This is the complete list of merchants known to have invested in the Colony. It includes the signers of the composition of 1626 as Bradford recorded them in his Letterbook, and, in brackets, five other persons. Names have been rearranged alphabetically. Spellings follow Bradford.Robert AlldenEmm. AllthamRichard AndrewsThomas AndrewsLawrence AnthonyEdward BassJohn BeauchampThomas BrewerHenry BrowningWilliam Collier[Christopher Coulson]Thomas CoventryThomas FletcherThomas Goffe[William Greene]Peter GudburnTimothy HatherleyThomas HeathWilliam HobsonRobert HollandThomas HudsonRobert KeanEliza KnightJohn KnightMyles KnowlesJohn LingThomas MillsopThomas MottFria. Newbald[John Peirce]William PeningtonWilliam Penrin[Edward Pickering]John PocockDaniel PoyntonWilliam QuarlesJohn RevellNewman RookesSamuel SharpJames SherleyJohn ThornedMatthew ThornhillJoseph TildenThomas Ward[Thomas Weston]John WhiteRichard Wright
This is the complete list of merchants known to have invested in the Colony. It includes the signers of the composition of 1626 as Bradford recorded them in his Letterbook, and, in brackets, five other persons. Names have been rearranged alphabetically. Spellings follow Bradford.
Robert AlldenEmm. AllthamRichard AndrewsThomas AndrewsLawrence AnthonyEdward BassJohn BeauchampThomas BrewerHenry BrowningWilliam Collier[Christopher Coulson]Thomas CoventryThomas FletcherThomas Goffe[William Greene]Peter GudburnTimothy HatherleyThomas HeathWilliam HobsonRobert HollandThomas HudsonRobert KeanEliza KnightJohn KnightMyles KnowlesJohn LingThomas MillsopThomas MottFria. Newbald[John Peirce]William PeningtonWilliam Penrin[Edward Pickering]John PocockDaniel PoyntonWilliam QuarlesJohn RevellNewman RookesSamuel SharpJames SherleyJohn ThornedMatthew ThornhillJoseph TildenThomas Ward[Thomas Weston]John WhiteRichard Wright
If Smith’s figure of seventy is correct, the survival of a partial list of subscribers is a handicap, for about one third are completely unknown. Thomas Weston, John Peirce, Edward Pickering,Christopher Coulson, and William Greene should be added to the list. A little less than half have been identified as London merchants, but their major contribution to the Colony’s support entitles them to close inspection. John White was a Puritan lawyer in London, while Emmanuel Altham belonged to a family of landed gentry. Many names are so obscure that it has not proved practicable to seek them out. It may be inferred, however, that the nonmercantile adventurers included some with background in a craft, such as that of the printer, Thomas Brewer. At the time of theMayflower’s expedition most of the sponsors were relatively young and attained maturity during the two or three decades after 1620, when some became prominent in the City and in the parliamentary opposition to CharlesI.
Just as the threads in a tapestry vary in color, but the pattern of the weave repeats itself, so with the detailed circumstances of the careers of the adventurers. Most of those we know belonged to one of London’s livery companies and were citizens. They held company or City offices; some were listed in a particular ward as wealthy enough to be noted by Crown officials as men of substance. One rose to the important role of Lord Mayor. The merchants were engaged in foreign trade and kept a shop or place of business in the heart of London. The crowded, narrow streets and lanes adjoining the widest thoroughfare, Cheapside, or close to the river, near London Bridge, then “replenished on both sides with fair and beautiful buildings, inhabitants for the most part rich merchants,” were their surroundings. They met to settle debts and accounts in the arcades of the handsome building of the Royal Exchange in Cornhill or in one of the taverns. The shipowners among them said goodbye to their captains from the wharves lining the Thames, the famous waterway connecting London with the sea. Some traveled on business to the Netherlands. The members of companies could attend meetings and feasts in a well-appointed hall, such as the Goldsmiths’ in Foster Lane, or on occasion one of the great banquets theLord Mayor gave at the Guildhall. They worshiped in the numerous parish churches, and doubtless others, besides Robert Keane, often heard lecturers or noted Puritan preachers, such as Hugh Peter. Sherley and Beauchamp, at least, had an additional residence across the river in Surrey; others held lands at some distance from the City. Like all merchants of their time, they were apt to have connections with the gentry; Thomas Andrews was himself knighted by Cromwell for service to the parliamentary cause.
