especially with her two children from her first marriage, Resolved and Peregrine. Some sensible women friends had just arrived from Leiden, including the efficient and formidable Elizabeth Warren with five daughters in tow, and maybe Susanna felt that her female friends would be better placed to look after her during the birth than a husband. Perhaps he felt safer leaving her now that the settlement was becoming more like home, especially as she was no longer having to share her house with other people.
It had been decided, after harvest, that the communal system had to be done away with. Weston was a rude and difficult man, but as at Southampton, when his energies had made sure the colonists sailed, his information about the Adventurers now enabled the leaders in the colony to act. They made a démarche to Bradford, asking whether each family member could have an acre to cultivate, so that they could see the effect of working their own land. Just under 200 acres were divided between just over a hundred named individuals. Under the new system, yields shot up dramatically. Women colonists who had previously pleaded that they were too weak to go into the fields were now to be seen working there even with their little children. This was a community established to escape oppression, as Bradford wryly remembered. Therefore to have compelled them ‘would have been thought great tyranny and oppression’.
The house-building programme went much faster. When Edward left there were twenty instead of seven, and a year later there were thirty-two.
These land grants were temporary, but Susanna and Edward’s plot became their permanent home. It was a bonus not to be living hugger-mugger with other families and to have some privacy at last. Francis Cooke, a wool comber from Leiden who sailed on the Mayflower, built the house next to the Winslows. His French Walloon wife Hester and children arrived on the Anne in 1623.
The erudite, sometimes sardonic William Bradford was becoming one of the major personalities of the colony, and its presiding genius, vitally necessary for their cohesion as William Brewster became more feeble. Bradford kept notes about the colony’s progress, minutely detailing what he called ‘Increasings’ – that is, children born to the colonists – as well as what are some of the oldest written records in America. In his looping handwriting Governor Bradford begins ‘The 1623 Division of Land’ with the words: ‘The Falls of their grounds which came first over in the Mayflower, according as their lots were cast.’ Among the names was that of Hobbamock, whose lot was bounded by Town Brook. Further away were the lots of those who had come on the Fortune in 1621; they lay closer to the sea. Then came the lands of those who came in the Anne; they lay against the swamp.
There was what the settlers called a ‘Highway’ – a little passage by the edge of all the gardens. Susanna’s garden was next door to the Cookes’, whom she had had known in Leiden, and just along from the noisy Billingtons’.
* * *
Myles Standish’s daughter Loara’s sampler with silk embroidery still survives. It reads:
Loara Standish is my name
Lord guide my heart that
I may do thy Will also
My hands with such
Convenient skill as may
Conduce to virtue void of
Shame and I will give
The glory to thy name.
The words used many different stitches. The intention was for the samplers to be permanent records of needlework stitch which would be passed from mother to daughter. The linen must have been imported.
Making such a sampler would be part of the education of any young lady in a well-to-do family in England. It would be a while before the walls at Plymouth were plastered and ready to hang ornaments. In the very early days, their living quarters were rather incongruously furnished. Silver porringers, linen and china amidst the smoky, rough-hewn interiors were the only visible signs of a former civilised existence in Europe. But the Winslows were only in their late twenties, and they had all the optimism of youth and religious faith that things would be well. Susanna came from the upper middle classes. She was used to a certain standard of living, as fragments from her house show. She could read and write, and so could her genteel friends.
The Pilgrims took pride in the simplicity of their living. Much of their way of life was influenced by a fervent vision of the early church. Like Susanna, Mrs Warren had also been used to a comfortable, cultured and commodious way of life. It is hard not to believe that she did not initially feel a slight horror at the primitive nature of the colony.
Edward would have expected the community to look after his wife. Although childbirth was a feminine mystery, life amongst the Indians was sufficiently open for Edward to see that Indian women were so fit that they gave birth effortlessly. He noted that two days after she had a baby, one Indian woman was ‘in cold weather in a boat upon the sea’.
Losing his own child had of course been a matter of great grief. Edward wrote: ‘it pleased Him that gave it to take it again unto himself’. The starvation conditions the colony had undergone possibly meant the little baby did not stand much of a chance. This must have given Edward some pause for thought. That winter, in London, he would write about Indians weeping at the death of their children. Christians were taught to accept what God did, whereas Indian fathers cut their hair and disfigured themselves to show their sorrow.
