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A religious and financial crisis
The Lyford Affair and the story of Emmanuel Altham show how precarious even a stable colony could be in the Jacobean Era. External financial backing was vital, and a minor error could ruin the finances of even the wealthiest person.
Then, when the Merchant Adventurers pushed a radical Puritan minister on the colony, the Pilgrims refused to accept him. He became part of a plot to overthrow the leadership of the colony, orchestrated by the Merchant Adventurers. When the Pilgrims exiled Lyford and his co-conspirator, Miles Standish was forced to return to London and borrow money at a 50% interest rate.
The colony’s Pilgrim leadership assumed responsibility for the debt in exchange for a monopoly on the region’s furs. The colony would only become financially solvent once it became a minor regional trading power after other people started to colonize the region.
Within a year of the affair, both John Robinson and King James were dead. In the next two years, a quarter of the colony’s population would decided to leave, either going home to England, to Virginia or to Maine.
Since this is the last episode of the Plymouth Colony, I’ve ended with a short discussion of Plymouth’s final form – a small, militant and tightly knit community – and a couple of external observations. It was, start to finish, an “eccentric” colony, and would maintain a distinct identity even as 20,000 English Puritans populated New England during the Great Migration, just a few years later.
Transcript
As 1624 approached, Plymouth was doing pretty well. New reinforcements had arrived, and on the ship that brought them, colonists had been able to send back some timber and beaver skins, and kept a small ship to use to cruise up and down the coast, fishing and fur trading.
Bradford’s switch from communal to private farming had eliminated food shortages almost immediately. Instead of simply doing what they perceived to be their duty, the colonists were now doing whatever was necessary to keep the crops going. Women worked in the fields, whereas they’d previously stayed home to raise the children.
The year would, however, bring the conflict which made Bradford angriest, and which he would continue to fume about long after the irritation over Weston and the pain of the first winter had dissipated.
Introduction
First, though, it brought that first batch of settlers, which included a 20-something man named Captain Emmanuel Altham. He was a friend of Pocock, and the puritan son of London merchants and lawyers, in a family which had become one of the most elite in the kingdom, and in fact he was related by marriage to Oliver Cromwell. He had sold his inheritance to invest in the company and move to New England, where he quickly made a good impression on Bradford. He admired Massasoit.
Altham captained a new ship, called the Little James, which he kept in New England. His crew signed up for six years with the Plymouth Colony as shareholders rather than wage earners. That meant that instead of being paid up front, they’d make their money by receiving a portion of the vessel’s profits from fishing and trading. In the meantime, investors would pay for their food, drink and clothing.
The problem was that they expected that this to include piracy. The War Party of the time did advocate piracy against the Spanish as a way of provoking war. Plus, doing piracy meant that working as a shareholder could earn them lots of money, much more than a wage would. That was a promise fishing and trading couldn’t make.
So, on their way to America, they saw a French ship sailing to La Rochelle, and prepared to plunder it. Altham refused, which made his stance on piracy clear. No Spanish riches for them. By the time they reached America, they were angry enough to go on strike and demand an interim payment of cash, which Bradford agreed to pay himself. The next spring, Altham took the Little James to Maine with a crew which was even angrier, having spent the winter in Plymouth, hungry, cold, and having gotten nothing they could be paid for. On the way to Maine, the crew mutinied, threatened to kill Altham and blow up the ship, and forced him to sail back by small boat to Plymouth for supplies.
Winslow accompanied him back to Maine, taking a supply of bread and peas. The mutiny seemed to be dissipating until a storm hit, which drowned the ship’s master and two of its crew. The mutineers refused to help salvage the vessel. Altham and Plymouth were able to pay some local mariners to salvage the ship, but thanks to the mutineers, they’d lost all the small boats used for doing business on the coast, along with salt, codfish, supplies and trading goods, as well as all of Altham’s books and most of his belongings. He had lost everything and ended up having to sell the ship with a small cargo of fish. Bradford hadn’t gotten around to paying the crew, so the mutineers sued the London investors for the 40 pounds he’d promised.
Altham stayed in America for a year, and then sent a letter asking his brother to mention his name to Samuel Argall, who was planning to found a new plantation. He said he thought he might be useful, with his New World experience and knowledge of the land and its people. Argall himself would die before any plantation plans materialized, but Altham returned to London. His inheritance was gone, so he joined the East India Company as a military commander and agent, and was stationed at the first British base in India, at Armagon, near modern day Chennai. He found a heap of mud, but rebuilt the defenses, and died there a few years later, after which the Company abandoned the post and moved 40 miles south to Fort St. George.
Altham’s story didn’t really affect New England, but it’s a sad reminder of the precariousness of life in the New World, even for someone who had already inherited a fair amount. We’ve heard so many stories of people fleeing desperation in one form or another, but even for someone who showed all signs of great success, just one bad decision could destroy it.
