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by Wayne Dyer
The Library of Congress website tells us, “Each year on May 1st, Law Day provides an opportunity for everyone to reflect on our legal heritage, on the role of law, and on the rights and duties which are the foundation of peace and prosperity for all mankind.”
The First Amendment to the US Constitution reads, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”
William Brewster of the Mayflower and the First Amendment are tied together in history. William Brewster was born in 1567 in Scrooby, Nottingham shire, England. He was the son of William and Mary Brewster, attended Cambridge University and later became an assistant secretary of state to Holland for Queen Elizabeth I. He returned to Eng-land and took over for his father as postmaster and bailiff in Scrooby.
By the time Queen Elizabeth took the throne in 1559 printing had become important as documents were reaching the common people and ideas were expanding. There was a great struggle between Protestants and Catholics with persecution against both sides as one monarch favored one religion and the next another. Stopping publications representing the views of opposing groups was common practice of the current monarch.
In the 1550’s a printing monopoly was given to the Stationers’ Company. Authorized printing presses were allowed only in London, Edinburgh, Dublin and universities. The Oxford University Press still exists today. In 1559 the queen or Star Chamber or university chancellors licensed all publications. The Stationers’ Company evolved over time into the governmental agency charged with controlling printing in England. On the surface it was a London based guild of approximately ninety-seven printers, bookbinders and booksellers. But the participants worked with the approval of the crown and its charter gave it a monopoly over what was published in England.
One of the obligations of the Stationers’ Company was to control the publication and distribution of “blasphemous” materials in England. This meant, of course, any publication that the crown disapproved of. Also, the Stationers’ Company in effect owned the printing. As a practical matter, the printers approved each other’s projects and the ownership of those projects came under the umbrella organization, the Company of Stationers. In this form the Stationers’ Company lasted for 150 years. It came to an end in 1694 when Parliament allowed the last of the licensing acts to expire.
In 1576 the Stationers’ Company started conducting weekly searches for unlicensed books. Severe penalties were imposed for violations. Admonition was backed up by example, and the severity with which offenders were occasionally treated served as a reminder of the risk involved in meddling with such matters. William Carter, a printer who had been imprisoned on several occasions for printing “naughtye papysticall books,” found that these were no empty threats. On January 10, 1584, he was condemned for high treason as having printed a seditious book entitled, A treatise of schisme, and, “on the morrow, he was drawn from Newgate to Tyburn and there hanged, bowelled and quartered.”
Various religious groups grew in England during this same time. The Puritans hoped to “purify” the Church of England. Separatists groups, mostly from northern counties like Lincoln, York and Nottingham, wanted to separate from the church. A group who eventually evolved into the Mayflower pilgrims tried to leave once but were blocked and sent back amidst mocking and harassment. One of their complaints was that they could not defend their positions without printed documents. They did successfully leave for Holland in 1609.
The only printing restrictions in Holland concerned private character and public morals. Many religious groups had presses there especially in Leyden where the pilgrims settled. Three main people led the pilgrim group. John Robinson was the minister. Thomas Brewer was a rich landowner from Kent who financed much of the printing. William Brewster was the printer. They studied many printed documents and decided to establish Pilgrim Press in Brewster’s home. Pilgrim Press produced about twenty titles with many copies of each.
Back in England printing restrictions were causing much persecution and redress in the courts. In 1614 King James I dissolved Parliament and it did not return for seven years.
In 1618 there was a big uproar over a document known as Perth Assembly. King James called church leaders together and thrust ceremonies into church services. Five of the ceremonies were very distasteful to Presbyterians in Scotland. David Calderwood, minister in Crailing, wrote his own version of Perth Assembly and got it to Brewster, Brewer and Robinson. They printed it and returned it to Scotland in wine vats and it was widely distributed. This enraged King James. He described Calderwood as “a very knave.” Calderwood was hunted from house to house and town to town. He managed to escape to Holland and did not return until after King James died in 1625.
Thomas Brewer was brought back to England with the understanding he would be questioned, confess and be released. This was arranged by Cambridge University. He was questioned by King James for two months and released. After the death of pilgrim minister John Robinson in 1629 he returned to England, where he was arrested and sentenced to fourteen years in prison. He lived for six months after his release.
William Brewster was the most wanted of the group. The English search for him went beyond its jurisdiction to include his own house in Holland. He escaped and no one knew where he hid until the Mayflower voyage. He was aware of the fate of another Scottish minister, Alexander Leighton, in 1619. Leighton had published a book found to be libelous against the Church of England. He was fined 100,000 pounds, (approximately $5,000,000 today) whipped, pilloried, and had one ear cut off. Branded “SS” (stirrer of sedition) on his forehead, he was put in prison “until a convenient time.”
Whipped and pilloried again, his other ear was cut off, and he was imprisoned for life in Fleet prison.
At the same time the separatist pilgrim church was not happy with life in Holland. Their children were leaving the church for the more liberal society there. They made arrangements with English businessmen for two ships, the Mayflower and the Speedwell, to take them to Virginia in the New World. Minister John Robinson was not allowed to get a passport by order of King James.
It is believed that English authorities were hoping to capture William Brewster in Plymouth, England before the ships left if he dared try to escape with the group. Brewster was a learned man greatly admired by the Pilgrims. The list of Mayflower passengers includes the alias, Master Williamson. This is thought to be William Brewster the son of William. Mourt ‘s Relation, a journal of pilgrim history, refers to Captain Standish and Master Williamson. William Mullins’ will, dictated just before he died the first winter in February 1621, named Governor Carver and a Master Williamson. Brewster remained the church elder of the Plymouth church until a minister arrived in 1629. He died in Plymouth in 1644.
