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Who were the Mayflower Pilgrims?
16th September is Mayflower Day. Mayflower Day commemorates the day the ship set sail from Plymouth, England in 1620. The story of the first New England settlers has been told many times but not much has been told about what motivated these pilgrims to face the hazards of the transatlantic crossing. Historian Derek Wilson addresses this in his new book The Mayflower Pilgrims: Sifting Fact from Fable. Learn more in this extract from the book's introduction.
Is there such a thing as a Christian country? If so, what would it look like?
In 1520, most English people would have dismissed those questions as weird. It was perfectly obvious to them that they lived in a Christian country. Every community revolved round the parish church at its centre. The routines of its existence were governed as much by the cycle of religious festivals and holy days as by seed time and harvest. The nation was an integral part of Western Christendom. It owed allegiance to the pope in Rome, just as it owed allegiance to its earthly sovereign, Henry VIII, the second ruler of the house of Tudor, on whom Pope Leo X was about to bestow the honorific ‘Defender of the Faith’. In that same year, a renegade monk in distant Saxony publicly burned a papal decree threatening him with excommunication for his disobedience, but that had nothing whatsoever to do with the men and women on Henry’s island. Few of them had heard of Martin Luther. Fewer still were interested in what he had to say.
In 1620, a tiny group of English men, women and children turned their backs on their native land because they had decided it was not a Christian country. So strong were their convictions that they were ready to face the hazards of a transatlantic crossing in order to settle in a wild, untamed, largely unknown continent; a ‘neutral’ territory where they believed they could impose a perfect society, a truly Christian commonwealth. Where the ‘Pilgrim Fathers’ led, others followed.
Are we confronted here by a people of profound faith or naivety or spiritual arrogance or stupidity? Any clues to understanding these – undoubtedly courageous – pioneers lie in their prehistory. They were the products of 1520‒1620, a century that had witnessed not just that unravelling of Catholic certainties we call the Reformation, nor the burgeoning of exciting and disturbing new rationalities we describe as the Renaissance, but also a complete reassessment of the world in which the members of Homo Europensis lived and moved and had their being. The story of the first New England settlers has, of course, been told many times. However, chroniclers have tended to be too easily dazzled by what came after. The luxuriant growth that is the USA has seemed to necessitate the discovery of heroes and heroines, a process well underway by 1799.
[Taken from the introduction of The Mayflower Pilgrims]
The voyage of the ‘Pilgrim Fathers’ from Plymouth, England, and their settlement in Plymouth, New England, is iconic. Unfortunately. Why unfortunately? Because icons both simplify and glamorise. Derek Wilson strips away the over-painting from the icon in order to discover what motivated the Pilgrim ‘Fathers’ (a term not invented until 1840), and to explain them against the background of the age in which they lived.
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