Back in Plymouth, the main problem was also financial. They still hadn’t sent many beaver pelts back to England, and investors were cooling on the idea of the Plymouth colony. Fortunately for the Pilgrims, though, the English economy was reviving, and people were more willing to start investing in New England.
The next ship to Plymouth brought the colony’s first major supply of goats, pigs, cows and horses, and the return of Thomas Morton, who had previously left with the Wessagusset settlers. It also brought a minister sent by the Merchant Adventurers, who were led by Pocock at this point. His name was John Lyford.
Lyford had studied at Oxford. Between Oxford and Cambridge, Cambridge was definitely the more Puritan-leaning school, but there wasn’t a 100% division. He had then gone on to be a preacher in the Church of Ireland, which was an ideal position for a Puritan because King James had allowed ministers in Ireland to implement whatever Puritan policies they wanted to. They didn’t have to do any of the high-church rituals they disapproved of, like pledging allegiance to the Book of Common Prayer, making the sign of the cross or wearing the surplice. That meant that Puritans who didn’t want to compromise their ideas could move to Ireland to help convert the locals. The Church of Ireland had become dominated by Puritans, and Lyford had chosen to settle in one of the most contentious counties.
Then, he had an illegitimate child while in Ireland, and another. Then he got married, but after his marriage he got caught having raped a woman. After that, he was expelled from the Church of Ireland, and forced to return to London. That’s where he’d connected with Pocock, who had sent him to Plymouth as a new minister. They’d already sent one minister, but he’d simply stayed a year, and lived quietly, written Latin poems, and left everyone alone. Given Lyford’s life story, it seems safe to say he preferred fighting to poetry.
A fundamental belief in Brownist ideology was that the Church should be run as an Athenian democracy. None of Plymouth’s Pilgrim leadership would accept a man as pastor who hadn’t been elected. In fact, they didn’t even consider him to be legitimately ordained if they hadn’t voted on his ordination.
But, Puritanism in general, and Brownism in particular, were not about freedom to do as you wanted. They were about the democracy to decide how a society should be run, and then obedience to the common will, and Lyford wasn’t it. What’s more, he wasn’t sent to be “it.”
Publicly, he made a tearful confession of his faith, but it sounded phony, and Bradford was skeptical. He didn’t call him out, though, just kept an eye on him.
Lyford almost immediately joined with another non-Pilgrim named John Oldham, who himself had already sent letters to London criticizing the colony and its leadership to the Merchant Investors. These criticisms had included criticism of everyday life, policy, and even the colony’s religious nature.
Lyford joined in sending these letters. He ran a serious risk of driving away influential supporters, especially because the Pilgrims hadn’t been able to give investors a return on their investment. When confronted, Lyford denied the accusations. But, he also baptized the children of one of the non-Pilgrims in the colony. Bradford was determined to find out what he was doing, so he asked the captain of the next boat carrying mail to England to pause after they were beyond the view of the Plymouth colonists. He followed in a small boat, intercepted the vessel and opened Lyford’s mail. There he found it full of accusations, many of which Bradford said were false. It seemed clear that Lyford and Oldham were partnering with a faction of investors at home and planning to overturn the religious and political leadership of the colony, ending the independence movement within the colony, and turning into a mainstream Puritan colony.
Bradford didn’t confront Lyford right away. He waited to see how the situation developed. One Sunday, Lyford and his supporters refused to join the Pilgrim congregation, setting up their own church with Lyford as minister. Bradford had had enough.
So, Bradford put Lyford and Oldham on trial. Lyford denied the accusations, and Bradford produced the letters. Lyford said he’d just been repeating complaints from people like Billington, and Billington and the others denied having participated. They said they’d gone to his meetings, but they would never have consented to something like this.
Lyford and Oldham had to go. They came to America to build a colony that adhered to their religious and political ideals, and the two were putting that mission at serious risk.
They put Oldham through a gauntlet where settlers beat him with the butt ends of their muskets. And then both were sentenced to exile. Oldham would be expelled immediately, but Lyford had a wife and kids, so they let him stay six months. Lyford made a second, even more tearful, confession of faith, but immediately began to write letters to London again. And then, his wife came forward with word of his affairs and illegitimate children, and even a rape committed in Ireland.
Lyford and Oldham briefly stayed with a new band of colonists at Naumkeag, which would later become Salem. From there, they hitched a ride to Virginia, where Lyford seemed to have been made a minister at either the Wests’ or John Martin’s plantation, but died just a few months later. Oldham later apologized for his participation in the affair and rejoined Plymouth colony.
The Lyford affair nearly tore the investors apart. Investors in London split into two groups, but most of the company’s powerful backers supported Lyford, including, of course, Pocock. In fact, the majority of all the investors backed Lyford, and he had as his advocate a well-known Puritan lawyer named John White. White himself was elected to Parliament in 1640 for the radical London seat of Southwark as an outspoken foe of the Bishops and the King. Lyford and his London associates weren’t meek and mild Anglicans. They were the most radical of Puritans.
