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ANNE BRADSTREET AND HER TIME
BY
HELEN CAMPBELL
AUTHOR OF "PRISONERS OF POVERTY," "MRS. HERNDON'S INCOME," "MISS MELINDA'S OPPORTUNITY," ETC.
A BOOK FOR "MISS ICY."
INTRODUCTION.
Grave doubts at times arise in the critical mind as to whether America has had any famous women. We are reproached with the fact, that in spite of some two hundred years of existence, we have, as yet, developed no genius in any degree comparable to that of George Eliot and George Sand in the present, or a dozen other as familiar names of the past. One at least of our prominent literary journals has formulated this reproach, and is even sceptical as to the probability of any future of this nature for American women.
What the conditions have been which hindered and hampered such development, will find full place in the story of the one woman who, in the midst of obstacles that might easily have daunted a far stouter soul, spoke such words as her limitations allowed. Anne Bradstreet, as a name standing alone, and represented only by a volume of moral reflections and the often stilted and unnatural verse of the period, would perhaps, hardly claim a place in formal biography. But Anne Bradstreet, the first woman whose work has come down to us from that troublous Colonial time, and who, if not the mother, is at least the grandmother of American literature, in that her direct descendants number some of our most distinguished men of letters calls for some memorial more honorable than a page in an Encyclopedia, or even an octavo edition of her works for the benefit of stray antiquaries here and there. The direct ancestress of the Danas, of Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Wendell Phillips, the Channings, the Buckminsters and other lesser names, would naturally inspire some interest if only in an inquiry as to just what inheritance she handed down, and the story of what she failed to do because of the time into which she was born, holds equal meaning with that of what she did do.
I am indebted to Mr. John Harvard Ellis's sumptuous edition of Anne Bradstreet's works, published in 1867, and containing all her extant works, for all extracts of either prose or verse, as well as for many of the facts incorporated in Mr. Ellis's careful introduction. Miss Bailey's "History of Andover," has proved a valuable aid, but not more so than "The History of New England," by Dr. John Gorham Palfrey, which affords in many points, the most careful and faithful picture on record of the time, personal facts, unfortunately, being of the most meager nature. They have been sought for chiefly, however, in the old records themselves; musty with age and appallingly diffuse as well as numerous, but the only source from which the true flavor of a forgotten time can be extracted. Barren of personal detail as they too often are, the writer of the present imperfect sketch has found Anne Bradstreet, in spite of all such deficiencies, a very real and vital person, and ends her task with the belief which it is hoped that the reader may share, that among the honorable women not a few whose lives are to-day our dearest possession, not one claims tenderer memory than she who died in New England two hundred years ago.
NEW YORK, 1890.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I. THE OLD HOME
CHAPTER II. UPHEAVALS
CHAPTER III. THE VOYAGE
CHAPTER IV. BEGINNINGS
CHAPTER V. OLD FRIENDS AND NEW
CHAPTER VI. A THEOLOGICAL TRAGEDY
CHAPTER VII. COLONIAL LITERARY DEVELOPMENT IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
CHAPTER VIII. SOME PHASES OF EARLY COLONIAL LIFE
CHAPTER IX. ANDOVER
CHAPTER X. VILLAGE LIFE IN 1650
CHAPTER XI A FIRST EDITION
CHAPTER XII. MISCELLANEOUS POEMS
CHAPTER XIII. CHANCES AND CHANGES
CHAPTER XIV. A LEGACY
CHAPTER XV. THE PURITAN REIGN OF TERROR
CHAPTER XVI. HOME AND ABROAD
CHAPTER XVII. THE END
ANNE BRADSTREET AND HER TIME.
CHAPTER I.
THE OLD HOME.
The birthday of the baby, Anne Dudley, has no record; her birthplace even is not absolutely certain, although there is little doubt that it was at Northhampton in England, the home of her father's family. She opened her eyes upon a time so filled with crowding and conflicting interests that there need be no wonder that the individual was more or less ignored, and personal history lost in the general. To what branch of the Dudley family she belonged is also uncertain. Moore, in his "Lives of the Governors of New Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay," writes: "There is a tradition among the descendants of Governor Dudley in the eldest branch of the family, that he was descended from John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, who was beheaded 22 February, 1553." Such belief was held for a time, but was afterward disallowed by Anne Bradstreet. In her "Elegy upon Sir Philip Sidney," whose mother, the Lady Mary, was the eldest daughter of that Duke of Northumberland, she wrote:
"Let, then, none disallow of these my straines,
Which have the self-same blood yet in my veines."
With the second edition of her poems, however, her faith had changed. This may have been due to a growing indifference to worldly distinctions, or, perhaps, to some knowledge of the dispute as to the ancestry of Robert Dudley, son of the Duke, who was described by one side as a nobleman, by another as a carpenter, and by a third as "a noble timber merchant"; while a wicked wit wrote that "he was the son of a duke, the brother of a king, the grandson of an esquire, and the great-grandson of a carpenter; that the carpenter was the only honest man in the family and the only one who died in his bed." Whatever the cause may have been she renounced all claim to relationship, and the lines were made to read as they at present stand:
"Then let none disallow of these my straines
Whilst English blood yet runs within my veines."
In any case, her father, Thomas Dudley, was of gentle blood and training, being the only son of Captain Roger Dudley, who was killed in battle about the year 1577, when the child was hardly nine years old. Of his mother there is little record, as also of the sister from whom he was soon separated, though we know that Mrs. Dudley died shortly after her husband. Her maiden name is unknown; she was a relative of Sir Augustine Nicolls, of Paxton, Kent, one of His Majesty's Justices of his Court of Common Pleas, and keeper of the Great Seal to Prince Charles.
The special friend who took charge of Thomas Dudley through childhood is said to have been "a Miss Purefoy," and if so, she was the sister of Judge Nicolls, who married a Leicestershire squire, named William Purefoy. Five hundred pounds was left in trust for him, and delivered to him when he came of age; a sum equivalent to almost as many thousand to-day. At the school to which he was sent he gained a fair knowledge of Latin, but he was soon taken from it to become a page in the family of William Lord Compton, afterward the Earl of Northumberland.
His studies were continued, and in time he became a clerk of his kinsman, "Judge Nicholls," whose name appears in letters, and who was a sergeant-at-law. Such legal knowledge as came to him here was of service through all his later life, but law gave place to arms, the natural bias of most Englishmen at that date, and he became captain of eighty volunteers "raised in and about Northhampton, and forming part of the force collected by order of Queen Elizabeth to assist Henry IV. of France, in the war against Philip II. of Spain," He was at the siege of Amiens in 1597, and returned home when it ended, having, though barely of age, already gained distinction as a soldier, and acquired the courtesy of manner which distinguished him till later life, and the blandness of which often blinded unfamiliar acquaintances to the penetration and acumen, the honesty and courage that were the foundations of his character. As his belief changed, and the necessity for free speech was laid upon him, he ceased to disguise his real feelings and became even too out-spoken, the tendency strengthening year by year, and doing much to diminish his popularity, though his qualities were too sterling to allow any lessening of real honor and respect. But he was still the courtier, and untitled as he was, prestige enough came with him to make his marriage to "a gentlewoman whose Extract and Estate were Considerable," a very easy matter, and though we know her only as Dorothy Dudley, no record of her maiden name having been preserved, the love borne her by both husband and daughter is sufficient evidence of her character and influence.
Puritanism was not yet an established fact, but the seed had been sown which later became a tree so mighty that thousands gathered under its shadow. The reign of Elizabeth had brought not only power but peace to England, and national unity had no further peril of existence to dread. With peace, trade established itself on sure foundations and increased with every year. Wealth flowed into the country and the great merchants of London whose growth amazed and troubled the royal Council, founded hospitals, "brought the New River from its springs at Chadwell and Amwell to supply the city with pure water," and in many ways gave of their increase for the benefit of all who found it less easy to earn. The smaller land-owners came into a social power never owned before, and "boasted as long a rent-roll and wielded as great an influence as many of the older nobles…. In wealth as in political consequence the merchants and country gentlemen who formed the bulk of the House of Commons, stood far above the mass of the peers."
Character had changed no less than outward circumstances. "The nation which gave itself to the rule of the Stewarts was another nation from the panic-struck people that gave itself in the crash of social and religious order to the guidance of the Tudors." English aims had passed beyond the bounds of England, and every English "squire who crossed the Channel to flesh his maiden sword at Ivry or Ostend, brought back to English soil, the daring temper, the sense of inexhaustable resources, which had bourn him on through storm and battle field." Such forces were not likely to settle into a passive existence at home. Action had become a necessity. Thoughts had been stirred and awakened once for all. Consciously for the few, unconsciously for the many, "for a hundred years past, men had been living in the midst of a spiritual revolution. Not only the world about them, but the world within every breast had been utterly transformed. The work of the sixteenth century had wrecked that tradition of religion, of knowledge, of political and social order, which had been accepted without question by the Middle Ages. The sudden freedom of the mind from these older bonds brought a consciousness of power such as had never been felt before; and the restless energy, the universal activity of the Renaissance were but outer expressions of the pride, the joy, the amazing self-confidence, with which man welcomed this revelation of the energies which had lain slumbering within him."
This was the first stage, but another quickly and naturally followed, and dread took the place of confidence. With the deepening sense of human individuality, came a deepening conviction of the boundless capacities of the human soul. Not as a theological dogma, but as a human fact man knew himself to be an all but infinite power, whether for good or for ill. The drama towered into sublimity as it painted the strife of mighty forces within the breasts of Othello or Macbeth. Poets passed into metaphysicians as they strove to unravel the workings of conscience within the soul. From that hour one dominant influence told on human action; and all the various energies that had been called into life by the age that was passing away were seized, concentrated and steadied to a definite aim by the spirit of religion. Among the myriads upon whom this change had come, Thomas Dudley was naturally numbered, and the ardent preaching of the well-known Puritan ministers, Dodd and Hildersham, soon made him a Non-conformist and later an even more vigorous dissenter from ancient and established forms. As thinking England was of much the same mind, his new belief did not for a time interfere with his advancement, for, some years after his marriage he became steward of the estate of the Earl of Lincoln, and continued so for more than ten years. Plunged in debt as the estate had been by the excesses of Thomas, Earl of Lincoln, who left the property to his son Theophilus, so encumbered that it was well nigh worthless, a few years of Dudley's skillful management freed it entirely, and he became the dear and trusted friend of the entire family. His first child had been born in 1610, a son named Samuel, and in 1612 came the daughter whose delicate infancy and childhood gave small hint of the endurance shown in later years. Of much the same station and training as Mrs. Lucy Hutchinson, Anne Dudley could undoubtedly have written in the same words as that most delightful of chroniclers: "By the time I was four years old I read English perfectly, and having a great memory I was carried to sermons…. When I was about seven years of age, I remember I had at one time eight tutors in several qualities, languages, music, dancing, writing and needle work; but my genius was quite averse from all but my book, and that I was so eager of, that my mother thinking it prejudiced my health, would moderate me in it; yet this rather animated me than kept me back, and every moment I could steal from my play I would employ in any book I could find when my own were locked up from me."
It is certain that the little Anne studied the Scriptures at six or seven, with as painful solicitude as her elders, for she writes in the fragmentary diary which gives almost the only clue to her real life:
"In my young years, about 6 or 7, as I take it, I began to make conscience of my wayes, and what I knew was sinful, as lying, disobedience to Parents, etc., I avoided it. If at any time I was overtaken with the like evills, it was a great Trouble. I could not be at rest 'till by prayer I had confest it unto God. I was also troubled at the neglect of Private Duteys, tho' too often tardy that way. I also found much comfort in reading the Scriptures, especially those places I thought most concerned my Condition, and as I grew to have more understanding, so the more solace I took in them.
"In a long fitt of sickness which I had on my bed, I often communed with my heart and made my supplication to the most High, who sett me free from that affliction."
For a childhood which at six searches the Scriptures to find verses applicable to its condition, there cannot have been much if any natural child life, and Mrs. Hutchinson's experience again was probably duplicated for the delicate and serious little Anne. "Play among other children I despised, and when I was forced to entertain such as came to visit me, I tried them with more grave instruction than their mothers, and plucked all their babies to pieces, and kept the children in such awe, that they were glad when I entertained myself with elder company, to whom I was very acceptable, and living in the house with many persons that had a great deal of wit, and very profitable serious discourses being frequent at my father's table and in my mother's drawing room, I was very attentive to all, and gathered up things that I would utter again, to great admiration of many that took my memory and imitation for wit…. I used to exhort my mother's words much, and to turn their idle discourses to good subjects."
Given to exhortation as some of the time may have been, and drab- colored as most of the days certainly were, there were, bright passages here and there, and one reminiscence was related in later years, in her poem "In Honour of Du Bartas," the delight of Puritan maids and mothers;
"My muse unto a Child I may compare,
Who sees the riches of some famous Fair,
He feeds his eyes but understanding lacks,
To comprehend the worth of all those knacks;
The glittering plate and Jewels he admires,
The Hats and Fans, the Plumes and Ladies' tires,
And thousand times his mazed mind doth wish
Some part, at least, of that brave wealth was his;
But seeing empty wishes nought obtain,
At night turns to his Mother's cot again,
And tells her tales (his full heart over glad),
Of all the glorious sights his eyes have had;
But finds too soon his want of Eloquence,
The silly prattler speaks no word of sense;
But seeing utterance fail his great desires,
Sits down in silence, deeply he admires."
It is probably to one of the much exhorted maids that she owed this glimpse of what was then a rallying ground for the jesters and merry Andrews, and possibly even a troop of strolling players, frowned upon by the Puritan as children of Satan, but still secretly enjoyed by the lighter minded among them. But the burden of the time pressed more and more heavily. Freedom which had seemed for a time to have taken firm root, and to promise a better future for English thought and life, lessened day by day under the pressure of the Stuart dynasty, and every Nonconformist home was the center of anxieties that influenced every member of it from the baby to the grandsire, whose memory covered more astonishing changes than any later day has known.
The year preceding Anne Dudley's birth, had seen the beginning of the most powerful influence ever produced upon a people, made ready for it, by long distrust of such teaching as had been allowed. With the translation of the Bible into common speech, and the setting up of the first six copies in St. Pauls, its popularity had grown from day to day. The small Geneva Bibles soon appeared and their substance had become part of the life of every English family within an incredibly short space of time. Not only thought and action but speech itself were colored and shaped by the new influence. We who hold to it as a well of English undefiled, and resent even the improvements of the new Version as an infringement on a precious possession, have small conception of what it meant to a century which had had no prose literature and no poetry save the almost unknown verse of Chaucer.
"Sunday after Sunday, day after day, the crowds that gathered round the Bible in the nave of St. Pauls, or the family group that hung on its words in the devotional exercises at home, were leavened with a new literature. Legend and annal, war song and psalm, State-roll and biography, the mighty voices of prophets, the parables of Evangelists, stories of mission-journeys, of perils by the sea and among the heathens, philosophic arguments, apocalyptic visions, all were flung broadcast over minds unoccupied for the most part by any rival learning. The disclosure of the stores of Greek literature had wrought the revolution of Renaissance. The disclosure of the older mass of Hebrew literature, wrought the revolution of the Reformation. But the one revolution was far deeper and wider in its effects than the other. No version could transfer to another tongue the peculiar charm of language which gave their value to the authors of Greece and Rome. Classical letters, therefore, remained in the possession of the learned, that is, of the few, and among these, with the exception of Colet and More, or of the pedants who revived a Pagan worship in the gardens of the Florentine Academy, their direct influence was purely intellectual. But the language of the Hebrew, the idiom of the Hellenistic Greek, lent themselves with a curious felicity to the purposes of translation. As a mere literary monument the English version of the Bible remains the noblest example of the English tongue, while its perpetual use made it from the instant of its appearance, the standard of our language.
"One must dwell upon this fact persistently, before it will become possible to understand aright either the people or the literature of the time. With generations the influence has weakened, though the best in English speech has its source in one fountain. But the Englishman of that day wove his Bible into daily speech, as we weave Shakespeare or Milton or our favorite author of a later day. It was neither affectation nor hypocrisy but an instinctive use that made the curious mosaic of Biblical words and phrases which colored English talk two hundred years ago. The mass of picturesque allusion and illustration which we borrow from a thousand books, our fathers were forced to borrow from one; and the borrowing was the easier and the more natural, that the range of the Hebrew literature fitted it for the expression of every phase of feeling. When Spencer poured forth his warmest love-notes in the 'Epithalamion,' he adopted the very words of the Psalmist, as he bade the gates open for the entrance of his bride. When Cromwell saw the mists break over the hills of Dunbar, he hailed the sun-burst with the cry of David: 'Let God arise, and let his enemies be scattered. Like as the smoke vanisheth so shalt thou drive them away!' Even to common minds this familiarity with grand poetic imagery in prophet and apocalypse, gave a loftiness and ardor of expression that with all its tendency to exaggeration and bombast we may prefer to the slip-shod vulgarisms of today."
Children caught the influence, and even baby talk was half scriptural, so that there need be no surprise in finding Anne Bradstreet's earliest recollections couched in the phrases of psalms learned by heart as soon as she could speak, and used, no doubt, half unconsciously. Translate her sentences into the thought of to-day, and it is evident, that aside from the morbid conscientiousness produced by her training, that she was the victim of moods arising from constant ill-health. Her constitution seems to have been fragile in the extreme, and there is no question but that in her case as in that of many another child born into the perplexed and troubled time, the constant anxiety of both parents, uncertain what a day might bring forth, impressed itself on the baby soul. There was English fortitude and courage, the endurance born of faith, and the higher evolution from English obstinacy, but there was for all of them, deep self-distrust and abasement; a sense of worthlessness that intensified with each generation; and a perpetual, unhealthy questioning of every thought and motive. The progress was slow but certain, rising first among the more sensitive natures of women, whose lives held too little action to drive away the mists, and whose motto was always, "look in and not out"—an utter reversal of the teaching of to-day. The children of that generation lost something that had been the portion of their fathers. The Elizabethan age had been one of immense animal life and vigor, and of intense capacity for enjoyment, and, deny it as one might, the effect lingered and had gone far toward forming character. The early Nonconformist still shared in many worldly pleasures, and had found no occasion to condense thought upon points in Calvinism, or to think of himself as a refugee from home and country.
The cloud at first no bigger than a man's hand, was not dreaded, and life in Nonconformist homes went on with as much real enjoyment as if their ownership were never to be questioned. Serious and sad, as certain phases come to be, it is certain that home life developed as suddenly as general intelligence. The changes in belief in turn affected character. "There was a sudden loss of the passion, the caprice, the subtle and tender play of feeling, the breath of sympathy, the quick pulse of delight, which had marked the age of Elizabeth; but on the other hand life gained in moral grandeur, in a sense of the dignity of manhood, in orderliness and equable force. The larger geniality of the age that had passed away was replaced by an intense tenderness within the narrower circle of the home. Home, as we now conceive it, was the creation of the Puritan. Wife and child rose from mere dependants on the will of husband or father, as husband or father saw in them saints like himself, souls hallowed by the touch of a divine spirit and called with a divine calling like his own. The sense of spiritual fellowship gave a new tenderness and refinement to the common family affections."
