They Knew They Were Pilgrims by John G. Turner

Author:John G. Turner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2020-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

Bradford observed that as “a man of sorrows” (the Book of Isaiah’s description of the suffering servant, whom Christians interpreted as Jesus Christ) he had known “wars, wants, peace, plenty.” Old age had overtaken him, and he looked forward to the “happy change,” the death that would bring him into the presence of Christ.31

For New Plymouth, Bradford’s death marked the end of an era but was not a rupture with the colony’s original principles. Bradford was succeeded as governor by Thomas Prence, the son of a Gloucestershire carriage maker who came to New Plymouth in 1621 aboard the Fortune. Prence quickly advanced himself. He married Patience Brewster in 1624, became one of the Undertakers, and served two terms as governor in the 1630s. He moved to Duxbury, then to Eastham. In the early eighteenth century, Josiah Cotton praised Prence as a “terror to evil doers” (Romans 13:3)—in other words, a biblical magistrate. Prence had supported Bradford’s moves against religious dissenters in New Plymouth, and he resolved to take action against the Quakers when they appeared in the colony.32

In addition to Prence, Mayflower passenger John Alden remained a magistrate, as did Scituate’s Timothy Hatherly and James Cudworth. Josiah Winslow and William Bradford Jr. also served among the assistants. So too did Thomas Willett, who belonged to the Leiden congregation in the 1620s and had emigrated on a different Mayflower in 1630. Despite the humiliation he endured at the hands of the French at Plymouth’s Kennebec trading outpost, Willett succeeded Myles Standish as the colony’s military captain in 1648 and gained election as a magistrate beginning in 1651. Like Isaac Allerton, with whom he sometimes did business, Willett spent considerable time in New Amsterdam. He forged close relationships with Willem Kieft and Petrus Stuyvesant and served as a liaison during times of tension between the English and Dutch. Willett grew rich trading in foodstuffs, tobacco, and slaves, and he accumulated land in both New Plymouth and New Amsterdam. Through the 1650s, Willett’s views on religious toleration resembled those of Bradford, Prence, and Stuyvesant, all of whom favored firm measures to uphold their established Reformed churches.33

For the several years after the arrival of the first Quaker missionaries in 1656, New Plymouth’s leaders found themselves consumed by what most of them regarded as a grave crisis. The events in Sandwich prompted Plymouth’s General Court to pass a series of anti-Quaker measures. Any person who attended one of the Quakers’ “silent meetings” faced a fine of ten shillings and those who hosted such gatherings faced stiffer fines. If inhabitants of the colony became aware of any Quakers in their midst, they had to inform the authorities or else face punishment themselves. When constables apprehended Quaker missionaries, they were to bring them before a magistrate, who would order them imprisoned without access to visitors and with only such food as the court permitted. Jailed Quakers would remain confined until they paid for the costs of their imprisonment and their transportation out of the colony. The General Court made it illegal to be a Quaker, to befriend a Quaker, or even to ignore a Quaker.

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