London investors wrote to Plymouth, accusing the settlers of being “contentious, cruel and hard-hearted among your neighbors, and towards such as in all points both civil and religious, jump not with you.”
Meanwhile, Bradford said that Oldham and Lyford were evil, profane and perverse, a human manifestation of the anti-Christ, and malignants. Malignant was a term mostly reserved for Catholics, meaning a willful sect in rebellion against God. After the Civil Wars, it would become a word used for Cavaliers who refused to submit to Puritan rule.
Morton also chimed in on the event, saying that Lyford was a moderate Puritan, diligent preacher and hardworking man who was “honest and laudable.”
There’s probably some truth to all (or at least most) of these perspectives, and it’s sadly difficult to get a real picture of the event. It is, however, one of the more interesting stories from Plymouth Colony.
The Lyford Affair did enough financial damage to Plymouth, though, that Standish ended up having to go to London to raise money, and then ended up borrowing at an interest rate of 50 percent. They were able to send 500 beaver skins back, but pirates captured the ship.
Then, within a year of the affair, John Robinson was dead. Even from Holland, he had been their heart and their guide, rebuking them when they behaved poorly, and encouraging them when they were struggling. Brewster took control as Plymouth’s spiritual leader, but the congregation didn’t warm to another minister for decades, even as John Cotton achieved widespread acclaim among Puritans elsewhere.
In the couple years after Robinson’s death, nearly a quarter of Plymouth’s residents decided to relocate, either back to England or to Virginia, or to Maine. Brownism had always had its twin sides of enthusiasm and bitterness, and both of those had already shown up multiple times through Plymouth’s short history. It’s not hard to imagine that without Robinson’s guidance, and without a suitable substitute, and in the aftermath of the Lyford Affair, Plymouth became a place which was much more inhospitable to the strangers. Even Billington would find himself hanged for murder just five years later.
A new settlement was started, just to the north of Wessagusset, and quickly everyone relocated except Thomas Morton, who dubbed his little home Merrymount, and proceeded to live in a way that represented everything the Pilgrims disapproved of. He read Greek and Latin classics, wrote dirty poems, erected a maypole, and spent his Sundays hunting and drinking with the Indians. He was also willing to give the Indians guns, because that allowed them to get him more furs. The Indians unsurprisingly preferred trading with him, and Bradford ultimately sent Standish to capture him. Morton echoed Pecksuot’s critical mockery of Standish, saying it was almost comical to see such fury in a man who had been forced to shorten his sword by six inches to prevent it from dragging on the ground, and he said that the Massachusetts showed more humanity than the Pilgrims, and that he had better quarter with them. When a former Plymouth resident had to intercede in an altercation between Standish and some fishermen, he also noted Standish’s violence and said Standish had “never entered the school of our Savior Christ, or if he was ever there, he’d forgotten his first lessons, to offer violence to no man.”
The next year, the Merchant Adventurers disbanded, and Bradford, Brewster, Winslow, Standish, Alden, Howland, Allerton and Thomas Prence agreed to assume the colony’s debt in exchange for a monopoly on the fur trade. Bradford had never been financially talented, so they did struggle to pay off this debt, but in the meantime, they started to trade with the Indians for more than just fur – also for land.
They developed a close relationship with the new Dutch colony which had been founded at Manhattan, called New Netherland, and it was residents of these colonies who introduced the Pilgrims to the shell beads that would become the region’s currency and allowed Plymouth to become a minor regional trading power, ensuring its future survival as a colony.
It’s a Dutch trading agent who provides an interesting last image of Plymouth Colony before we move on to Massachusetts Bay. When we started this series, we saw John Robinson’s congregation, lost, confused, and thankful for any sources of strength they could find. Five years later, Dutch traders described Plymouth as an armed fortress, where every male worshipped with a gun at his side. On a typical Sunday, they assembled by beat of drum, each with his musket or firelock, in front of the captain’s door, cloaks on, in order, three abreast, and led by a sergeant without beat of drum. Next comes the governor, Bradford, wearing a long robe, and beside him on the right hand, a preacher with his cloak on, and on the left, the captain – Standish – with his cloak on and carrying his side arms, as well as a small cane. They march in order, and then sit, constantly on guard, night and day.
I’ve referenced the contrasts to Virginia history through this series, and the contrast includes its final outcome. Virginia grew into a society dominated by individual emigration and society so void of population centers that law enforcement was virtually impossible. Plymouth was the opposite. The similarity, though, is that it’s a story of small groups of ordinary humans in extraordinary circumstances. In failure, in weakness, in success, in honor, they were just people trying to figure out where to go next, what to do next, how to act in situations they’d never imagined. And, we’ve left both colonies at the point where they’re stable, but not prosperous.
As we finish the story of Plymouth, though, we enter a new phase of English colonization. In the same year that John Robinson died, so did King James. Colonization under his son, Charles I, could not possibly look more different.