CHAPTER XI.
GOVERNOR BRADFORD PAYS A VISIT.
“Now mind you, goodman, you are to put on your ruff, and the goodly wrist-ruffles, and see that your doublet is fresh brushed, and your hosen tight and smooth, and your hair well set up, and your beard newly combed,—I wish I might but put a thought of ambergris and civet upon it”—
“Nay, dame, not while I live, and I think when once you have killed me with kindness you’ll have no heart to send me to the grave smelling like a civet cat”—
“Oh, Will, Will! How can you!”—
“How can I die, or how can I forbear civet upon my beard? Nay, then, my dame! Wilt cry over it—there, then, sweetheart, there, there!”—
“’Twas that you talked of dying, Will, and if thou wert dead”—
“Men who talk of dying never die, Elsie; but take courage, take courage, and for thy sweet sake I’ll don the ruffles, and brush my doublet, and re-garter my hosen, and set up my hair; nay, then, I’ll even clean my shoes and anoint them afresh, which is more than you bade me do.”
“Why certainly, of course you must do that, dear; and, laugh at your poor wife as you will, I’m sure enough you’ll pleasure her by going brave, and showing a good front to these fine new-comers; and if you come to see Lady Arbella Johnson be sure to mark all the items of her clothes, for she will have the latest modes out of England.”
“Oh, wife, wife! Oh, woman, woman! ’Twas but yesterday we were driven to make coats of deer-skins, and shoe ourselves with the hides of wolves and bears, because we had no other clothing, and to-day you are all agog for the latest modes out of England, and send me to take inventory of a titled lady’s raiment that you may copy her silks in kersey, and her velvets in homespun.”
“Nay, then, sir, I’m none so poor as you would make me out, but have more than one robe of say of mine own, only they have never been aired in this rude wilderness, and are a thought antiquated. But now that we hear of Governor Endicott of Salem, and Governor Winthrop of the Bay, I mind me that I am wife of Governor Bradford of Plymouth, and it is my duty, my bounden duty, Will, to magnify thine office, and show myself abroad as a governor’s lady should.”
“Ay, dame; but methinks the wife of a governor should show herself more governed than other women; more meek, and recollected, and chastened, rather than more arrogant.”
“Nay, Will, do I lack in these matters?” And Alice looked up in her husband’s face, her blue eyes so swimming in tears that she could not see the smile of tender malice upon her husband’s lips as he folded her in his arms and whispered tender reassurances needless to set down.
Yes, our governor was going a-neighboring to his brother potentates at Boston, for a great change had almost suddenly befallen that pleasant region where William Blackstone had dwelt as a solitary for so long. Let us, as briefly as may be, freshen our memories of these early arrivals, and so understand more clearly the new relations suddenly involving the Pilgrims of Plymouth.
It was in 1628 that Governor Endicott with a large and aristocratic following arrived at Naumkeag, and speedily dispossessed Roger Conant and the other old settlers both of their proprietary rights and their privilege of trading with the natives. The next step was to name the place Salem, and ordain as Independent ministers the men who had left England proclaiming their fealty to her Established Church.
But Salem did not long claim the seat of government, for on the 17th of June, 1630, Governor Winthrop, with near a thousand colonists under his command, sailed into Boston Bay and landed at Charlestown, where a deputation from Salem had already prepared for them. Neither numbers, nor home protection, nor wealth, nor aristocratic pretensions could, however, save this great colony from the very same enemies that had assailed the glorious hundred of Mayflower Pilgrims ten years before, and cut down one half of their number. Ship fever, scurvy, and other diseases incident to the horrors of a sea-voyage in that day seized upon the new-comers, who aggravated their own danger by improper food, treatment, and, so long as they lasted, terrible drugs. In six months Charlestown had become a village of graves and of loathsome insanitation, complicated with the want of pure and sufficient water. Moved at length by the sufferings of his neighbors, Blackstone, who at first had scowled upon their invasion of his solitude, visited Governor Winthrop, and told him of a pure and unfailing spring of water near the southern foot of the hill upon whose western slope lay his own cabin and apple orchard, and suggested that it might be well for the settlement to be removed across the mouth of the Mystic, and reëstablished at Trimountain, as he called the peninsula hitherto his own.
