William Brewster

Elder William Brewster of the Mayflower, ruling elder of the Pilgrim church and of Plymouth Colony. He matriculated at Peterhouse, Cambridge, on 3 Dec 1580, and became a “discreete and faithfull” assistant to William Davison, Queen Elizabeth’s Secretary of State, going with him on his embassy to the Netherlands in 1585. After Davison’s fall he went home to Scrooby, where in 1590 he succeeded his father as “Post,” master of the court mails, and lived in the archbishop’s old manor house. There the Separatist church of John Robinson and Richard Clifton met, and Brewster “with great loue entertained them when they came, making prouission for them to his great charge.” When the congregation tried to leave for Holland in 1607 he “was ye cheefe of those that were taken at Boston, and suffered ye greatest loss” (Bradford, as quoted, source).

At Leiden he taught English to university students and, with friends’ help, set up a press that printed books banned in England, “seven books against the regime of the Church of England in 1618 alone”; King James ordered the seizure of its Perth Assembly (1619) (source). Chosen elder of the Leiden church, he went with the first company in the Mayflower in 1620, with his wife Mary and their young sons Love and Wrestling, while the pastor stayed behind. At Plymouth he did not shrink “from even the severest manual labor,” and, Bradford wrote, “when the church had no other minister, he taught twise euery saboth, and yt both powerfully and profitably, to ye great contentment of ye hearers.” In 1632 he took land at Duxbury. Four islands in Boston Harbor, the Great, Little, Middle and Outer Brewsters, carry his name.

Mary died in April 1627 and the Elder on 10 April 1644, “nere fourskore years of age (if not all out).” In August 1645 Bradford, Winslow, Prence and Standish divided his estate between “Jonathan and Loue his onely children remayneing.” His children: Jonathan (1593), Patience, who married Thomas Prence, Fear, who married Isaac Allerton, a child buried at Leiden in 1609, Love and Wrestling. Bradford wrote in 1650 that the Elder’s “daughters which came ouer after him are dead.” The Elizabeth Brewster who married Thomas Emerson in 1611 is unlikely to have been his daughter (see her page).

Research: research/hatten/Hatten_Philbrick_Marvin.md.