The Pilgrim
Copyright © 2011 by Hugh Nissenson
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The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious and used fictitiously. Apart from well-known historical figures, any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Nissenson, Hugh.
The pilgrim : a novel / Hugh Nissenson.
p. cm.
1. Pilgrims (New Plymouth colony)âFiction. 2. PuritansâFiction. 3. Self-actualization (Psychology)âFiction. I. Title.
PS3564.I8P55 2011
813'.54âdc22
2011017815
I hereby publicly confess my sins and declare my regeneration, and I pray that, with the grace of Christ, the Saints of Plymouth Colony's godly congregation will elect me a member in their fellowship of the Gospel. Even though there is no precedent in Scripture, Master Brewster of the Plymouth Colony Church hath graciously given me leave to express myself in writing, so that my story may be read to admonish and enlighten godly generations to come.
I shall write in a plain style and tell the truth as near as I am able. I will confess to being an accessory to the hanging of my beloved friend Zachariah Rigdale at Wessagusset, and I will include an account of my sinful life before and after it.
⢠⢠â¢
Last night in a dream, I put off the noose from Rigdale's neck as he was about to be hanged and said, “You are saved!” He said, “Today, then, is my new birthday. Praise God, I have been born again.”
I was born eight-and-twenty years ago, on the tenth day of March in the year of Christ 1595, in St. James parish, Winterbourne, Dorset. My beloved father, Piers Wentworth, was the rector of St. James's church in the High Street. Father baptized me Charles, after his father.
My mother, Edith Higgens Wentworth, bled to death the night after she gave me birth. Amongst the gifts my father gave my mother when he courted her was a pair of soft gloves of kidskin. He kept them in the carved, oaken chest with brass hinges and hasps in the parlor. I put them on when I was five or six years of age. I cried out, “Mama! Where are you?” Then I covered the gloves with kisses.
My father hired Mary Puckering, one of his poorest parishioners, as my wet nurse. Her sixth child had just been stillborn. Mary weaned me at two years of age. My father paid her two pounds a year, together with meat and drink, to raise me at his parsonage. It was more money and better victuals than Mary had ever enjoyed. She saved the cash and in time was able to buy a spinning wheel for her eldest daughter.
Mary was only allowed to return to her home on Friday afternoon at three of the clock. When she came back to me at sundown, her eyes were always red from weeping. By the time I was seven years of age, I knew in my heart that she grieved because she lived apart from her family, and I prayed to God to forgive me for being the cause of her grief.
Mary's husband, Mark, was a cowherd for two local farmers. He also collected dung which he sold for fuel. When he had the time, he worked as a weaver for a clothier named Wells in Howard Street. It took Mark five and a half years to save the money with which to buy his own loom. Thereafter, he received two shillings for a finished woolen cloth on which he worked for four days. He also earned a few pence by clearing the gutters of St. James. But he never went to church services because, said he, “I have not clothes fit to wear in company.”
My father said to me, “Mark's hard life, filled with much labour, proves that he is a good member of our little commonality. Who knows? Perhaps he is one of God's invisible Saints and will in heaven be clothed in glory.”
He gave Mark money to hire a cobbler to make him a new pair of shoes and a tailor to make him a new jerkin, a shirt, breeches, and a Monmouth cap. Mark thereafter went to church every Sabbath till the last month of his life.
Mary taught me to fear death and the Devil. One winter afternoonâI remember this very wellâwhen I was six years of age she sat in her chair by the fire and bade me commit to memory the following to recite before I went to bed: “At night lie down prepared to meet thy death. Thy bed is thy grave.” Thereafter, I was terrified to go to bed for months.
Mary kept a wary eye for the Evil One. She once took up a mess of my porridge before I had eaten of it, because she had espied therein a great black spider. She plucked it out, saying, “Beware of black spiders. They are the instruments of the Devil.”
My father praised her for her vigilance. He said to me, “Think on vast regiments of cruel and bloody Spanish musketeers, with a ringleader over them, overrunning a pillaged neighborhood, and you will have some idea of the work of the Devil and his minions in this world.”
