Page:Great Men and Famous Women Volume 3.djvu/253

 to be found "no bible and a careless priest." Whatever the facts, the environments, undoubtedly, were not such as would suggest the making of a leader or the development of a religious nature. But we are assured that, before the age of twelve, the boy William Bradford, brought up in that Austerfield farm-house "in the innocent trade of husbandry," displayed alike a thoughtful temperament and "a pious mind." At sixteen he fell, in some unknown way, under the influence of one of the much-maligned Puritan preachers of Scrooby, a Nottinghamshire village but a few miles from Austerfield. As a result he gave up his farming-life, left his Austerfield home, and in the face of bitter opposition, distrust, censure, and persecution, joined the Puritan church and settlement at Scrooby, established there by William Brewster, the postmaster of Scrooby and a prominent leader in the new sect of dissenters from the English church, known first as separatists and, later, because of their frequent changes and wanderings, as Pilgrims.

From his earliest association with this feeble and despised communion, William Bradford was zealous in his readiness to stand boldly for his faith, whatever the risk involved. He was one of the first to appreciate the real meaning of the struggle; he saw that dissent implied not alone a religious opposition, but a political defiance as well, and that its followers, braving the will of England's royal bigot, James Stuart, and denying his assumption of the divine right of kings, would ere long do open battle in the cause of the people against despotism, and stand for that deeper question of liberty which the Pilgrims of Scrooby and Leyden first fully grasped.

Bradford was one of that venturesome company which, in 1607, embarking at Boston, in Lincolnshire, sought to flee from English tyranny, and find a home in Holland. They were betrayed, turned back, and imprisoned. The next year this young eighteen-year old enthusiast escaped from his jailers, and made his way to Amsterdam. Here he apprenticed himself to a silk-weaver, and became an efficient member of the association of English exiles in Holland.

Upon his coming of age in 1610, he sold off the Austerfield lands that had descended to him upon the death of his father, and entered upon an unsuccessful business investment in Amsterdam. This failing, he joined himself to the Pilgrim colony that Brewster and Robinson, the Pilgrim preachers, had established at Leyden.

When those far-seeing reformers awoke to the fact that an English-speaking community in Holland must, in time, become Dutch in manners, speech, and life, and looked across the western ocean with the dream of founding a religious republic of English-speaking folk in the New World, Bradford was one of the most earnest in adopting and carrying out their views, and was one of that famous company which, on September 16, 1620, sailed from Plymouth in England, to cast anchor, three months later, in the harbor of the new Plymouth in New England.

It has been said that if William Brewster was the Aaron of the Plymouth enterprise, William Bradford was its Moses. Certainly he was, almost from its inception, its leader and deliverer. It was his brain that conceived and his hand