London - Edward Rutherfurd [383]
But one thing she loved to talk to Mrs Wheeler about was America. She could listen by the hour. Always the questions took the same form; after listening politely to a few details of Virginia, she would ask: “And Massachusetts. What did you hear of Massachusetts?”
The fabled, promised land. Martha had never given up her quest. She might say of the Mayflower: “Perhaps it was as well we did not go” – for over half the pilgrims who made that fateful voyage had perished within a year – but the dream of the godly commune, the shining city, had never faded from her mind. And indeed, in recent years it was not just in the mind of Martha: many Englishmen saw in that dream no mere hope but a very pleasant reality. The reason could be summed up in two words: Laud and Winthrop.
There could not be any doubt, it seemed to Martha, that Archbishop Laud must be a very wicked man. His grip upon London had increased with every year that passed. One by one the parishes were brought into line. Many clergymen resigned.
“What happened,” Martha could well ask, “to the Reformation?”
Not only that: he was worldly. When he rode into London, he came with a train of fine gentlemen, with lackeys riding before who cried: “Clear the path, make way for the lord Bishop”, as though he were a medieval cardinal. He was on the king’s council; he had virtual control of the treasury. “Laud and the king are one and the same,” men said. But even this worldly pomp did not shock Martha as much as his sacrilege.
“Keep ye the Sabbath.” Every good Puritan did. But the king and his bishop allowed sports and games, ladies were permitted to wear finery; once she had even seen some young people dancing around a maypole, and complained to the Church authorities. Nobody cared.
No wonder then if, seeing such outrages, she and countless Puritans like her had longed for a blessed means of escape.
This Winthrop had provided. The Massachusetts colony had continued growing even more rapidly than Virginia; Puritans who had hesitated to take to the seas before were gaining confidence. Word came back with every returning ship: “Truly it is a godly commune.”
How Martha yearned to go. The first of her friends to leave were people she had prayed with since her childhood. By 1634 many of her friends had gone. “But you will follow us one day, Martha,” they assured her. In 1636, she saw not a ship, but a small flotilla at Wapping, all bound for America. The trickle of emigration was turning into a flood. When Sir Henry had ironically remarked to Julius that Laud was a good friend to Massachusetts, he had spoken more truly than even he realized. Laud and the king might think they were only losing some troublemakers, but in fact during these and the next few years puritan ships were to ferry away no less than 2 per cent of England’s entire population to America’s eastern coast.
Sometimes she would speak to her family about it, and Dogget would mutter that they were too old. But, as she gently reminded him, they were both still only in their fifties, and people far older than that were making the voyage. Dogget’s younger son, who did not seem to know what he wanted to do, was agreeable. As for the elder son, the reports coming back of the cod catches were so astonishing that he had declared: “I’ll go if you do.” But the person who held Martha back, strangely enough was Gideon – or rather, to be precise, his wife.
Martha had always tried to love the girl. She prayed about it often. Yet she could not quite overcome a certain sense of disappointment. Gideon’s wife had given him nothing except girls. They came, with monotonous regularity, every two years. They were given, as might be expected, the virtuous names that Puritans so favoured; and each mildly expressed the family’s mounting exasperation about their sex. First Charity, then Hope; then Faith, Patience and finally, when still the awaited son had not arrived, Perseverance.