(1589-1657)

[Footnote 15: Copyright, 1894, by Selmar Hess.]

[Illustration: Seal of Massachusetts. [TN]]

Greatness is not allied to rank alone, nor is heroism to blood. The
noblest of the Pilgrims of Plymouth was sprung from the people. For
generations the little farming village of Austerfield, a royal manor of
the West Riding of Yorkshire close to the Nottingham line, had known the
family of Bradfurth or Bradford as a race of tenant-yeomen who, besides
tilling the lands of the Mortons, possessed also a freehold of their
own. But no man or woman of the Bradford name had given it prominence or
worth until, on March 19, 1589, William Bradford was born in that
low-roofed farm-house on the great plain of York. Puritan writers speak
of Austerfield as a "profane and irreligious" village in which was to
be found "no bible and a careless priest." Whatever the facts, the
environments, undoubtedly, were not such as would suggest the making of
a leader or the development of a religious nature. But we are assured
that, before the age of twelve, the boy William Bradford, brought up in
that Austerfield farm-house "in the innocent trade of husbandry,"
displayed alike a thoughtful temperament and "a pious mind." At sixteen
he fell, in some unknown way, under the influence of one of the
much-maligned Puritan preachers of Scrooby, a Nottinghamshire village
but a few miles from Austerfield. As a result he gave up his
farming-life, left his Austerfield home, and in the face of bitter
opposition, distrust, censure, and persecution, joined the Puritan
church and settlement at Scrooby, established there by William Brewster,
the postmaster of Scrooby and a prominent leader in the new sect of
dissenters from the English church, known first as separatists and,
later, because of their frequent changes and wanderings, as Pilgrims.

From his earliest association with this feeble and despised communion,
William Bradford was zealous in his readiness to stand boldly for his
faith, whatever the risk involved. He was one of the first to appreciate
the real meaning of the struggle; he saw that dissent implied not alone
a religious opposition, but a political defiance as well, and that its
followers, braving the will of England's royal bigot, James Stuart, and
denying his assumption of the divine right of kings, would ere long do
open battle in the cause of the people against despotism, and stand for
that deeper question of liberty whic