Thomas Andrews, in fact, was one of the most notable merchants attached to the Puritan and parliamentary cause in the English Civil Wars. Although not a member of an older family of wealth, he succeeded in acquiring riches and a leading role in politics and finance under the Commonwealth and Protectorate. In 1638 he became master of the Leathersellers, his company. A share in collecting customs revenue for the Crown provided him with what was usually a profitable investment. Subsequently, he served the City as alderman and arrived at the pinnacle of office as Lord Mayor in 1649. At the beginning of the conflict with the King, this ambitious merchant served on the City’s all-important Militia Committee, which, besides controlling London forces, was “largely responsible for organizing money for the parliamentary army.” One of the committees he served as treasurer, collected about £1,000,000. He helped manage money raised for putting down the Irish Rebellion and by selling lands confiscated from the King and Royalists. Andrews himself contributed huge sums to the parliamentary forces. Both Edward Winslow, a Plymouth colonist, and James Sherley were his fellow members on other commissions, one to judge treasons against the Commonwealth and the other to dismiss ministers and schoolmasters thought to be “insufficient,” i.e., not conforming to Puritan standards. In the later political struggle between the Independents and Presbyterians, Andrews belonged to the Independent party. It is difficult to explain in a short space howthese groups differed about church government and politics. Roughly speaking, an English Independent developed ideas of religious toleration, self-government for each congregation, and opposition to a state church, which were rejected by Presbyterians. New Englanders, on the other hand, enforced the congregational form of church government. It is probable that a London merchant who had arrived at the position of Independency by the 1640s would have sympathized earlier with the religious views of the settlers of New England.
Andrews’ business interests were widely scattered in trade, colonization, land speculation, and finance. He joined the effort of the Massachusetts Bay Company to found a Puritan refuge in New England; he agreed to lend it £25 and later became one of a group of “Undertakers” who took over its debts in 1634. In the 1640s he had a crucial role in financing new trades pioneered by the East India Company. As a director of that Company for many years, he was required to own at least £1000 of stock. At one time he invested in a rival syndicate which traded on the Malabar Coast of India; another of its schemes was to plant a colony on the West Coast of Africa. Eventually, Andrews came to co-operate with the Company and rose to be its governor.[22]These varied mercantile enterprises, and they could be extended into land dealings, suggest that the young Thomas Andrews was induced to support the Plymouth venture by calculations of profit as well as initial approval of its religious aims.
On the whole, however, the religious bonds of the London backers of Plymouth Colony have received too little attention and their mercenary objectives have been contrasted too sharply with the purity of motive of the Pilgrims. In the Massachusetts Bay Company, on the other hand, it is acknowledged that the investors shared “Puritan” religious and political ends inspiring them to encourage colonial ventures. This company included among its members nine Londoners who previously had been adventurers in the founding of Plymouth. These were RichardAndrews, Thomas Andrews, just described, Christopher Coulson, Thomas Goffe, Robert Keane, John Pocock, John Revell, Samuel Sharpe, and John White.[23]Let us glance at the background of each and consider its relation to his participation in both plantation schemes.
Richard Andrews persisted in a business career rather than sharing the prominence of his brother in government affairs. He remained interested in Plymouth even after 1626, becoming a partner with the “Undertakers.” Thus, he certainly was not one of the adventurers whom Treasurer Sherley described as offended by the Colony’s form of religious worship. His enthusiasm for New England extended to Massachusetts Bay. He, too, lent it money and entered the syndicate of those who furnished supplies after 1634. He was a member of the Haberdashers’ Company, a renowned sponsor of Puritan preachers. His business was conducted at the sign of the Mermaid near the Cross in Cheapside; this was a well-known tavern in Bread Street with an entrance from Cheapside. Late in the 1620s he owned shares in the shipsRebecca(200 tons), theJane(200 tons), and theRoebuck(80 tons), all of which received letters of marque to capture pirates. Another of his ships prepared to undertake a voyage to Massachusetts early in 1645. Most of his trading probably was with the Netherlands, where in 1632 his factor ran afoul of Sir Paul Pindar, a wealthy merchant who shared in collecting customs revenue and was privileged to hold a patent for alum. Andrews and the factor were charged with bringing in some alum contrary to Pindar’s patent. In the 1640s Andrews spent several years in Rotterdam, where there was a trading center of the Merchant Adventurers; he may have been a member of that organization selling English cloth abroad. Andrews’ search for profit doubtless helped direct him to invest in New England, but his gifts to the poor and to the ministers of Massachusetts substantiate John Winthrop’s claim that the donor was a “godly man,” consistently dedicated to Puritan causes. He even sent agift to the Indians to be distributed by John Eliot and Thomas Mayhew. This included “8 little books against swearing,” “3 books against drunkenness,” and “2 dozen of small books called the rule of the New Creature,” all summoning up Puritan themes.[24]
