Chief Of The Pilgrims - or, The Life and Time of William Brewster

He was never ordained, never governor, and yet nothing at Plymouth held together without him. Ashbel Steele's Chief of the Pilgrims is the life of William Brewster.

Brewster (c. 1566-1644) began in the diplomatic service, as secretary to Queen Elizabeth's ambassador William Davison, and was standing beside him at Flushing when the keys of the town were handed over. Davison's fall after the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, ended that career. Brewster withdrew to Scrooby in Nottinghamshire, took the post of village postmaster, and opened the manor house to the Separatist congregation meeting there. Pressure from the authorities drove the group to Amsterdam in 1608 and on to Leiden, where he printed banned religious tracts under the nose of King James's ambassador, and in 1620 he sailed on the Mayflower as the congregation's ruling elder.

Ashbel Steele (born 1796) was an American clergyman, related to the Brewsters by marriage and descended from Governor Bradford. A committee of Brewster's descendants commissioned the book in 1853 and paid for the research, and Steele worked from Bradford's own history, from manuscript collections in Washington, Boston and New York, and from records searched in England on his behalf by the antiquary Joseph Hunter. Published in 1857, the result follows its subject year by year across thirty-four chapters.

This edition features:

• The complete 1857 text, arranged year by year from the 1560s through to the elder's death in 1644
• Chapters on Scrooby Manor, the flight to Holland, the Leiden press, and the voyage of 1620
• Built on Bradford's history, family papers, and English archives searched on the author's behalf
• Groundwork for Mayflower descendants and anyone tracing the Separatist congregation to its source
• A close view of Plymouth's first years: the sickness, the treaty with Massasoit, the harvest feast