The western division of the original company appears to have been formed into a distinct church in the summer of 1606, and, according to the testimony of Governor Bradford, in his notice of Elder Brewster, “they ordinarily met at his [Brewster’s] house on the Lord’s day (which was a manor [i. e. manor-house] of the Bishop’s), and with great love he entertained them when they came, making provision for them, to his great charge.”
AUTOGRAPHS OF JOHN ROBINSON.
[No wholly authenticated signature of Robinson is known. Dr. Dexter, in his Congregationalism as seen in its Literature, pp. xx, 359, gives the upper of these two, as from a book in the British Museum, “believed by the experts of that institution to have belonged to him.” It is evidently by the same hand as the lower of the two, which, with another very like it, is upon the title of Sir Edwin Sandys’s Relation of the State of Religion, London, 1605, belonging to Charles Deane, Esq., of Cambridge. Hunter, Founders of New Plymouth, p. 155, has pointed out how parts of this book show its author to have been “much in advance of his time,” and that there is “a correspondency in some parts with the celebrated Farewell Address of Robinson.” It is easy to suppose, therefore, that Robinson once owned the little treatise. Hunter errs in assigning 1687 as the date of its first edition. That of 1605 is called in the 1629 edition a surreptitious one, and there is a copy in the Boston Athenæum, with MS. annotations said to be by the author. Dr. Dexter points out 1629 as the year of the first authorized edition, and there were others in 1632, 1633, 1638, and 1673. (Congregationalism, App. nos. 299, 568; Palfrey, New England, i. 191.)—Ed.]
William Brewster, the chief layman of this congregation, was postmaster, or “post,” as the usual term was, at Scrooby, a small village in the northern part of Nottinghamshire, ten miles west of Gainsborough. Though Scrooby was a mere hamlet, its station on the London and Edinburgh post-road gave Brewster full occupation, especially after the two capitals were united under one king, as it was his duty to provide food and lodging for all travellers by post on Government business, as well as relays of horses for them and for the conveyance of Government despatches. He was a native of the village, and had matriculated in 1580 at the University of Cambridge, where he came under Puritan influence; he soon, however, quitted his books to enter the service of William Davison, Elizabeth’s upright and Puritan Secretary of State, whose promising career was sacrificed to her duplicity in the matter of the execution of Mary Stuart. Under Davison, Brewster had experience both at court and in foreign embassies; he remained with his master for a year or two after the fall of the latter in 1587, and then retired to his native village. There he assisted his father, who was then postmaster, until the latter’s death in 1590; and after a brief interval the son, then about twenty-three years of age,[475] succeeded to the father’s place through the intercession of his old patron, Davison.[476]
In 1603 his annual stipend from the Government was raised from £30 to £36, the two sums corresponding in present values to perhaps six and seven hundred dollars respectively. The manor-house of Scrooby, built originally as a hunting-seat for the Archbishops of York, though in Brewster’s time “much decayed,”[477] had been occupied for many years by his father as bailiff for the archbishops, and as representative of their vested interests in the surrounding property, which was leased to Sir Samuel Sandys, of London.
The clerical leaders of the church, meeting in the great hall or chapel under Brewster’s roof, were Richard Clyfton and John Robinson. The former had been instituted in 1586, at the age of thirty-three, rector of Babworth, a village six or seven miles southeast of Scrooby, and had continued there until the undisguised Puritanism of his teachings caused his removal, probably in connection with Archbishop Bancroft’s summary proceedings against Nonconformist ministers at the end of 1604. His associate, Robinson, apparently a native of the neighborhood, had entered Cambridge University in 1592, and after gaining a Fellowship had spent some years in the ministry in or near Norwich; but about 1604 he threw up his cure on conscientious grounds, and returning to the North, allied himself with Separatists in Gainsborough. He was, by the testimony of an opponent (Robert Baillie), “the most learned, polished, and modest spirit among the Brownists.”
AUSTERFIELD CHURCH.
[This cut follows a photograph owned by Mr. Charles Deane, who also furnished a photograph, after which the accompanying fac-simile of the registry of the baptism of Bradford, preserved in this church, is made; see Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc. x. 39. The view of the church given in the title of Bartlett’s Pilgrim Fathers is the one followed by Dexter in Sabbath at Home, 1867, p. 131, and in Harper’s Magazine, 1877, p. 183. Raine, in his Parish of Blyth, Westminster, 1860, gives a larger view; and Bartlett, p. 36, gives the old Norman door within the porch.—Ed.]