Stories about my Mother 11
The Reverend William Brewster, his wife Mary, and two sons were among the 102 passengers who set sail from Southampton, England, on September 16, 1620, along with about twenty or thirty crew members, aboard the good ship, Mayflower.
William and Mary, somewhat to my surprise, turn out to be two of my 10th great-grandparents. Even more surprising, my connection to them is through my British mother and not through my American father.
The Brewster’s eldest son, Jonathan, my 9th great-grandfather, stayed behind in the Netherlands until a year later when he made the voyage over, himself, on the ship, Fortune. Once in the Plymouth Colony, he married a woman named Lucretia Oldham and they had several children. Two of them were my 8th great-grandmothers, Grace and Hannah Brewster. They each married different men and had families of their own. Two of THEIR respective grandchildren, Daniel Dennison, Sr. and Rachel Starr, who were second cousins, then got married to each other. THEIR granddaughter Grace married Barent Van Buren and then the granddaughter of those two, Harriet, married John McElhinny, my great-great-grandfather who was born in Canada. All clear?
More than half the original passengers and crew of the Mayflower died during their first winter in the New World. Forty-seven male passengers, including William and their two sons, and about half the crew survived. Only five women, one of whom was Mary, lived through into the next year. There is an organization called The General Society of Mayflower Decedents, or Mayflower Society for short, that is made up of people who can prove that one of the original passengers is an ancestor. It sounds like it should be an exclusive group, given that so few of these people lived to have children. The truth, however, is that the number of us who can legitimately claim a connection to one of those few early colonists is about thirty-five million.
In later years, a whole mythology sprung up around the Mayflower passengers and their voyage to the point that they now seem to be the stuff of legend. It wasn’t that way at the beginning.
We didn’t start celebrating Thanksgiving as a National holiday until President Lincoln made it one in 1863. That is two hundred and forty-three years after the fact. Similarly, it wasn’t even until the bicentennial of their landing in 1820 that the term “Pilgrim” started being used to describe the passengers. At the time, they referred to themselves as “Saints” or “Separatists.” Their goal was to separate themselves from the Church of England and the Catholic Church in Rome, both of which they felt were corrupt. Only forty of the passengers held this religious conviction, the rest were just secular colonists that the Saints referred to as “Strangers.”
Even Plymouth Rock, the famous so-called landing place of the passengers in Plymouth Harbor is suspect. These days, the small boulder is enshrined in an enormous portico designed by the firm of McKim, Mead and White and built in 1921. The rock itself was only identified in 1741 by a ninety-four-year-old man who claimed that some of the original settlers had told him which one it was when he was a kid. 1741 was already a hundred and twenty-one years after the fact. It could just be a rock.
William Brewster was born in a little town called Scrooby in Nottinghamshire, England, just east of Sheffield. His father, also named William, was the town’s postmaster. William Jr. attended Cambridge in 1580 but there’s no record of him attaining a degree. Regardless, he soon secured a position as the right-hand man of William Davison, an official in Queen Elizabeth I’s court. Officially an assistant to one of the Queen’s secretaries, he was really a full secretary himself.
When William Brewster joined him, Davison already had a long list of diplomatic accomplishments. With Brewster assisting him, he was sent to the Netherlands to broker a treaty after the death of William the Silent, Prince of Orange. While the mission was successful, Queen Elizabeth became angry with him for, what she considered, an overstepping of his bounds. He fell under her eye, and not in a good way.
Some months later, he was made part of a commission that was to try Mary Queen of Scotts. Davison took no part in the proceedings which nonetheless found her guilty. Parliament petitioned for her to be executed. Davison was then entrusted with the warrant for her execution. The second that happened, he was doomed.
Elizabeth wanted Mary out of the way but did not want it to look like she had been responsible for executing her. She signed the warrant at Davison’s prompting after a lot of dithering but was cryptic about what should be done with it. She ordered him to hold onto it. Davison passed it on to someone up the food chain who immediately used it to have Queen Mary beheaded. Elizabeth feigned fury that this had happened and blamed Davison. He ended up in the Tower. He survived but his career at court was over.
Without his mentor, Brewster left London and the Queen’s service and went back to Scrooby. His father had died, so he took over as postmaster.
Elizabeth I was the head of the Church of England. Whether his time at her court influenced him or not, William Brewster became set against its doctrines. He and his wife joined an illegal separatist Church. He allowed them to meet at Scrooby Manor. To outsiders, they were known as Brownists after an earlier leader in the movement named Richard Browne.
Because worshipping this way was against the law in Elizabethan England, the decision was made to move to Holland which was more lenient. William Brewster organized the group’s departure. Leaving Britain without permission was also a crime. Their first furtive try in 1607 ended up with them being arrested. The next year, though, they were successful.
Brewster and his family settled in Leiden. To make ends meet, he taught English to university students and printed and published religious books. The books were quite critical of the English government which made him an outlaw. Brewster had to go into hiding. Even in Holland, they weren’t safe from the English, so Brewster helped convince the congregation to head to America.
At that point in time, you needed a patent to be able to settle in the English territories in the New World. Two other members of the congregation finally secured one for the group to be able to homestead in what was then the Virginia territory near the mouth of the Hudson River.
They purchased a small ship named the Speedwell and snuck out of Delfthaven and across the channel to meet up with the Mayflower. Both ships were meant to sail across the Atlantic, but the Speedwell turned out not to be seaworthy. After several false starts and a rearrangement of passengers, the Mayflower finally set sail on her own on September 6, 1620.