The same influence had touched Thomas Dudley, and Dorothy Dudley could have written of him as Lucy Hutchinson did of her husband: "He was as kind a father, as dear a brother, as good a master, as faithful a friend as the world had." In a time when, for the Cavalier element, license still ruled and lawless passion was glorified by every play writer, the Puritan demanded a different standard, and lived a life of manly purity in strange contrast to the grossness of the time. Of Hutchinson and Dudley and thousands of their contemporaries the same record held good: "Neither in youth nor riper years could the most fair or enticing woman draw him into unnecessary familiarity or dalliance. Wise and virtuous women he loved, and delighted in all pure and holy and unblameable conversation with them, but so as never to excite scandal or temptation. Scurrilous discourse even among men he abhorred; and though he sometimes took pleasure in wit and mirth, yet that which was mixed with impurity he never could endure."
Naturally with such standards life grew orderly and methodical. "Plain living and high thinking," took the place of high living and next to no thinking. Heavy drinking was renounced. Sobriety and self-restraint ruled here as in every other act of life, and the division between Cavalier and Nonconformist became daily more and more marked. Persecution had not yet made the gloom and hardness which soon came to be inseparable from the word Puritan, and children were still allowed many enjoyments afterward totally renounced. Milton could write, even after his faith had settled and matured:
"Haste then, nymph, and bring with thee
Jest and youthful jollity,
Quips and Cranks and wanton Wiles,
Nods and becks and wreathed Smiles,
Such as hang on Hebe's cheek
And love to live in dimple sleek;
Sports that wrinkled care derides
And Laughter holding both his sides."
Cromwell himself looked on at masques and revels, and Whitelock, a Puritan lawyer and his ambassador to Sweden, left behind him a reputation for stately and magnificent entertaining, which his admirers could never harmonize with his persistent refusal to conform to the custom of drinking healths. In the report of this embassy printed after Whitelock's return and republished some years ago, occurs one of the best illustrations of Puritan social life at that period. "How could you pass over their very long winter nights?" was one of the questions asked by the Protector at the first audience after his return from The embassy.
"I kept my people together," was the reply, "and in action and recreation, by having music in my house, and encouraging that and the exercise of dancing, which held them by the eyes and ears, and gave them diversion without any offence. And I caused the gentlemen to have disputations in Latin, and declamations upon words which I gave them." Cromwell, "Those were very good diversions, and made your house a little academy."
Whitelock, "I thought these recreations better than gaming for money, or going forth to places of debauchery."
Cromwell, "It was much better."
In the Earl of Lincoln's household such amusements would be common, and it was not till many years later, that a narrowing faith made Anne write them down as "the follyes of youth." Through that youth, she had part in every opportunity that the increased respect for women afforded.
Many a Puritan matron shared her husband's studies, or followed her boys in their preparation for Oxford or Cambridge, and Anne Bradstreet's poems and the few prose memorials she left, give full evidence of an unusually broad training, her delicacy of health making her more ready for absorption in study. Shakespeare and Cervantes were still alive at her birth, and she was old enough, with the precocious development of the time, to have known the sense of loss and the general mourning at their death in 1616. It is doubtful if the plays of the elder dramatists were allowed her, though there are hints in her poems of some knowledge of Shakespeare, but by the time girlhood was reached, the feeling against them had increased to a degree hardly comprehensible save in the light of contemporaneous history. The worst spirit of the time was incorporated in the later plays, and the Puritans made no discrimination. The players in turn hated them, and Mrs. Hutchinson wrote: "Every stage and every table, and every puppet- play, belched forth profane scoffs upon them, the drunkards made them their songs, and all fiddlers and mimics learned to abuse them, as finding it the most gameful way of fooling."
If, however, the dramatists were forbidden, there were new and inexhaustible sources of inspiration and enjoyment, in the throng of new books, which the quiet of the reign of James allowed to appear in quick succession. Chapman's magnificent version of Homer was delighting Cavalier and Puritan alike. "Plutarch's Lives," were translated by Sir Thomas North and his book was "a household book for the whole of the seventeenth century." Montaigne's Essays had been "done into English" by John Florio, and to some of them at least Thomas Dudley was not likely to take exception. Poets and players had, however, come to be classed together and with some reason, both alike antagonizing the Puritan, but the poets of the reign of James were far more simple and natural in style than those of the age of Elizabeth, and thus, more likely to be read in Puritan families. Their numbers may be gauged by their present classification into "pastoral, satirical, theological, metaphysical and humorous," but only two of them were in entire sympathy with the Puritan spirit, or could be read without serious shock to belief and scruples.
For the sake of her own future work, deeper drinking at these springs was essential, and in rejecting them, Anne Dudley lost the influence that must have moulded her own verse into much more agreeable form for the reader of to-day, though it would probably have weakened her power in her own day. The poets she knew best hindered rather than helped development. Wither and Quarles, both deeply Calvinistic, the former becoming afterward one of Cromwell's major-generals, were popular not only then but long afterward, and Quarles' "Emblems", which appeared in 1635, found their way to New England and helped to make sad thought still more dreary. Historians and antiquaries were at work. Sir Walter Raleigh's "History of the World," must have given little Anne her first suggestion of life outside of England, while Buchanan, the tutor of King James, had made himself the historian and poet of Scotland. Bacon had just ended life and labor; Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity was before the world, though not completed until 1632, and the dissensions of the time had given birth to a "mass of sermons, books of devotion, religious tracts and controversial pamphlets." Sermons abounded, those of Archbishop Usher, Andrews and Donne being specially valued, while "The Saint's Cordial," of Dr. Richard Sibbs, and the pious meditations of Bishop Hall were on every Puritan bookshelf. But few strictly sectarian books appeared, "the censorship of the press, the right of licensing books being almost entirely arrogated to himself by the untiring enemy of the Nonconformists, Laud, Bishop of London, whose watchful eye few heretical writings could escape.. . . Many of the most ultra pamphlets and tracts were the prints of foreign presses secretly introduced into the country without the form of a legal entry at Stationers' Hall."
The same activity which filled the religious world, was found also in scientific directions and Dr. Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood, and Napier's introduction of logarithms, made a new era for both medicine and mathematics.
That every pulse of this new tide was felt in the castle at Lempingham is very evident, in all Anne Bradstreet's work. The busy steward found time for study and his daughter shared it, and when he revolted against the incessant round of cares and for a time resigned the position, the leisure gained was devoted to the same ends. The family removed to Boston in Lincolnshire, and there an acquaintance was formed which had permanent influence on the minds of all.
Here dwelt the Rev. John Cotton, vicar of the parish and already obnoxious to the Bishops.
No man among the Nonconformists had had more brilliant reputation before the necessity of differing came upon him, and his personal influence was something phenomenal. To the girl whose sensitive, eager mind reached out to every thing high and noble he must have seemed of even rarer stuff than to-day we know him to have been.
At thirteen he had entered Emmanuel College at Cambridge, and adding distinction to distinction had come at last to be dean of the college to which he belonged. His knowledge of Greek was minute and thorough, and he conversed with ease in either Latin or Hebrew. As a pulpit orator he was famous, and crowds thronged the ancient church of St. Mary in Cambridge whenever he preached. Here he gave them "the sort of sermons then in fashion—learned, ornate, pompous, bristling with epigrams, stuffed with conceits, all set off dramatically by posture, gesture and voice."
The year in which Anne Dudley was born, had completed the change which had been slowly working in him and which Tyler describes in his vivid pages on the theological writers of New England:
"His religious character had been deepening into Puritanism. He had come to view his own preaching as frivolous, Sadducean, pagan." He decided to preach one sermon which would show what changes had come, and the announcement of his intention brought together the usual throng of under-graduates, fellows and professors who looked for the usual entertainment. Never was a crowd more deceived. "In preparing once more to preach to this congregation of worldly and witty folk, he had resolved to give them a sermon intended to exhibit Jesus Christ rather than John Cotton. This he did. His hearers were astonished, disgusted. Not a murmur of applause greeted the several stages of his discourse as before. They pulled their shovel caps down over their faces, folded their arms, and sat it out sullenly, amazed that the promising John Cotton had turned lunatic or Puritan."
Nearly twenty years passed before his energies were transferred to New England, but the ending of his university career by no means hampered his work elsewhere. As vicar of St. Botolphs at Boston his influence deepened with every year, and he grew steadily in knowledge about the Bible, and in the science of God and man as seen through the dim goggles of John Calvin.
His power as a preacher was something tremendous, but he remained undisturbed until the reign of James had ended and the "fatal eye of Bishop Laud" fell upon him. "It was in 1633 that Laud became primate of England; which meant, among other things, that nowhere within the rim of that imperial island was there to be peace or safety any longer for John Cotton. Some of his friends in high station tried to use persuasive words with the archbishop on his behalf, but the archbishop brushed aside their words with an insupportable scorn. The Earl of Dorset sent a message to Cotton, that if he had only been guilty of drunkenness or adultery, or any such minor ministerial offence, his pardon could have been had; but since his crime was Puritanism, he must flee for his life. So, for his life he fled, dodging his pursuers; and finally slipping out of England, after innumerable perils, like a hunted felon; landing in Boston in September, 1633."
Long before this crisis had come, Thomas Dudley had been recalled by the Earl of Lincoln, who found it impossible to dispense with his services, and the busy life began again. Whether Anne missed the constant excitement the strenuous spiritual life enforced on all who made part of John Cotton's congregation, there is no record, but one may infer from a passage in her diary that a reaction had set in, and that youth asserted itself.
"But as I grew up to bee about fourteen or fifteen I found my heart more carnall and sitting loose from God, vanity and the follys of youth take hold of me.
"About sixteen, the Lord layd his hand sore upon me and smott mee with the small-pox. When I was in my affliction, I besought the Lord, and confessed my Pride and Vanity and he was entreated of me, and again restored me. But I rendered not to him according to ye benefit received."
Here is the only hint as to personal appearance. "Pride and Vanity," are more or less associated with a fair countenance, and though no record gives slightest detail as to form or feature, there is every reason to suppose that the event, very near at hand, which altered every prospect in life, was influenced in degree, at least, by considerations slighted in later years, but having full weight with both. That Thomas Dudley was a "very personable man," we know, and there are hints that his daughter resembled him, though it was against the spirit of the time to record mere accidents of coloring or shape. But Anne's future husband was a strikingly handsome man, not likely to ignore such advantages in the wife he chose, and we may think of her as slender and dark, with heavy hair and the clear, thoughtful eyes, which may be seen in the potrait of Paul Dudley to-day. There were few of what we consider the typical Englishmen among these Puritan soldiers and gentry. Then, as now, the reformer and liberal was not likely to be of the warm, headlong Saxon type, fair-haired, blue-eyed, and open to every suggestion of pleasure loving temperament. It was the dark-haired men of the few districts who made up Cromwell's regiment of Ironsides, and who from what Galton calls, "their atrabilious and sour temperament," were likely to become extremists, and such Puritan portraits as remain to us, have most of them these characteristics. The English type of face altered steadily for many generations, and the Englishmen of the eighteenth century had little kinship with the race reproduced in Holbein's portraits, which show usually, "high cheek-bones, long upper lips, thin eyebrows, and lank, dark hair. It would be impossible … for the majority of modern Englishmen so to dress themselves and clip and arrange their hair, as to look like the majority of these portraits."
The type was perpetuated in New England, where for a hundred years, there was not the slightest admixture of foreign blood, increased delicacy with each generation setting it farther and farther apart from the always grosser and coarser type in Old England. Puritan abstinence had much to do with this, though even for them, heavy feeding, as compared with any modern standard was the rule, its results being found in the diaries of what they recorded and believed to be spiritual conflicts. Then, as now, dyspepsia often posed as a delicately susceptible temperament, and the "pasty" of venison or game, fulfilled the same office as the pie into which it degenerated, and which is one of the most firmly established of American institutions. Then, as occasionally even to day, indigestion counted as "a hiding of the Lord's face," and a bilious attack as "the hand of the Lord laid heavily on one for reproof and correction." Such "reproof and correction" would often follow if the breakfasts of the Earl of Lincoln and his household were of the same order as those of the Earl of Northumberland, in whose house "the family rose at six and took breakfast at seven. My Lord and Lady sat down to a repast of two pieces of salted fish, and half a dozen of red herrings, with four fresh ones, or a dish of sprats and a quart of beer and the same measure of wine … At other seasons, half a chine of mutton or of boiled beef, graced the board. Capons at two-pence apiece and plovers (at Christmas), were deemed too good for any digestion that was not carried on in a noble stomach."
With the dropping of fasts and meager days, fish was seldom used, and the Sunday morning breakfast of Queen Elizabeth and her retinue in one of her "progresses" through the country, for which three oxen and one hundred and forty geese were furnished, became the standard, which did not alter for many generations. A diet more utterly unsuited to the child who passed from one fit of illness to another, could hardly be imagined, and the gloom discoverable in portions of her work was as certainly dyspepsia as she imagined it to be "the motion and power of ye Adversary." Winthrop had encountered the same difficulty and with his usual insight and common sense, wrote in his private dairy fifteen years before he left England, "Sep: 8, 1612. ffinding that the variety of meates drawes me on to eate more than standeth with my healthe I have resolved not to eat of more than two dishes at any one meale, whither fish, fleshe, fowle or fruite or whitt-meats, etc; whither at home or abroade; the lord give me care and abilitie to perform it." Evidently the flesh rebelled, for later he writes: "Idlenesse and gluttonie are the two maine pillars of the flesh his kingdome," but he conquered finally, both he and Simon Bradstreet being singularly abstinent.
Her first sixteen years of life were, for Anne Dudley, filled with the intensest mental and spiritual activity—hampered and always in leading strings, but even so, an incredible advance on anything that had been the portion of women for generations. Then came, for the young girl, a change not wholly unexpected, yet destined to alter every plan, and uproot every early association. But to the memories of that loved early life she held with an English tenacity, not altered by transplanting, that is seen to-day in countless New Englanders, whose English blood is of as pure a strain as any to be found in the old home across the sea.
CHAPTER II.
UPHEAVALS.
Though the long engagement which Mr. Ruskin demands as a necessity in lessening some of the present complications of the marriage question may not have been the fortune of Simon and Anne Bradstreet, it is certain that few couples have ever had better opportunity for real knowledge of one another's peculiarities and habits of thought. Circumstances placed them under the same roof for years before marriage, and it would have been impossible to preserve any illusions, while every weakness as well as every virtue had fullest opportunity for disclosure. There is no hint of other suitors, nor detail of the wooing, but the portrait of Governor Bradstreet, still to be seen in the Senate Chamber of the Massachusetts State House, shows a face that even in middle life, the time at which the portrait was painted, held an ardor, that at twenty-five must have made him irresistible. It is the head of Cavalier rather than Roundhead—the full though delicately curved lips and every line in the noble face showing an eager, passionate, pleasure-loving temperament. But the broad, benignant forehead, the clear, dark eyes, the firm, well-cut nose, hold strength as well as sweetness, and prepare one for the reputation which the old Colonial records give him. The high breeding, the atmosphere of the whole figure, comes from a marvellously well- balanced nature, as well as from birth and training. There is a sense of the keenest life and vigor, both mental and physical, and despite the Puritan garb, does not hide the man of whom his wife might have written with Mrs. Hutchinson: "To sum up, therefore, all that can be said of his outward frame and disposition, we must truly conclude that it was a very handsome and well-furnished lodging prepared for the reception of that prince who, in the administration of all excellent virtues, reigned there a while, till he was called back to the palace of the universal emperor."
Simon Bradstreet's father, "born of a wealthy family in Suffolk, was one of the first fellows of Emanuel College, and highly esteemed by persons distinguished for learning." In 1603 he was minister at Horbling in Lincolnshire, but was never anything but a nonconformist to the Church of England. Here in 1603 Simon Bradstreet was born, and until fourteen years old was educated in the grammar school of that place, till the death of his father made some change necessary. John Cotton was the mutual friend of both Dudley and the elder Bradstreet, and Dudley's interest in the son may have arisen from this fact. However this may be, he was taken at fifteen into the Earl of Lincoln's household, and trained to the duties of a steward by Dudley himself. Anne being then a child of nine years old, and probably looking up to him with the devotion that was shared by her older brother, then eleven and always the friend and ally of the future governor.
His capacity was so marked that Dr. Preston, another family friend and a noted Nonconformist, interested himself in his further education, and succeeded in entering him at Emanuel College, Cambridge, in the position of governor to the young Lord Rich, son of the Earl of Warwick. For some reason the young nobleman failed to come to college and Bradstreet's time was devoted to a brother of the Earl of Lincoln, who evidently shared the love of idleness and dissipation that had marked his grandfather's career. It was all pleasant and all eminently unprofitable, Bradstreet wrote in later years, but he accomplished sufficient study to secure his bachelor's degree in 1620. Four years later, while holding the position of steward to the Earl of Lincoln, given him by Dudley on the temporary removal to Boston, that of Master of Arts was bestowed upon him, making it plain that his love of study had continued. With the recall of Dudley, he became steward to the countess of Warwick, which position he held at the time of his marriage in 1628.
It was in this year that Anne, just before her marriage recorded, when the affliction had passed: "About 16, the Lord layde his hand sore upon me and smott me with the small-pox." It is curious that the woman whose life in many points most resembles her own—Mrs. Lucy Hutchinson—should have had precisely the same experience, writing of herself in the "Memoirs of Colonel Hutchinson": "That day that the friends on both sides met to conclude the marriage, she fell sick of the small-pox, which was in many ways a great trial upon him. First, her life was in almost desperate hazard, and then the disease, for the present, made her the most deformed person that could be seen, for a great while after she recovered; yet he was nothing troubled at it, but married her as soon as she was able to quit the chamber, when the priest and all that saw her were affrighted to look on her; but God recompensed his justice and constancy by restoring her, though she was longer than ordinary before she recovered to be as well as before."
Whether disease or treatment held the greater terror, it would be hard to say. Modern medical science has devised many alleviations, and often restores a patient without spot or blemish. But to have lived at all in that day evidenced extraordinary vitality. Cleanliness was unknown, water being looked upon as deadly poison whether taken internally or applied externally. Covered with blankets, every window tightly sealed, and the moaning cry for water answered by a little hot ale or tincture of bitter herbs, nature often gave up the useless struggle and released the tortured and delirious wretch. The means of cure left the constitution irretrievably weakened if not hopelessly ruined, and the approach of the disease was looked upon with affright and regarded usually as a special visitation of the wrath of God.
That Anne Dudley so viewed it is evident from the passage in her diary, already quoted; that the Lord "smott" her, was unquestioned, and she cast about in her girlish mind for the shadow of the sin that had brought such judgment, making solemn resolutions, not only against any further indulgence in "Pride and Vanity," but all other offences, deciding that self-abnegation was the only course, and possibly even beginning her convalescence with a feeling that love itself should be put aside, and all her heart be "sett upon God." But Simon Bradstreet waited, like Colonel Hutchinson, only till "she was fit to leave her chamber," and whether "affrighted" or not, the marriage was consummated early in 1628.