Winthrop gladly accepted the suggestion, came over with Blackstone to view the proposed site, and liked it so well that in October, 1630, he caused the frame of his own house nearly ready for erection in Charlestown to be taken over, and set up close by the spring in question, or, as we might now describe it, on Washington Street, between the Old South Church and the corner of Spring Lane, under whose worn and dusty pavement one still fancies to hear the cool wash and gurgle of those imprisoned waters.
Was Blackstone sorry for his good-nature when, after a little, Winthrop and his council kindly set apart fifty acres of the domain to which he had invited them, as his property, and proceeded to divide the rest among themselves? Cannot one picture the reserved and somewhat cynical hermit smoking his pipe beside his solitary fire in the evening of that day, and smiling to himself as he considered the condescension of the new government? And did haply some herald of coming Liberty suggest certain pithy queries to be more plainly worded on Boston Common a century or so later? Did the lonely man ask himself what right Governor Winthrop or any other man had to come into this wild country and dispossess the pioneer settlers of their holdings? True, the King of England had given him that right. But where did the King of England himself get the authority to do so? He had neither bought the land of the natives, nor had he conquered them in fair fight; he simply had heard of a fair new world beyond the seas, and claimed it for his own by some arbitrary right divine whose source no man could tell. The land was his, he said, and so he had sent these men in his name to take possession, to parcel out, to give, or to withhold, from men as good as themselves who had borne the heat and toil of the earlier days, and who had paid the savages full measure for the lands they held. What was this right divine? Why should kings so control the property of other men—men who only asked to live their own lives, and neither meddle nor make with kingcraft? Why? And as William Blackstone, the forgotten pipe burned out, pondered this “why,” the yellowing leaves of the young Liberty tree a few rods from his cottage door rustled impatiently, as though they felt the breath of 1775 already in their midst.
It did not last very long. Not only were there disputes and heartburnings about proprietorship, but the Puritans who had come to New England professing a stanch adherence to the church, and almost immediately proved false to her, could not forgive the quiet man who made no parade of religion, but never swerved from his adherence to his ordination vows. They tried to persuade him, they tried to coerce him, and at last received the assurance that he who had exiled himself from England to avoid the tyranny of the Lords Bishops was not disposed to submit to that of the lords brethren, but would leave them to dispute with each other.
So selling all that he had, except a plot of land around his old home, Blackstone invested the thirty pounds of purchase money in cattle, packed his books and some other matters upon his cows’ backs, and driving the herd before him passed over Boston Neck and out into the wilderness; nor did he pause until upon a tributary of Narragansett Bay he found a lonely and lovely spot, so far from white men or their ordinary line of travel as to rival the Isle of Juan Fernandez in solitude. Naming his domain Study Hill, Blackstone built another house, planted some young apple trees carefully brought from the old orchard, set up his bookshelves, filled his pipe, and settled himself for forty years of happiness, dying just in time to escape King Philip’s war.
But in September, 1630, when Governor Bradford went up to pay his first visit to Governor Winthrop, Blackstone still lived on Boston Common, and looked upon the new-comers as his guests. They had not yet presented him with the fifty acres of his own land.
With the Governor of Plymouth came Elder Brewster, and Captain Standish, Thomas Prence, and Doctor Fuller, who was already well and gratefully known by many of the new settlers; for when the pestilence broke out in Salem about a year before, Governor Endicott dispatched Roger Conant to beg, in the name of Christian fellowship, that the doctor of Plymouth, who had already met the grim enemy at home, would come and aid his brethren. Fuller was not slow to respond, and not only cured some of the sufferers in spite of the deadly methods of his day, but so set forth the religious beliefs and practices of the church of the Pilgrims that Endicott, who was still a Puritan Churchman, and soon to be a Puritan Independent, wrote a cordial letter to Bradford, telling how glad he was to find that the Separatists were not so bad as he had supposed them to be.
Again, when in the summer of 1630 the settlers at Charlestown, Boston, Dorchester, and the neighboring country fell into the same disaster, and with the earliest victims lost Doctor Gager their only physician, Plymouth was appealed to for assistance, and Doctor Fuller at once responded. But the scanty stock of drugs brought by the emigrants was already exhausted, and Fuller’s own supply soon went, so that his treatment was principally confined to blood-letting, and after writing a homesick letter to his brother-in-law Bradford, he returned to Plymouth.