Christopher Coulson was named in Peirce’s suit as an assistant of the New Plymouth Company, but he had withdrawn before the composition. While deciding not to participate in Isaac Allerton’s investment in the Maine fur trade, he did become an assistant of the Bay Company. Coulson was a dyer of cloth. As one of the well-to-do citizens of Dowgate Ward, he served on the City’s Common Council and, with Thomas Andrews, on the Militia Committee.[25]
Too deep an involvement in colonial ventures was likely to harm one’s credit. The first deputy governor and treasurer of the Massachusetts Bay Company, Thomas Goffe, sank into heavy debt for a time, part contracted for Winthrop personally and part for the Company. Goffe complained bitterly when, in a difference with Winthrop, he received no payment. As a shipowner with a share in theWelcomeand in two other vessels which seem to have crossed the Atlantic, he wrote that his shipowning was far from successful in 1630, the year of the initial Winthrop voyage. His affairs were “in an ambiguous and desperate estate” until some of his creditors, pitying him, took over part of the plantation debts and lent him enough capital to begin trading again. Though he suffered financial loss from the Puritan venture in Massachusetts, Goffe perhaps derived a greater measure of satisfaction from his donation to another Puritan cause. Along with a number of other Londoners he supported a daily lecture at the Church of St. Antholin’s. This afforded Puritan ministers and lecturers a platform for their views until the government suppressed the society, known as the Feoffees of Impropriations, which had been active in raising money to encourage a preaching ministry in London and elsewhere.[26]
By investing in the Pilgrims’ colony, John Pocock began what was a long association with New England. John Peirce called this merchant a leader in its support, and even after the composition Pocock extended it credit. Recruited as an officer in the Bay Company, he continued his generosity to that colony for about a quarter of a century. In fact, after Thomas Weld and Hugh Peter had concluded a mission in England in Massachusetts’ behalf, Pocock succeeded them as London agent; he also offered his shop in Watling Street, where he conducted business as a merchant taylor and woolen draper, to exhibit their disputed accounts. A fifteen years’ wait for payment of about £150 worth of cloth he had sent in 1641 to assist Massachusetts, did not deter him from investing substantially in John Winthrop Jr.’s project for establishing ironworks at Braintree, Massachusetts. Pocock fully sympathized with Puritanism and the parliamentary opposition to the King, as demonstrated by his contributions to the St. Antholin’s lectureship and his inclusion among the promoters of the London scheme to raise money for troops to help crush the Irish Rebellion. Parliament next made him one of the officials to whom were entrusted the Anglican church revenues so that they might be converted to the use of new Puritan preachers.[27]John Pocock’s range of activities indicates that he, too, looked kindly on Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay as outposts of Puritan influence.
Three of the merchants who had subscribed to the Plymouth venture, Robert Keane, John Revell, and Samuel Sharpe, actually emigrated to Massachusetts. The first to come over was Samuel Sharpe, who arrived in Salem as a member of the council chosen to assist Governor Endecott and to serve as business agent for the merchant, Matthew Cradock. In fact, Sharpe carried over the copy of the Company’s new patent. Had Endecott died, he was one of two designated to take over the government of the colony. Sharpe settled in Salem and became a freeman in 1632.[28]
John Revell’s part in financing the early Bay venture was clearly more important, however. Not only was he an assistant of the Massachusetts Bay Company, but he took a one-sixteenth share in a large ship for the transport of passengers and supplies to New England the Company could not afford. He also contributed £40 for freight during preparation for the 1630 fleet of vessels. He came aboard Winthrop’s vessel for dinner during the crossing, returning to his own under the salute of a volley of three shots. It is not known why he returned to England after a few weeks. He must have planned to stay, as his wife and children were with him. Back in London he belonged to the group of “Undertakers” supplying the Massachusetts plantation.[29]
The mind and temper of the final emigrant, Robert Keane, is clearer to us than that of any other adventurer in New Plymouth, with the possible exception of James Sherley. No career could illustrate better the compatibility of a calculated design to add to one’s wealth in the New World with the satisfaction of a sensitive Puritan conscience. At the same time that he was improving his worldly estate in London and Boston, Keane was walking the paths of salvation, he hoped, leaving in the interesting document, his last will and testament, a full discussion of both objectives. His account books, numerous as they were, can hardly have exceeded in bulk the handwritten ledgers he filled with comments on Scriptural books and on the sermons he had heard. In London, he laboriously noted in 1627 and 1628 the contents of discourses in several churches, including the famed St. Stephen’s, Coleman Street, where he listened to Mr. John Davenport, and one at Hackney visited by Master Hugh Peter. He attended some of the lectures at St. Antholin’s but most often, service at what he calls “Cornhill,” probably either St. Michael, Cornhill, or St. Peter’s, Cornhill. Between attending several services a month and writing down what was said, he gave a good deal of earnest thought to religion.