Of heavier, stouter frame than Colonel Hutchinson, and of a far more vigorous constitution, the two men had much in common. The forces that moulded and influenced the one, were equally potent with the other. The best that the time had to give entered into both, and though Hutchinson's name and life are better known, it is rather because of the beauty and power with which his story was told, by a wife who worshipped him, than because of actually greater desert. But the first rush of free thought ennobled many men who in the old chains would have lived lives with nothing in them worth noting, and names full of meaning are on every page of the story of the time.
We have seen how the whole ideal of daily life had altered, as the Puritan element gained ground, and the influence affected the thought and life—even the speech of their opponents. A writer on English literature remarks: "In one sense, the reign of James is the most religious part of our history; for religion was then fashionable. The forms of state, the king's speeches, the debates in parliament and the current literature, were filled with quotations from Scripture and quaint allusions to sacred things."
Even the soldier studied divinity, and Colonel Hutchinson, after his "fourteen months various exercise of his mind, in the pursuit of his love, being now at rest in the enjoyment of his wife," thought it the most natural thing in the world to make "an entrance upon the study of school divinity, wherein his father was the most eminent scholar of any gentleman in England and had a most choice library…. Having therefore gotten into the house with him an excellent scholar in that kind of learning, he for two years made it the whole employment of his time."
Much of such learning Simon Bradstreet had taken in unconsciously in the constant discussions about his father's table, as well as in the university alive to every slightest change in doctrine, where freer but fully as interested talk went on. Puritanism had as yet acquired little of the bitterness and rigor born of persecution, but meant simply emancipated thought, seeking something better than it had known, but still claiming all the good the world held for it. Milton is the ideal Puritan of the time, and something of the influences that surrounded his youth were in the home of every well-born Puritan. Even much farther down in the social scale, a portrait remains of a London house mother, which may stand as that of many, whose sons and daughters passed over at last to the new world, hopeless of any quiet or peace in the old. It is a turner in Eastcheap, Nehemiah Wallington, who writes of his mother: "She was very loving and obedient to her parents, loving and kind to her husband, very tender-hearted to her children, loving all that were godly, much misliking the wicked and profane. She was a pattern of sobriety unto many, very seldom was seen abroad except at church; when others recreated themselves at holidays and other times, she would take her needle-work and say—'here is my recreation'…. God had given her a very pregnant wit and an excellent memory. She was very ripe and perfect in all stories of the Bible, likewise in all the stories of the Martyrs, and could readily turn to them; she was also perfect and well seen in the English Chronicles, and in the descents of the Kings of England. She lived in holy wedlock with her husband twenty years, wanting but four days."
If the influence of the new thought was so potent with a class who in the Tudor days had made up the London mob, and whose signature, on the rare occasions when anybody wanted it, had been a mark, the middle class, including professional men, felt it infinitely more. In the early training with many, as with Milton's father, music was a passion; there was nothing illiberal or narrow. In Milton's case he writes: "My father destined me while yet a little boy to the study of humane letters; which I seized with such eagerness that from the twelth year of my age I scarcely ever went from my lessons to my bed before midnight." "To the Greek, Latin and Hebrew learned at school the scrivener advised him to add Italian and French. Nor were English letters neglected. Spencer gave the earliest turn to the boy's poetic genius. In spite of the war between playwright and precisian, a Puritan youth could still in Milton's days avow his love of the stage, 'if Jonson's learned sock be on, or sweetest Shakspeare Fancy's child, warble his native wood-notes wild' and gather from the 'masques and antique pageantry,' of the court revels, hints for his own 'Comus' and 'Arcades'."
Simon Bradstreet's year at Cambridge probably held much the same experience, and if a narrowing faith in time taught him to write it down as "all unprofitable," there is no doubt that it helped to broaden his nature and establish the Catholic-mindedness which in later years, in spite of every influence against it, was one of his distinguishing characteristics. In the meantime he was a delightful companion. Cut off by his principles from much that passed as enjoyment, hating the unbridled licentiousness, the "ornate beastliness," of the Stuart reign, he like others of the same faith took refuge in intellectual pleasures. Like Colonel Hutchinson—and this portrait, contrary in all points to the preconceived idea, is a typical one—he "could dance admirably well, but neither in youth nor riper years made any practice of it; he had skill in fencing such as became a gentleman; he had great love to music and often diverted himself with a viol, on which he played masterly; he had an exact ear and judgment in other music; he shot excellently in bows and guns, and much used them for his exercise; he had great judgment in paintings, graving, sculpture, and all liberal arts, and had many curiosities of value in all kinds; he took great delight in perspective glasses, and, for his other rarities was not so much affected with the antiquity as the merit of the work; he took much pleasure in improvement of grounds, in planting groves and walks and fruit trees, in opening springs, and making fish-ponds."
All these tastes were almost indispensable to anyone filling the position which, alike, Dudley and Bradstreet held. "Steward" then, had a very different meaning from any associated with it now, and great estates were left practically in the hands of managers while the owners busied themselves in other directions, relying upon the good taste as well as the financial ability of the men who, as a rule, proved more than faithful to the trust.
The first two years of marriage were passed in England, and held the last genuine social life and intellectual development that Anne Bradstreet was to enjoy. The love of learning was not lost in the transition from one country to another, but it took on more and more a theological bias, and embodied itself chiefly in sermons and interminable doctrinal discussions. Even before the marriage, Dudley had decided to join the New England colony, but Simon Bradstreet hesitated and lingered, till forced to a decision by the increasing shadow of persecution. Had they remained in England, there is little doubt that Anne Bradstreet's mind, sensitively alive as it was to every fine influence, would have developed in a far different direction to that which it finally took. The directness and joyous life of the Elizabethan literature had given place to the euphuistic school, and as the Puritans put aside one author after another as "not making for godliness," the strained style, the quirks and conceits of men like Quarles and Withers came to represent the highest type of literary effort. But no author had the influence of Du Bartas, whose poems had been translated by Joshua Sylvester in 1605, under the title of "Du Bartas. His Duuine Weekes and Workes, with a Complete Collection of all the other most delightfull Workes, Translated and Written by ye famous Philomusus, Josvah Sylvester, Gent." He in turn was an imitator; a French euphuist, whose work simply followed and patterned after that of Ronsard, whose popularity for a time had convinced France that no other poet had been before him, and that no successor could approach his power. He chose to study classical models rather than nature or life, and his most formidable poem, merely a beginning of some five or six thousand verses on "the race of French kings, descended from Francion, a child of Hector and a Trojan by birth," ended prematurely on the death of Charles IX, but served as a model for a generation of imitators.
What spell lay in the involved and interminable pages the modern reader cannot decide, but Milton studied them, and affirmed that they had aided in forming his style, and Spenser wrote of him—
"And after thee, (du Bellay) 'gins
Barras hie to raise
His Heavenly muse, th' Almighty to adore.
Live, happy spirits! th' honor of your name,
And fill the world with never dying fame."
Dryden, too, shared the infatuation, and in the Epistle Dedicatory to "The Spanish Friar," wrote: "I remember when I was a boy, I thought inimitable Spenser a mean poet, in comparison of Sylvester's 'Dubartas,' and was wrapt into an ecstasy when I read these lines:
"'Now when the winter's keener breath began
To crystallize the Baltic ocean;
To glaze the lakes, to bridle up the floods,
And periwig with snow (wool) the bald-pate woods.'
"I am much deceived if this be not abominable fustian." Van Lann stigmatizes this poem, Le Semaine ou Creation du Monde, as "the marriage-register of science and verse, written by a Gascon Moses, who, to the minuteness of a Walt Whitman and the unction of a parish-clerk, added an occasional dignity superior to anything attained by the abortive epic of his master."
But he had some subtle, and to the nineteenth century mind, inscrutable charm. Poets studied him and Anne Bradstreet did more than study; she absorbed them, till such originality as had been her portion perished under the weight. In later years she disclaimed the charge of having copied from him, but the infection was too thorough not to remain, and the assimilation had been so perfect that imitation was unconscious. There was everything in the life of Du Bartas to appeal to her imagination as well as her sympathy, and with her minute knowledge of history she relished his detail while reverencing his character. For Du Bartas was a French Puritan, holding the same religious views as Henry IV, before he became King of France, his strong religious nature appealing to every English reader. Born in 1544, of noble parents, and brought up, according to Michaud in the Biographic Universelle, to the profession of arms, he distinguished himself as a soldier and negotiater. Attached to the person of Prince Henry "in the capacity of gentleman in ordinary of his bedchamber, he was successfully employed by him on missions to Denmark, Scotland and England. He was at the battle of Ivry and celebrated in song the victory which he had helped to gain. He died four months after, in July, 1559, at the age of forty-six, in consequence of some wounds which had been badly healed. He passed all the leisure which his duties left him, at his chateau du Bartas. It was there that he composed his long and numerous poems…. His principal poem, La Semaine, went through more than thirty editions in less than six years, and was translated into Latin, Italian, Spanish, English, German and Dutch."
The influence was an unfortunate one. Nature had already been set aside so thoroughly that, as with Dryden, Spenser was regarded as common-place and even puerile, and the record of real life or thought as no part of a poet's office. Such power of observation as Anne Bradstreet had was discouraged in the beginning, and though later it asserted itself in slight degree, her early work shows no trace of originality, being, as we are soon to see, merely a rhymed paraphrase of her reading. That she wrote verse, not included in any edition of her poems, we know, the earliest date assigned there being 1632, but the time she had dreaded was at hand, and books and study went the way of many other pleasant things.
With the dread must have mingled a certain thrill of hope and expectation common to every thinking man and woman who in that seventeenth century looked to the New World to redress every wrong of the Old, and who watched every movement of the little band that in Holland waited, for light on the doubtful and beclouded future.
The story of the first settlement needs no repetition here. The years in Holland had knit the little band together more strongly and lastingly than proved to be the case with any future company, their minister, John Robinson, having infused his own intense and self-abnegating nature into every one. That the Virginian colonies had suffered incredibly they knew, but it had no power to dissuade them. "We are well weaned," John Robinson wrote, "from the delicate milk of the mother-country, and inured to the difficulties of a strange land; the people are industrious and frugal. We are knit together as a body in a most sacred covenant of the Lord, of the violation whereof we make great conscience, and by virtue whereof, we hold ourselves strictly tied to all care of each other's good and of the whole. It is not with us, as with men whom small things can discourage."
By 1629, the worst difficulties had been overcome, and the struggle for mere existence had ended. The little colony, made up chiefly of hard working men, had passed through every phase of suffering. Sickness and famine had done their worst. The settlers were thoroughly acclimated, and as they prospered, more and more the eyes of Puritan England turned toward them, with a longing for the same freedom. Laud's hand was heavy and growing heavier, and as privileges lessened, and one after another found fine, or pillory, or banishment awaiting every expression of thought, the eagerness grew and intensified. As yet there had been no separation from the Mother Church. It had simply "divided into two great parties, the Prelatical or Hierarchical, headed by Laud, and the Nonconformist or Puritan." For the latter, Calvin had become the sole authority, and even as early as 1603, their preachers made up more than a ninth of the clergy. The points of disagreement increased steadily, each fresh severity from the Prelatical party being met by determined resistance, and a stubborn resolution never to yield an inch of the new convictions. No clearer presentation of the case is to be found anywhere than in Mason's life of Milton, the poet's life being absolutely contemporaneous with the cause, and his own experience came to be that of hundreds. From his childhood he had been set apart for the ministry, but he was as he wrote in later life, with a bitterness he never lost, "Church-outed by the prelates." "Coming to some maturity of years, and perceiving what tyranny had invaded in the Church, that he who would take orders, must subscribe slave, and take an oath withal, which, unless he took with a conscience that would retch, he must either straight perjure or split his faith, I thought it better to prefer a blameless silence before the sacred office of speaking, bought and begun with servitude and forswearing."
Each year of the increasing complications found a larger body enrolled on his side, and with 1629, Simon Bradstreet resigned any hope of life in England, and cast in his fortunes once for all with the projected colony. In dissolving his third Parliament Charles had granted the charter for the Massachusetts Colony, and seizing upon this as a "Providential call," the Puritans at once circulated "conclusions" among gentry and traders, and full descriptions of Massachusetts. Already many capitalists deemed encouragement of the emigration an excellent speculation, but the prospective emigrants had no mind to be ruled by a commercial company at home, and at last, after many deliberations, the old company was dissolved; the officers resigned and their places were filled by persons who proposed to emigrate.
Two days before this change twelve gentlemen met at Cambridge and "pledged themselves to each other to embark for New England with their families for a permanent residence."
"Provided always, that, before the last of September next, the whole government, together with the patent for the said plantation, be first legally transferred." Dudley's name was one of the twelve, and at another meeting in October he was also present, with John Winthrop, who was shortly chosen governor. A day or two later, Dudley was made assistant governor, and in the early spring of 1630, but a few days before sailing Simon Bradstreet was elected to the same office in the place of Mr. Thomas Goffe. One place of trust after another was filled by the two men, whose history henceforward is that of New England. Dudley being very shortly made "undertaker," that is, to be one of those having "the sole managinge of the joynt stock, wth all things incydent theronto, for the space of 7 years."
Even for the sternest enthusiasts, the departure seemed a banishment, though Winthrop spoke the mind of all when he wrote, "I shall call that my country where I may most glorify God and enjoy the presence of my dearest friends."
For him the dearest were left behind for a time, and in all literature there is no tenderer letter than that in which his last words go to the wife whom he loved with all the strength of his nature, and the parting from whom, was the deepest proof that could have been of his loyalty to the cause he had made his own.
As he wrote the Arbella was riding at anchor at Cowes, waiting for favorable winds. Some of the party had gone on shore, and all longed to end these last hours of waiting which simply prolonged a pain that even the most determined and resolute among them, felt to be almost intolerable. Many messages went back carried by friends who lingered at Cowes for the last look at the vanishing sails, but none better worth record than the words which hold the man's deep and tender soul.
"And now, my sweet soul, I must once again take my last farewell of thee in old England. It goeth very near to my heart to leave thee, but I know to whom I have committed thee, even to Him, who loves thee much better than any husband can; who hath taken account of the hairs of thy head, and puts all thy tears in his bottle; who can, and (if it be for his glory) will, bring us together again with peace and comfort. Oh, how it refresheth my heart to think, that I shall yet again see thy sweet face in the land of the living; that lovely countenance that I have so much delighted in, and beheld with so great content! I have hitherto been so taken up with business, as I could seldom look back to my former happiness; but now when I shall be at some leisure, I shall not avoid the remembrance of thee, nor the grief for thy absence. Thou hast thy share with me, but I hope the course we have agreed upon will be some ease to us both. Mondays and Fridays at five o'clock at night we shall meet in spirit till we meet in person. Yet if all these hopes should fail, blessed be our God, that we are assured we shall meet one day, if not as husband and wife, yet in a better condition. Let that stay and comfort thine heart. Neither can the sea drown thy husband, nor enemies destroy, nor any adversity deprive thee of thy husband or children. Therefore I will only take thee now and my sweet children in mine arms, and kiss and embrace you all, and so leave you with God. Farewell, farewell. I bless you all in the name of the Lord Jesus."
"Farewell, dear England!" burst from the little group on that 8th of April, 1630, when at last, a favorable wind bore them out to sea, and Anne Bradstreet's voice had part in that cry of pain and longing, as the shores grew dim and "home faded from their sight. But one comfort or healing remained for them, in the faith that had been with all from the beginning, one record being for them and the host who preceded and followed their flight. So they left that goodly and pleasant city which had been their resting place; … but they knew they were pilgrims and looked not much on those things, but lift up their eyes to the heavens, their dearest country, and quieted their spirits."
CHAPTER III.
THE VOYAGE.
It is perhaps the fault of the seventeenth century and its firm belief that a woman's office was simply to wait such action as man might choose to take, that no woman's record remains of the long voyage or the first impressions of the new country.
For the most of them writing was by no means a familiar task, but this could not be said of the women on board the Arbella, who had known the highest cultivation that the time afforded. But poor Anne Bradstreet's young "heart rose," to such a height that utterance may have been quite stifled, and as her own family were all with her, there was less need of any chronicle.
For all details, therefore, we are forced to depend on the journal kept by Governor Winthrop, who busied himself not only with this, making the first entry on that Easter Monday which found them riding at anchor at Cowes, but with another quite as characteristic piece of work. A crowded storm-tossed ship, is hardly a point to which one looks for any sustained or fine literary composition, but the little treatise, "A Model of Christian Charity," the fruit of long and silent musing on the new life awaiting them, holds the highest thought of the best among them, and was undoubtedly read with the profoundest feeling and admiration, as it took shape in the author's hands. There were indications even in the first fervor of the embarkation, that even here some among them thought "every man upon his own," while greater need of unselfishness and self-renunciation had never been before a people. "Only by mutual love and help," and "a grand, patient, self-denial," was there the slightest hope of meeting the demands bound up with the new conditions, and Winthrop wrote—"We must be knit together in this work as one man. We must entertain each other in brotherly affection. We must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities for the supply of others' necessities. We must uphold a familiar commerce together, in all meekness, gentleness, patience and liberality. We must delight in each other; make others' conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes, our commission and community in the work as members of the same body."
A portion of this body were as closely united as if forming but one family. The lady Arbella, in compliment to whom the ship, which had been first known as The Eagle, had been re-christened, had married Mr. Isaac Johnson, one of the wealthiest members of the party. She was a sister of the Earl of Lincoln who had come to the title in 1619, and whose family had a more intimate connection with the New England settlements than that of any other English nobleman. Her sister Susan had become the wife of John Humfrey, another member of the company, and the close friendship between them and the Dudleys made it practically a family party. Anne Bradstreet had grown up with both sisters, and all occupied themselves in such ways as their cramped quarters would allow. Space was of the narrowest, and if the Governor and his deputies indulged themselves in spreading out papers, there would be small room for less important members of the expedition. But each had the little Geneva Bible carried by every Puritan, and read it with a concentrated eagerness born of the sense that they had just escaped its entire loss, and there were perpetual religious exercises of all varieties, with other more secular ones recorded in the Journal. In the beginning there had been some expectation that several other ships would form part of the expedition, but they were still not in sailing order and thus the first entry records "It was agreed, (it being uncertain when the rest of the fleet would be ready) these four ships should consort together; the Arbella to be Admiral, the Talbot Vice-Admiral, the Ambrose Rear-Admiral, and the Jewel a Captain; and accordingly articles of consortship were drawn between the said captains and masters."
The first week was one of small progress, for contrary winds drove them back persistently and they at last cast anchor before Yarmouth, and with the feeling that some Jonah might be in their midst ordered a fast for Friday, the 2d of April, at which time certain light-minded "landmen, pierced a runlet of strong water, and stole some of it, for which we laid them in bolts all the night, and the next morning the principal was openly whipped, and both kept with bread and water that day."
Nothing further happened till Monday, when excitement was afforded for the younger members of the party at least, as "A maid of Sir Robert Saltonstall fell down at the grating by the cook-room, but the carpenter's man, who unwittingly, occasioned her fall caught hold of her with incredible nimbleness, and saved her; otherwise she had fallen into the hold."
