Photograph by Hackford, Boston
Guildhall and South Street, Boston
They must have had secret friends in the place; for some time after their Boston adventure the Government sent down Commissioners to make serious inquiry as to who had cut off the crosses from the tops of the maces carried before the Mayor to church "on Sundays and Thursdays and solemn times." John Cotton, the Puritan vicar, openly condemned the act. Suspicion fell upon churchwarden Atherton Hough. But he denied it, though "he confessed he did before that year break off the hand and arm of a picture of a Pope (as it seemed) standing over a pillar of the outside of the steeple very high, which hand had the form of a church in it." The confession seems to have been safely made, and doubtless churchwarden Hough was proud of it. He might have been better employed at that moment; but if any be tempted to censure his Puritan zeal, let them remember the temper of the times in which he lived. There was something more than wanton mischief behind it all. It was not in fact a "picture" of a Pope, but an image much more innocent. But the resemblance was sufficient for Atherton Hough.
The venerable Guildhall, where Brewster and the rest faced the justices, stands in a street containing the queerest of riverside warehouses. One of them, old Gysors' Hall, was once the home of a family belonging to the merchant guilds of Boston, which gave to London two Mayors and a Constable of the Tower in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The Guildhall itself dates from the thirteenth century; the image of St. Mary which once adorned its front shared the fate of the "picture" on the church tower, with the difference that the Virgin vanished more completely than the "Pope." The hall is regularly used by the public; and local authorities with long and honourable history still deliberate in the ancient court-room, with its wagon roof, its arch beams, its wainscoted walls, and the Boston coat-of-arms and the table of Boston Mayors since 1545 proudly displayed to view. Except for its fittings and furniture the chamber presents much the appearance now that it did when the Pilgrim Fathers, brought up from the cells which exist to-day just as when they tenanted them, stood pathetic figures on its floor and were interrogated by a body of justices, courteous and well-disposed, but powerless to give them back their liberty.
Photograph by Hackford, Boston
The Old Courtroom, Guildhall, Boston
Where the Pilgrims' Fathers faced the Justices. In the floor on the left is the trap door to the staircase leading down to the Cells. The Court ceased to be held here in 1843
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Dr. John Brown in "The Pilgrim Fathers of New England and their Puritan Successors."
[2] "Seeing themselves thus molested, and that there was no hope of their continuance there, they resolved to go into ye Low Countries, wher they heard was freedome of religion for all men; as also how Sundrie from London, and other parts of ye land had been exiled and persecuted for ye same cause, and were gone thither and lived at Amsterdam and in other places of ye land, so affter they had continued togeither about a year, and kept their meetings every Saboth, in one place or other, exercising the worship of God amongst themselves, notwithstanding all ye dilligence and malice of their adversaries, they seeing they could no longer continue in yt condition, they resolved to get over into Hollăd as they could which was in yy year 1607-1608."—Bradford's "History of Plymouth Plantation."