esting country while our Fathers were witnesses and partakers
of its fortunes. Within a year after they reached Amsterdam,
and the very year they removed to Leyden, the grand twelve
years truce between Spain and her revolted Colonies had been
negotiated and ratified. Those Colonies had now virtually
established their freedom and independence. Olden Barne veldt
and Prince Maurice had reconciled their animosities and rival
ries for a time; and the great Republic henceforth, though
not for ever, to be known and recognized as the United States
of the Netherlands was enjoying internal as well as external
peace and rest, after a fearful struggle of forty years duration.
It is a charming coincidence, certainly, that the coming of the
Pilgrims was thus simultaneous with the commencement of that
blessed truce, which was destined, too, by its own limitation, to
last during the precise period of their stay there. One might
almost picture the bow of peace and promise, lifting itself in all
OF THE LANDING OF THE PILGRIMS. 89
its many-colored glories, and overarching that blood-stained soil,
to welcome the little band of fugitives for conscience sake to
their temporary repose, and to assure them that war should
crimson its fields no more while they should bless it with their
presence !
At Leyden, they find, as Bradford says, " a fair and beautiful
city, and of a sweet situation, but made more famous by the
University wherewith it is adorned, in which of late had been
so many learned men." That was, certainly, a noble University,
erected as a monument to the heroism of those who had fought
and fallen in the dreadful siege which the city had endured so
grandly in 1574, erected in the same spirit in which our
Memorial Hall has recently been founded at Cambridge by the
Alumni of Harvard. Famous professors, and famous scholars
also, it had indeed enjoyed. The learned Arminius had died
just as the Pilgrims arrived there, but his teachings and doc
trines were left to be the subject of endless disputation. The
marvellous Joseph Scaliger, too, had died the same year ; but
his not less marvellous pupil, Hugo Grotius, was only at the
outset of his great career, having published his Latin Tragedy,
"The Suffering Christ," the very year of their arrival at Am
sterdam, and his " Mare Liberum " the year of their removal
to Leyden.
The youthful Bradford may not, perhaps, have been much in
the way of taking note or notice of what was going on at this
great seat of learning, as, in default of other means of support,
he had put himself as an apprentice to a French Protestant, and
was acquiring the art of dyeing silk. But Brewster had found
employment as a tutor to some of the } r outh of the city and the
University, and was teaching them the English language by a
grammar of his own construction ; while, at the same time, he
had set up a printing-press, and " was instrumental in publish
ing several books against the hierarchy, which could not obtain
a license in England." To him the University and its learned
professors, and all their proceedings and lectures, must have
been as familiar as they were interesting. His revered friend
and pastor, Robinson, moreover, as we learn from the re
searches of an accomplished and lamented New England scholar
90 TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY
and traveller, the late Mr. George Sumner, was formally
admitted to the privileges of a member or subject of the Uni
versity four or five years after his arrival at Leyden. By the
investigations of Mr. Sumner, too, and of a late American Min
ister at the Hague, the Hon. Henry C. Murphy, we have been
enabled to identify the very spot, in the Cathedral Church of
St. Peter, where the precious remains of this holy man, whose
memory is so dear to New England, were at least temporarily
deposited ; while the record of that burial has also most happily
helped us to fix the exact place of his residence as long as he
lived there. In that residence, and not in any church edi
fice, for they had none, there is the best reason for thinking
that the Pilgrims worshipped ; and thanks to the pious pains
of the Rev. Henry Martyn Dexter, of Boston, whose labors in
the cause of Pilgrim history I may find further cause for ac
knowledging, a plate has been affixed to the walls of the build
ing which now stands on that site, inscribed, " On this spot
lived, taught, and died, JOHN ROBINSON, 1611-1625."
