William Brewster

Change is the only constant.

Heraclitus of Ephesus

We know more about William Brewster than most who stepped off the Mayflower. Few were less prepared for life in the wilderness. Fewer still did more to bring them there.

By 1620, Brewster had already lived a full life. As a young man, he witnessed up close the perils of English politics. He went on to have at least three different careers in markedly different environments. He agitated for change and was persecuted for it (when they could catch him). He bore the worst of conditions, from poverty to prison, with cheerfulness and contentment.

No one was more impacted by his life than Plymouth Colony’s longtime governor, William Bradford, who met Brewster as a young teenager, followed him from England to Holland to the New World and, after Brewster’s death, wrote at length about the life of his great friend and mentor.

Early Life

Born around 1564, Brewster grew up in rural Scrooby, England. Even today, the village is tiny, with fewer than four hundred residents. Brewster’s father was postmaster and the “receiver and bailiff of the lordship, or manor, of Scrooby.” Scrooby Manor was a stop on the Great North Road from London to Scotland. Many dignitaries of the day, including Queen Elizabeth, stayed there on their travels north.

Given his father’s duties, its likely Brewster learned to read and write at a young age. When he was sixteen or seventeen years old, he matriculated at Peterhouse, University of Cambridge, in December 1580. He learned to speak Latin and Greek.

A Cambridge education at that time was almost entirely religious in nature. Religion had been a deadly topic for decades. The Peterhouse headmaster, Andrew Perne, was necessarily pragmatic. A Catholic who supported the pope and Queen Mary in the 1550’s, he subsequently paid lip service to the Church of England under Queen Elizabeth.

His counsel: Live in the religion the Queen professes. Don’t die in it.

Despite Perne’s papal loyalties, Cambridge was rapidly becoming a Puritan hotbed. Brewster may have even seen the 1584 establishment of Emmanuel College by Sir Walter Mildmay, which educated many of the Puritans who turned up in the Massachusetts Bay Colony fifty years later.

Political Service

Sometime in 1584, around age 20, Brewster left Cambridge to enter the employment of William Davison, a court official and diplomat for Queen Elizabeth. The nature of his service for Davison is ambiguous, neither menial nor diplomatic, though according to Bradford, “Davison found [Brewster] so discrete and faithful as he trusted him above all other that were about him, and only employed him in all matters of greatest trust and secrecy.”

In this capacity, Brewster spent six months in the Netherlands while Davison brokered a treaty to provide military support. Davison negotiated well; the English took control of several Low Country cities. The Queen was reportedly upset he exerted more control over Amsterdam than an envoy should have done on his own.

Davison told her, in the language of his day, Your welcome.

From 1586, Davison was a member of Parliament and colleague of Francis Walsingham, Queen Elizabeth’s secretary of state (and spymaster). Davison was on the commission to try Mary, the deposed Catholic Queen of Scotland living under house arrest in England, for plotting to assassinate Queen Elizabeth. Mary, who had consented to the plot in a letter, was found guilty. It was Davison who secured Queen Elizabeth’s signature for Mary’s execution warrant.

Possibly to create deniably for herself, the Queen sent Davison separate instructions to hold the warrant unsealed. He received these instructions too late to prevent Mary’s execution. The Queen blamed Davison for her death and locked him in the Tower of London.

Brewster stayed in Davison’s service throughout his imprisonment and, according to Bradford, “doing him many faithful offices of service in the time of his troubles.” After 18 months, Davison was acquitted of evil intention and released. He stayed in Parliament but never served the Queen again.

Brewster’s services, it seems, were no longer required.

Scrooby Again

Brewster returned to Scrooby. By 1590, he had taken up his father’s former position as postmaster and was living at Scrooby Manor. Now in his late twenties, he married (little is known about Mary, his wife) and began a family. Their oldest child, Jonathan, was born in 1593.

During this time, the Church of England was in chaos. For clergy, surviving each shift in the political winds was more important than service. Ministers with nonconforming views of the moment were forced out. Ecclesiastical ranks ran thin.

Ordinary citizens were regularly confronted with impossible situations. By law, a priest was required to officiate at baptisms, marriages, and funerals. The only problem? There weren’t enough priests to go around. In many country towns and villages, months passed between services. It is no surprise the congregationalist movement started by Robert Browne and Henry Barrow, which gives autonomy to each congregation to run its own affairs, was born during this time.

The Brewsters appear to have fully adopted Brownist views during the 1590s. Their children born from 1600 onward had “Brownist” names: Patience, Fear, Love, and Wrestling. They attended the sermons of Richard Clifton in nearby Babworth. They worked to attract like-minded preachers to the area.

Also during this time, Brewster befriended a young orphan, William Bradford, who traveled by Scrooby Manor on his was to Clifton’s services. He came to stop often at Brewster’s home to borrow books and listen to tales of church reform taking place across England.

By 1605, the nonconforming views of both Clifton and another minister, John Robinson, had cost them their Anglican pulpits. Clifton, “a grave and fatherly old man, having a great white beard,” and the younger Robinson began to lead Brownist meetings hosted by the Brewsters at Scrooby Manor. Brewster was the Ruling Elder, a position in Presbyterian churches responsible for church governance and discipline.

These meetings lasted two years before the Anglican Church took notice. The High Court of Commission, the supreme ecclesiastical court in England, summoned the Scrooby Congregation leaders, including Brewster, for “disobedience in matters of religion.”

Brewster never showed up.