Tuesday, finding that the wind was still against them, the captain drilled the landmen with their muskets, "and such as were good shot among them were enrolled to serve in the ship if occasion should be"; while the smell of powder and the desire, perhaps, for one more hour on English soil, made the occasion for another item: "The lady Arbella and the gentlewomen, and Mr. Johnson and some others went on shore to refresh themselves."
The refreshment was needed even then. Anne Bradstreet was still extremely delicate, never having fully recovered from the effects of the small-pox, and the Lady Arbella's health must have been so also, as it failed steadily through the voyage, giving the sorest anxiety to her husband and every friend on board.
It is evident from an entry in Anne Bradstreet's diary after reaching New England that even the excitement of change and the hope common to all of a happy future, was not strong enough to keep down the despondency which came in part undoubtedly from her weak health. The diary is not her own thoughts or impressions of the new life, but simply bits of religious experience; an autobiography of the phase with which we could most easily dispense. "After a short time I changed my condition and was married, and came into this country, where I found a new world and new manners at which my heart rose. But after I was convinced it was the will of God I submitted to it and joined to the church at Boston."
This rebellion must have been from the beginning, for every inch of English soil was dear to her, but she concealed it so thoroughly, that no one suspected the real grief which she looked upon as rebellion to the will of God. Conservative in thought and training, and with the sense of humor which might have lightened some phases of the new dispensation, almost destroyed by the Puritan faith, which more and more altered the proportions of things, making life only a grim battle with evil, and the days doings of absolute unimportance save as they advanced one toward heaven, she accepted discomfort or hardship with quiet patience.
There must have been unfailing interest, too, in the perpetual chances and changes of the perilous voyage. They had weighed anchor finally on the 8th of April, and were well under way on the morning of the 9th, when their journey seemed suddenly likely to end then and there. The war between Spain and England was still going on, and privateers known as Dunkirkers, were lying in wait before every English harbor. Thus there was reason enough for apprehension, when, "In the morning we descried from the top, eight sail astern of us…. We supposing they might be Dunkirkers, our captain caused the gun room and gun deck to be cleared; all the hammocks were taken down, our ordnance loaded, and our powder chests and fireworks made ready, and our landmen quartered among the seamen, and twenty-five of them appointed for muskets, and every man written down for his quarter.
"The wind continued N. with fair weather, and after noon it calmed, and we still saw those eight ships to stand towards us; having more wind than we, they came up apace, so as our captain and the masters of our consorts were more occasioned to think they might be Dunkirkers, (for we were told at Yarmouth, that there were ten sail of them waiting for us); whereupon we all prepared to fight with them, and took down some cabins which were in the way of our ordnance, and out of every ship were thrown such bed matters as were subject to take fire, and we heaved out our long boats and put up our waste cloths, and drew forth our men and armed them with muskets and other weapons, and instruments for fireworks; and for an experiment our captain shot a ball of wild fire fastened to an arrow out of a cross bow, which burnt in the water a good time. The lady Arbella and the other women and children, were removed into the lower deck, that they might be out of danger. All things being thus fitted, we went to prayer upon the upper deck. It was much to see how cheerful and comfortable all the company appeared; not a woman or child that shewed fear, though all did apprehend the danger to have been great, if things had proved as might well be expected, for there had been eight against four, and the least of the enemy's ships were reported to carry thirty brass pieces; but our trust was in the Lord of Hosts; and the courage of our captain, and his care and diligence did much to encourage us.
"It was now about one of the clock, and the fleet seemed to be within a league of us; therefore our captain, because he would show he was not afraid of them, and that he might see the issue before night should overtake us, tacked about and stood to meet them, and when we came near we perceived them to be our friends— the little Neptune, a ship of some twenty pieces of ordnance, and her two consorts, bound for the Straits, a ship of Flushing, and a Frenchman and three other English ships bound for Canada and Newfoundland. So when we drew near, every ship (as they met) saluted each other, and the musketeers discharged their small shot, and so (God be praised) our fear and danger was turned into mirth and friendly entertainment. Our danger being thus over, we espied two boats on fishing in the channel; so every one of our four ships manned out a skiff, and we bought of them great store of excellent fresh fish of divers sorts."
It is an astonishing fact, that no line in Anne Bradstreet's poems has any reference to this experience which held every alternation of hope and fear, and which must have moved them beyond any other happening of the long voyage. But, inward states, then as afterward, were the only facts that seemed worthy of expression, so far as she personally was concerned, and they were all keyed to a pitch which made danger even welcome, as a test of endurance and genuine purpose. But we can fancy the dismay of every house-wife as the limited supply of "bed matters," went the way of many other things "subject to take fire." Necessarily the household goods of each had been reduced to the very lowest terms, and as the precious rugs and blankets sunk slowly, or for a time defied the waves and were tossed from crest to crest, we may be sure that the heart of every woman, in the end at least, desired sorely that rescue might be attempted. Sheets had been dispensed with, to avoid the accumulation of soiled linen, for the washing of which no facilities could be provided, and Winthrop wrote of his boys to his wife in one of his last letters, written as they rode at anchor before Cowes, "They lie both with me, and sleep as soundly in a rug (for we use no sheets here) as ever they did at Groton; and so I do myself, (I praise God)."
Among minor trials this was not the least, for the comfort we associate with English homes, had developed, under the Puritan love of home, to a degree that even in the best days of the Elizabethan time was utterly unknown. The faith which demanded absolute purity of life, included the beginning of that cleanliness which is "next to godliness," if not an inherent part of godliness itself, and fine linen on bed and table had become more and more a necessity. The dainty, exquisite neatness that in the past has been inseparable from the idea of New England, began with these Puritan dames, who set their floating home in such order as they could, and who seized the last opportunity at Yarmouth of going on shore, not only for refreshment, but to wash neckbands and other small adornments, which waited two months for any further treatment of this nature.
There were many resources, not only in needlework and the necessary routine of each day, but in each other. The two daughters of Sir Robert Saltonstall, Mrs. Phillips the minister's wife, the wives of Nowell, Coddington and others made up the group of gentlewomen who dined with Lady Arbella in "the great cabin," the greatness of which will be realized when the reader reflects that the ship was but three hundred and fifty tons burden and could carry aside from the fifty or so sailors, but thirty passengers, among whom were numbered various discreet and reputable "young gentlemen" who, as Winthrop wrote, "behave themselves well, and are conformable to all good orders," one or two of whom so utilized their leisure that the landing found them ready for the marriage bells that even Puritan asceticism still allowed to be rung.
Disaster waited upon them, even when fairly under way. Winthrop, whose family affection was intense, and whose only solace in parting with his wife had been, that a greatly loved older son, as well as two younger ones were his companions, had a sore disappointment, entered in the journal, with little comment on its personal bearings. "The day we set sail from Cowes, my son Henry Winthrop went on shore with one of my servants, to fetch an ox and ten wethers, which he had provided for our ship, and there went on shore with him Mr. Pelham and one of his servants. They sent the cattle aboard, but returned not themselves. About three days after my servant and a servant of Mr. Pelham's came to us in Yarmouth, and told us they were all coming to us in a boat the day before, but the wind was so strong against them as they were forced on shore in the night, and the two servants came to Yarmouth by land, and so came on shipboard, but my son and Mr. Pelham (we heard) went back to the Cowes and so to Hampton. We expected them three or four days after, but they came not to us, so we have left them behind, and suppose they will come after in Mr. Goffe's ships. We were very sorry they had put themselves upon such inconvenience when they were so well accommodated in our ship."
A fresh gale on the day of this entry encouraged them all; they passed the perils of Scilly and looked for no further delay when a fresh annoyance was encountered which, for the moment, held for the women at least, something of the terror of their meeting with supposed "Dunkirkers."
"About eight in the morning, … standing to the W. S. W. we met two small ships, which falling in among us, and the Admiral coming under our lee, we let him pass, but the Jewel and Ambrose, perceiving the other to be a Brazilman, and to take the wind of us, shot at them, and made them stop and fall after us, and sent a skiff aboard them to know what they were. Our captain, fearing lest some mistake might arise, and lest they should take them for enemies which were friends, and so, through the unruliness of the mariners some wrong might be done them, caused his skiff to be heaved out, and sent Mr. Graves, one of his mates and our pilot (a discreet man) to see how things were, who returned soon after, and brought with him the master of one of the ships, and Mr. Lowe and Mr. Hurlston. When they were come aboard to us, they agreed to send for the captain, who came and showed his commission from the Prince of Orange. In conclusion he proved to be a Dutchmen, and his a man of war from Flushing, and the other ship was a prize he had taken, laden with sugar and tobacco; so we sent them aboard their ships again, and held on our course. In this time (which hindered us five or six leagues) the Jewel and the Ambrose came foul of each other, so as we much feared the issue, but, through God's mercy, they came well off again, only the Jewel had her foresail torn, and one of her anchors broken. This occasion and the sickness of our minister and people, put us all out of order this day, so as we could have no sermons."
No words hold greater force of discomfort and deprivation than that one line, "so as we could have no sermons," for the capacity for this form of "temperate entertainment," had increased in such ratio, that the people sat spell bound, four hours at a stretch, both hearers and speaker being equally absorbed. Winthrop had written of himself at eighteen, in his "Christain Experience": "I had an insatiable thirst after the word of God; and could not misse a good sermon, though many miles off, especially of such as did search deep into the conscience," and to miss this refreshment even for a day, seemed just so much loss of the needed spiritual food.
But the wind, which blew "a stiffe gale," had no respect of persons, and all were groaning together till the afternoon of the next day, when a device occurred to some inventive mind, possibly that of Mistress Bradstreet herself, which was immediately carried out. "Our children and others that were sick and lay groaning in the cabins, we fetched out, and having stretched a rope from the steerage to the main mast, we made them stand, some of one side and some of the other, and sway it up and down till they were warm, and by this means they soon grew well and merry."
The plan worked well, and three days later, when the wind which had quieted somewhat, again blew a "stiffe gale," he was able to write: "This day the ship heaved and set more than before, yet we had but few sick, and of these such as came up upon the deck and stirred themselves, were presently well again; therefore our captain set our children and young men, to some harmless exercises, which the seamen were very active in, and did our people much good, though they would sometimes play the wags with them."
Wind and rain, rising often till the one was a gale and the other torrents, gave them small rest in that first week. The fish they had secured at Yarmouth returned to their own element, Winthrop mourning them as he wrote: "The storm was so great as it split our foresail and tore it in pieces, and a knot of the sea washed our tub overboard, wherein our fish was a-watering." The children had become good sailers, and only those were sick, who, like "the women kept under hatches." The suffering from cold was constant, and for a fortnight extreme, the Journal reading: "I wish, therefore, that all such as shall pass this way in the spring have care to provide warm clothing; for nothing breeds more trouble and danger of sickness, in this season, than cold."
From day to day the little fleet exchanged signals, and now and then, when calm enough the masters of the various ships dined in the round-house of the Arbella, and exchanged news, as that, "all their people were in health, but one of their cows was dead." Two ships in the distance on the 24th of April, disturbed them for a time, but they proved to be friends, who saluted and "conferred together so long, till his Vice Admiral was becalmed by our sails, and we were foul one of another, but there being little wind and the sea calm, we kept them asunder with oars, etc., till they heaved out their boat, and so towed their ship away. They told us for certain, that the king of France had set out six of his own ships to recover the fort from them."
Here was matter for talk among the travellers, whose interest in all that touched their future heightened day by day, and the item, with its troublous implications may have been the foundation of one of the numerous fasts recorded.
May brought no suggestion of any quiet, though three weeks out, they had made but three hundred leagues, and the month opened with "a very great tempest all the night, with fierce showers of rain intermixed, and very cold…. Yet through God's mercy, we were very comfortable and few or none sick, but had opportunity to keep the Sabbath, and Mr. Phillips preached twice that day."
Discipline was of the sharpest, the Puritan temper brooking no infractions of law and order. There were uneasy and turbulent spirits both among the crew and passengers, and in the beginning swift judgment fell upon two young men, who, "falling at odds and fighting, contrary to the orders which we had published and set up in the ship, were adjudged to walk upon the deck till night, with their hands bound behind them, which accordingly was executed; and another man for using contemptuous speeches in our presence, was laid in bolts till he submitted himself and promised open confession of his offence."
Impressive as this undoubtedly proved to the "children and youth thereby admonished," a still greater sensation was felt among them on the discovery that "a servant of one of our company had bargained with a child to sell him a box worth three-pence for three biscuits a day all the voyage, and had received about forty and had sold them and many more to some other servants. We caused his hands to be tied up to a bar, and hanged a basket with stones about his neck, and so he stood two hours."
Other fights are recorded, the cause a very evident one. "We observed it a common fault in our young people that they gave themselves to drink hot waters very immoderately."
Brandy then as now was looked upon as a specific for sea-sickness, and "a maid servant in the ship, being stomach sick, drank so much strong water, that she was senseless, and had near killed herself."
The constant cold and rain, the monotonous food, which before port was reached had occasioned many cases of scurvy and reduced the strength of all, was excuse enough for the occasional lapse into overindulgence which occurred, but the long penance was nearly ended. On the 8th of June Mount Mansell, now Mt. Desert, was passed, an enchanting sight for the sea-sad eyes of the travellers. A "handsome gale" drove them swiftly on, and we may know with what interest they crowded the decks and gazed upon these first glimpses of the new home. As they sailed, keeping well in to shore, and making the new features of hill and meadow and unfamiliar trees, Winthrop wrote: "We had now fair sunshine weather, and so pleasant a sweet air as did much refresh us, and there came a smell off the shore like the smell of a garden."
Peril was past, and though fitful winds still tormented them, the 12th of May saw the long imprisonment ended, and they dropped anchor "a little within the islands," in the haven where they would be.
CHAPTER IV.
BEGINNINGS.
There are travellers who insist that, as they near American shores in May or early June, the smell of corn-blossom is on the wind, miles out at sea, a delicate, distinct, penetrating odor, as thoroughly American as the clearness of the sky and the pure, fine quality in the air. The wild grape, growing as profusely to-day on the Cape as two hundred years ago, is even more powerful, the subtle, delicious fragrance making itself felt as soon as one approaches land. The "fine, fresh smell like a garden," which Winthrop notes more than once, came to them on every breeze from the blossoming land. Every charm of the short New England summer waited for them. They had not, like the first comers to that coast to disembark in the midst of ice and snow, but green hills sloped down to the sea, and wild strawberries were growing almost at high-tide mark. The profusion of flowers and berries had rejoiced Higginson in the previous year, their men rowing at once to "Ten Pound Island," and bringing back, he writes: "ripe strawberries and gooseberries and sweet single roses. Thus God was merciful to us in giving us a taste and smell of the sweet fruit, as an earnest of his bountiful goodness to welcome us at our first arrival."
But no fairness of Nature could undo the sad impression of the first hour in the little colony at Salem, where the Arbella landed, three days before her companions reached there. Their own cares would have seemed heavy enough, but the winter had been a terrible one, and Dudley wrote later in his letter to the Countess of Lincoln: "We found the Colony in a sad and unexpected condition, above eighty of them being dead the winter before; and many of those alive, weak and sick; all the corn and bread amongst them all, hardly sufficient to feed them a fortnight, insomuch that the remainder of a hundred and eighty servants we had the two years before sent over, coming to us for victuals to sustain them, we found ourselves wholly unable to feed them, by reason that the provisions shipped for them were taken out of the ship they were put in, and they who were trusted to ship them in another, failed us and left them behind; whereupon necessity enforced us, to our extreme loss, to give them all liberty, who had cost us about L16 or L20 a person, furnishing and sending over."
Salem holding only discouragement, they left it, exploring the Charles and the Mystic Rivers, and finally joining the settlement at Charlestown, to which Francis Higginson had gone the previous year, and which proved to be in nearly as desperate case as Salem. The Charlestown records as given in Young's "Chronicles of Massachusetts," tell the story of the first days of attempt at organization. The goods had all been unshipped at Salem and were not brought to Charlestown until July. In the meantime, "The Governor and several of the Patentees dwelt in the great house which was last year built in this town by Mr. Graves and the rest of their servants. The multitude set up cottages, booths and tents about the Town Hill. They had long passage; some of the ships were seventeen, some eighteen weeks a coming. Many people arrived sick of the scurvy, which also increased much after their arrival, for want of houses, and by reason of wet lodging in their cottages, etc. Other distempers also prevailed; and although [the] people were generally very loving and pitiful, yet the sickness did so prevail, that the whole were not able to tend the sick as they should be tended; upon which many perished and died, and were buried about the Town Hill."
Saddest of all among these deaths must have been that of the Lady Arbella, of whom Mather in a later day, wrote: "She came from a paradise of plenty and pleasure, in the family of a noble earldom, into a wilderness of wants, and took New England in her way to heaven." There had been doubt as to the expediency of her coming, but with the wife of another explorer she had said: "Whithersoever your fatal destiny shall drive you, either by the waves of the great ocean, or by the manifold and horrible dangers of the land, I will surely bear you company. There can no peril chance to me so terrible, nor any kind of death so cruel, that shall not be much easier for me to abide, than to live so far separate from you."
Weakened by the long voyage and its perpetual hardships, and dismayed, if may be at the sadness and privations of what they had hoped might hold immediate comfort, she could not rally, and Anne Bradstreet's first experience of New England was over the grave, in which they laid one of the closest links to childhood and that England both had loved alike.
Within a month, Winthrop wrote in his journal: "September 30. About two in the morning, Mr. Isaac Johnson died; his wife, the lady Arbella, of the house of Lincoln, being dead about one month before. He was a holy man and wise, and died in sweet peace, leaving some part of his substance to the Colony."
"He tried
To live without her, liked it not and died."
Still another tragedy had saddened them all, though in the press of overwhelming business, Winthrop wrote only: "Friday, July 2. My son Henry Winthrop drowned at Salem," and there is no other mention of himself till July 16, when he wrote the first letter to his wife from America.
The loss was a heavy one to the colony as well as the father, for Henry Winthrop, though but twenty-two, had already had experience as a pioneer, having gone out to Barbadoes at eighteen, and became one of the earliest planters in that island. Ardent, energetic, and with his fathers deep tenderness for all who depended on him, he was one who could least be spared. "A sprightly and hopeful young gentleman he was," says Hubbard, and another chronicle gives more minute details. "The very day on which he went on shore in New England, he and the principal officers of the ship, walking out to a place now called by the Salemites, Northfield, to view the Indian wigwams, they saw on the other side of the river a small canoe. He would have had one of the company swim over and fetch it, rather than walk several miles on foot, it being very hot weather; but none of the party could swim but himself; and so he plunged in, and, as he was swimming over, was taken with the cramp a few roods from the shore and drowned."
The father's letter is filled with an anguish of pity for the mother and the young wife, whose health, like that of the elder Mrs. Winthrop, had made the journey impossible for both.