I cannot forget that I lingered in Leyden, for some hours,
two or three years ago, for the single purpose of visiting that
site, and the place of the grave of him who made it so mem
orable for ever ; but I could find no one at hand to point either
of them out for me ; and, but for the record of Mr. Sumner and
the inscription of Dr. Dexter, I might have missed all that
there is there to recall the memory of the Fathers of New Eng
land. For, indeed, this is all, the place of a temporary grave
and the site of a dwelling long ago levelled to the ground,
this is absolutely all which can be identified of the Pilgrims
home at Leyden for eleven years. Yet no New Englander, I
think, can visit that city on an early autumn or a late summer s
day, and behold the ancient buildings on which their eyes must
have been accustomed to look ; and gaze on the countless canals,
and on the flowing river, on the bosom of which they must so
often have sailed, and on the banks of which they must so often
have rested ; and drink in that soft, hazy, golden sunshine,
which one of the great masters of that region, Cuyp, not far
from the very time and place at which they were enjoying it,
was engaged in making the chief charm of not a few of his most
OP THE LANDING OF THE PILGRIMS. 91
exquisite landscapes, without being conscious of the inspira
tion of the scene ; nor without feeling and acknowledging that
there is, and will for ever be, a magnetic sympathy between
Leyden and Plymouth Rock, which no material batteries or
tangible wires are needed to kindle and keep alive.
Leyden must indeed have been, as we know it was, most dear
to the hearts of the Pilgrim Fathers. There they found rest
and safety. There, to use their own language, they enjoyed
"much sweet and delightful society and spiritual comfort to
gether in the ways of God," and "lived together in peace and
love and holiness." But there, too, they were joined by not a
few of those who who were to be most serviceable and most
dear to them in their future experiences and trials.
There they were joined by JOHN CARVER, of whom we know
enough for his own glory, and for his perpetual remembrance
among men, in knowing almost nothing except that he was
counted worthy to be chosen the first Governor of the little
band, and that he died, here at Plymouth, after a brief career,
in the faithful discharge of that office.
There ROBERT CUSHMAN joined them, who, in spite of some
infirmities of temper and some infelicities of conduct, and
though at one time he seemed to have "put his hand to the
plough and to have looked back," and was missing from the
group whose advent we celebrate to-day, came over not long
afterwards, reinstated in the confidence of those with whom he
had been so prominently associated at Leyden ; delivered, in
the Common House of the Plantation, that memorable sermon
on Self-Love, the first printed sermon of New England, if not
of our whole continent; and, after a perhaps premature return
home, continued to watch carefully over the interests of the
Pilgrims in England, writing letters remarkable alike for the
beauty of their style and for the prudence of their counsel ; and
was lamented by Bradford, when he heard of his death in 1624,
as " a wise and faithful friend."
There they were joined by MILES STANDISH, the intrepid
soldier and famous captain of New England ; who, having
served on the side of the Dutch in the armies of England in the
war against Spain, and having now been released by the great
92 TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY
truce from further campaigning in the Old World, united him
self with the Pilgrims, and, though not a member of their
church, followed their fortunes, and fought their battles gal
lantly to the end. A little man himself, hardly more than
five feet high, the grand army with which he performed " his
most capital exploit " was probably the smallest which was ever
mustered for a serious conflict in the annals of human warfare,
only eight men besides their leader. But, "in small room
large heart inclosed," he had acquired, not perhaps from Caesar s
Commentaries, his favorite study, but certainly from some other
source, a knowledge which some ruthless warriors of the pres
ent day have failed to exhibit, the knowledge where to stop,
as well as when to strike ; and, having secured a signal victory,
he brought home in safety every man whom he carried out.
Honor to Miles Standish, " the stalwart captain of Plymouth,"
of whose restrained wrath, when the Puritan influence had
come in to temper the profanity for which there was a proverbial
license in Flanders, our charming Longfellow would seem to
have caught the very accent and cadence, when he says of it,
"Sometimes it seemed like a prayer, and sometimes it sounded like swearing; "
and whose threefold accomplishments he so tersely sums up,
when he describes him as doubting
" Which of the three he should choose for his consolation and comfort,
Whether the wars of the Hebrews, the famous campaigns of the Romans,
Or the artillery practice, designed for belligerent Christians."
A higher tribute to the fidelity, vigilance, and courage of the
old Plymouth captain could hardly have been paid, than when
the late venerable Judge Davis, a Plymouth man, and full of
the original Plymouth spirit, not many years before his death,
unwilling to be wanting to the volunteer patrol service, in
Boston, on some occasion of real or imaginary peril, made
solemn application to our old Massachusetts Historical Society
for the use of one of his reputed albeit somewhat rusty
swords, and walked the midnight round with that for his trusty
and all-sufficient companion !