There is a replica of the real Mayflower, which presumably was broken up for scrap, called the Mayflower II which is docked in Plymouth Harbor. It’s a tourist attraction. I was just on it. You can walk on the main deck and the deck underneath but the lower deck, where the passengers were, is considered too dangerous to let visitors in. The ceiling is too low. The ship is about a hundred feet from stem to stern and about 24 feet wide. 102 passengers and 30-40 crew members spent sixty-six days cooped up together in that space. Five passengers died during the trip, and one, who was appropriately named Oceanus, was born.
They first landed in what is now Provincetown on Cape Cod, but a lack of water drove them to head inland to Plymouth. There’s an enormous monument to their arrival in P-town. The author Michael Cunningham pointed out that the top of it looks like Donald Duck if you look at it correctly. Once seen, you can never unsee it. I wonder what William Brewster would make of it. I wonder what Elder William Brewster would make of Bear Week. Michael’s and my favorite restaurant there is called Strangers and Saints. Until a few days ago, I didn’t have the slightest idea why.
The Mayflower colonists were lucky in that they happened to land in an area where the indigenous population had been decimated by the diseases brought over by the early Spanish explorers some decades before. The surviving tribespeople they encountered didn’t hold claim over it, so the Pilgrims setting themselves up there didn’t particularly concern them. The Wampanoag, still weakened by the pandemic entered a mutually beneficial arrangement with the colonists for protection against other tribes. Moving forward, as they expanded their settlement into adjoining areas, the colonists were careful to purchase the new tracts from the Wampanoag. The Wampanoag, however, didn’t have the same concept of land ownership that the Europeans had, and conflicts arose when fences were built, and they couldn’t hunt there anymore. The expansion continued regardless.
The first winter was brutal. None of the passengers had a clue how to live in such an environment. Because of their late start out of England, they didn’t arrive until November. It was cold. They started dying. Along with everyone else who dropped, at least twenty of the Saints did not survive the first winter. One of the women may have committed suicide. The Wampanoag people helped them without realizing what the future had in store for them otherwise none of the Europeans would have made it.
The Mayflower patent had given them permission to settle to the south, but not where they ended up. It was too late in the season to sail anywhere else when they got there, so they were forced to stay. Even before they landed, some Strangers in the group started saying that since they weren’t in the area under the patent, they were no longer subject to the Crown’s rule of law. This led to the drafting and signing of the Mayflower Compact.
The original Compact is lost but William Bradford, another of the passengers, wrote a transcription of it in his journal. The forty-one male Saints, including William Brewster, signed it. The colony got a renewed patent for Plymouth a year after they landed, which made it almost immediately unnecessary. Even so, the Compact has become a symbolic fixture in American governance, far beyond what its creators intended. It was the first time in European history that common people united to create a government for themselves. Of course, the Strangers weren’t a part of it. It also goes without saying that the women weren’t either. Besides that, it was a very democratic document.
Until an ordained minister arrived nine years later, William Brewster was the nominal head of the church in Plymouth. He was the only university-educated member of the colony. He became their preacher. His family all survived that first winter. In Leiden, they had taken in two children whose mother had been having an affair with another man. Their father had disowned them. The youngest of those kids perished that winter. The Brewster’s eldest son Jonathan then arrived in 1691. Two more of his daughters came over in 1693.
After Mary died, William eventually retired to a farm on land he had been given a few miles to the north in Duxbury. I drove up there the other day and found the stone that marks where his homestead had been. There are lilacs from Holland planted around it. He died there in 1644 and was buried with his wife in Plymouth.
Among the hundreds and thousands of us who can claim descent from William and Mary Brewster are Julia Child, Bing Crosby, Ted Danson, Angela Davis, John Foster Dulles, Richard Gere, Katharine Hepburn, Ashley Judd, Sarah Palin, Thomas Pynchon, and Nelson Rockefeller. John Lithgow with whom I did the Broadway musical Sweet Smell of Success also has William Brewster as an ancestor. All of us are related in some way. The good, the bad, and the ugly.
On eBay, I see that I could buy a 12” doll of William Brewster. I’ll pass on that although I did buy a tankard with his name and likeness that was made for the 400th anniversary of their arrival. I say likeness, but nobody really knows what he or Mary Brewster looked like. All the portraits of him are conjecture.
I walked through the reconstruction of the original settlement at Plimouth Plantation and saw the facsimile of what his dirt-floored house might have looked like. I’ve seen the plaque on the side of the bank on Leyden Street where his house may have once stood. I found the marker in the Plymouth Burial ground which memorializes William and Mary near where they may have been buried. They are, by far, the most famous of all my relatively recent ancestors. Sure, another twenty or so generations back and I get to King Robert the Bruce of Scotland then back to King Duncan, but the Brewsters are closer to me than that. They seem like realer people.
Several of his belongings – a sword, a chair, and his trunk - are in the Pilgrim Museum in Plymouth. They’re under glass, but I can still imagine them being used.
Sitting by myself inside the replica of what their house might have been was maybe as close to meeting him as I will get. Fake though it was, the dirt floor was real. It was 75 degrees outside, but the floor was still cold. What must that have been like in the dead of winter? This man who worked in the court of Queen Elizabeth I ended his days on a farm in Duxbury, Massachusetts in a house with earthen floors. Was he happy?
We use the term King Baby, to describe the narcissistic bullying people we often end up working for. They hold sway over everyone but themselves. I have certainly worked for my share of them – men and women alike. I can only imagine what it would be like working for an actual Queen who wielded actual power. No, thank you. William Brewster saw what happened to William Davison, a very capable man, firsthand. He fled.
Was William Brewster happy? I’m guessing he was in heaven.
In my mind, I had pegged the cryptic name "Strangers and Saints" to terms used by the gay community. Thanks for the clarification, LOL. As always, a fascinating read!!