"I am so overpressed with business, as I have no time for these or other mine own private occasions. I only write now that thou mayest know, that yet I live and am mindful of thee in all my affairs. The larger discourse of all things thou shalt receive from my brother Downing, which I must send by some of the last ships. We have met with many sad and discomfortable things as thou shalt hear after; and the Lord's hand hath been heavy upon myself in some very near to me. My son Henry! My son Henry! Ah, poor child! Yet it grieves me much more for my dear daughter. The Lord strengthen and comfort her heart to bear this cross patiently. I know thou wilt not be wanting to her in this distress."
Not one of the little colony was wanting in tender offices in these early days when a common suffering made them "very pitiful one to another," and as the absolutely essential business was disposed of they hastened to organize the church where free worship should make amends for all the long sorrow of its search.
A portion of the people from the Arbella had remained in Salem, but on Friday, July 3Oth, 1630, Winthrop, Dudley, Johnson and Wilson entered into a church covenant, which was signed two days after by Increase Nowell and four others—Sharpe, Bradstreet, Gager and Colborne.
It is most probable that Anne Bradstreet had been temporarily separated from her husband, as Johnson in his "Wonder-working Providence," writes, that after the arrival at Salem, "the lady Arrabella and some other godly women aboad at Salem, but their husbands continued at Charles Town, both for the settling the Civill Government and gathering another Church of Christ." The delay was a short one, for her name stands thirteenth on the list. Charlestown, however, held hardly more promise of quiet life than Salem. The water supply was, curiously enough, on a peninsula which later gave excellent water, only "a brackish spring in the sands by the water side … which could not supply half the necessities of the multitude, at which time the death of so many was concluded to be much the more occasioned by this want of good water."
Heat was another evil to the constitutions which knew only the equable English temperature, and could not face either the intense sun, or the sudden changes of the most erratic climate the earth knows. In the search for running-water, the colonists scattered, moving from point to point, "the Governor, the Deputy-Governor and all the assistants except Mr. Nowell going across the river to Boston at the invitation of Mr. Blaxton, who had until then been its only white inhabitant."
Even the best supplied among them were but scantily provided with provisions. It was too late for planting, and the colony already established was too wasted and weakened by sickness to have cared for crops in the planting season. In the long voyage "there was miserable damage and spoil of provisions by sea, and divers came not so well provided as they would, upon a report, whilst they were in England, that now there was enough in New England." Even this small store was made smaller by the folly of several who exchanged food for beaver skins, and, the Council suddenly finding that famine was imminent "hired and despatched away Mr. William Pearce with his ship of about two hundred tons, for Ireland to buy more, and in the mean time went on with their work of settling."
The last month of the year had come before they could decide where the fortified town, made necessary by Indian hostilities, should be located. The Governor's house had been partly framed at Charlestown, but with the removal to Boston it was taken down, and finally Cambridge was settled upon as the most desirable point, and their first winter was spent there. Here for the first time it was possible for Anne Bradstreet to unpack their household belongings, and seek to create some semblance of the forsaken home. But even for the Dudleys, among the richest members of the party there was a privation which shows how sharply it must have fared with the poorer portion, and Dudley wrote, nine months after their arrival, that he "thought fit to commit to memory our present condition, and what hath befallen us since our arrival here; which I will do shortly, after my usual manner, and must do rudely, having yet no table, nor other room to write in than by the fireside upon my knee, in this sharp winter; to which my family must have leave to resort, though they break good manners, and make me many times forget what I would say, and say what I would not."
No word of Mistress Dudley's remains to tell the shifts and strivings for comfort in that miserable winter which, mild as it was, had a keenness they were ill prepared to face. Petty miseries and deprivations, the least endurable of all forms of suffering, surrounded them like a cloud of stinging insects, whose attacks, however intolerable at the moment, are forgotten with the passing, and either for this reason, or from deliberate purpose, there is not a line of reference to them in any of Anne Bradstreet's writings. Scarcity of food was the sorest trouble. The Charlestown records show that "people were necessitated to live upon clams and muscles and ground nuts and acorns, and these got with much difficulty in the winter-time. People were very much tried and discouraged, especially when they heard that the Governor himself had the last batch of bread in the oven."
All fared alike so far as possible, the richer and more provident distributing to the poor, and all watching eagerly for the ship sent back in July in anticipation of precisely such a crisis. Six months had passed, when, on the fifth of February, 1631, Mather records that as Winthrop stood at his door giving "the last handful of meal in the barrel unto a poor man distressed by the wolf at the door, at that instant, they spied a ship arrived at the harbor's mouth with provisions for them all." The Fast day just appointed became one of rejoicing, the first formal proclamation for Thanksgiving Day being issued, "by order of the Governour and Council, directed to all the plantations, and though the stores held little reminder of holiday time in Old England, grateful hearts did not stop to weigh differences. In any case the worst was past and early spring brought the hope of substantial comfort, for the town was 'laid out in squares, the streets intersecting each other at right-angles,' and houses were built as rapidly as their small force of carpenters could work. Bradstreet's house was at the corner of 'Brayntree' and Wood Streets, the spot now occupied by the familiar University Book- store of Messrs. Sever and Francis on Harvard Square, his plot of ground being 'aboute one rood,' and Dudley's on a lot of half an acre was but a little distance from them at the corner of the present Dunster and South Streets." Governor Winthrop's decision not to remain here, brought about some sharp correspondence between Dudley and himself, but an amicable settlement followed after a time, and though the frame of his house was removed to Boston, the town grew in spite of its loss, so swiftly that in 1633, Wood wrote of it:
"This is one of the neatest and best compacted Towns in New England, having many fair structures, with many handsome contrived streets. The inhabitants most of them are very rich and well stored with Cattell of all sorts."
Rich as they may have appeared, however, in comparison with many of the settlements about them, sickness and want were still unwelcome guests among them, so that Dudley wrote: "there is not a house where there is not one dead and in some houses many. The natural causes seem to be in the want of warm lodging and good diet, to which Englishmen are habituated at home, and in the sudden increase of heat which they endure that are landed here in summer, the salt meats at sea having prepared their bodies thereto; for those only these two last years died of fevers who landed in June and July; as those of Plymouth, who landed in winter, died of the scurvey, as did our poorer sort, whose houses and bedding kept them not sufficiently warm, nor their diet sufficiently in heart."
Thus far there were small inducements for further emigration. The tide poured in steadily, but only because worse evils were behind than semi-starvation in New England. The fairest and fullest warning was given by Dudley, whose letter holds every strait and struggle of the first year, and who wrote with the intention of counteracting the too rosy statements of Higginson and Graves: "If any come hither to plant for worldly ends that can live well at home, he commits an error, of which he will soon repent him; but if for spiritual, and that no particular obstacle hinder his removal, he may find here what may well content him, viz., materials to build, fuel to burn, ground to plant, seas and rivers to fish in, a pure air to breathe in, good water to drink till wine or beer can be made; which together with the cows, hogs and goats brought hither already, may suffice for food; for as for fowl and venison, they are dainties here as well as in England. For clothes and bedding, they must bring them with them, till time and industry produce them here. In a word, we yet enjoy little to be envied, but endure much to be pitied in the sickness and mortality of our people. And I do the more willingly use this open and plain dealing, lest other men should fall short of their expectations when they come hither, as we to our great prejudice did, by means of letters sent us from hence into England, wherein honest men, out of a desire to draw over others to them, wrote something hyperbolically of many things here. If any godly men, out of religious ends, will come over to help us in the good work we are about, I think they cannot dispose of themselves nor their estates more to God's glory and the furtherance of their own reckoning. But they must not be of the poorer sort yet, for divers years; for we have found by experience that they have hindered, not furthered the work. And for profane and debauched persons, their oversight in coming hither is wondered at, where they shall find nothing to content them."
This long quotation is given in full to show the fair temper of the man, who as time went on was slightly less in favor than in the beginning. No one questioned his devotion to the cause, or the energy with which he worked for it, but as he grew older he lost some portion of the old urbanity, exchanging it disastrously for traits which would seem to have been the result of increasing narrowness of religious faith rather than part of his real self. Savage writes of him: "a hardness in publick and ridgidity in private life, are too observable in his character, and even an eagerness for pecuniary gain, which might not have been expected in a soldier and a statesman." That the impression was general is evident from an epitaph written upon him by Governor Belcher, who may, however, have had some personal encounter with this "rigidity," which was applied to all without fear or favor.
"Here lies Thomas Dudley, that trusty old stud,
A bargain's a bargain and must be made good."
Whatever his tendencies may have been they did not weigh heavily on his family, who delighted in his learning and devoted spirit, and whose affection was strong enough to atone for any criticism from outsiders.
Objectionable as his methods may sometimes have been—sour as his compatriots now and then are said to have found him, "the world it appears, is indebted for much of its progress, to uncomfortable and even grumpy people," and Tyler whose analysis of the Puritan character has never been surpassed, writes of them: "Even some of the best of them, perhaps, would have seemed to us rather pragmatical and disputatious persons, with all the edges and corners of their characters left sharp, with all their opinions very definitely formed, and with their habits of frank utterance quite thoroughly matured. Certainly … they do not seem to have been a company of gentle, dreamy and euphemistical saints, with a particular aptitude for martyrdom and an inordinate development of affability."
They argued incessantly, at home and abroad, and "this exacting and tenacious propensity of theirs, was not a little criticized by some who had business connections with them." Very probably Governor Belcher had been worsted in some wordy battle, always decorously conducted, but always persistent, but these minor infelicities did not affect the main purposes of life, and the settlement grew in spite of them; perhaps even, because of them, free speech being, as yet, the privilege of all, though as the answering became in time a little too free, means were taken to insure more discretion.
In the meantime Cambridge grew, and suddenly arose a complaint, which to the modern mind is preposterous. "Want of room" was the cry of every citizen and possibly with justice, as the town had been set within fixed limits and had nearly doubled in size through the addition in August, 1632, of the congregation of the Rev. Thomas Hooker at Chelmsford in the county of Essex, England, who had fallen under Laud's displeasure, and escaped with difficulty, being pursued by the officers of the High Commission from one county to another, and barely eluding them when he took ship for New England.
One would have thought the wilderness at their doors afforded sense of room enough, and that numbers would have been a welcome change, but the complaint was serious enough to warrant their sending out men to Ipswich with a view of settling there. Then for a time the question dropped, much to the satisfaction, no doubt, of Mistress Dudley and her daughter, to whom in 1633, or '34, the date being uncertain, came her first child, the son Samuel, who graduated at Harvard College in 1653, and of whom she wrote long after in the little diary of "Religious Experiences":
"It pleased God to keep me a long time without a child, which was a great greif to me, and cost mee many prayers and tears before I obtained one, and after him gave mee many more of whom I now take the care."
Cambridge still insisting that it had not room enough, the town was enlarged, but having accomplished this, both Dudley and Bradstreet left it for Ipswich, the first suggestion of which had been made in January, 1632, when news came to them that "the French had bought the Scottish plantation near Cape Sable, and that the fort and all the amunition were delivered to them, and that the cardinal, having the managing thereof, had sent many companies already, and preparation was made to send many more the next year, and divers priests and Jesuits among them—-called the assistants to Boston, and the ministers and captains, and some other chief men, to advise what was fit to be done for our safety, in regard the French were like to prove ill neighbors, (being Papists)."
Another change was in store for the patient women who followed the path laid open before them, with no thought of opposition, desiring only "room for such life as should in the ende return them heaven for an home that passeth not away," and with the record in Winthrop's journal, came the familiar discussion as to methods, and the decision which speedily followed.
Dudley and Bradstreet as "assistants" both had voice in the conclusions of the meeting, the record of which has just been given, though with no idea, probably, at that time, that their own movements would be affected. It was settled at once that "a plantation and a fort should be begun at Natascott, partly to be some block in an enemy's way (though it could not bar his entrance), and especially to prevent an enemy from taking that passage from us…. Also, that a plantation be begun at Agawam (being the best place in the land for tillage and cattle), least an enemy, finding it void should possess and take it from us. The governor's son (being one of the assistants) was to undertake this, and to take no more out of the bay than twelve men; the rest to be supplied, at the coming of the next ships."
That they were not essential to Cambridge, but absolutely so at this weak point was plain to both Dudley and Bradstreet, who forthwith made ready for the change accomplished in 1634, when at least one other child, Dorothy, had come to Anne Bradstreet. Health, always delicate and always fluctuating, was affected more seriously than usual at this time, no date being given, but the period extending over several years, "After some time, I fell into a lingering sickness like a consumption, together with a lameness, which correction I saw the Lord sent to humble and try me and do me Good: and it was not altogether ineffectual."
Patient soul! There were better days coming, but, self-distrust was, after her affections, her strongest point, and there is small hint of inward poise or calmness till years had passed, though she faced each change with the quiet dauntlessness that was part of her birthright. But the tragedy of their early days in the colony still shadowed her. Evidently no natural voice was allowed to speak in her, and the first poem of which we have record is as destitude of any poetic flavor, as if designed for the Bay Psalm- book. As the first, however, it demands place, if only to show from what she afterward escaped. That she preserved it simply as a record of a mental state, is evident from the fact, that it was never included in any edition of her poems, it having been found among her papers after her death.
UPON A FIT OF SICKNESS, Anno. 1632.
Aetatis suce, 19.
Twice ten years old not fully told since
nature gave me breath,
My race is run, my thread is spun, lo! here
is fatal Death.
All men must dye, and so must I, this cannot
be revoked,
For Adam's sake, this word God spake, when he
so high provoke'd.
Yet live I shall, this life's but small, in
place of highest bliss,
Where I shall have all I can crave, no life is
like to this.
For what's this life but care and strife? since
first we came from womb,
Our strength doth waste, our time doth hast and
then we go to th' Tomb.
O Bubble blast, how long can'st last? that
always art a breaking,
No sooner blown, but dead and gone ev'n as a
word that's speaking,
O whil'st I live this grace me give, I doing good
may be,
Then death's arrest I shall count best because
it's thy degree.
Bestow much cost, there's nothing lost to make
Salvation sure,
O great's the gain, though got with pain, comes
by profession pure.
The race is run, the field is won, the victory's
mine, I see,
For ever know thou envious foe the foyle belongs
to thee.
This is simply very pious and unexceptionable doggerel and no one would admit such fact more quickly than Mistress Anne herself, who laid it away in after days in her drawer, with a smile at the metre and a sigh for the miserable time it chronicled. There were many of them, for among the same papers is a shorter burst of trouble:
UPON SOME DISTEMPER OF BODY.
In anguish of my heart repleat with woes,
And wasting pains, which best my body knows,
In tossing slumbers on my wakeful bed,
Bedrencht with tears that flow from mournful head,
Till nature had exhausted all her store,
Then eyes lay dry disabled to weep more;
And looking up unto his Throne on high,
Who sendeth help to those in misery;
He chas'd away those clouds and let me see,
My Anchor cast i' th' vale with safety,
He eas'd my soul of woe, my flesh of pain,
And brought me to the shore from troubled Main.
The same brooding and saddened spirit is found in some verses of the same period and written probably just before the birth of her third child, the latter part containing a touch of jealous apprehension that has been the portion of many a young mother, and that indicates more of human passion than could be inferred from anything in her first attempt at verse.
All things within this fading world hath end,
Adversity doth still our joys attend;
No tyes so strong, no friends so dear and sweet
But with death's parting blow is sure to meet.
The sentence past is most irrevocable
A common thing, yet oh, inevitable;
How soon, my Dear, death may my steps attend,
How soon 't may be thy Lot to lose thy friend!
We both are ignorant, yet love bids me
These farewell lines to recommend to thee,
That when that knot's untyed that made us one,
I may seem thine, who in effect am none.
And if I see not half my dayes that's due,
What nature would, God grant to yours and you;
The many faults that well you know I have,
Let be interred in my oblivious grave;
If any worth or virtue were in me,
Let that live freshly in thy memory,
And when thou feel'st no grief as I no harms,
Yet love thy dead, who long lay in thine arms:
And when thy loss shall be repaid with gains
Look to my little babes my dear remains,
And if thou love thyself, or loved'st me,
These O protect from step-Dames injury.
And if chance to thine eyes shall bring this verse,
With some sad sighs honor my absent Herse;
And kiss this paper for thy love's dear sake
Who with salt tears this last farewell did take.
—A. B.
CHAPTER V.
OLD FRIENDS AND NEW.
In spite of the fits of depression evident in most of the quotations thus far given, there were many alleviations, as life settled into more tolerable conditions, and one chief one was now very near. Probably no event in the first years of Anne Bradstreet's life in the little colony had as much significance for her as the arrival at Boston in 1633, of the Rev. John Cotton, her father's friend, and one of the strongest influences in the lives of both English and American Puritans. She was still living in Cambridge and very probably made one of the party who went in from there to hear his first sermon before the Boston church. He had escaped from England with the utmost difficulty, the time of freedom allowed him by King James who admired his learning, having ended so thoroughly that he was hunted like an escaped convict. Fearless and almost reckless, the Colonial ministers wondered at his boldness, a brother of Nathaniel Ward saying as he and some friends "spake merrily" together: "Of all men in the world, I envy Mr. Cotton of Boston, most; for he doth nothing in way of conformity, and yet hath his liberty, and I do everything in that way and cannot enjoy mine."
The child born on the stormy passage over, and who in good time became Anne Bradstreet's son-in-law, marrying her daughter Dorothy in 1654, appeared with the father and mother at the first public service after his arrival, and before it was positively decided that he should remain in Boston. The baptism, contrary to the usual custom of having it take place, not later than ten days after birth, had been delayed, and Winthrop gives a characteristic picture of the scene: "The Lord's day following, he (Mr. Cotton) exercised in the afternoon, and being to be admitted, he signified his desire and readiness to make his confession according to order, which he said might be sufficient in declaring his faith about baptism (which he then desired for their child, born in their passage, and therefore named Seaborn). He gave two reasons why he did not baptize it at sea (not for want of fresh water, for he held sea-water would have served): 1st, because they had no settled congregation there; 2d, because a minister hath no power to give the seals, but in his own congregation."
Some slight question, as to whether Boston alone, or the colony at large should be taxed for his support was settled with little difficulty, and on Sept. 10, another gathering from all the neighboring towns, witnessed his induction into the new church a ceremony of peculiar solemnity, preceded by a fast, and followed by such feasting as the still narrow stores of the people admitted.
No one can estimate the importance of this occasion, who does not realize what a minister meant in those first days, when the sermon held for the majority the sole opportunity of intellectual stimulus as well as spiritual growth. The coming of John Cotton to Boston, was much as if Phillips Brooks should bestow himself upon the remotest English settlement in Australia, or a missionary station in northern Minnesota, and a ripple of excitement ran through the whole community. It meant keener political as well as religious life, for the two went side by side. Mather wrote later of New England: "It is a country whose interests were most remarkably and generally enwrapped in its ecclesiastical circumstances," and he added: "The gospel has evidently been the making of our towns."
