Mistress Bradstreet (10 page)

Of course, now that they had decided on migration, Anne knew that the main problem her father and Simon were debating was where they should go. Right across the North Sea, there was Holland, which allowed dissenters to practice their religion freely. But the Puritans who had fled there, including the original Pilgrims, had complained that English children ran the risk of losing their identity and becoming too much like the Dutch. Dudley and Simon had no intention of raising their children to be anything but proud English people, and so they would need to go somewhere that was still somehow English. Anne clung to her national culture with pride and would have resented living in another country and learning another language. Besides, the memory of Antwerp persisted; Holland was entirely too close to Catholic marauders.

The prospect of the wilderness loomed as Anne’s father was drawn to the vast emptiness of America. Anne was aghast, but only in isolation, Puritan leaders believed, could they truly build a new, redeemed England, one far away from the king. The French explorers in Canada were a worrisome factor, but Dudley and his colleagues steeped themselves in propaganda citing the attractions of the continent, such as the explorer Captain John Smith’s overheated cries of the potential riches New England had to offer. “Who would live at home idly . . . only to eat, drink, and sleep, and so die,” Smith exhorted, when there was the possibility of

planting and building a foundation for his posterity, got from the rude earth, by God’s blessing and his own industry. . . . What pleasure can be more, than . . . in planting vines, fruits, or herbs, in contriving their own grounds, to the pleasure of their own minds, their fields, gardens, orchards, buildings, ships, and other works, etc., to recreate themselves before their own doors, in their own boats upon the sea, where man, woman, and child with a small hook and line, by angling, may take diverse sorts of excellent fish, at their pleasure?
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How could Dudley not resonate with such stirring words? New England sounded more like a garden ready to be planted than a wilderness yet to be tamed.

A fifty-one-year-old war veteran by the time of Anne’s marriage, Dudley was now a senior man in the Puritan community, and his words were heeded carefully by more than just his son-in-law. Isaac Johnson led the pack of younger, influential “brethren” who, with Dudley’s support, readied themselves to embark on the greatest adventure they would ever experience, the “removal” to a new world that seemed promising, unknowable, and best of all, far beyond the reach of their enemies.

AN AMERICAN NEW ENGLAND
was still a vague, mysterious place on the map, despite earlier attempts by explorers to make the savage New World seem like a mere extension of the Old. Even the name New England was loaded with symbolic power. It was Smith who had first used the term, in 1616; until then, those Englishmen who gave the matter any thought considered the land from Penobscot to Cape Cod as “the north part of Virginia.” Smith, eager to promote colonization, quickly replaced all the Indian names that had figured so prominently on previous maps with the more familiar names of English towns and villages, and distributed this new map to the public.
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Still, Smith must have known that he was treading on dangerous territory if he hoped to convince Puritans to come and settle in America. Puritans tended to regard anything termed “new” with suspicion. After all, it was the king’s Anglican Church that embodied innovation and change, sponsoring the “new” Book of Common Prayer, instituting “new” rules of decoration and formality. Later, when Anne described how difficult her “remove” to New England had been, she would write that she had resisted “a new world” with “new manners,” and her contemporaries would have understood these negative sentiments.
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But it seems that Anne only fully realized how near they were to leaving when, a few months after she and Simon had moved to the Countess of Warwick’s estate, they received shocking news from Sempringham. Charles’s persecution of Puritans had finally spread to Lincolnshire, and Theophilus had been thrown into the dreaded Tower of London for resisting the king’s demands of additional tax money, or a “loan” to the royal coffers, as Charles called it. Dudley himself, as a close adviser of the earl’s, was in danger of arrest.

