The women of the Mayflower and women of Plymouth colony

by Ethel J. R. C. Noyes

This decade flashes many another change before our eyes. In a few years the first church building has been erected in Plymouth, with Richard Church as architect and builder, as seems appropriate. Its bell rings out for many a year, succeeding the roll of drums to summon worshipers. Many of the girls marry and the younger children succeed to their pleasures. Mercy Bradford has gone to live in Boston as Mercy Vermayes. Her mother’s loneliness is partly relieved by the coming to her of her remaining sister in England, Mary Carpenter. This sister is rather notable among the women of Plymouth, in that she never married. Her attractions were not less than her sisters’; indeed, from what was said of her, quite an appropriate companion for the governor’s wife, her sister, Alice. Another exception to the general rule may be noted, and another spinster of the colony named Elizabeth Pool, daughter of Sir William, who coming as Plymouth’s boundaries expanded, and possessing wealth, property and intelligence, remained unwon. These two esteemed women, one a resident of Plymouth town, the other, one of the founders of the new township of Taunton, are an interesting contrast. Miss Carpenter lived quietly, uneventfully, until ninety years old; of a religious frame of mind and given to kind deeds, unknown, through her retiring nature. Miss Pool seems much more modern in her career. She erected iron works and was altogether enterprising and a promoter of advancement for her settlement. She brought over a minister for the church in Taunton, so had a thought for religion, also, not only for herself but for others. A record states “she died greatly honored, in 1654 aged 66.”

Edward Winslow was again governor for a brief period and then made another trip to England, at the request of the authorities of the Bay, as they had recognized his great abilities as a negotiator of business interests and there were some affairs pressing on the Bay Colony which he undertook to remove. This was to the regret of the Plymouth people who were reluctant to have him go from their own affairs. He left Susanna and his children, almost grown now, in comfortable Careswell, and there, for several years, his wife awaited his return. Not that the Bay or his own affairs took very long, but England herself needed him, as it seemed, and he agreed to a diplomatic mission to an island colony. Loving Plymouth and loving England he was not destined to rest in either; his grave was made in the ocean he had crossed so often. Susanna had parted from her husband for the last time.

Other deaths among the first comers saddened the Pilgrims. Elizabeth Hopkins closed her long and honorable career as one of the women of Plymouth. Her husband soon followed her. In this year perhaps its greatest blow fell on Plymouth when their leader in spiritual and often adviser in temporal things passed from among them. No words can more fittingly describe the beautiful end of his earthly life than those of the governor. There is no greater record of loyalty and affection than that shown in the nearly fifty years between his followers and himself. While his fame, as William Bradford said, is more enduring than a marker at his grave—which he lacks, in company with so many—such words as the governor wrote of him and such work as Constantino Brumidi has made to represent him, serve to keep it vigorous through the centuries. (In the President’s room at the Capitol in Washington, Brumidi has painted Elder Brewster as typifying Religion.)

When Mary Chilton Winslow moved to Boston, it could not have seemed more strange or different than Plymouth had come to be to her by that time. Except the Aldens, the Howlands and her sister-in-law, few remained who had been her companions and friends on the Mayflower and in building the colony. Her husband had become a prosperous merchant in the West India trade and perhaps Boston seemed a necessary relief to them. Their position became at once prominent and important and her life flowed happily onward for many years. In one of her daughters, Myles Standish, Jr., found his fate, and upon their marriage likewise settled in Boston.

Meanwhile Susanna Winslow continued in eminence of circumstance, to live at her beautiful home in Marshfield. Her boys, Resolved and Peregrine, had married and made homes of their own but remained devoted to her. Josiah, her youngest son, reproducing in a marked degree the look and manners of his talented father, remained with her. As he grew into the handsome, courtly man, whom all admired, she must have smiled as she looked sometimes at the little shoes he had worn as her baby and which she carefully kept with other treasures—such as the cradle in which she had rocked all her boys and little girl. That little girl was now Mrs. Robert Brooks of Scituate.

In the heyday of Plymouth’s prosperity a gentleman in England, long interested in colonial life by the reports of it which had found their way to him in his comfortable ancestral home, planned a visit to see life across the sea. With his young daughter, Penelope, Mr. Herbert Pelham came to the Old Colony. The spirit of adventure in them both and the interest they found in their new surroundings caused them to linger for a period beyond the length of a casual visit in their temporary home in Marshfield. To the men, the companionship of Herbert Pelham was a delight, and seeing her father’s pleasure, Penelope, with her own various employments, did not long for home. Her’s is the last romance we may notice as closely connected with the women of our special interest in Plymouth colony, even as that of her mother-in-law, was the first. Penelope Pelham, with her high-bred manner and aristocratic face, made the only permanent impression on the heart of Josiah Winslow and we can easily fancy that in making her bead bag, Penelope had plenty of time to decide that for him she would renounce all thought of returning to her home, and remain a colonial woman. The bead bag, her dressing-case and her portrait are other links connecting us to those vivid lives of our chronicle.

Soon Josiah Winslow was called to the place occupied by his father, for a time, and by William Bradford for many years—when the great governor had left it vacant, forever—so Penelope became the first lady of the land in her adopted home and Susanna closed her life’s history in the first place which had been hers so often in the colony—first mother after the Mayflower found harbor, first bride of Plymouth and now mother of the first native born governor of New England. Truly the footprints of Anna Fuller, since we found them first in Leyden, have led us along a colorful pathway.

The records we find of her brilliant daughter-in-law show her a character after Susanna Winslow’s own type. The second mistress of Careswell lived there for many happy years ere she and her family were forced to flee from it under the fearful scourge of Philip’s War.

Thus on through its seventy years of shadow and sunshine, heroic daring, splendid achievement and independence, we may follow the fascinating records of Plymouth Colony—especially as those records are tinted even faintly by the footprints and finger-touches of its women.

As the first death on the Mayflower at anchor was that of a woman, Dorothy Bradford, so the last survivor of the original Mayflower company was a woman, Mary Allerton Cushman, who saw all of the life with its chances and changes of which we read.