It was the deacons and elders who ruled public affairs, always under direction of well-nigh supreme authority vested in the minister. There was reason for such faith in them. "The objects of much public deference were not unaware of their authority; they seldom abused it; they never forgot it. If ever men, for real worth and greatness, deserved such pre-eminence, they did; they had wisdom, great learning, great force of will, devout consecration, philanthropy, purity of life. For once in the history of the world, the sovereign places were filled by the sovereign men. They bore themselves with the air of leaderships; they had the port of philosophers, noblemen and kings. The writings of our earliest times are full of reference to the majesty of their looks, the awe inspired by their presence, the grandeur and power of their words."
New England surely owes something of her gift of "ready and commanding speech," to these early talkers, who put their whole intellectual force into a sermon, and who thought nothing of a prayer lasting for two hours and a sermon for three or even four. Nathaniel Ward, whose caustic wit spared neither himself nor the most reverend among his brethren, wrote in his "Simple Cobbler": "We have a strong weakness in New England, that when we are speaking, we know not how to conclude. We make many ends, before we make an end…. We cannot help it, though we can; which is the arch infirmity in all morality. We are so near the west pole, that our longitudes are as long as any wise man would wish and somewhat longer. I scarce know any adage more grateful than 'Grata brevitas'."
Mr. Cotton was no exception to this rule, but his hearers would not have had him shorter. It was, however, the personality of the man that carried weight and nothing that he has left for a mocking generation to wonder over gives slightest hint of reason for the spell he cast over congregations, under the cathedral towers, or in the simple meeting house in the new Boston. The one man alive, who, perhaps, has gone through his works conscientiously and hopefully, Moses Coit Tyler, writes of John Cotton's works: "These are indeed clear and cogent in reasoning; the language is well enough, but that is all. There are almost no remarkable merits in thought or style. One wanders through these vast tracts and jungles of Puritanic discourse—exposition, exhortation, logic- chopping, theological hair-splitting—and is unrewarded by a single passage of eminent force or beauty, uncheered even by the felicity of a new epithet in the objurgation of sinners, or a new tint in the landscape-painting of hell."
Hubbard wrote, while he still lived: "Mr. Cotton had such an insinuating and melting way in his preaching, that he would usually carry his very adversary captive, after the triumphant chariot of his rhetoric," but "the chariot of his rhetoric ceased to be triumphant when the master himself ceased to drive it," and we shall never know the spell of his genius. For one who had shown himself so uncompromising in action where his own beliefs were concerned, he was singularly gentle and humble. Followed from his church one day, by a specially sour and peevish fanatic, who announced to him with a frown that his ministry had become dark and flat, he replied:
"Both, brother—it may be both; let me have your prayers that it may be otherwise."
Such a nature would never revolt against the system of spiritual cross-questioning that belonged to every church, and it is easy to see how his hold on his congregation was never lost, even at the stormiest episode in his New England career.
The people flocked to hear him, and until the removal to Ipswich, there is no doubt that Anne Bradstreet and her husband met him often, and that he had his share in confirming her faith and stimulating her thought. Dudley and he remained friends to the end, and conferred often on public as well as private matters, but there are no family details save the record of the marriage in later years, which united them all more closely, than even their common suffering had done.
Health alone, or the want of it, gave sufficient reason for at least a shadow of gloom, and there were others as substantial, for fresh changes were at hand, and various circumstances had brought her family under a general criticism against which Anne Bradstreet always revolted. Minute personal criticism was the order of the day, considered an essential in holding one another in the straight path, and the New England relish for petty detail may have had its origin in this religious gossip. As usual the first trouble would seem to have arisen from envy, though undoubtedly its originator strenuously denied any such suspicion. The houses at Cambridge had gradually been made more and more comfortable, though even in the beginning, they were the rudest of structures, the roofs covered with thatch, the fire-places generally made of rough stones and the chimneys of boards plastered with clay. To shelter was the only requisite demanded, but Dudley, who desired something more, had already come under public censure, the governor and other assistants joining in the reproach that "he did not well to bestow such cost about wainscotting and adorning his house in the beginning of a plantation, both in regard to the expense, and the example."
This may have been one of the "new customs" at which poor Anne's "heart rose, for none of the company, not even excepting the governor, had come from as stately and well-ordered a home as theirs, the old castle still testifying to the love of beauty in its ancient owners." Dudley's excuse was, however, accepted, "that it was for the warmth of his house, and the charge was but little, being but clapboards nailed to the wall in the form of wainscot."
The disagreement on this question of adornment was not the only reason why a removal to Ipswich, then known as Agawam, may have seemed desirable. Dudley, who was some thirteen years older than the Governor, and whose capacity for free speech increased with every year, had criticised sharply the former's unexpected removal to Boston, and placable as Winthrop always was, a little feeling had arisen, which must have affected both families. The first open indication of Dudley's money-loving propensities had also been made a matter of discussion, and was given "in some bargains he had made with some poor members of the same congregation, to whom he had sold seven bushels and a half of corn, to receive ten for it after harvest, which the governor and some others held to be oppressing usury."
Dudley contested the point hotly, the governor taking no "notice of these speeches, and bore them with more patience than he had done upon a like occasion at another time," but the breach had been made, and it was long before it ceased to trouble the friends of both. With all his self-sacrifice, Dudley desired leadership, and the removal to Ipswich gave him more fully the position he craved, as simply just acknowledgment of his services to the Colony, than permanent home at Cambridge could have done. Objections were urged against the removal, and after long discussion waxing hotter and hotter Dudley resigned, in a most Puritan fit of temper, leaving the council in a passion and "clapping the door behind him." Better thoughts came to all. The gentle temper of both wife and daughter quieted him, and disposed him to look favorably upon the letter in which the council refused to accept his resignation, and this was the last public occasion upon which such scandal arose. But Ipswich was a safe harbor, and life there would hold fewer thorns than seemed sown in the Cambridge surroundings, and we may feel sure, that in spite of hardships, the long-suffering Anne and her mother welcomed the change, when it had once been positively decided upon.
The most serious objection arose from the more exposed situation of Ipswich and the fact that the Indians were becoming more and more troublesome. The first year, however, passed in comparative quiet. A church was organized, sermons being the first necessity thought of for every plantation, and "Mr. Wilson, by leave of the congregation of Boston whereof he was pastor, went to Agawam to teach the people of that plantation, because they had yet no minister," to be succeeded shortly by Nathaniel Ward, a man of most intense nature and personality, who must have had marked effect on every mind brought under his influence. A worker of prodigious energy, he soon broke down, and after two years of pastorship, left Ipswich to become a few years later, one of the commission appointed to frame laws for the Colony and to write gradually one of the most distinctive books in early American literature, "The Simple Cobbler of Agawam." That he became the strong personal friend of the Bradstreet family was natural, for not only were they of the same social status, but sympathetic in many points, though Simon Bradstreets' moderation and tolerant spirit undoubtedly fretted the uncompromising Puritan whose opinions were as stiff and incisive as his way of putting them. An extensive traveller, a man of ripe culture, having been a successful lawyer before the ministry attracted him, he was the friend of Francis Bacon, of Archbishop Usher and the famous Heidelberg theologian, David Pareus. He had travelled widely and knew men and manners, and into the exhortations and expoundings of his daily life, the unfoldings of the complicated religious experience demanded of every Puritan, must have crept many a reminiscence of old days, dear to the heart of Anne Bradstreet, who, no matter what theory she deemed it best to follow, was at heart, to the end of her life a monarchist. We may know with what interest she would listen, and may fancy the small Simon and Dorothy standing near as Puritan discipline allowed, to hear tales of Prince Rupert, whom Nathaniel Ward had held as a baby in his arms, and of whom he wrote what we may be sure he had often said: "I have had him in my arms; . . . I wish I had him there now. If I mistake not, he promised then to be a good prince; but I doubt he hath forgot it. If I thought he would not be angry with me, I would pray hard to his Maker to make him a right Roundhead, a wise-hearted Palatine, a thankful man to the English; to forgive all his sins, and at length to save his soul, notwithstanding all his God-damn-me's."
Even in these early days, certain feminine pomps and vanities had emigrated with their owners, and much disconcerted the energetic preacher. Anne Bradstreet had no share in them, her gentle simplicity making her always choose the least obtrusive form of speech and action, as well as dress, but she must have smiled over the fierceness with which weaker sisters were attacked, and perhaps have sought to change the attitude of this chronic fault- finder; "a sincere, witty and valiant grumbler," but always a grumbler, to whom the fashions of the time seemed an outrage on common sense. He devotes a separate section of his book to them, and the delinquencies of women in general because they were "deficients or redundants not to be brought under any rule," and therefore not entitled to "pester better matter with such stuff," and then announces that he proposes, "for this once to borrow a little of their loose-tongued liberty, and mis-spend a word or two upon their long-waisted but short-skirted patience." "I honor the woman that can honor herself with her attire," he goes on, his wrath rising as he writes; "a good text always deserves a fair margent, but as for a woman who lives but to ape the newest court- fashions, I look at her as the very gizzard of a trifle, the product of a quarter of a cipher, the epitome of nothing; fitter to be kicked, if she were of a kickable substance, than either honored or humored. To speak moderately, I truly confess, it is beyond the ken of my understanding to conceive how those women should have any true grace or valuable virtue, that have so little wit as to disfigure themselves with such exotic garbs, as not only dismantles their native, lovely lustre, but transclouts them into gaunt bar-geese, ill-shapen, shotten shell-fish, Egyptian hieroglyphics, or at the best into French flirts of the pastry, which a proper English woman should scorn with her heels. It is no marvel they wear trails on the hinder part of their heads; having nothing it seems in the forepart but a few squirrels' brains to help them frisk from one ill-favored fashion to another…. We have about five or six of them in our colony; if I see any of them accidentally, I cannot cleanse my fancy for a month after…. If any man think I have spoken rather merrily than seriously, he is much mistaken; I have written what I write, with all the indignation I can, and no more than I ought."
Let it be remembered, that these ladies with "squirrels brains," are the "grandmothers" whose degenerate descendants we are daily accused of being. It is an old tune, but the generations have danced to it since the world began, each with a profound conviction of its newness, and their own success in following its lead. Nor was he alone in his indignation, for even in the midst of discussions on ordnance, and deep perplexities over unruly settlers, the grave elders paused, and as Winthrop records:
"At the lecture in Boston a question was propounded about veils. Mr. Cotton concluded, that where (by the custom of the place) they were not a sign of the woman's subjection, they were not commanded by the apostle. Mr. Endecott opposed, and did maintain it by the general arguments brought by the apostle. After some debate, the governor, perceiving it to grow to some earnestness, interposed, and so it brake off." Isaiah had protested, before Nathaniel Ward or the Council echoed him, but if this is the attitude the sturdy preacher held toward the women of his congregation, he must have found it well to resign his place to his successor, also a Nathaniel, Nathaniel Rogers, one of the row of "nine small children," still to be seen in the New England Primer, gazing upon the martyr, John Rogers, the famous preacher of Dedham, whose gifts of mind and soul made him a shining mark for persecution, and whose name is still honored in his descendants.
Of less aggressive and incisive nature than Nathaniel Ward, he was a man of profound learning, his son and grandson succeeding him at Ipswich, and the son, who had accompanied him from England becoming the President of Harvard College. His sympathy with Simon Bradstreet's moderate and tolerant views, at once brought them together, and undoubtedly made him occasionally a thorn in the side of Governor Dudley, who felt then, precisely the same emotions as in later life were chronicled in his one attempt at verse:
"Let men of God in Courts and Churches watch,
O'er such as do a Toleration hatch,
Lest that ill egg bring forth a cockatrice
To poison all with Heresie and Vice."
Nathaniel Rogers has left no written memorial save a tract in the interest of this most objectionable toleration, in which, while favoring liberty and reformation, he censured those who had brought false charges against the king, and as a result, was accused of being one of the king's agents in New England. Anne Bradstreet's sympathies were even more strongly with him than those of her husband, and in the quiet listening to the arguments which went on, she had rarest opportunity for that gradual accumulation of real worldly wisdom to be found in many of her "Reflections" in prose.
At present there was more room for apprehension than reflection. Indian difficulties were more and more pressing, and in Sept., 1635, the General Court had included Ipswich in the order that no dwelling-house should be more than half a mile from the meeting- house, it being impossible to guard against the danger of coming and going over longer space. The spring of 1636-7 brought still more stringent care. Watches were kept and no one allowed to travel without arms. The Pequot war was the culmination for the time, the seed of other and more atrocious conflicts to come, and whatever the judgment of to-day may be on the causes which brought such results, the terror of the settlers was a very real and well- grounded fact. As with Deerfield at a later date, they were protected from Indian assaults, only by "a rude picketted fort. Sentinels kept guard every night; even in the day time, no one left his door-steps without a musket; and neighborly communication between the houses was kept up principally by underground passages from cellar to cellar."
Mr. Daniel Dennison, who had married Anne Bradstreet's sister, was chosen captain for Ipswich and remained so for many years. As the Indians were driven out, they concentrated in and about New Hampshire, which, being a frontier colony, knew no rest from peril day and night, but it was many years before any Massachusetts settler dared move about with freedom, and the perpetual apprehension of every woman who dreaded the horrible possibilities of Indian outrage, must have gone far toward intensifying and grinding in the morbid sensitiveness which even to-day is part of the genuine New England woman's character. The grim details of expeditions against them were known to every child. The same impatience of any word in their favor was shown then, as we find it now in the far West, where their treachery and barbarity is still a part of the story of to-day, and Johnson, in his "Wonder- Working Providence," gives one or two almost incredible details of warfare against them with a Davidic exultation over the downfall of so pestilent an enemy, that is more Gothic than Christian.
"The Lord in mercy toward his poor churches, having thus destroyed these bloody, barbarous Indians, he returns his people in safety to their vessels, where they take account of their prisoners. The squaws and some young youths they brought home with them; and finding the men to be deeply guilty of the crimes they undertook the war for, they brought away only their heads."
Such retribution seemed just and right, but its effect on Puritan character was hardly softening, and was another unconscious factor in that increasing ratio of hatred against all who opposed them, whether in religious belief, or in the general administration of affairs. In these affairs every woman was interested to a degree that has had no parallel since, unless it may be, on the Southern side during our civil war. Politics and religion were one, and removal to Ipswich had not deadened the interest with which they watched and commented on every fluctuation in the stormy situation at "home," as they still called England, Cotton taking active part in all discussions as to Colonial action.
It was at this period that she wrote the poem, "A Dialogue between Old England and New," which holds the political situation at that time. Many of the allusions in the first edition, were altered in the second, for as Charles II. had then begun his reign, loyalty was a necessity, and no strictures upon kings could be allowed. The poem, which is rather a summary of political difficulties, has its own interest, as showing how thoroughly she had caught the spirit of the time, as well as from the fact that it was quoted as authority by the wisest thinkers of the day, and regarded with an awe and admiration we are hardly likely to share, as the phenomenal work of a phenomenal woman.
A DIALOGUE BETWEEN OLD ENGLAND AND NEW, CONCERNING THEIR PRESENT TROUBLES. Anno, 1642.
NEW ENGLAND.
Alas, dear Mother, fairest Queen and best,
With honour, wealth and peace happy and blest;
What ails thee hang thy head and cross thine arms?
And sit i' th' dust, to sigh these sad alarms?
What deluge of new woes thus overwhelme
The glories of thy ever famous Realme?
What means this wailing tone, this mournful guise?
Ah, tell thy daughter, she may sympathize.
OLD ENGLAND.
Art ignorant indeed of these my woes?
Or must my forced tongue my griefs disclose?
And must myself dissect my tatter'd state,
Which mazed Christendome stands wond'ring at?
And thou a child, a Limbe, and dost not feel
My fainting weakened body now to reel?
This Physick purging portion I have taken,
Will bring Consumption, or an Ague quaking,
Unless some Cordial, thou fetch from high,
Which present help may ease my malady.
If I decease, dost think thou shalt survive?
Or by my wasting state dost think to thrive?
Then weigh our case, if't be not justly sad;
Let me lament alone, while thou art glad.
NEW ENGLAND.
And thus (alas) your state you much deplore,
In general terms, but will not say wherefore;
What medicine shall I seek to cure this woe
If th' wound so dangerous I may not know?
But you, perhaps, would have me ghess it out,
What hath some Hengist like that Saxon stout,
By fraud or force usurp'd thy flow'ring crown,
Or by tempestuous warrs thy fields trod down?
Or hath Canutus, that brave valiant Dane,
The Regal peacefull Scepter from the tane?
Or is't a Norman, whose victorious hand
With English blood bedews thy conquered land?
Or is't Intestine warrs that thus offend?
Do Maud and Stephen for the crown contend?
Do Barons rise and side against their King,
And call in foreign aid to help the thing?
Must Edward be deposed? or is't the hour
That second Richard must be clapt i' th' tower?
Or is't the fatal jarre again begun
That from the red white pricking roses sprung?
Must Richmond's aid, the Nobles now implore,
To come and break the Tushes of the Boar?
If none of these, dear Mother, what's your woe?
Pray do you fear Spain's bragging Armado?
Doth your Allye, fair France, conspire your wrack,
Or do the Scots play false behind your back?
Doth Holland quit you ill for all your love?
Whence is the storm from Earth or Heaven above?
Is't drought, is't famine, or is't pestilence,
Dost feel the smart or fear the Consequence?
Your humble Child intreats you, shew your grief,
Though Arms nor Purse she hath for your relief,
Such is her poverty; yet shall be found
A Suppliant for your help, as she is bound.
OLD ENGLAND.
I must confess, some of those sores you name,
My beauteous body at this present maime;
But forreign foe, nor feigned friend I fear,
For they have work enough, (thou knowst) elsewhere.
Nor is it Alce's Son nor Henrye's daughter,
Whose proud contention cause this slaughter;
Nor Nobles siding to make John no King,
French Jews unjustly to the Crown to bring;
No Edward, Richard, to lose rule and life,
Nor no Lancastrians to renew old strife;
No Duke of York nor Earl of March to soyle
Their hands in kindred's blood whom they did foil.
No crafty Tyrant now usurps the Seat,
Who Nephews slew that so he might be great;
No need of Tudor Roses to unite,
None knows which is the Red or which the White;
Spain's braving Fleet a second time is sunk,
France knows how oft my fury she hath drunk;
By Edward third, and Henry fifth of fame
Her Lillies in mine Arms avouch the same,
My sister Scotland hurts me now no more,
Though she hath been injurious heretofore;
What Holland is I am in some suspence,
But trust not much unto his excellence.
For wants, sure some I feel, but more I fear,
And for the Pestilence, who knows how near
Famine and Plague, two Sisters of the Sword,
Destruction to a Land doth soon afford.
They're for my punishment ordain'd on high,
Unless our tears prevent it speedily.
But yet I answer not what you demand
To shew the grievance of my troubled Land?
Before I tell the Effect I'le shew the Cause,
Which are my sins, the breach of sacred Laws,
Idolatry, supplanter of a nation,
With foolish Superstitious Adoration,
Are liked and countenanced by men of might
The gospel trodden down and hath no right;
Church offices were sold and bought for gain,
That Pope had hoped to find Rome here again;
For Oaths and Blasphemies did ever Ear
From Belzebub himself such language hear?
What scorning of the saints of the most high,
What injuries did daily on them lye,
What false reports, what nick-names did they take
Not for their own but for their Master's sake?
