Boston, like Plymouth, gave them a warm welcome. The cordiality of their reception to the old town was acknowledged on behalf of the pilgrims by Dr. Dunning. "Our fathers found it difficult to get away from Boston," said he, "and from the kindness you have shown us we are much afraid that you are planning to detain us also." The character of the "detention" was very different with nearly three centuries intervening, and this Dr. Dunning and his friends abundantly realised.
The visitors were taken over the old parish church, and were duly impressed by its size and grandeur as a whole; and the scene was most striking and memorable when, gathered within its beautiful chancel, these representative New World men, many of them with the blood of the Pilgrim Fathers in their veins, joined in singing together the noble hymn, "O God, our help in ages past." Next the Guildhall was visited. Here the disused sessions-court, where the fugitives were arraigned in 1607, and other upper rooms were scrutinised.
But most attractive were the kitchen and prison beneath. The cells must in fact have had more "prisoners" in them that day than they had held for a long time, for there was scarcely a member of the company who was not shut up in at least one of them during the inspection. They thus realised something of what their forefathers actually endured; the taste of the bitterness was slight, and wanting in the old-time flavour which the prisoners' treatment imparted, but it was sufficient to call forth expressions of abhorrence at the thought of continued confinement in such a place.
At last the pilgrims said farewell to a town crowded with precious memories and entrained for Lincoln, where their welcome by the Free Churches and Cathedral authorities was in keeping with that extended to them everywhere on their route. At Lincoln they received an address. "We feel," said the Nonconformists there, "that in welcoming you to this county of ours, we are welcoming you back to your ancestral home, for Lincolnshire people never forget that their county is inseparably associated with the history of the Pilgrim Church. We claim the great John Robinson, the pastor of the Pilgrim church, as our own, and the neighbouring town of Gainsborough boasts of having been for some time the church's home. We are proud of the men, of the testimony they bore, of the work they did. All England is debtor to the men of the Pilgrim Church for their heroic witness in behalf of a pure and Scriptural faith and freedom of conscience worship."
And "the neighbouring town of Gainsborough," home of the Pilgrim Church, gave itself up at this time to a ceremonial stone-laying of the Robinson Memorial Church, a function which the American pilgrims attended, together with the Honourable T. F. Bayard, the United States Ambassador, who made a journey into Lincolnshire to lay this stone, and Congregationalists gathered from all parts.
Photograph by Welchman Bros., Retford
Robinson Memorial Church, Gainsborough
The corner-stone of the church was laid by Mr. Bayard in June, 1896
First the pilgrims drove to Scrooby, Bawtry, and Austerfield, where they inspected Brewster's house and Bradford's cottage and other objects of absorbing interest linked with the lives of the exiled Separatists. They then entered Gainsborough—that "foreign-looking town," subject of George Eliot's romantic pen, birthplace of John Robinson—where an address was presented to Mr. Bayard at the Town Hall, and luncheon was partaken of at the Old Hall, one of Gainsborough's most cherished antiquities, where John Smyth and his brethren held services and John Wesley many times preached. A move was next made to the site of the future Robinson Memorial Hall, a building at once a tribute to a worthy Englishman and an agency for the development of Christian work in the home of the Pilgrim Fathers. The proceedings were under the presidency of the Reverend J. M. Jones, chairman of the Congregational Union of England and Wales. To Mr. Bayard was handed a silver trowel, the gift of the congregation of the Gainsborough church, bearing an inscription and engravings of the Mayflower and of Delfshaven, on whose beach Robinson knelt in prayer with the Pilgrim band ere they set out on their long and checkered voyage. Having laid the cornerstone, Mr. Bayard sketched the early life of John Robinson, on from his Cambridge career to his harassed ministry at Norwich, his withdrawal to Lincolnshire in 1604 and the inception of the Scrooby congregation, whose faith found cause for hope and cheerful courage in the dark hours of their persecution, adversity, and affliction. He went on to picture the blessings of civil and religious liberty which we are apt to accept and enjoy without giving much heed to the generations that in bygone years toiled and suffered to secure them for us. How small, said he, the measure of our gratitude and infrequent our recognition of those who