In his business career, Keane asserted that he was “self-made,”with no inheritance from his father. After apprenticeship in the Merchant Taylors’ Company, he took a shop in Birchin Lane, a street where the sellers of clothing displayed their wares. Either because of his fortunate marriage to the daughter of a gentleman or, more likely, because of success in business which enabled him to accumulate an estate of some £2000 or £3000, he enjoyed the modest rewards of a prosperous citizen, such as membership in the Honourable Artillery Company of London. His routine business included supplying liveries for the pages and footmen of the Lord Chamberlain. Keane was associated with James Sherley and the other merchants who furnished Plymouth with capital and direction. With Sherley he signed a letter to the colonists in 1624, and Peirce mentions him as an “assistant.” In the list of 1626, Keane was among the five designated to receive the £1800 to be paid by the Colony. In the Massachusetts Bay Company he was one of the inner ring of “Undertakers.” Keane was also the leading spirit in the organization of the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company of Massachusetts. He served as the first captain of this military company, the earliest to be chartered in America.
The religious pressures upon a conscience like Keane’s are unmistakable, for amidst all the troubles he suffered in Massachusetts he described the new commonwealth, in its closeness to the Gospel, as little different from that which had summoned him to leave England in 1635. Of those who came to Boston, he was remarkable for his wealth and his successful application of it to new kinds of profitable transactions, such as investment in land and trade to Bermuda or the West Indies. In time, he installed his son, Benjamin, in Birchin Lane in London to act as his agent and to sell cloaks. Keane’s career is a model of the intertwining of “merchandise, reading and writing,” all matters of importance to Puritans anxious to redeem their time on earth.[30]
Most London Puritans whose interests embraced first Plymouth and then Massachusetts Bay were merchants, but one wasa prominent lawyer of the Middle Temple. This was “Counsellor” John White, so called to distinguish him from the minister, John White of Dorchester, another leader in New England colonization. The lawyer John White became an investor in the latter’s enterprise, the Dorchester Company. Many activities mark him as a sympathizer with nonconformity, but his record with the New Plymouth venture suggests that he was one of the adventurers opposed to Separatism. While these were debating hotly the treatment Bradford had meted out to Lyford, partly for his use of the Book of Common Prayer, the faction favoring Lyford chose John White to be moderator in their interest. On terminating his interest in Plymouth in 1626, he perhaps was the lawyer John Peirce chose to arbitrate in his behalf in the course of his lawsuit against the adventurers. By becoming one of the Lay Feoffees, a group of trustees raising money to support the preachers they favored in the churches, White lent his name to one of the most dangerous of the Puritan efforts to oppose the policy of strict conformity insisted on by English authorities. He attended meetings of the early Massachusetts Bay Company and perhaps at one time contemplated emigration to New England, as suggested by one of John Winthrop’s correspondents. Remaining in London, he became a strong influence instead in settling such difficult problems as whether the prospective emigrants or the London merchants were to control the joint stock. A friend of Winthrop wrote in 1640 of this consistent friend of Massachusetts: “... there is so little money stirring to be exc[h]anged for the Plantation and so many hands to catch for it, that there is no hopes of obtaining any ... nor of Mr. White the Lawyer ... it being disposed some other way....” John White’s greatest service to Puritanism and the parliamentary cause came when he was chosen to serve for Southwark in the Long Parliament. There he presided over two committees, one to replace “scandalous” ministers with Puritan preachers, and the other to care for ministers who had been “plundered” by thepreceding government. A little of the affectionate regard in which he was held may be observed in that when he died in 1645, the House of Commons accompanied his body to Middle Temple Church for burial.[31]
So much for the investors in both the New England colonies. What we know of the other New Plymouth adventurers does not contradict the sketch set forth of men of moderate prosperity or wealth, Puritan in religious outlook, and usually of some prominence in the City’s affairs in the period of the Civil Wars. It remains to discuss more fully the two merchants who, along with Richard Andrews, did most to maintain the credit of the Plymouth “Undertakers” after 1627. These were John Beauchamp and James Sherley.