And thou, poor soul, wert jeer'd among the rest,
Thy flying for the truth was made a jest
For Sabbath-breaking, and for drunkenness,
Did ever loud profaneness more express?
From crying blood yet cleansed am not I,
Martyrs and others, dying causelessly.
How many princely heads on blocks laid down
For nought but title to a fading crown!
'Mongst all the crueltyes by great ones done,
Of Edward's youths, and Clarence hapless son,
O Jane, why didst thou dye in flow'ring prime?
Because of royal stem, that was thy crime.
For bribery, Adultery and lyes,
Where is the nation I can't parallize?
With usury, extortion and oppression,
These be the Hydraes of my stout transgression.
These be the bitter fountains, heads and roots,
Whence flowed the source, the sprigs, the boughs, and fruits,
Of more than thou canst hear or I relate,
That with high hand I still did perpetrate;
For these were threatened the woful day
I mockt the Preachers, put it far away;
The Sermons yet upon Record do stand
That cri'd destruction to my wicked land;
I then believed not, now I feel and see,
The plague of stubborn incredulity.
Some lost their livings, some in prison pent,
Some fin'd from house and friends to exile went.
Their silent tongues to heaven did vengeance cry,
Who saw their wrongs, and hath judg'd righteously,
And will repay it seven fold in my lap;
This is forerunner of my After clap.
Nor took I warning by my neighbors' falls,
I saw sad Germany's dismantled walls,
I saw her people famish'd, nobles slain,
The fruitful land a barren Heath remain.
I saw immov'd her Armyes foil'd and fled,
Wives forc'd, babes toss'd, her houses calimed.
I saw strong Rochel yielded to her Foe,
Thousands of starved Christians there also
I saw poor Ireland bleeding out her last,
Such crueltyes as all reports have passed;
Mine heart obdurate stood not yet aghast.
Now sip I of that cup, and just't may be
The bottome dreggs reserved are for me.
NEW ENGLAND.
To all you've said, sad Mother, I assent,
Your fearful sins great cause there's to lament,
My guilty hands in part, hold up with you,
A Sharer in your punishment's my due.
But all you say amounts to this affect,
Not what you feel but what you do expect,
Pray in plain terms what is your present grief?
Then let's joyn heads and hearts for your relief.
OLD ENGLAND.
Well to the matter then, there's grown of late
'Twixt King and Peers a Question of State,
Which is the chief, the law or else the King.
One said, it's he, the other no such thing.
'Tis said, my beter part in Parliament
To ease my groaning land, shew'd their intent,
To crush the proud, and right to each man deal,
To help the Church, and stay the Common-weal
So many obstacles came in their way,
As puts me to a stand what I should say;
Old customes, new prerogatives stood on,
Had they not held Law fast, all had been gone;
Which by their prudence stood them in such stead
They took high Strafford lower by the head.
And to their Land be't spoke, they held i' th' tower
All England's Metropolitane that hour;
This done, an act they would have passed fain
No Prelate should his Bishoprick retain;
Here tugged they hard (indeed), for all men saw
This must be done by Gospel, not by law.
Next the Militia they urged sore,
This was deny'd (I need not say wherefore),
The King displeas'd at York himself absents,
They humbly beg return, shew their intents;
The writing, printing, posting too and fro,
Shews all was done, I'll therefore let it go;
But now I come to speak of my disaster,
Contention grown, 'twixt Subjects and their Master;
They worded it so long, they fell to blows,
That thousands lay on heaps, here bleeds my woes;
I that no wars so many years have known,
Am now destroy'd and slaughter'd by mine own;
But could the Field alone this strife decide,
One Battle two or three I might abide.
But these may be beginnings of more woe
Who knows but this may be my overthrow?
Oh, pity me in this sad Perturbation,
My plundered Towns, my houses devastation,
My weeping Virgins and my young men slain;
My wealthy trading fall'n, my dearth of grain,
The seed times come, but ploughman hath no hope
Because he knows not who shall inn his Crop!
The poor they want their pay, their Children bread,
Their woful—Mothers' tears unpittied.
If any pity in thy heart remain,
Or any child-like love thou dost retain,
For my relief, do what there lyes in thee,
And recompence that good I've done to thee.
NEW ENGLAND.
Dear Mother, cease complaints and wipe your eyes,
Shake off your dust, chear up and now arise,
You are my Mother Nurse, and I your flesh,
Your sunken bowels gladly would refresh,
Your griefs I pity, but soon hope to see,
Out of your troubles much good fruit to be;
To see those latter days of hop'd for good,
Though now beclouded all with tears and blood;
After dark Popery the day did clear,
But now the Sun in's brightness shall appear;
Blest be the Nobles of thy Noble Land,
With ventur'd lives for Truth's defence that stand;
Blest be thy Commons, who for common good,
And thy infringed Laws have boldly stood;
Blest be thy Counties, who did aid thee still,
With hearts and States to testifie their will;
Blest be thy Preachers, who did chear thee on,
O cry the Sword of God and Gideon;
And shall I not on them with Mero's curse,
That help thee not with prayers, Arms and purse?
And for myself let miseries abound,
If mindless of thy State I ere be found.
These are the dayes the Churches foes to crush,
To root out Popelings, head, tail, branch and rush;
Let's bring Baals' vestments forth to make a fire,
Their Mytires, Surplices, and all their Tire,
Copes, Rotchets, Crossiers, and such empty trash,
And let their Names consume, but let the flash
Light Christendome, and all the world to see,
We hate Romes whore, with all her trumpery.
Go on, brave Essex, with a Loyal heart,
Not false to King, nor to the better part;
But those that hurt his people and his Crown,
As duty binds, expel and tread them down,
And ye brave Nobles, chase away all fear,
And to this hopeful Cause closely adhere;
O Mother, can you weep and have such Peers,
When they are gone, then drown yourself in tears,
If now you weep so much, that then no more
The briny Ocean will o'erflow your shore.
These, these are they I trust, with Charles our King,
Out of all mists, such glorious days shall bring;
That dazzled eyes beholding much shall wonder,
At that thy settled peace, thy wealth and splendor.
Thy Church and weal establish'd in such manner,
That all shall joy, that then display'st thy Banner;
And discipline erected so I trust,
That nursing Kings shall come and lick thy dust.
Then justice shall in all thy courts take place,
Without respect of person, or of case;
Then Bribes shall cease, and Suits shall not stick long
Patience and purse of Clients oft to wrong;
Then high Commissions shall fall to decay,
And Pursivants and Catchpoles want their pay.
So shall thy happy nation ever flourish,
When truth and righteousness they thus shall nourish,
When thus in peace, thine Armies brave send out,
To sack proud Rome, and all her Vassals rout;
There let thy name, thy fame and glory shine,
As did thine Ancestors in Palestine;
And let her spoyls full pay with Interest be,
Of what unjustly once she poll'd from thee,
Of all the woes thou canst, let her be sped
And on her pour the vengeance threatened;
Bring forth the Beast that rul'd the World with 's beck,
And tear his flesh, and set your feet on 's neck;
And make his filthy Den so desolate,
To th' astonishment of all that knew his state.
This done, with brandish'd Swords to Turky goe,
For then what is 't, but English blades dare do?
And lay her waste for so 's the sacred Doom,
And to Gog as thou hast done to Rome.
Oh Abraham's seed lift up your heads on high,
For sure the day of your Redemption 's nigh;
The Scales shall fall from your long blinded eyes,
And him you shall adore who now despise,
Then fulness of the Nations in shall flow,
And Jew and Gentile to one worship go;
Then follows days of happiness and rest;
Whose lot doth fall, to live therein is blest.
No Canaanite shall then be found i' th' Land,
And holiness on horses bell's shall stand;
If this make way thereto, then sigh no more,
But if it all, thou did'st not see 't before;
Farewell, dear Mother, rightest cause prevail
And in a while, you'll tell another tale.
This, like all her earlier work, is heavy reading, the account given by "Old Age" in her "Four Ages of Man," of what he has seen and known of Puritan affairs, being in somewhat more lively strain. But lively was an adjective to which Mistress Anne had a rooted objection. Her contemporaries indulged in an occasional solemn pun, but the only one in her writings is found in the grim turn on Laud's name, in the "Dialogue" just quoted, in which is also a sombre jest on the beheading of Strafford.
"Old Age" recalls the same period, opening with a faint—very faint—suggestion of Shakespeare's thought in his "Seven Ages."
"What you have been, even such have I before
And all you say, say I, and somewhat more,
Babe's innocence, youth's wildness I have seen,
And in perplexed middle Age have been;
Sickness, dangers and anxieties have past,
And on this stage am come to act my last,
I have been young and strong and wise as you;
But now Bis pueri senes, is too true.
In every age I've found much vanity
An end of all perfection now I see.
It's not my valour, honor, nor my gold,
My ruined house now falling can uphold,
It's not my learning Rhetorick wit so large,
Hath now the power, death's warfare to discharge,
It's not my goodly state, nor bed of downs
That can refresh, or ease, if Conscience frown,
Nor from Alliance can I now have hope,
But what I have done well that is my prop;
He that in youth is Godly, wise and sage,
Provides a staff then to support his Age.
Mutations great, some joyful and some sad,
In this short pilgrimage I oft have had;
Sometimes the Heavens with plenty smiled on me,
Sometime again rain'd all Adversity,
Sometimes in honor, sometimes in disgrace,
Sometime an Abject, then again in place.
Such private changes oft mine eyes have seen,
In various times of state I've also been,
I've seen a Kingdom nourish like a tree,
When it was ruled by that Celestial she;
And like a Cedar, others so surmount,
That but for shrubs they did themselves account.
Then saw I France and Holland say'd Cales won,
And Philip and Albertus half undone,
I saw all peace at home, terror to foes,
But oh, I saw at last those eyes to close.
And then methought the clay at noon grew dark,
When it had lost that radiant Sunlike Spark;
In midst of griefs I saw our hopes revive,
(For 'twas our hopes then kept our hearts alive)
We changed our queen for king under whose rayes
We joy'd in many blest and prosperous dayes.
I've seen a Prince, the glory of our land
In prime of youth seiz'd by heaven's angry hand,
Which fil'd our hearts with fears, with tears our eyes,
Wailing his fate, and our own destinies.
I've seen from Rome an execrable thing,
A Plot to blow up nobles and their King,
But saw their horrid fact soon disappointed,
And Land Nobles say'd with their annointed.
I've Princes seen to live on others' lands;
A royal one by gifts from strangers' hands
Admired for their magnanimity,
Who lost a Prince-dome and a Monarchy.
I've seen designs for Ree and Rochel crost,
And poor Palatinate forever lost.
I've seen unworthy men advanced high,
And better ones suffer extremity;
But neither favour, riches, title, State,
Could length their days or once reverse their fate.
I've seen one stab'd, and some to loose their heads,
And others fly, struck both with gilt and dread;
I've seen and so have you, for tis but late
The desolation of a goodly state,
Plotted and acted so that none can tell
Who gave the counsel, but the Prince of hell.
Three hundred thousand slaughtered innocents
By bloody, Popish, hellish miscreants;
Oh, may you live, and so you will I trust,
To see them swill in blood until they burst.
I've seen a King by force thrust from his thrones
And an Usurper subt'ly mount thereon;
I've seen a state unmoulded, rent in twain,
But ye may live to see't made up again.
I've seen it plunder'd, taxt and soaked in blood,
But out of evill you may see much good.
What are my thoughts, this is no time to say.
Men may more freely speak another day;
These are no old-wives tales, but this is truth,
We old men love to tell what's done in youth."
Though this is little more than rhymed chronology, there are curious reminders here and there of the spirit of the time. Gentle as was Anne Bradstreet's nature, it seemed to her quite natural to write of the "bloody, Popish, hellish miscreants"—
"Oh may you live, and so you will I trust,
To see them swill in blood untill they burst."
There was reason it was true; the same reason that brings the same thought to-day to women on the far Western frontiers, for the Irish butcheries had been as atrocious as any Indian massacre our own story holds. The numbers butchered were something appaling, and Hume writes: "By some computations, those who perished by all these cruelties are supposed to be a hundred and fifty or two hundred thousand; by the most moderate, and probably the most reasonable account, they are made to amount to forty thousand—-if this estimation itself be not, as is usual in such cases, somewhat exaggerated."
Irish ferocity was more than matched by English brutality. Puritanism softened many features of the Saxon character, but even in the lives of the most devoted, there is a keen relish for battle whether spiritual or actual, and a stern rejoicing in any depth of evil that may have overtaken a foe. In spite of the tremendous value set upon souls, indifference to human life still ruled, and there was even a certain relish, if that life were an enemy's, in turning it over heartily and speedily to its proper owner, Satan. Anne Bradstreet is no exception to the rule, and her verses hold various fierce and unexpected outbursts against enemies of her faith or country. The constant discussion of mooted points by the ministers as well as people, made each man the judge of questions that agitated every mind, and problems of all natures from national down to town meeting debates, were pondered over in every Puritan home. Cotton's interest in detail never flagged, and his influence was felt at every point in the Colony, and though Ipswich, both in time and facilities for reaching it, was more widely separated from Boston than Boston now is from the remotest hamlet on Cape Cod, there is no doubt that Nathaniel Ward and Mr. Cotton occasionally met and exchanged views if not pulpits, and that the Bradstreet family were not entirely cut off from intercourse. When Nathaniel Ward became law-maker instead of settled minister, it was with John Cotton that he took counsel, and Anne undoubtedly thought of the latter what his grandson Cotton Mather at a later day wrote. "He was indeed a most universal scholar, and a living system of the liberal arts and a walking library."
Walking libraries were needed, for stationary ones were very limited. Governer Dudley's, one of the largest in the Colony, contained between fifty and sixty books, chiefly on divinity and history, and from the latter source Anne obtained the minute historical knowledge shown in her rhymed account of "The Four Monarchies." It was to her father that she owed her love of books. She calls him in one poem, "a magazine of history," and at other points, her "guide," and "instructor," writing:
"Most truly honored and as truly dear,
If worth in me, or ought I do appear,
Who can of right better demand the same?
Then may your worthy self from whom it came?"
As at Cambridge, and in far greater degree, she was cut off from much that had held resources there. At the worst, only a few miles had separated them from what was fast becoming the center and soul of the Colony. But Ipswich shut them in, and life for both Mistress Dudley and her daughter was an anxious one. The General Court called for the presence of both Dudley and Bradstreet, the latter spending much of his time away, and some of the tenderest and most natural of Anne Bradstreet's poems, was written at this time, though regarded as too purely personal to find place in any edition of her poems. The quiet but fervent love between them had deepened with every year, and though no letters remain, as with Winthrop, to evidence the steady and intense affection of both, the "Letter to her Husband, absent upon some Publick employment," holds all the proof one can desire.
"My head, my heart, mine Eyes, my life, my more,
My joy, my Magazine of earthly store.
If two be one as surely thou and I,
How stayest thou there, whilst I at Ipswich lie?
So many steps, head from the heart to sever,
If but a neck, soon would we be together;
I like the earth this season mourn in black
My Sun is gone so far in 's Zodiack,
Whom whilst I joyed, nor storms nor frosts I felt,
His warmth such frigid colds did cause to melt.
My chilled limbs now nummed lye forlorn,
Return, return sweet Sol, from Capricorn;
In this dead time, alas, what can I more
Than view those fruits which through thy heat I bore?
Which sweet contentment yield me for a space,
True, living Pictures of their Father's face.
O strange effect! now thou art Southward gone,
I weary grow, the tedious day so long;
But when thou Northward to me shalt return,
I wish my Sun may never set but burn
Within the Cancer of my glowing breast.
The welcome house of him my dearest guest.
Where ever, ever stay, and go not thence
Till nature's sad decree shall call thee hence;
Flesh of thy flesh, bone of thy bone,
I here, thou there, yet both are one."
A second one is less natural in expression, but still holds the same longing.
Phoebus, make haste, the day's too long, be gone,
The silent nights, the fittest time for moan;
But stay this once, unto my suit give ear,
And tell my griefs in either Hemisphere.
(And if the whirling of thy wheels don't drown'd)
The woeful accents of my doleful sound,
If in thy swift Carrier thou canst make stay,
I crave this boon, this Errand by the way,
Commend me to the man more lov'd than life,
Shew him the sorrows of his widowed wife;
My dumpish thoughts, my groans, my brakish tears,
My sobs, my longing hopes, my doubting fears,
And if he love, how can he there abide?
My Interest's more than all the world beside.
He that can tell the Starrs or Ocean sand,
Or all the grass that in the Meads do stand,
The leaves in th' woods, the hail or drops of rain,
Or in a corn field number every grain,
Or every mote that in the sunshine hops,
May count my sighs, and number all my drops:
Tell him, the countless steps that thou dost trace,
That once a day, thy Spouse thou mayst embrace;
And when thou canst not treat by loving mouth,
Thy rays afar salute her from the south.
But for one month I see no day (poor soul)
Like those far scituate under the pole,
Which day by day long wait for thy arise,
O, how they joy, when thou dost light the skyes.
O Phoebus, hadst thou but thus long from thine,
Restrained the beams of thy beloved shine,
At thy return, if so thou could'st or durst
Behold a Chaos blacker than the first.
Tell him here's worse than a confused matter,
His little world's a fathom under water,
Nought but the fervor of his ardent beams
Hath power to dry the torrent of these streams
Tell him I would say more but cannot well,
Oppressed minds, abruptest tales do tell.
Now post with double speed, mark what I says
By all our loves, conjure him not to stay."
In the third and last, there is simply an imitation of much of the work of the seventeenth century; with its conceits and twisted meanings, its mannerisms and baldness, but still the feeling is there, though Mistress Bradstreet has labored painfully to make it as unlike nature as possible.
"As loving Hind that (Hartless) wants her Deer,
Scuds through the woods and Fern with hearkening ear,
Perplext, in every bush and nook doth pry,
Her dearest Deer might answer ear or eye;
So doth my anxious soul, which now doth miss,
A dearer Deer (far dearer Heart) than this.
Still wait with doubts and hopes and failing eye;
His voice to hear or person to descry.
Or as the pensive Dove doth all alone
(On withered bough) most uncouthly bemoan
The absence of her Love and Loving Mate,
Whose loss hath made her so unfortunate;
Ev'n thus doe I, with many a deep sad groan,
Bewail my turtle true, who now is gone,
His presence and his safe return, still wooes
With thousand doleful sighs and mournful Cooes.
Or as the loving Mullet that true Fish,
Her fellow lost, nor joy nor life do wish,
But lanches on that shore there for to dye,
Where she her captive husband doth espy,
Mine being gone I lead a joyless life,
I have a living sphere, yet seem no wife;
But worst of all, to him can't steer my course,
I here, he there, alas, both kept by force;
Return, my Dear, my Joy, my only Love,
Unto thy Hinde, thy Mullet and thy Dove,
Who neither joys in pasture, house nor streams,
The substance gone, O me, these are but dreams,
Together at one Tree, O let us brouse,
And like two Turtles roost within one house.
And like the Mullets in one River glide,
Let's still remain one till death divide.