Also recently arrived on the Anne with Elizabeth Warren were the two Brewster daughters, Fear and Patience. Mrs Brewster had been pining, and William Brewster had become very worried at what he called his wife’s ‘weak and decayed state of body’. Now John Robinson also hoped that the safe arrival of the girls, as well as better provisions, would see a revival in his old friend ‘the dear lady’.
Mrs Warren had been separated from her beloved husband for almost three years. A most formidable woman from Baldock in Hertfordshire, she had been looking after her five daughters in Holland while her husband built a home for them in the New World. (The redoubtable matriarch probably did some matchmaking on the Anne on her way over. In a few years a cooper also on the ship, Robert Bartlett, would marry her daughter Mary.)
* * *
Susanna never seems to have been discontented, never missed England very much and appears never to have considered returning, despite her well-to-do background. Nevertheless she had given Edward instructions to contact her father via her uncle. He was also to send his best wishes to her sister and brother.
Edward was away for six months, raising funds on account of Weston’s withdrawing his support from Plymouth and putting it in his own colony. While in London, Edward had hoped his old patron Thomas Coventry would help with connections in the City, but Coventry was too busy with his political life. It seems unlikely Edward managed to get an audience with him, though he obtained a patent to fish at Cape Ann from Lord Sheffield, which was perhaps the result of Coventry’s assistance.
Then, as now, investors were conservative and highly sensitive to any issues that threatened their profits. Edward’s fund-raising efforts were hampered by strange reports about Plymouth. The colonists’ outspokenness and honesty gave them a poor reputation; the fact that they lacked a proper clergyman was making them ‘scandalous’, while rumours circulated that women and children were part of the colony’s government (which was simply not true – Bradford wrote that ‘they are excluded, as both reason and nature teacheth they should be’).
Edward was very keen to impress upon backers how worthwhile it was to interact with the Indians, and wrote his second pamphlet, Good News from New England, when he was in London. Perhaps in the cramped streets he was overwhelmed with longing for his extraordinary American life, and remembered the Indians with nostalgia and warmth. He was in a rather triumphant mood because the harvest had convinced him that God was on the colony’s side, and he, in turn, wanted to convince investors. As he wrote in promotional material, he really believed Plymouth could be a successful economic venture where ‘religion and profit jump together’.
He and Robert Cushman also made compromises: they decided rather unorthodoxly but sensibly that it would not destroy the colony’s purpose if the Adventurers sent out an ordinary Church of England clergyman for Plymouth. They chose a clergyman, John Lyford, who had a degree from Cambridge and had recently been minister to a parish in Northern Ireland. It meant the much-needed money for foodstuffs would continue to flow.
However, his arrival caused a great split when Edward returned with him in March 1624 and Lyford baptised the baby of one of the settlers, William Hilton, who was not a member of the Leiden church. It caused an uproar not only amongst members of the original Scrooby church, but also amongst colonists who were ordinary members of the Church of England and who had a less intense view of religion.
Lyford violently took against the separatist nature of the settlement. He wrote rude letters back to the Merchant Adventurers, and allied himself with the malcontents who had always existed in the colony, such as the disruptive Billingtons, as well as discontented rootless newcomers. One such was a Devonian trader named John Oldham, who was determined to make his fortune in America. He arrived with his wife, stepson and pretty sister Lucretia (who married Jonathan Brewster). Oldham was a strong and unusual personality, who, despite prohibition, would soon trade with the Indians, including the Narragansetts’ elusive and reserved chief Canonicus.
Oldham was not the only newcomer who did not like the controlling and religious ways of the Leiden church. The discontented included a vigorous young salter named Roger Conant. He was religious enough, but did not care for the strictness of life at Plymouth. The future founder of Salem, Conant had married a woman from a family with many influential Puritan connections but he became alarmed by what he now saw as the narrowness of separatism.
There were ugly scenes when it was discovered that Lyford had been writing letters attacking the colonists with whom he had pretended to sympathise. When the ship that took these letters was about to set off, Governor Bradford rowed out beyond the sandbar to retrieve them, and then put Lyford on trial for treason. Lyford promised not to write such letters again, but when more of them were discovered he was expelled, along with Oldham. It must have been extremely embarrassing for Lucretia when her brother was found guilty of conspiring to overthrow the colony. But Oldham was not a fellow to be kept down by disapproval. In fact the Lyford episode led to about a quarter of the Plymouth population leaving in 1625, with Lyford, Conant and Oldham. They went north along the coast towards Boston to make a small settlement at Nantasket, where the Indians had given them shelter.