OF THE LANDING OF THE PILGRIMS. 93
But there, too, at Leyden, they were joined, by the acci
dents of travel, as it would seem, in 1617, by one of the very
noblest of our little band, who was soon associated most lead-
ingly and lovingly with all their spiritual as well as temporal
concerns ; their Governor for three years, when Bradford had
"by importunity got off; " the narrator and chronicler of not a
few of the most interesting passages of their history ; the leader
of not a few of their most important enterprises ; a man of em
inent activity, resolution, and bravery ; who did not shrink
from offering himself as a hostage to the savages, while a con
ference was held and a treaty made with one of their barbarous
chieftains ; who did not shrink from imprisonment, and the
danger of death, in confronting, as an agent of Plymouth and
Massachusetts, the tyrannical Archbishop Laud ; who earned
a gentler and more practical title to remembrance as the im
porter of the first neat cattle ever introduced into New England ;
an earnest and devoted friend to the civilization of the Indian
tribes and their conversion to Christianity ; the chief commis
sioner of Oliver Cromwell in his warlike designs upon an island,
which our own hero President has so recently attempted to
secure by peaceful purchase : EDWARD WINSLOW, the only
one of the Pilgrim Fathers of whom we have an authentic por
trait ; whose old seat of Careswell, at Marshfield, was the chosen
home of Webster ; and whose remains, had they not been com
mitted to the deep, when he died so sadly on the sea, at the
close of his unsuccessful expedition to St. Domingo, would have
been counted among the most precious dust which New Eng
land could possess.
Leyden must indeed have been dear to the Pilgrims, as the
place where so many of these leading spirits first entered into
their association, and first pledged their lives and fortunes to the
sacred enterprise.
But Leyden, and the whole marvellous land of which it was
at that day one of the most interesting and enlightened cities,
had a charm for our Forefathers far above all mere personal
considerations. It was a land to which the great German poet,
dramatist, and historian, Schiller, in his " Reyolt of the Nether
lands," gave the noblest testimony, in saying that " every injury
94 TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY
inflicted b^y a tyrant gave a right of citizenship in Holland." It
was a land to which that quaint old Suffolk County essayist,
Owen Felltham, paid a still higher tribute when he described it
as " a place of refuge for sectaries of all denominations." " Let
but some of our Separatists be asked," said he, with evident ref
erence to our English exiles of whom he was a contemporary,
" let but some of our Separatists be asked, and they shall swear
that the Elysian Fields are there." " If you are unsettled,"
says he in another place, " if you are unsettled in your religion,
you may try here all, and take at last what you like best. If
you fancy none, you have a pattern to follow of two that would
be a church by themselves."
Yes, that was exactly it, "a Church by themselves;" and
there, in that church by themselves, our Pilgrim Fathers first
tasted the sweets of civil and religious freedom, and enjo}^ed
that liberty to worship God, according to the dictates of their
own consciences, which to them was worth every sacrifice and
above all price. There, too, just as they removed from Amster
dam to Leyden, the extraordinary sound was heard, from the
lips of a Roman Catholic, and in behalf of his Roman Catholic
brethren, of an appeal for liberty of conscience which was
never surpassed by the founders of Rhode Island, Maryland, or
Pennsylvania. " Those," said President Jeannin, most forcibly
and eloquently, on taking leave of the States General, u those
cannot be said to share any enjoyment from whom has been
taken the power of serving God according to the religion in
which they were brought up. On the contrary, no slavery is
more intolerable, nor more exasperates the mind than such re
straint. You know this well, my Lords States ; you know, too,
that it was the principal, the most puissant cause that made
you fly to arms and scorn all dangers, in order to effect your
deliverance from this servitude. You know that it has excited
similar movements in various parts of Christendom, and even in
the kingdom of France, with such fortunate success everywhere
as to make it appear that God had so willed it, in order to prove
that religion ought to be taught and inspired by the movements
which come from the Holy Ghost, and not by the force of
OF THE LANDING OF THE PILGRIMS. 95