At the wooden wharf where the Pilgrims disembarked in Charlestown, they were met by Governor Winthrop, Dudley his Deputy and successor, and the Reverend Master Wilson, who, as he cordially grasped Elder Brewster by the hand, cast a hurried glance over the group of visitors, and felt a sensible relief at not perceiving the face of Ralph Smith among them. For this reverend gentleman, persecuted out of Salem for opinion’s sake, and refused shelter in Boston or Charlestown, had found an asylum among the liberal Pilgrims who presently invited him to the position of their first ordained minister.
Mr. Wilson need not, however, have been alarmed, since Bradford, whose character singularly united the wisdom of the serpent with the innocence of the dove, had not thought best to include a person so likely to be unwelcome to his hosts in this visit, at once friendly and official; for the Governor of Plymouth had been invited to assist at the first formal session of the Bay authorities, convened at the Great House built by Thomas Grove, the architect “entertained” by the Massachusetts Company under whose auspices the new colony came out.
To this inauguration feast came also Governor Endicott from Salem, with Master Isaac Johnson, whose wife, the Lady Arbella, lay sick unto death in her new home, and never more would don the brave attire in which Alice Bradford had expressed such womanly interest. With these were assembled Sir Richard Saltonstall, Master Bradstreet, soon to be Governor of the Bay Colony, and Pynchon, ancestor, perhaps, of Hawthorne’s Hester; all the magistrates in fact of New England, all the representatives of legal or spiritual authority upon this side of the broad seas; for these men were about to test their right to self-government, and to exercise jurisdiction over the liberty, the property, the persons, nay, the very lives of others, and doubtless felt that in case this right were to be called in question from the throne or the Star Chamber, it might be well to secure the strength of numbers and authoritative consensus.
But we, like Bradford and his company, are only guests at Mishawum, as they still called Charlestown, and must hasten back to Plymouth. Enough to briefly note that Morton of Merry Mount, who had audaciously returned to his “old nest” and his old ways, after Allerton had been forced to dismiss him from his house in Plymouth, was brought before the magistrates, somewhat unfairly tried, and sentenced to be “set in the bilboes,” and afterward sent prisoner to England. His entire property was to be confiscated, and his house burned in presence of the Indians whom he had robbed and insulted, and so speedily was the first portion of the sentence carried out that, as the court left the Great House at noon, they passed close beside the criminal already seated in the stocks with a party of Indian squaws staring at him, half in dismay, half in satisfaction.
“This way, Bradford! Don’t look upon him; ’tis no punishment for a gentleman,” muttered Standish, seizing the governor’s arm and dragging him in a sidelong direction, while Parson Wilson, and Increase Newell the Elder of the Charlestown church, stopped to administer a “word in season” to the defenseless prisoner.
The business of the Bay Colony finished, Governor Bradford begged the attention of his fellow magistrates to an affair in his own jurisdiction: one as important as life and death could make it, for it was a question of enforcing the death penalty upon a murderer, fully convicted and offering no plea of extenuating circumstances.
The culprit was John Billington, already notorious as the first person the Pilgrims had felt called upon to punish. Since that early day he had more than once come under discipline of the law, but now his offense exceeded all human bounds of forgiveness, and by the stern code of Old Testament justice merited nothing short of death.
The victim was a young man named John Newcomen, a somewhat rough and lawless companion, who had persisted in trapping and shooting over ground which Billington claimed as his own monopoly, although neither man made any pretense of ownership. The end was a bitter quarrel, after which Billington armed himself, and, lying in wait until Newcomen appeared, deliberately shot and killed him.
A solemn trial by jury ensued, whereat the crime was fully proven and no defense was attempted. A verdict of willful murder was brought in, and no recommendation to mercy was offered by the stern foreman. The trial could not have been more deliberate or more just, but sentence was not immediately pronounced, for as Bradford frankly declared to his fellow magistrates, he shrank both before God and man from pronouncing the words that should deprive a fellow mortal of life, and before doing so he desired the counsel and concurrence of the other New England authorities.
“Who killeth man, by man shall his blood be shed,” quoted Endicott in the silence which followed Bradford’s solemn appeal. “It is the law of God.”
“And haply,” added Winthrop, “a sharp example in these early days may hinder the loss of more valuable lives hereafter.”
“With God is no respect of persons,” spoke Elder Brewster in tones of stern reproof; but Parson Wilson, with almost a sneer, retorted,—
“Then let him die as one of the princes, even as Zeb and Salmana.”
A little more discussion followed, but the result was obvious, and the next day Bradford turned his face toward home with a heavy heart, and yet a mind resolved upon the terrible duty soon after fulfilled.