The leavers made trouble for Plymouth at a time when they did not need bad opinions and gossip, especially if rumours got back to England. It was now made to seem that the Pilgrim separatists were not only strange – and potentially disruptive and anarchic – but cruel too. From the Pilgrims’ point of view it was the right moment to assert themselves. As the historian of Plymouth Colony George D. Langdon junior has written: ‘They had thwarted an attempt to overthrow their political and religious control of the colony, an attempt which, had it succeeded, would have nullified the very purpose of their exile. In surviving these first years they had successfully met the greatest challenge of their lives.’ The leaders began to think it would be better to replace the Adventurers with other investors. They had had enough to do holding things together ‘amongst men of so many humours, under so many difficulties and fears of many kinds’. But the Adventurers would not let them go.
* * *
On 1 March 1625, John Robinson died after eight days of illness. He never saw the little colony he had inspired. Despite his illness he had insisted on preaching twice on the Sunday preceding his death. There was some comfort to be found in the fact that the funeral of Robinson, who had been treated so harshly by his mother country, was attended by all Leiden’s most eminent intellectuals. His grave is beneath the Pieterskerk, surrounded by the most celebrated professors and powerful members of the town government.
Robinson’s wife Bridget, the sister of Mrs Carver, lived for almost another twenty years. One of her sons, Isaac, went to join the pilgrim colony in 1631, while another, John, became a doctor and returned to England. In 1629 a last remnant of the church would make their way over the waters in a ship hired by the powerful Massachusetts Bay Company and then be guided south by delighted members of the church. After that the congregation in Leiden slowly disintegrated. There is a rumour that Bridget Robinson joined the Dutch Reformed Church at Amsterdam and moved there. She made her will in Leiden in 1643, though the date of her death is not known.
Extremely sad too for Edward and the other colonists was the sudden death of Robert Cushman in the outbreak of bubonic plague in 1625. Despite his fussy ways he had been one of the colony’s most important figures.
The plague killed 40,000 Londoners that year. Trade was at a standstill, and this stasis may have convinced the Adventurers to rid themselves at last of their investment and release Plymouth to the colonists, who bought themselves out. The Adventurers eventually sold the colony’s debt for £1,800 to fifty-eight people, known as the Purchasers, four of whom were the religious London merchants who remained interested. A smaller group (eight from Plymouth, four from London) called the Undertakers ‘undertook’ to repay the Adventurers within the next six years. The debts in fact would not be properly discharged until 1645 due to inaccurate accounts. Edward and other Undertakers had to give money from the sale of their homes to make up the shortfall. In return for taking on this burden the Undertakers had special rights. They were to have a monopoly on the trade with the Indians, and the rest of the Purchasers were bound to produce annual payments of corn and tobacco over the next six years to help with the debt. Buying out the Adventurers resulted in huge changes for the Pilgrims. The land and future profits would now be divided between the shareholders, who were mainly the settlers themselves.
They were divided into twelve groups, each of which received a cow and two goats. Although all the surrounding meadowland and all fishing and fowling was free to all or held in common, it was feared that the colonists might not be efficient enough to make the payments on the huge debt. Their farming activities would have to be expanded, but they had come to realise the area around Plymouth had poor soil. It was inevitable that a small township would no longer contain them.
On 22 May 1627, at the usual solemn and ceremonial court that marked a Plymouth Colony gathering to deliberate on matters of importance, it was announced how the assets of the company – ‘to wit the cows and the goats’ – would be divided. Still surviving is a list of the 156 colonists, divided into twelve lots of fifteen colonists each. Thanks to animals brought on the Anne and other ships, by 1627 Plymouth had a herd of sixteen cattle, over twenty goats, around fifty pigs and many chickens. Sheep are not mentioned but probate inventories show the settlers owned some. Their wool would have been spun and carded to make stockings and jerseys.
Around this time Edward’s brother John married Mary Chilton, who, legend has it, was the first European woman who stepped on what has become known as Plymouth Rock. She had got three shares in the 1623 Division of Land, one for herself and one for each of her parents, who had died during the first terrible winter.
