Pilgrims

Stuff I learn about the Pilgrims.  So how did this group come to be?  Why were there 4 voyages from 1620-31? How did they decide to go? Survive?

            After Henry VIII parted the the pope, he told the church leaders he was now head of the church.  He wanted no change in worships, but wanted to adopt reformation beliefs.  Archbishop Cranmer and the bishops conferred and decided he’d never accept Calvinism with its strict behavioral demands, and instead picked Lutheran doctrine.  So the Anglicans were Catholic worship/Luther’s theology. This got mixed reviews but no riots.  90% of English thought of themselves as Catholic.  But after Henry’s son Edward IV ruled only 5 years, sister Mary, born of Katherine of Spain, came to power and tried to force Catholicism back into the church. Bloody Mary went after any reticent Protestant or even someone who wanted to talk it over.  Result: Several thousand forced to flee, often to Netherlands where the English traded.  Holland was the commerce capital and made a vibrant economy by freely allowing refugees to come with their foreign ideas. And the Low Countries were the place for fabric weaving.  Wales and Western England were the place for sheep and wool.  East Anglia (Eastern England) was heavy in ship commerce, and Northern England was getting acquainted with Presbyterianism.  Holland was Calvinist and thus most of the new ideas were Calvinistic that spread to Britain.  When the Low Countries declared independence from Spain, 10,000 Englishmen rushed to help their cause. 

            There was a city in Yorkshire (north) that was blamed for the beheading of Mary Stuart.  She was Elizabeth’s cousin, raised in France and quite Catholic.  When she assumed the throne of Scotland, she clashed with John Knox and the Presbyterians there.  So much so, that about 8 years after she’d become queen, she fled leaving behind her infant son, James. This was a big problem for Elizabeth of England, who secretly ordered her placed on house arrest, because Mary was the rightful heir of the English throne, had Parliament not recinded Elizabeth's bastardness.  But Parliament had seated Elizabeth instead of Mary because Elizabeth was Protestant. A revolt might dethrone Elizabeth. 18 years later, Mary was beheaded way up north at a Yorkshire castle. Elizabeth claimed someone had countered her orders (even though it solved everything.  Nephew James could now become the future Protestant King of England, since she had no heirs) Who dunnit? Calvinists hated Catholics with a passion and the church nearby had a Calvinist (Puritan) pastor.  The scapegoated Scrooby church was exiled in mass to Holland. 

            There, others from Worchestershire (west) and East Anglia, being persecuted, also joined them. Congregation grew to 250 people in Lieden, Netherlands.  And it became a center for printing Puritan/Separatist (Calvinist) books and tracts to be secretly smuggled back to England.  There were writers like William Brewster (former Cambridge professor), Robinson (the pastor), and Edward Winslow.  Some soldiers who had joined the Dutch revolt like Miles Standish, a rich woolens merchant, Thomas Brewer, who bankrolled everything, and a lot of illiterate but devout peasants.  It was tough times.  Most could only do the menial jobs of textile trade and they lived in much poverty.  Dissatisfaction made them want to go elsewhere, even though Holland allowed them precious free speech.  Robert Cushman, a merchant, negotiated with the British Virginia Company to allow a settlement next to Jamestown.  The Government (Privy Council) okayed reluctantly under the reasoning that it was better to have these radicals harass the Spanish in the new world, rather than to stay home and harass us.  Two old rotten boats and some cautious investors were found to fund the project. 

            45 “Pilgrims”(members of Leiden congregation) and 25 other adventurers joined plus a crew to make 102 people.  They encountered rough storms in the western Atlantic and miraculously survived. Landed in November near present day Provincetown, MA as the weather was getting wintery and the crew refused to go south to VA. Too late to build houses, they stayed aboard and went hunting/exploring on land. Wrote the Mayflower Compact. That winter, a mystery disease killed 50 of the 102.  Only six pilgrim women survived. Many of the non-pilgrims were non-believers and ex-cons. Brewster and Brewer held them together while Standish enforced order. 

            They found an abandoned Indian village.  The Pawtuxets had been wiped out by white-man’s disease, contacted from befriending fisherman (offshore area had been fished by English and Irish for 100 years).  There were fields and huts.  The pilgrims found corn (almost unknown in Europe) and the village had several brooks. In the days before pipes, in order to found a town, you had to have a brook to bring fresh water, washing water and carry away waste going through the townsite. And they met one lonely former resident, Squanto, who had been captured into slavery and taken to Europe before his tribe died.  He’d escaped, found his way to the house of a guy who worked for the Virginia company, who hired him as a coastal guide on the next fishing voyage, then let him escape back to his native land. Squanto gave the Pilgrims life-saving advice on poisonous plants and planting corn.

            The Pilgrims were bent on sharing the gospel with the natives, #2 priority after settling.  But they had brought no seed, not enough candles, hardly any livestock but much Dutch cheese.  The women often figured things out.  They observed how Indians would break off a pine branch, wait for sap to bead at the wound, then smear it on the tip of the broken branch. Makes a torch-candle they named “candlewood”.  Fish were phenomenally plentiful and that is how the Pilgrims paid off their investors over the years.  Deer replaced cattle for meat and hides for clothes.  (Rarely did Pilgrims wear those outfits they are portrayed in).  Being English, they tried making shelters of wattle and daub, but the dauby mud kept falling out from the wet climate.  Women observed the Indians had used ‘shingles’ of bark and hide which later evolved into the shingled and clapboard siding of New England.  Making friends with the Wampanoag tribe was key because they wanted the Pilgrims to stay in the “ghost village” to keep the warlike Naragansetts out. Many of the later Pilgrims had been Yorkshire peasants, so they were tough redneck types who could survive.

            Mayflower sailed back in 1623 and other ships followed until most of the Lieden congregaton had a chance to join.  My great..grandfather Solomon Leonard came in 1629 or 1630.  Cousin to Brewster, he and Miles Standish and Bradford founded the town of Bridgeport. His wife, Sarah Chandler, was sister to one of the original 1620 pilgrims.

            Odd stuff I learn.  Pilgrims didn’t celebrate Christmas and thought it was poor taste to rabble-rouse after Advent which was “little Lent” with repentance and watchfulness.  But they drank beer copiously.  The non-drinking of Calvinists in our age are mainly Baptists who have added this.  Some would think Puritans and Separtists don’t like sex, but the opposite was true.  They hated Catholic teaching that celibacy was “higher” and sex was sinful.  They stressed love from Ephesians 5 for couples and shelled out kids like mad.  2 babies were born on the 2-month voyage over.  And virtually all the women were midwives.  It was not a specialty.  Moreover they understood the necessity of clean linens and water at birth.  But the Pilgrims didn’t take baths (believed you should only bathe at certain times of the moon).  Squanto told them they needed to because they “stincked”. So here we have a nice clean American telling the unwashed foreigners they needed clean up their act.