My father's forebears were honest yeomen of the country. His father, Charles, freely held a farm of eighty acres of good pasture called the Hempstead in the manor and parish of Harrow Hill, a slender village three miles south of Winterbourne. He tilled skillfully and kept a shepherd, one servant in husbandry, and half a dozen day labourers during shearing time. He saved his money and, in ten years, bought twenty more acres. In time, he also kept a glover's shop in the market-place.
My uncle Roger, who was my father's elder brother, could neither read nor write. Yet, since he was sixteen, he had managed the one-hundred-acre farm and the glover's shop. My father kept the accounts. Roger, who was disposed to great thrift, paid him only two pounds a year. My father, who dearly loved his brother, never complained.
In the fall of 1588, uncle Roger met Eliza Collinson while she was milking her father's cows on his farm near Shaftesbury. They were married the next spring. Eliza was barren. She sold milk, butter, cheese, chickens, and eggs at the Tuesday and Thursday markets in Winterbourne. Within a few years, said my father, she changed from a slim young girl into a sad, fat, matronly woman.
My father had a natural propensity to be a scholar. At the age of six, he went to Winterbourne's Free Grammar School on Bridgeport Road. At fifteen, he was admitted to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he matriculated as a pensioner, his father paying for his lodging, &c. While at Cambridge, my father became an impassioned advocate of the true faith, which prejudiced men derogatorily call Puritan. He took a B.A. degree in Divinity and was ordained a Minister by Bishop Turner of London in the year of Christ 1585. As a candidate for Holy Orders, my father had to accept the Thirty-Nine Articles of Faith of the Church of England, which he did, asking God to forgive him for betraying his belief in our true religion, which rejects the papist doctrines of the aforesaid Church of England.
Once ordained, my father sought appointment to a benefice, which he received in the following year when he became the Rector of All Saints' Church in Little Totham, some six miles southeast of Witham. His living was fifteen pounds per annum.
One of his church wardens was a glazier, Thomas Higgens. Father fell in love with Higgens's daughter, Edith. They were wed in the year of Christ 1589. After my mother's death, my father would not marry again. He called her “my sweetheart” all the remaining days of his life.
⢠⢠â¢
In the year of Christ 1595, when I was born, my father was appointed Minister of St. James by Bishop Tiffin of Bristol. My father was but eight-and-twenty years of age, yet much famed for learning. He was master of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew and devoted to the study of the sacred Scriptures in their original languages.
My father's living was forty pounds a year, which he augmented by lecturing on religion in the church, and about the country, three evenings a week for twenty pounds a year paid by the richer sort in his congregation. He gave one-fortieth of his stipend to the poor. He kept five servants in his parsonage, and a woman who was in charge of malting, brewing, and baking.
My favorite of his servants, beside Mary, was Ben Tucker, a gentle and quiet fellow. The year after my birth, Ben was arrested whilst sleeping in the street for being a vagrant without a pass. Ben was condemned to a whipping and, as it was his second offence, being branded with a red-hot iron thrust through the gristle of his right ear. They said, though, he would be spared punishment if an honest householder worth five pounds in goods retained him in his services for one whole year.
Once satisfied that Ben was not a drunkard, my father retained him. Ben learned to be a gardener, and he became my first friend. He taught me the names of our local flowers, herbs and nuts, viz., the pink and purple columbines, the cowslips, the kingslips and lilies, sweet herbs, ivy leaves, hazel nuts, and green rushes.
Ben's father was a beggar who raised him to be a
kinchin
koes
âwhich means “a male beggar child” in the language beggars devised to speak amongst themselves. His father made corrosives and applied them to the fleshy parts of Ben's body, raising odious sores upon them that moved men to bestow alms upon him. Ben showed me the shiny red scars that remained upon his left breast and stomach. He considered himself fortunate that his father did not burn, break, or disfigure his childish limbs after the fashion of other beggars who made their children pitiful to people. Ben's father was an “Abraham's man,” a beggar who feigned madness. In the end he went truly mad and drowned himself in the Thames at Wapping in the Woze.
Ben had no knowledge of Jesus Christ till he became my father's servant. He was converted upon learning that Christ spake of a beggar named Lazarus, who was full of sores and, when he died, was carried by the angels into Abraham's bosom.
⢠⢠â¢
On a fair, sunshining Sabbath, just without the church after the morning service, when I was seven years of age, my father asked me, “Have you Christ in your heart? Have you true grace? How do you prepare for saving grace? How will you know you are saved?”