The Division of Cattle not only gives all the names of those living at Plymouth in 1627, it also shows how tightly the settlers had to cooperate with one another. The company did not have a huge number of animals. It was not a parish pump they gathered round, but the heifers.
The Winslows’ house is the best-documented original house of what are usually called the ‘First Comers’. It would last into the 1660s, being substantial enough to serve as the colony court house. When they sold it in 1639 to another merchant named Thomas Wallis for £120, the details of the sale show the first property included land stretching to the water. There was a barn and stabling for the family’s horses (the subject of much envy to the Wampanoags, who had no horses), a ‘backhouse’, an outhouse and some fruit trees. Despite the first years of very hard graft Plymouth people had not lost their taste for the accoutrements of pleasant English life which they wished to reproduce in America. When Edward sold the house he uprooted the fruit trees and took them across the bay by boat. Tradition has it that plants had come over on the Mayflower. Although crab apple trees were native to North America these may have been cuttings from the renowned pear trees of Edward’s native Worcestershire.
Showing signs of being a careful businessman like his brother John (and unlike his father), Edward retained the barn, stables and fold yard for his sheep, and the right to come and go through his old garden. Locks were itemised as a precious resource and always removed by the vendor, who used them in their next building.
The house was comfortably equipped with wainscoting, and neatly fenced. Recent archaeological excavations have shown that the early buildings in Plymouth Colony lacked stone foundations because the Pilgrims did not have the tools, and wood was plentiful. They were post-in-earth constructions, as were the later grander dwellings at Duxbury and Marshfield.
The Pilgrims soon imported furniture, though iron rusted and material was corroded by the salty winds. Traditionally the bed was the most expensive item of furniture and in the parlour was a ‘wainscot bedstead’ which would have been built with the house.
Edward’s younger brother Kenelm would be one of the key carpenters in the colony. Almost all furniture for the houses of Plymouth was produced by them; and as time went on and better houses were built, carpenters would also be largely responsible for their design.
* * *
Edward Winslow’s life flipped between England and the wild American frontier, between conducting business with merchants in London and trading with half-naked Indians beside vast unknown rivers. One thing the relationships with Indians and the merchants of the City had in common was that they thrived on trust. Just as much as the keen-eyed merchants (whose grandiose portraits of themselves slung about with gold and ermine hung in their livery companies), the Indians (who were the key to the hugely profitable fur to be got from their connections in Hudson Bay) believed their word was their bond.
Edward spent time in London with Emanuel Altham and with one of the investors, James Sherley. The Puritan Sherley was a man of property with a goldsmith’s shop on London Bridge, a villa in Surrey and a house in Crooked Lane. Edward had letters sent there. Since Sherley became an executor of Edward’s will, it seems likely Edward stayed there, as well as using it as a poste restante. Over the years, as Edward became one of the chief people going back and forth to London to raise money, he became friends with the other Puritan merchants who had kept faith with the colony. One such investor, a wholesale linen draper named Thomas Andrewes, was one of the greatest financiers of the day. He and his Puritan businessman brother Richard both had shares in the Plymouth Colony.
By 1627 the experiment was regarded as a success. The late 1620s were delightful years. Bradford wrote nostalgically that they suddenly felt the sweetness of the country. Plymouth was a haven for wildlife: to the north were the cranberry bogs, full of fowl, that were the headwaters of the Eel River and its large watershed with its many wild birds and flora and fauna. Plymouth Beach, the sandbar stretching out for three miles at right angles to the harbour and forming a protective wall, was an important nesting point for migratory birds, the piping plover and the tern. The Pilgrims named a section of the coast across Plymouth Bay Brant Rock due to the Brant geese they saw there. Thoreau wrote in Walden that the sound of geese was like a ‘tempest’ when they flew low over his house, ‘their commodore honking all the while with a regular beat’.
In a few years the colonists would start farming in the low-lying lush green pastures of the Eel River, inland from the grassy sand dunes and pebbled beaches that formed Plymouth’s natural habitat. It was sheltered from the high Atlantic winds. Salt marshes transformed their lives, providing winter fodder for cattle without the necessity of having to prepare the land for hay. Coastal salt marsh in New England opened up great areas of land for profitable farming. No wonder the Plymouth colonists believed at times they were saved from God’s wrath.