To make the situation even more threatening, in the midst of the chaos of Theophilus’s imprisonment, someone at Sempringham had published an abridged version of the English statutes on the people’s rights, proving that the king’s request for additional funds from his nobles was illegal. Although it is not known for sure who wrote this pamphlet, it might well have been the dowager countess or the strong-willed Thomas Dudley himself. Whoever it was, the household now faced almost certain retribution from the king for harboring the unknown culprit. And yet the defiant Puritan stronghold did not back down. Dudley himself resisted the royal demand for money, as one informer whispered to officials: “Mr. Dudlye beynge reported to have 300 per annum, some say 400, refused upon our earnest request to bear 30 shillings towards the loan.” In fact, contemporary witnesses reported that all of Lincolnshire appeared to be in “open rebellion” against “the Royal Commissioners.”
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Conversations at Sempringham and the Countess of Warwick’s estate now centered on the earl’s fate. What would become of Theophilus? What would happen to his properties and family? What actions would the king take against Theophilus’s allies and servants? Although Anne heard about these events secondhand, she followed them closely and, young matron that she was, sympathized with the women close to the earl, especially the dowager and Arbella.

Knowing her father as she did, Anne was not surprised when he proclaimed that it was the moment for Puritans to act. By 1629 everyone at Sempringham and in the surrounding neighborhood agreed that with Theophilus in the king’s grip, it was time to set things in motion, to forge a New England colony far away from the king’s tyranny. Ministers stirred their flocks with pronouncements that the Puritans were the chosen people and must be as brave as the Israelites leaving Egypt.

It was during this crisis that Arbella’s husband, Isaac, proving that he was indeed the worthy choice of his visionary bride, created as thorough a business plan as he could devise. In 1628 he and several associates had formed the New England Company on the basis of their Sempringham meetings, but now he created the wealthier, more powerful Massachusetts Bay Company in order to facilitate a hasty “remove.” He and Dudley invited other distinguished Puritans to help plan their emigration, most notably the clergyman Roger Williams, whose passionate idealism would inspire others to flee England, and the solid, experienced solicitor, John Winthrop, who would become the most important political leader of the colony.

Williams was an eager and intelligent participant in these meetings and gave no evidence of the extremist zeal that would appall his friends in years to come. Winthrop, who came from Suffolk, had some difficulty making his way through the marshy countryside to the manor house in Sempringham. He recorded that “my horse fell under me in a bogge in the fennes, so as I was allmost to the waiste in water.”
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Perhaps the difficulty of his journey through Lincolnshire contributed to his initial resistance to the plan. But Johnson and Dudley persuaded him to give the matter some thought, and before long he, too, had decided to join the venture. After extensive meetings, the group easily procured the king’s permission to settle a rocky swath of land along the northern New England coast. Why should Charles stand in the way of their departure? He must have been glad to see the first boatload of troublemaking Puritans take leave of England.

In 1629 Isaac and Arbella put up the cash for an advance expedition to the area of their claim. This hardy band of explorers arrived safely on the shores of America and established the flimsy settlement that would so dismay Anne and her family when at last they arrived in New England twelve months later. But none of the planners of the migration had any inkling of what was to come. In fact their hopes could only rise when Francis Higginson, the minister of this experimental journey, wrote home a thrilling letter of discovery that fired the Puritans’ determination: “Both land and sea abound with a state of blessings for the comfortable sustenance of man’s life in New England.” He went on to declare that “a sup of New England’s air is better than a whole draught of old England’s ale.”
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The excitement generated by these words echoed throughout the Dudley and Bradstreet homes, confirming Thomas Dudley’s dreams of what the New World would be like. Now he knew he was embarking on the right adventure. The only problem was that as the months passed, they never heard from Higginson again.