We know not precisely how far the ears of the Pilgrims may
have been regaled, and their hearts encouraged and strengthened,
by this grand appeal from so unaccustomed a source. Brews-
ter. who, as we have seen, had been in the Low Countries
before, as Secretary to the English Ambassador, may hardly
have been ignorant of it. But, at all events, it affords most
significant testimony to the spirit of religious liberty which per
vaded the land in which such words at that period could have
been uttered ; and, coming from the lips of a Romanist, it must
have put to shame any Protestant bigotry or intolerance, if any
such were lurking there, which might have restrained the full
freedom of our English exiles. Dr. Belknap, in his American
Biography, may, perhaps, have anticipated events in stating, as
he does, that Robinson himself, about this time, after a friendly
conference with one upon whose name he had recently made a
petulant pun, in an angry controversy, changing it reproach
fully from Ames to Amiss, relaxed the rigor of his Separat
ism ; published a book, allowing and defending the lawfulness
of communicating with the Church of England; "allowed
pious members of the Church of England, and of all the re
formed churches, to communicate with his church ; and declared
that he separated from no church, but from the corruptions of
all churches." But the statement was substantially true of a
later period, if not of this. The book, he adds, gained him the
title of a Semi-Separatist, and was so offensive to the rigid
Brownists of Amsterdam that they would scarcely hold commu
nion with the Church of Leyden.
But, alas ! more serious dissensions than these were soon to
agitate again that whole united Republic, and to involve it in a
crime of which all the multitudinous seas which surround it
could hardly wash out the stain. The successor to the chair of
Arminius in the University of Leyden Vorstius had not only
stirred up " hearts of controversy " in his own land by teaching
and preaching the peculiar doctrines of his master, but had
roused the special indignation of the Royal theological polemic
and titular Defender of the Faith across the channel, that
same James I., who a few years before had cut short a confer
ence with the Puritan leaders, at Hampton Court, by declaring
96 TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY
that " he would make them conform or he would harry them
out of the land," and who, in this respect certainly, had been
as good as his word. The recent assassination of his glorious
fellow-sovereign, Henry IV. of France, had revived and quick
ened his antipathy not to Roman Catholics only, but to all
religionists who did not agree with himself; and he had the
insolence now to demand that the obnoxious Professor of Ley-
den should be dismissed from his chair and banished from the
States, leaving it, also, to their " Christian wisdom " whether
he should not be burned at the stake for " his atheism and
blasphemies." The States were compelled to comply, and did
most humiliatingly comply, with this demand ; but the banish
ment of Vorstius only the more inflamed the theological strife
which raged throughout their dominions. Prince Maurice and
Olden Barneveldt were again at each other s throats ; the for
mer as the leader of the Calvinist party, and the latter as the
leader of the Arminians, with Grotius as his second. And,
incredible as it seems to us at this hour, the controversy was
only terminated by one of the most infamous judicial murders
which pollute the annals of mankind; taking its loathsome
place in the calendar of crime by the side of the execution of
Sir Walter Raleigh, the year before, and of Algernon Sydney
and Lord William Russell half a century later. On the 18th
of May, 1619, Olden Barneveldt, the noble patriot and benefac
tor, second to no one among the founders of the Republic and
the authors of its liberties, was condemned to death and be
headed at the Hague ; while Grotius was sentenced to perpet
ual imprisonment, from which, however, the ingenuity of his
wife happily released him at the end of two years. 1
I would gladly have found some allusion to these monstrous
outrages in some of the journals or letters of the Pilgrims.
Occurring, as they did, during the very last year of their resi
dence there, I would gladly believe that some abhorrence of
such crimes may have mingled with their motives for seeking
another place of refuge. Although their religious sympathies
1 The full story of Olden Barneveldt and Hugo Grotius was charmingly told, a
few years afterwards (1874), by our accomplished historian Motley, whose death is,
at this moment, the subject of so much sorrow at home and abroad.