Before the Pilgrims landed in Plymouth they realized they were physically outside the geographical area controlled by England since they arrived at Cape Cod and not Virginia. Cherishing freedom but realizing they needed some form of government, they composed and signed the Mayflower Compact, calling themselves “loyal subjects of our dread sovereign Lord, King James.” They hoped for basic freedoms in the New World.
It is not by mistake or coincidence that the first amendment bundled freedom of speech, religion, the press, assembly, and petition of grievances. The Bill of Rights protects US citizens from its own government. The framers, some of whom were from Massachusetts, knew of past abuses based on religious beliefs, speech, assembly, printing and seeking relief from government wrongs. They went on with amendments about firearms, search and seizure, trials, arrests, legal representation, confessions, bail, punishment, and property rights. People like William Brewster, John Robinson, Thomas Brewer, David Calderwood, William Carter and Alexander Leighton were willing to establish the principles that we take for granted. President Dwight Eisenhower knew it was important to remember and reflect on our legal heritage when he proclaimed Law Day in 1958.
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Categories: History
Re: “They went on with amendments about firearms, search and seizure, trials, arrests, legal representation, confessions, bail, punishment, and property rights.”
Actually, it was ‘property rights’ that proved to be the most important covenant in Plymouth Plantations governance. That this feature is, more often than not, underappreciated is a reflection of our recent academic tendency toward revisionist history.
While the Pilgrims came seeking primarily religious liberty and the freedom to order their community according to their understanding of Scripture, within three years they discovered—through bitter experience—that without economic liberty (specifically, the right to private property and personal incentive), the colony itself would die, as would every other freedom they prized, especially the tenets of what would, 165 years later, become the 1st Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
In that regard, we should not forget that without the ability to exercise free enterprise and its inclusion of the right to private property, all other liberties would be for naught, as Plymouth Plantation’s Governor, William Bradford, wrote in his memoire.
Economic failure almost destroyed the entire project under the communal system (1620–1623), Bradford wrote that young men resented working for other men’s wives and children, wives resented cooking and washing for others without reward, and output collapsed. Starvation, not Indians or weather, was the biggest killer. Without the 1623 privatization, the colony likely collapses by 1624–25. Religious freedom, self-government, the Mayflower Compact—everything—dies with them.
Private property was the precondition for surplus, trade, and independence. Once each family farmed its own plot, corn production exploded. By 1624 they exported their first cargo of corn, paid off debts faster than required, and began accumulating capital. That surplus funded the church, schools, fortifications, and eventual political independence from the London merchants. Economic self-sufficiency underwrote every other liberty.
The lesson was not lost on later settlers. The Plymouth example circulated widely in England and among later migrations (Massachusetts Bay, Connecticut, Rhode Island). When John Winthrop’s much larger fleet arrived in 1630, private property and trade were baked in from day one. The rapid growth of New England’s economy in the 17th century rested on that foundation.
Bradford himself saw the connection between economic and spiritual liberty. He framed the communal experiment as an attempt to live out “that conceit of Plato’s… applauded by some of later times… as if they were wiser than God.” In his view, denying private property was not just economically foolish but theologically wrong—an overreach of human authority against God’s design.
So yes, one can reasonably argue that free enterprise (or at minimum, strong private property rights plus personal incentive) was the indispensable material condition without which the Pilgrims’ religious and political freedoms would have remained unrealized dreams. The colony survived its near-death experience only because it embraced economic liberty, and that embrace made possible the flourishing that followed.
In that specific historical context, economic freedom really was the keystone: remove it and the entire arch collapses.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/13TxNjuY9IBuaIl4Th5pbvb83PLuW7LvJ/view?usp=gmail
Great response Jay what struck me most was ” The lesson was not lost on later settlers.” because these lessons certainly seem to have been lost by many current citizens of this country. Keep em coming!
One of the other truly curious aspects of the Pilgrim’s governance is its juxtaposition with that other colony of the time – Jamestown. You know, the colony the 1619 Project folks claim to be the illicit founding of all things American.
Both colonies faced disaster. Both survived. But why?
The Pilgrims flourished primarily through their religious faith and the notion that their rights are not granted by any government but are endowed by their creator, by nature’s law, inherent in all individuals.
Plymouth Plantation’s counterpart, Jamestown, survived because Portuguese slave runners provided the opposite tenet in economic governance.
It’s little wonder then that the southern colonies became primarily slave states, while the northern colonies tended toward abolition from the start.
And while this conflict of motivations carried on for nearly 250 years after Bradford’s epiphany, culminating, of course, with the Civil War, the conflict remains unresolved.
Today there are those who are skeptical of individual liberty and freedom, who you will often hear say, that even with free enterprise, we require “…the stipulation that there needs to be some kind of process for ensuring “choice” … public or independent/private – meet a minimum set of standards for [health], education, safety, [and] services.” A stipulation I’ve characterized as ‘a proverbial Catch 22’. In other words, once a slave to the ‘omnipotent moral busybody’, always a slave.
As we arrive at the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States of America, the anniversary of what was (and still is), arguably, the most profoundly enlightened form of governance ever conceived by humankind, I hope we don’t lose sight of the ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’. That while spiritual awakening and moral obligation is inherent in our enjoyment of the bounties from free enterprise, it is, nonetheless, our individual freedom and personal responsibility that rules the day.
Very good article, one of the best and Comment. Thanks very much. Should be taught in schools, if it isn’t. When I was in the early years of HS (about 1948), had to study about the French Revolution. Didn’t mean a thing to me being in another country. But if this country, much more attention, being here. Being older I’m open to history wherever. I have many roots in England and France.