I rejoined, “Sir, I know not how I should come by such knowledge.”
He replied in words I will never forget: “My son, you will come by such knowledge by having faith in God's grace. My life's journey is to strengthen my faith. But it comes and goes. The truth is, we all live in doubt.”
The day following, Mary said to me, “Such a sad face! Where are your merry eye and sweet smile of yesterday? Why the sad face? You are too young to have such a sad face. What's this? A tear in your right eye? Let me kiss it hence.”
“Yes,” I said. “Kiss the tear from my right eye.”
She kissed my eye and said, “'Tis gone, sweet boy. I drank up your sadness.”
And she did! My merry eye and sweet smile were once more mine.
Soon afterwards, Mr. Howard Coppinger's house burned down. All black and deformed by the fire, he ran up Chapelhay Street, followed by some friends who wanted to stay him and dress his wounds. Near the end of the street, Mr. John Parkins, a cutler, thinking Coppinger was a felon on the run, had a pole in his hand with which he brained Mr. Coppinger.
Coppinger was one of my father's parishioners. He had been fined several times for not attending church on the Sabbath. Two weeks before the fire, he had left church before my father's sermon and was arrested by a constable for catching birds with a handnet. He was sentenced to two hours in the stocks.
My father said, “Coppinger's discordant death confirms that he was not one of the Elect. Christ is not the savior of the whole world, but only of His elected and chosen people. My question is this: are you and I amongst the saved?”
I had no doubts that my father was saved, but I could not speak for myself. I sank into the dumps.
⢠⢠â¢
Winterbourne is a godly town. When my father was presented with a living at St. James, he told the church Elders, “I prefer the primitive church of antiquity to the popish practices of the modern Church of England.” He said that he was averse to wearing a surplice, crossing himself while baptizing, bowing at the mention of Jesus's name, and kneeling whilst receiving the sacrament.
The Elders were pleased, but they greatly feared that my father would be clapped up in prison for incurring ecclesiastical censure by not wearing a surplice, &c. So my father wore a torn and soiled surplice in church in protest against the Church of England's papist fopperies.
He was an inspired preacher who exercised himself with much diligence, teaching his congregation and all the country about. It was his custom, when confounded by an insoluble predicament, to seek the help of the Lord by opening the Bible at random and pointing with his forefinger by chance at a verse.
In my seventh year, I began my studies at the new Free Grammar School on Bridgeport Road. Mary returned to live wholly with her family. We wept and kissed at our parting. She said, “Fare thee well, my dear boy. You have been a son to me, as much as any child I ever bore.”
I said, “I have twice lost my Mama,” and wept anew.
As my school years passed, I learned from Norwell's
A
Catechism, or First Instruction and Learning of Christian Religion
that “all corrupt thoughts, although our consent be not added to them, do proceed of our corrupted nature.” And, as my father said, faith alone distinguished the saved; those who were predestined before the foundations of the world were laid to know within their souls the Holy Ghostâthe Spirit of Christ. My soul knew only its own corrupted nature, emptied of Christ.
I loathed myself but loved words. I ravenously read William Lily's
Short
Introduction
of
Grammar.
I was snared by Lily's exposition of Latin grammar. A well-wrought English or Latin sentence gave me ardent pleasure. Grammar was yet another demonstration of God's omnipotence, for He gave unto all nations their own languages and rules of grammar when He scattered them from Babel.
I discovered that the meaning of each Latin sentence comes from the inflection of its words. The order of words means comparatively little. The multitude of endings makes for a multitude of possible meanings. All the meanings that a noun or a verb can have depend on close attention to these various forms. Latin is, above all, a concise language. Brevity is beautiful to me. I devoured on my own small, delectable portions of Cicero, Ovid, Virgil, Plautus, Terence, Horace, and Caesar. I resolved that when I reached man's estate I would be as brave as Caesar, who wrote in his
Gallic
Wars
that he wore the only red cloak in the Roman army so that when he went into battle, the Gauls would know who he was and strive to be the first to kill him. Thus, in the spring of 1623, when I fought with Captain Standish against the Indians in Wessagusset, I deliberately exposed myself to the Indians' arrows.