Thy loving Love and Dearest Dear,
At home, abroad and everywhere.
A.B."
Of a far higher order are a few lines, written at the same time, and with no suspicion of straining or of imitation in the quiet fervor of the words, that must have carried a thrill of deep and exquisite happiness to the heart of the man, so loved and honored.
"To my dear and loving Husband:
If ever two were one then surely we,
If ever man were loved by wife, then thee;
If ever wife was happy in a man,
Compare with me ye women if you can.
I prize thy love more than whole Mines of Gold,
Or all the riches that the East doth hold.
My love is such that Rivers cannot quench,
Nor ought but love from thee give recompense.
Thy love is such I can no way repay,
The heavens reward thee, manifold I pray.
Then while we live in love let's so persevere,
That when we live no more, we may live ever."
The woman who could feel such fervor as these lines express, owed the world something more than she ever gave, but every influence tended, as we have seen, to silence natural expression. One must seek, however, to discover why she failed even when admitting that failure was the only thing to be expected, and the causes are in the nature of the time itself, the story of literary development for that period being as complicated as politics, religion and every other force working on the minds of men.
CHAPTER VI.
A THEOLOGICAL TRAGEDY.
It was perhaps Anne Bradstreet's youth, and a sense that she could hardly criticise a judgment which had required the united forces of every church in the Colony to pronounce, that made her ignore one of the most stormy experiences of those early days, the trial and banishment of Anne Hutchinson. Her silence is the more singular, because the conflict was a purely spiritual one, and thus in her eyes deserving of record. There can be no doubt that the effect on her own spiritual and mental life must have been intense and abiding. No children had as yet come to absorb her thoughts and energies, and the events which shook the Colony to the very center could not fail to leave an ineffaceable impression. No story of personal experience is more confounding to the modern reader, and none holds a truer picture of the time. Governor Dudley and Simon Bradstreet were both concerned in the whole course of the matter, which must have been discussed at home from day to day, and thus there is every reason for giving it full place in these pages as one of the formative forces in Anne Bradstreet's life; an inspiration and then a warning. There are hints that Anne resented the limitations that hedged her in, and had small love of the mutual criticism, which made the corner stone of Puritan life. That she cared to write had already excited the wonder of her neighbors and Anne stoutly asserted her right to speak freely whatever it seemed good to say, taking her stand afterwards given in the Prologue to the first edition of her poems, in which she wrote:
"I am obnoxious to each carping tongue
Who says my hand a needle better fits,
A Poet's pen all scorn I should thus wrong,
For such despite they cast on Female wits;
If what I do prove well, it won't advance,
They'l say it's stol'n, or else it was by chance.
"But sure the antique Greeks were far more mild,
Else of our Sexe, why feigned they those Nine
And poesy made Callippi's own Child;
So 'mongst the rest they placed the Arts Divine,
But this weak knot they will full soon untie,
The Greeks did nought but play the fools and lye."
This has a determined ring which she hastens to neutralize by a tribute and an appeal; the one to man's superior force, the other to his sense of justice.
"Let Greeks be Greeks, and women what they are,
Men have precedency and still excell,
It is but vain unjustly to wage warrs;
Men can do best and women know it well,
Preheminence in all and each is yours;
Yet grant some small acknowledgement of ours."
Plain speaking was a Dudley characteristic, but the fate of Anne Hutchinson silenced all save a few determined spirits, willing to face the same consequences. In the beginning, however, there could have been only welcome for a woman, whose spiritual gifts and unusual powers had made her the friend of John Cotton, and who fascinated men and woman alike. There was reason, for birth and training meant every gift a woman of that day was likely to possess. Her father, Thomas Marbury, was one of the Puritan ministers of Lincolnshire who afterward removed to London; her mother, a sister of Sir Erasmus Dryden. She was thus related in the collateral line to two of the greatest of English intellects. Free thinking and plain speaking were family characteristics, for John Dryden the poet, her second cousin, was reproached with having been an Anabaptist in his youth, and Johnathan Swift, a more distant connection, feared nothing in heaven or earth. It is no wonder, then, that even an enemy wrote of her as "the masterpiece of women's wit," or that her husband followed her lead with a devotion that never swerved. She had married him at Alford in Lincolnshire, and both were members of Mr. Cotton's congregation at Boston.
Mr. Hutchinson's standing among his Puritan contemporaries was of the highest. He had considerable fortune, and the gentlest and most amiable of dispositions. The name seems to have meant all good gifts, for the same devoted and tender relation existed between this pair as between Colonel Hutchinson and his wife. From the quiet and happy beginning of their married life to its most tragic ending, they clung together, accepting all loss as part of the cross they had taken up, when they left the ease of Lincolnshire behind, and sought in exile the freedom which intolerance denied.
It is very probable that Anne Hutchinson may have known the Dudley family after their return to Lincolnshire, and certainly in the first flush of her New England experiences was likely to have had intimate relations with them. Her opinions, so far as one can disentangle them from the mass of testimony and discussion, seem to have been in great degree, those held by the early Quakers, but they had either not fully developed in her own mind before she left England, or had not been pronounced enough to attract attention. In any case the weariness of the long voyage seems to have been in part responsible for much that followed. Endless discussions of religious subtleties were their chief occupation on board, and one of the company, the Rev. Mr. Symmes, a dogmatic and overbearing man, found himself often worsted by the quick wit of this woman, who silenced all objections, and who, with no conception of the rooted enmity she was exciting, told with the utmost freedom, past and present speculations and experiences. The long fasts, and continuous religious exercises, worked upon her enthusiast's temper, and excited by every circumstance of time and place, it is small wonder that she supposed a direct revelation had come to her, the nature of which Winthrop mentions in his History.
"One Mrs. Hutchinson, a member of the church of Boston, a woman of a ready wit and bold spirit, brought over with her two dangerous errours:
"1. That the person of the Holy Ghost dwells in a justified person.
"2. That no sanctification can help to evidence to us our justification. From these two, grew many branches; as, 1st, Our union with the Holy Ghost, so as a Christian remains dead to every spiritual action, and hath no gifts nor graces, other than such as are in hypocrites, nor any other sanctification but the Holy Ghost himself. There joined with her in these opinions a brother of hers, one Mr. Wheelwright, a silenced minister sometime in England."
Obnoxious as these doctrines came to be, she had been in New England two years before they excited special attention. Her husband served in the General Court several elections as representative for Boston, until he was excused at the desire of the church, and she herself found constant occupation in a round of kindly deeds. She denied the power of works as any help toward justification, but no woman in the Colony, gave more practical testimony of her faith or made herself more beloved. Though she had little children to care for, she found time to visit and nurse the sick, having special skill in all disorders of women. Her presence of mind, her warm sympathy and extraordinary patience made her longed for at every sick bed, and she very soon acquired the strongest influence. Dudley had made careful inquiries as to her religious standing, and must have been for the time at least, satisfied, and unusual attention was paid her by all the colonists; the most influential among them being her chief friends. Coddington, who had built the first brick house in Boston, received them warmly. Her public teaching began quietly, her ministrations by sick beds attracting many, and it is doubtful if she herself realized in the least the extent of her influence.
Governor Vane, young and ardent, the temporary idol of the Colony, who had taken the place Governor Winthrop would have naturally filled, visited her and soon became one of her most enthusiastic supporters. Just and unprejudiced as Winthrop was, this summary setting aside by a people for whom he had sacrificed himself steadily, filled him with indignation, though the record in his Journal is quiet and dignified. But naturally, it made him a sterner judge, when the time for judgment came. In the beginning, however, her work seemed simply for good. It had been the custom for the men of the Boston church to meet together on Thursday afternoons, to go over the sermon of the preceding Sunday, of which notes had been taken by every member. No women were admitted, and believing that the same course was equally desirable for her own sex, Anne Hutchinson appointed two days in the week for this purpose, and at last drew about her nearly a hundred of the principal women of the Colony. Her lovely character and spotless life, gave immense power to her words, and her teaching at first was purely practical. We can imagine Anne Bradstreet's delight in the tender and searching power of this woman, who understood intuitively every womanly need, and whose sympathy was as unfailing as her knowledge. Even for that time her Scriptural knowledge was almost phenomenal, and it is probable that, added to this, there was an unacknowledged satisfaction in an assembly from which men were excluded, though many sought admission. Mrs. Hutchinson was obliged at last to admit the crowd who believed her gifts almost divine, but refused to teach, calling upon the ministers to do this, and confining herself simply to conversation. But Boston at last seemed to have gone over wholly to her views, while churches at other points opposed them fiercely. Up to this time there had been no attempt to define the character of the Holy Ghost, but now a powerful opposition to her theory arose, and furious discussions were held in meetings and out. The very children caught the current phrases, and jeered one another as believers in the "Covenant of Grace," or the "Covenant of Works," and the year 1636 came and passed with the Colony at swords points with one another. Every difficulty was aggravated by Vane, whose youth and inexperience made it impossible for him to understand the temper of the people he ruled. The rise of differences had been so gradual that no one suspected what mischief might come till the results suddenly disclosed themselves. That vagaries and eccentricities were to be expected, never entered the minds of this people, who accepted their own departure from authority and ancient ordinances as just and right, but could never conceive that others might be justified in acting on the same principle.
To understand even in slight degree the conflict which followed, one must remember at every turn, that no interests save religious interests were of even momentary importance. Every member of the Colony had hard, laborious work to do, but it was hurried through with the utmost speed, in order to have time for the almost daily lectures and expoundings that made their delight. Certain more worldly minded among them had petitioned for a shortening of these services, but were solemnly reproved, and threatened with the "Judgment of God on their frowardness."
With minds perpetually concentrated on subtle interpretations, agreement was impossible. Natural life, denied and set aside at every point, gave place to the unnatural, and every colonist was, quite unconsciously, in a state of constant nervous tension and irritability. The questions that to us seem of even startling triviality, were discussed with a fervor and earnestness it is well nigh impossible to comprehend. They were a slight advance on the scholastic disputations of the preceding century, but they meant disagreement and heart-burnings, and the more intolerant determined on stamping out all variations from their own convictions.
Any capacity for seeking to carry out Robinson's injunction in his final sermon at Leyden seems to have died once for all, in the war of words. "I beseech you," he had said, "remember that it is an article of your church covenant, that you be ready to receive whatever truth shall be made known to you from the written word of God." There was small remnant of this spirit even among the most liberal.
Dudley was one of the chief movers in the course resolved upon, and mourned over Cotton, who still held to Anne Hutchinson, and wrote and spoke of her as one who "was well beloved, and all the faithful embraced her conference, and blessed God for her fruitful discourses."
Mr. Welde, on the contrary, one of her fiercest opponents, described her as "a woman of haughty and fierce carriage, of a nimble wit and active spirit, and a very voluble tongue, more bold than a man, though in understanding and judgment inferior to many women."
How far the object of all this confusion realized the real state of things cannot be determined. But by January, 1637, dissension had reached such a height that a fast was appointed for the Pequot war and the religious difficulties. The clergy had become her bitterest enemies, and with some reason, for through her means many of their congregations had turned against them. Mr. Wilson, once the most popular minister in Boston, had been superseded by her brother,—Mr. Wheelwright, and Boston began the heretical career which has been her portion from that day to this.
Active measures were necessary. The General Court was still governed by the clergy, and by March had settled upon its future course, and summoned Wheelwright, who was censured and found guilty of sedition. Governor Vane opposed the verdict bitterly. The chief citizens of Boston sent in a "Remonstrance," and actual anarchy seemed before them. The next Court was held at Newtown to avoid the danger of violence at Boston, and a disorderly election took place in which the Puritan Fathers came to blows, set down by Winthrop as "a laying on of hands."
The grave and reverend Wilson, excited beyond all considerations of Puritanical propriety, climbed a tree, and made a vigorous speech to the throng of people, in which many malcontents were at work urging on an opposition that proved fruitless. Vane was defeated and Winthrop again made governor, his calm forbearance being the chief safety of the divided and unhappy colonists, who resented what they settled to be tyranny, and cast about for some means of redress. None was to be had. Exile, imprisonment and even death, awaited the most eminent citizens; Winthrop's entry into Boston was met by gloomy silence, and for it all, Welde and Symmes protested Anne Hutchinson to be responsible, and denounced her as a heretic and a witch.
She in the meantime seems to have been in a state of religious exaltation which made her blind and deaf to all danger. Her meetings continued, and she in turn denounced her opponents and believed that some revelation would be given to show the justice of her claims. There was real danger at last. If the full story of these dissensions were told in England, possession of charter, which had already been threatened, might be lost entirely. Dudley was worked up to the highest pitch of apprehension, believing that if the dissension went on, there might even be a repetition of the horrors of Munster. Divided as they were, concerted action against enemies, whether Indian or foreign, could not be expected. There was danger of a general league of the New England Indians, and "when a force was ordered to take the field for the salvation of the settlements, the Boston men refused to be mustered because they suspected the chaplain, who had been designated by lot to accompany the expedition, of being under a covenant of works."
Such a state of things, if known in full at home, would shut off all emigration. That men of character and means should join them was an essential to the continued life of the Colony. Setting aside any question of their own personal convictions, their leaders saw that the continuance among them of these disturbing elements meant destruction, and Winthrop, mild and reasonable as he sought to be, wrote: "He would give them one reason, which was a ground for his judgment, and that was, for that he saw that those brethren, etc., were so divided from the rest of the country in their judgment and practice, as it could not stand with the public peace, that they should continue amongst us. So by the example of Lot in Abraham's family, and after Hagar and Ishmael, he saw they must be sent away."
With August came the famous Synod of Cambridge, the first ever held in New England, in which the Church set about defining its own position and denouncing the Hutchinsonians. Eighty-two heresies were decided to have arisen, all of which were condemned, and this being settled, Cotton was admonished, and escaped exile only by meekly explaining away his errors. Wheelwright, refusing to yield, was sentenced to imprisonment and exile; Mrs. Hutchinson's meetings were declared seditious and disorderly, and prohibited, and the Synod separated, triumphant. The field was their own.
What they had really accomplished was simply to deepen the lines and make the walls of division still higher. In later years no one cared to make public the proceedings of the body, and there is still in existence a loose paper, described by the Rev. George E. Ellis in his "Life of Anne Hutchinson"; a petition from Mr. John Higginson, son of the Salem minister … by which it appears that he was employed by the magistrates and ministers to take down in short hand, all the debates and proceedings of the Synod. He performed the work faithfully, and having written out the voluminous record, at "the expense of much time and pains," he presented it to the Court in May, 1639. The long time that elapsed may indicate the labor. The Court accepted it, and ordered that, if approved by the ministers, after they had viewed it, it should be printed, Mr. Higginson being entitled to the profits, which were estimated as promising a hundred pounds. The writer waited with patience while his brethren examined it, and freely took their advice. Some were in favor of printing it; but others advised to the contrary, "conceiving it might possibly be an occasion of further disputes and differences both in this country and other parts of the world."
Naturally they failed to agree. The unfortunate writer, having scruples which prevented his accepting an offer of fifty pounds for the manuscript, made probably by some Hutchinsonian, waited the pleasure of the brethren, reminding them at intervals of his claim, but so far as can be discovered, failing always to make it good, and the manuscript itself disappeared, carrying with it the only tangible testimony to the bitterness and intolerance of which even the owners were in after years ashamed.
In the meantime, Harry Vane, despairing of peaceful life among his enemies, had sailed for England early in August, to pass through every phase of political and spiritual experience, and to give up his life at last on the scaffold to which the treachery of the second Charles condemned him. With his departure, no powerful friend remained to Anne Hutchinson, whose ruin had been determined upon and whose family were seeking a new and safer home. Common prudence should have made her give up her public meetings and show some deference to the powers she had always defied. Even this, however, could not have saved her, and in November, 1637, the trial began which even to-day no New Englander can recall without shame; a trial in which civil, judicial, and ecclesiastical forces all united to crush a woman, whose deepest fault was a too enthusiastic belief in her own inspiration.
Winthrop conducted the prosecution, mild and calm in manner, but resolutely bent upon punishment, and by him sat Dudley, Endicott, Bradstreet, Nowell and Stoughton; Bradstreet and Winthrop being the only ones who treated her with the faintest semblance of courtesy. Welde and Symmes, Wilson and Hugh Peters, faced her with a curious vindictiveness, and in the throng of excited listenders, hardly a friendly face met her eyes, even her old friend, John Cotton, having become simply a timid instrument of her persecutors.
The building in which the trial took place was thronged. Hundreds who had been attracted by her power, looked on: magistrates and ministers, yeoman and military, the sad colored garments of the gentry in their broad ruffs and high crowned hats, bringing out the buff coats of the soldiers, and the bright bodices of the women, who clung to the vanities of color, and defied the tacit law that limited them to browns and drabs. Over all hung the gray November sky, and the chill of the dolorous month was in the air, and did its work toward intensifying the bitterness which ruled them all.
It is doubtful if Anne Bradstreet made one of the spectators. Her instinct would have been to remain away, for the sympathy she could not help but feel, could not betray itself, without at once ranking her in opposition to the judgment of both husband and father. Anne Hutchinson's condition was one to excite the compassion and interest of every woman, but it had no such effect on her judges, who forced her to stand till she nearly fell from exhaustion. Food was denied her; no counsel was allowed, or the presence of any friend who could have helped by presence, if in no other way.
Feeble in body, depressed and anxious in mind, one reacted on another, and the marvel is not that she here and there contradicted herself, or lost patience, but that any coherence or power of argument remained.
The records of the trial show both. Winthrop opened it by making a general charge of heresy, and Anne demanded a specific one, and when the charge of holding unlawful meetings was brought, denied it so energetically and effectually, that Winthrop had no more words and turned the case over to the less considerate Dudley, whose wrath at her presumption knew no bounds. Both he and the ministers who swore against her, used against her statements which she had made in private interviews with them, which she had supposed to be confidential, but which were now reported in detail. Naturally she reproached the witnesses with being informers, and they justified their course hotly. Mr. Cotton's testimony, given most reluctantly, confirmed their statements. The chief grievance was not her meetings, so much as the fact that she had publicly criticized the teaching and religious character of the ministers, insisting that Mr. Cotton alone had the full "thorough-furnishing" for such work. Deep but smothered feeling was apparent in every word the initiated witnesses spoke, and the magistrate, Mr. Coddington, in vain assured them, that even if she had said all this and more, no real harm had been done. Cotton sided with him, and spoke so powerfully that there was a slight diversion in her favor, rendered quite null by her claim of immediate inspiration in what she had done.
The records at this point, show none of the excitement, the hysterical ecstasy which marked the same declaration in the case of some among the Quakers who were afterward tried. Her calmness increased instead of lessening. On the score of contempt of the ministers it had become evident that she could not be convicted, but this claim to direct revelation, was an even more serious matter. Scripture might be twisted to the point of dismemberment, so long as one kept to the text, and made no pretence of knowledge beyond it; contention within these bounds was lawful and honorable, and the daily food of these argumentative Christians who gave themselves to the work of combining intellectual freedom and spiritual slavery, with perpetual surprise at any indication that the two were incompatible.