A member of the Salters’ Company, Beauchamp was an early associate of Thomas Weston, with whom he furnished theSparrow, a small vessel sent to Plymouth on private account in 1622. Like Weston he had traded as an “interloper” to the Low Countries from about 1612 to 1619. In the composition, Beauchamp was one of the five chosen to receive payment of the settlement money, and Sherley requested that he be joined with him as agent or factor in London for the “Undertakers.” Another New England colonial interest of his was the Muscongus patent in which Edward Ashley served as agent in fur trade with the Indians. The merchant also had a share in at least one ship which received a commission to take pirates. About 1640 he was judged to be not among the first, but the third, rank of citizens able to contribute to the King’s financial needs. Beauchamp lent money to various persons and apparently was rigorous in collection, for even Sherley described him as “somewhat harsh,” while a debtor’s widow, suing him, accused him of “unconscionably” prosecuting her at law after her husband had discharged his debt to him. This appears to be in character with the attitude we shall see he assumed in the winding up of the Pilgrims’ debts.[32]
James Sherley’s career is indeed the central one among the London merchant supporters of the colony at Plymouth. In December 1624, when he was thought to be fatally ill, his generosity was called “the only glue of the company.” Without his “unfeigned love” for the Pilgrims, his patience and willingness to disregard the harsh judgments of the dissatisfied adventurers, it was said that the project would have failed.
Sherley was apprenticed to his father, Robert Sherley, as a goldsmith in 1604, and became a full member of the Goldsmiths’ Company in 1612. Like several other members of his family he remained in close association with the Company throughout his life, although it is clear that he did not follow the craft of making plate or objects of gold and silver. Instead, he was in trade. Yet he was first active in Company business through his collection of Company rents, and he was chosen to take part in the ceremonial occasions of the Goldsmiths. On Lord Mayor’s Day, 1633, attired in a rich livery gown “furred with Foynes,” Sherley appeared at dinner at the Guildhall to “welcome the Lords Ladies & other guests.” On another occasion, before dining with members of a neighboring company, he joined them in a special service at St. Mary Woolnoth’s. Beginning with the office of assistant, and refusing the third wardenship in 1639, he had risen to the Company’s highest office, that of prime warden, by 1644. In this capacity he attended frequent wardens’ and court meetings and presided over a complex amount of Company business involving leases, loans, relations to the Mint, and other matters. Goldsmiths’ Hall, in Foster Lane, was a busy center for financial transactions.
Sherley’s own London address is something of a puzzle. Letters were directed to him in 1623 both as “dwelling on London bridge at the Golden hoospyte,” and to Crooked Lane. His brother John had a shop on London Bridge; perhaps in early years they shared a dwelling among the fine merchants’ houses erected there. Crooked Lane was a winding artery in CandlewickWard, the site of a noted Dutch tavern; this may have been where James Sherley maintained his business address. Like many others who had left the stench, noise, and possible plague of London, he later had a home in Clapham, Surrey, then a rural environment. He wrote Bradford of carrying his records there in 1636 when the plague was raging in London.
It was from Clapham that Sherley was chosen to serve in the public capacities then filled by men of substance. He was a member of the Surrey committee for levying assessments for the militia. In confirmation of the strong religious tendency evident in his correspondence with Bradford, he was an elder in the Croydon Classis in Surrey, formed during a reorganization of the English Church along Presbyterian lines. The New England Company, erected to spread the Gospel to the Indians, included him among its members. Parliament made him one of a Surrey group appointed in 1652 to deal with the problem of supplying proper ministers and schoolmasters in the churches of his county. His son was granted the right to administer his will in Clapham in 1657.[33]
Early in his business career Sherley very likely was connected with the Netherlands trade, for he was sufficiently friendly with Edward Pickering, Weston’s agent, who died in 1623, to be one of the executors of his will; in 1630 he wrote that he had spent nearly three months in Holland. In underwriting the Plymouth “Undertakers,” he perhaps was committed financially as deeply as he could afford, for he did not join the Massachusetts Bay Company. He did own ships in the New England trade, however, one of which was hired by Isaac Allerton. He had a share in the Ashley scheme in Maine and in voyages to Massachusetts Bay. The latter colony owed him money in 1648.[34]
Nothing has been discovered about the remaining adventurers to alter the character of the group as described above; they were chiefly Puritan merchants, possessed of substantial means but not great wealth. It is true that Robert Alden, a prosperoussalter, at the opening of the Civil Wars adhered to the Royalist minority of London citizens. William Greene, described as “one of the most religious of the adventurers,” was among those whose opposition to sending out any more emigrants from Leyden, made him withdraw his support. Another, Thomas Brewer, lumped together and imprisoned by the royal authorities with Brownists, by 1640 had become Anabaptist, a sect not tolerated by the Pilgrims.[35]For the most part, however, a consistency of business, religious, and political purposes seems to have prevailed among those who closed out the Company of Adventurers to New Plymouth.