"Let it not be greeveous unto you yt you have been instruments to breake ye ise for others who come after with less difficulty, the honour shall be yours to ye worlds end....
"We bear you always in our brests, and our harty affection is towards you all, as are ye harts of hundreds more which never saw your faces, who doubtles pray for your saftie as their owne, as we our selves both doe & ever shall, that ye same God which hath so marvelously preserved from seas, foes, and famine, will still preserve you from all future dangers, and make you honourable amongst men, and glorious in blise at ye last day. And so ye Lord be with you all & send us joyfull news from you, and inable us with one shoulder so to accomplish & perfecte this worke, as much glorie may come to Him yt confoundeth ye mighty by the weak, and maketh small thinges great. To whose greatnes, be all glorie for ever & ever."
Edward Winslow was appointed to return with the Anne, for the procuring of needed supplies and especially to report the truth about the Colony, whose enemies had maligned it. This gifted and honorable man rendered a valuable service to Plymouth at that day, and to posterity ever since, by his detailed journal of events to that time, entitled Good Newes from New-England. He and Bradford, unnamed, had previously prepared a Journal of the Plantation through June of the first full year, which was printed in 1622. That and the longer account were embodied in "Purchas his Pilgrims" in 1625.
In the feminine contingent of these latest arrivals, there appeared one who was to share her life for thirty-three years with the Governor of the Old Colony. She was previously well acquainted with him, and born in the same year. Alice Carpenter was the widow of Edward Southworth a descendant of Sir Gilbert Southworth, knight of Lancaster. When a maiden of seventeen, she had cast in her lot with the Puritans and lived a while as an exile in Holland, with her father. She became a woman of devout mind and great force of character.
Alice must often have seen William Bradford in the Separatist community at Leyden. And in her widowhood, two years after the tragic decease of Dorothy May Bradford, she received with favor his suit for marriage, which was happily consummated at Plymouth on August fourteen, Old Style.
She brought over considerable property with her. Dorothy Bradford's son John, a lad under seven then, did not come till a few years later. He himself though married died childless, after threescore years of life; and he was given the position of Deputy to the General Court, before his father passed away. He received a house and land from a paternal will.
Goodwife Southworth's own sons Thomas and Constant Southworth rejoined her within seven years, meeting their half-brothers, the Plymouth family having then been blessed with three little ones, William, Mercy and Joseph. The Bradford household, of parents and children, therefore comprised eight persons, residing in the Governor's assigned homestead at the south-west corner of the square in the intersection of the two main streets.
Mrs. Bradford engaged earnestly and long in labors for the young people at Plymouth.
Though she survived her life-partner by nearly thirteen years, he had the joy of knowing some of the fifteen children of his son and namesake William, the Deputy Governor and Major, and several of his other son Joseph's seven children. His only daughter, Mercy, married and was living in 1650. The grandmother's name was repeated in Alice, daughter of William Junior.
Following a long debility, on April 5, 1670, shortly before the dark days of King Philip's war, the Governor's consort closed, at her home of peace, her course of almost fourscore years; and a relative, Nathaniel Morton, Secretary of Plymouth Colony, writing verses which are copied on the first original leaf of Bradford's History, "Upon the life and death of that godly matron Mistris Alice Bradford," said of her that after the obsequies of her husband,