Page:The International - Volume 7.djvu/189



HE story of Old Saybrook’s founding is a leaf from Old England’s history. For it was the fierce struggle for mastery between Charles I and Parliament that gave Saybrook birth; it was founded with the express purpose of providing a port of refuge; if the storm then raging in England should result in blowing the head men of the popular party out of home and country. And so it came about that Saybrook, Connecticut, can boast of being one of the oldest towns in New England.

As early as 1635 Lord Say-and-Sele, Lord Brooke, Sir Richard Saltonstall, Sir Arthur Haselrig, Sir Matthew Boynton, George Fenwick, Esq., and many other prominent Englishmen who had defied the royal wrath, were throwing out an anchor to windward by ordering an advance company to begin a plantation at the mouth of the “Conectecotte River.” Here they held a grant of land from Robert, Earl of Warwick; who in turn derived his right from the Plymouth Company, which had transferred to him all its claim to a large tract vaguely designated, but certainly including all the valley of the lower Connecticut.

A fort was to be constructed, dwellings were to be built for soldiers and laborers, and there must be houses for “gentlemen of quality”—so ran the orders. The honor of giving a name to the future metropolis was shared by the first two of the patentees above named.

If the political storm had shattered the Parliamentary ship, there is no telling what rich wreckage might have heaped the Saybrook shore. The noble Lords Say-and-Sele and Robert Brooke would have contributed to the infant colony things more substantial than their noble names, in fact their noble persons, families and much goodly properties.

It was expected that in the following year the main body of three hundred colonists would follow the advance company, but there were delays. Three years later there was a generally accepted report that Oliver Cromwell, John Hampden, John Pym and others were on the point of setting sail for the Saybrook colony, but were stopped in the Thames by the king’s officers. This story has been given as fact by several English historians, but its authenticity is doubtful.

But alas for what might have been! The tide of immigration which dashed high on the rockbound coast of Massachusetts ebbed away from the sands of Connecticut. As the Parliamentary party gained the ascendency, the prospect of an exile life in an