By the fall of 1607, he had resigned his position as baliff and postmaster. When the court sought him for non-appearance, the court officer certified he “couldn’t find Brewster or understand where he was”.

From England to Leiden

The decision to leave England was not easy. There was extensive discussion among the congregation members. Most were farmers, not merchants or tradesman who could earn a living in any of the expensive Dutch cities. As Bradford summarized those debates: Many thought leaving was “a case intolerable and a misery worse than death.”

Their alternatives, however, were limited. Wanted men in England, they eventually decided to leave. But it was also against the law to leave England without permission, and many of the separatists were stopped at the coast. A group led by Brewster was imprisoned in Boston, on the English Channel. Brewster (and six others) were held the longest. Of those, Brewster “suffered the greatest loss.”

As many feared, the separatists were ill prepared for Leiden. The guilds were off limits to foreigners. Menial work was all they could find. Laborious and toilsome work.

The kind of work Brewster had never done.

Over many painful years between 1608 and 1615, Brewster redefined himself. He became a sought-after teacher for those seeking to learn the English language. His approach, which incorporated his knowledge of Latin and his own proprietary teaching method, allowed students to learn quickly. Men from wealthy and powerful circles sought Brewster’s services to give their sons the best education possible.

The Pilgrim Press

When he wasn’t teaching English, Brewster kept busy with a printing operation he started with a partner, Thomas Brewer, in 1616. While King James controlled all printing in England, the presses in Holland were only loosely supervised.

Brewer bought the type. Brewster and his assistants (including Mayflower passengers Edward Winslow and George Soule) made the ink and laid out the type sheets. A local printer, possibly Soule’s brother, Johannes Sol, provided the press. 

Over several years, the team printed perhaps 21 books in all. Most were anti-Anglican religious tracts destined to be smuggled across the channel.

The situation reached a tipping point with their 1619 publication of “Perth Assembly”, a critique of new laws forcing the Church of Scotland into conformance with the Church of England. Brewster prepared the book, like all the others. Copies were smuggled into Scotland in wine vats. In July, a copy passed the eyes of Sir Dudley Carleton, an English envoy to the Hague, who notified Whitehall.

The English appealed to the Dutch to destroy the press and arrest the printers. Brewster’s wealthy silent partner, Thomas Brewer, was arrested in September and met with a “hard fate that ultimately overtook him.” The type was confiscated. Brewster hid.

Letters between Whitehall and The Hague show the hunt for Brewster lasted in earnest into 1620 and at some level until at least the departure of the Speedwell the following summer.

From Leiden to the New World

Brewster’s friends had been seeking financing for a venture in the New World for several years. By early 1620, plans reached fruition for the first group of separatists to leave. These first pilgrims needed a spiritual leader, but decided Robinson would make the voyage later with the main congregation. “Elder” Brewster was not an ordained minister but had become, in addition to a fugitive printer, a spiritual lieutenant to Robinson.

Brewster agreed to make the trip with Mary and their two youngest, Love and Wrestling. He was 56 years old.

Once again, Brewster’s life changed completely. Plymouth Plantation had no need for printing. Or a postmaster. Or a politician’s aide.

Despite his age and somewhat revered status, Brewster labored alongside the other pilgrims. He built his own house. He worked the fields with his hands. He went without food. Often.

And for most of the first decade, and later whenever the Church had no other minister, he taught twice every Sunday. As a teacher, he was “moving and stirring of affections; also very plain and distinct in what he taught; by which means he became more profitable to the hearers.” Bradford credited Brewster with preserving order and successfully suppressing any error or contention that arose amongst the Church members.

As for his character, Bradford wrote:

“He was wise and discreet and well spoken, having a grave and deliberate utterance, of a very cheerful spirit; very sociable and pleasant amongst his friends; of a humble and modest mind; of a peaceable disposition; undervaluing himself and his own abilities, and sometimes overvaluing others. Inoffensive and innocent in his life and conversation; which gained him the love of those without as well as those within; yet he would tell them plainly of their faults and evils, both publicly and privately; but in a such a manner as usually was well taken from him.”

As for Brewster’s dislikes, Bradford had this to say:

“None did more offend and displease him, than such as would haughtily and proudly carry and lift up themselves, being risen from nothing; and having little else in them to commend them but a few fine clothes and a little more riches than others.”

Brewster died in his sleep, age 80, “surrounded by friends who mourned, and wept over him, and ministered what help and comfort they could. And he, again, recomforted them whilst he could.” His sickness was brief. He was able to get out of bed until his last day. A few minutes before he died, he “drew his breath long, as a man falling into a sound sleep, without any pangs or gaspings, and so sweetly departed this life unto a better.”

Seems like a fine way to go.

We descend from the Brewster’s son Love through Mabel Prescott’s maternal grandfather, George Grinnell.

Sources:

Bradford, William. History of Plymouth Plantation, 1620-1647

Dexter, Franklin B. The England and Holland of the Pilgrims p322

Johnson, Caleb. Mayflower History www.mayflowerhistory.com/brewster-william/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Bradford_(governor)#Early_life

A Look Through Time http://alookthrutime.com/the-scrooby-congregation/

The Story of the Pilgrim Fathers, 1606-1623, as told by Themselves, their Friends, and their Enemies, London 1897. Edited from the original texts by Edward Arber.

Throop, Louise Walsh. Soulekindred.org Mayflower Passenger George Soule; Printer’s Devil in Leiden