OF THE LANDING OF THE PILGRIMS. 97
were strongly with the Calvinist party, and their pastor, Rob
inson, had disputed publicly against the doctrines of Arminius,
putting his antagonist Episcopius, the Arminian Professor, to
" an apparent nonplus," as Bradford tells us, " not once only,
but a second and third time, before a great and public audience,
and winning a famous victory for the truth," and " much honor
and respect for those who loved the truth," yet he and Brews-
ter and Bradford and Winslow must have shrunk with horror
from this atrocious murder. There is good reason for believing
that Brews ter, indeed, left Leyden with his family not many
weeks afterwards ; and I will not doubt that such events in
creased the eagerness of them all once more to change the
place of their habitation, and hastened their negotiations with
the merchant adventurers in London.
But their purpose of quitting Holland had been conceived
nearly two years before this terrible tragedy was enacted. As
early as the autumn of 1617, Robert Cushman and John Carver
had been sent as their agents to attempt an arrangement for
their removal to America with the Virginia Company in Lon
don; and in 1618 the Church of Leyden with a view to
removing the objections, and conciliating the favor of the King
and others had adopted those memorable Seven Articles,
first published in 1856 by our accomplished historian Bancroft,
in which the authority of his Majesty and of his Bishops is
acknowledged, with an unqualified assent " to the confession of
faith published in the name of the Church of England and to
every article thereof." The adoption of these " Seven Articles,"
and the appeals addressed to Sir Edwin Sandys and others by
Brewster and Robinson, at length elicited an assurance that
" both the King and the Bishops had consented to wink at their
departure."
" Conniving at them and winking at their departure " were
all the assurances they could wring from Royalty. " To allow
or tolerate them by his public authority, under his seal, they
found it would not be." And though the Virginia Company
were strongly desirous to have them go to America under their
auspices, and willing to grant them a patent with as ample priv
ileges as they could grant to any one, the feuds and factions in
7
98 TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY
the council of the Company occasioned such delays that no
patent was sealed until the 9th of June, 1619 ; and, after all
the labor and cost of procuring it, it was never made use of.
An agreement, however, was entered into with Thomas Weston
and other merchant adventurers ; the Mayflower was hired to
await them at Southampton ; the Speedwell was bought to take
them over to England, and keep them company afterwards ; a
day of solemn humiliation was spent, after a parting sermon
from Robinson, who was to remain behind with half the mem
bers of his church, " in pouring out prayers to the Lord with
great fervency mixed with abundance of tears," and so they
proceeded to Delft Haven ; and after another most touching
parting scene, all kneeling in prayer and taking leave of each
other, u with mutual embraces and many tears," the sail was
hoisted, and with a prosperous wind they came in a short time
to Southampton. There they found " the bigger ship come
from London, lying ready, with all the rest of their company."
A few days more are occupied in dealing with their agents and
the merchant adventurers ; a noble farewell letter from Robin
son is received and read ; arid once more they set sail. A leak
in the Speedwell compels them to put in at Dartmouth, and
then again, after they had gone above a hundred leagues be
yond Land s End, to put back to Plymouth, and to abandon the
Speedwell altogether. At last, " these troubles being blown
over, and now all being compact together in one ship, they put
to sea again with a prosperous wind ; " and on the 16th da} r of
September, 1620, Old England is parted from for ever. The
Mayflower, and its one hundred and two passengers, have en
tered on the voyage, which is to end not merely in founding a
more memorable Plymouth than that which they left behind,
but in laying the corner-stone of a mightier and freer Nation
than the sun in its circuit had ever before shone upon.
England at the moment took no note of their departing.
Her philosophers and statesmen and poets had not quite yet
begun to appreciate the losses which religious persecution was
entailing upon her. Lord Bacon, indeed, u the great Secre
tary of Nature and all learning," as Izaak Walton called him,
had already foreshadowed the glory which was to be gained by
OP THE LANDING OP THE PILGRIMS. 99
some of his Suffolk and Lincolnshire neighbors, when, in one of
his celebrated essays, he assigned the first place, " in the true
marshalling of the degrees of sovereign honor," to the " condi-
tores imperiorum, the founders of States and Commonwealths." 1
But it was more than ten years afterwards before the saintly
Herbert published those noted lines, which the Vice-Chancellor
of Cambridge had so much hesitation about licensing :
"Religion stands on tiptoe in our land,
Readie to passe to the American strand "