William Brewster: The Father of New England, His Life and Times, 1567-1644. - book reviews

Contemporary Review, Dec, 1993 by Esmond Wright

The Reverend Dr. Harold Kirk-Smith. Richard Kay. Boston. 1992.

The Reverend Harold Kirk-Smith is a dedicated and a modest man. He believes that he is a lineal descendant of William Brewster of Scrooby, who led the Pilgrim Fathers to Boston, fifty-miles away, then to Leyden in Holland, and in the end in 1620 to Cape Cod, to found a church -- and in so doing to found a colony of Separatists that became a state. Not the least interesting chapter here is that on ~The Voyage Over the Atlantic'. Kirk-Smith does not mention that a similar claim to be descendants of the first Pilgrim Father was made by Longfellow and by President Ulysses Grant.

This is a piece of careful scholarship as well as of pietas. There is a vivid telling of Brewster's involvement with Scrooby, as bailiff of the estate, as postmaster and as church-warden. As such he was responsible for the hiring of the curates and preachers who were the real keepers of the faith in late Tudor and early Stuart times--for many ministers inherited or acquired their posts as pieces of patronage, and were--too many of them -- merely Vicars of Bray. There is an equally vivid description of Brewster's days as a student at Peterhouse, Cambridge, where many dons and students were Puritan in their sympathies. In Scrooby, in their prison in Boston, in Leyden, and on the journey to Plymouth, Massachusetts, Brewster was the ruling elder true to the Calvinist code. This has been a life-long study, and is a piece of original research. It is worth a place alongside Bradford's History of Plymouth Plantation, the Bible of American Puritan origins. And Bradford, who became the leader of the Pilgrim Fathers and Governor of Plymouth Colony was himself a protege of Brewster, and was brought up at Scrooby by him after his parents died. This is a splendid and a beautifully written piece of work.