With the notable exception of Anne, the enthusiasm of the Puritans mounted, and as preparations continued, they began to feel that they were stranded in England and far from their real and rightful home in the New World. As Edward Johnson wrote, “Oh yes! oh yes! oh yes! All you, the people of Christ that are here oppressed, imprisoned and scurrilously derided, gather yourselves together . . . for planting the united colonies of New England.”
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Not that Anne was entirely alone in her reluctance. Many Reformers knew that the fascinating accounts of “Penobscot to Cape Cod” might be unreliable, as they were written by financiers to encourage investment in New World mercantile projects. Although Higginson’s report sealed the matter as far as they were concerned, Puritan leaders still continued to seek out information about the condition of the Pilgrims, who had settled in Plymouth in 1620. Again, all seemed promising. Travelers to the fledgling colony noted the “healthfulness” of the settlers. One wrote, “I know of no place in the world that can match it,” listing the plentiful bounty: “delicate plums,” “five several sorts of grapes,” as well as “much plenty both of fish and foul everyday in the year.” As they readied for the voyage, the preparations for which would take almost a year, Dudley had plenty of opportunity to read these reports aloud to his family and send them on to Anne and Simon. Life would be delicious there, proponents for the journey argued, with lots of “good cheer” to go around.
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But there were also the less appealing reports, from rumors of French Catholics who attacked Puritan settlers to man-eating Indians. As early as 1607, an English settlement in Maine had failed miserably, prompting those who survived to describe New England as “a cold, barren, mountainous, rocky desert.”
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In 1623 a pioneering group of traders had tried to settle a colony on Cape Ann, but most of them had died of disease or starvation within a few years, though a few stragglers did remain in Salem, living as traders, fishermen, and hunters. In fact these were the old planters who would help the Puritans establish their initial colonies. Although Anne’s father and his friends were aware of the struggles of these men, they still felt eager to voyage to a world “as gorgeously garnished with all . . . pregnant nature ravishing the sight with variety.”
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This was not the life Anne had envisioned for herself when she left her sickroom for marriage to Simon. Not only had her father plunged her and her family into this New World expedition, but they were to become leaders of the venture. Dudley was voted deputy governor, second in command under Winthrop. Simon, who was always happy to follow in his father-in-law’s footsteps, agreed to serve as secretary of the Massachusetts Bay Company. Anne, who was now eighteen, continued to resist her father’s decision, but only in the privacy of her own heart. She had been well trained by her mother and knew better than to complain to either Simon or her father. Whether she liked it or not, Anne and her willing young husband were bound for New England. She was a daughter, not a father; a wife, not a husband. Hers was not the deciding voice.

Chapter Six

Preparedness

We must . . . wait all the days of our appointed time till our change shall come.

—
ANNE BRADSTREET,
“Meditation 53”

The certainty that that time will come, together with the uncertainty, how, where, and when, should make us so to number our days as to apply our hearts to wisdom, that when we are put out of these houses of clay we may be sure of an everlasting habitation that fades not away.

—
ANNE BRADSTREET,
“Meditation 70”

I
N THE EARLY MONTHS OF
1629, no one, not even Anne’s father, could predict exactly when the journey would begin, and so, as far as Anne was concerned, the voyage hung in the air like an impending storm. Preoccupied as she was with the idea of her own death, having already experienced two close calls, the expedition that lay ahead could only exacerbate the eighteen-year-old’s anxieties.

No one would have thought to soothe Anne’s fears. Instead most of the potential emigrants were instructed by their ministers to meditate on their own “destruction” before they even began the undertaking. This activity made sense to someone like Anne not only because of the dangers she would confront but also because the process of closing one’s affairs and bidding farewell to England seemed a kind of rehearsal for permanent departure from earthly affairs. She must also have secretly wondered if she would be able to survive a journey about which a contemporary had said “the weak bodies of women . . . could never be able to endure.”
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Few journeys of any magnitude actually start with departure, and the sailing of the first ship in the Great Migration to America would be no exception. It was not a simple proposition, this climactic break from civilization. More than seven hundred men, women, and children had signed on for the trip. Although the
Arbella
would carry around three hundred of these pioneers, ten other, smaller ships were necessary to carry the remaining passengers and to help transport livestock and supplies. Three of these vessels would depart with the
Arbella,
and seven more would follow. This venture to the New World would be on a scale unlike any other, not only in the lives of the Lincolnshire Puritans, but also in human history, and therefore there were few precedents to follow. Only fiercely devout men like Dudley and John Winthrop, who believed that God had ordained this plan—the passage of so many unweathered civilians across more than three thousand miles of ocean—would have dared embark on such a terrifying experiment. But these were pragmatic men as well as visionaries, and so they did not set forth impetuously.