3. This passage shows
JQA involved in at least a double confusion; and since
JA and
AA also, like many other Americans—historians and tourists alike—have been similarly
confused,
JQA's allusion to “the brownist Church” at Leyden requires clarification. By the term
“brownist”
JQA unquestionably meant the English Separatists, later commonly known as the Pilgrim
Fathers; see the preceding note. But to call John Robinson's company Brownists was
not accurate, for although the eccentric Robert Browne (1550?–1633?) is regarded as a precursor of New England Congregationalism, those Englishmen who
followed Robinson first to Amsterdam in 1608 and in the following May to Leyden rejected
much of Browne's teaching, and Robinson expressly rejected the term “Brownist” as
applicable to his views. It was hardly to be expected, however, that 18th-century
Americans, great as their reverence was for the Pilgrim Fathers, would be aware of
such theological niceties.
A worse confusion, and one that still troubles modern American pilgrims to Leyden,
concerns the place where Robinson's company worshiped.
JQA implies that it was in a building then still standing. A year and a half later
JA was to write: “I have been to that Church in Leyden where the Planters of Plymouth
worshiped so many Years, and felt a kind of Veneration for the Bricks and Timbers”
(to Samuel Adams,
15 June 1782,
NN:Bancroft Coll.). During her only visit to the Netherlands,
AA also, of course, paid her respects to the founders of Plymouth Colony: “ I would
not omit to mention that I visited the Church at Leyden in which our forefathers worshipd
when they fled from hierarchical tyranny and persecution. I felt a respect and veneration
upon entering the Doors, like what the ancients paid to their Druids” (to Mary Smith
Cranch, 12 Sept. 1786,
MWA, printed repeatedly in
CFA's editions of
AA, Letters, 1840et seq.). But the fact is, and was, that Robinson's company of Separatists had neither their
own church building nor the use of any other in Leyden. If they had, it would have
been a matter of public record, and no such record has been found by successive generations
of diligent investigators. One of the first and most competent of these, the British
scholar George Sumner, writing in 1842, concluded “that their religious assemblies
were held in some hired hall, or in the house of Robinson, their pastor,” which was
in 1611 described as “large”
{ 41 } (George Sumner, “Memoirs of the Pilgrims at Leyden,”
MHS, Colls., sd ser., 9 [1846]:51–52). Sumner also identified the source of the Adamses' and
others' confusion as Rev. Thomas Prince's famous
Annals, first published in Boston, 1736, which in a footnote related that “when I was at
Leyden in 1714, the most ancient people from their parents, told me, that the city
had such a value for them
[the English Separatists], as to let them have one of their churches, in the Chancel whereof he
[Robinson] lies buried, which the English still enjoy” (Thomas Prince,
A Chronological History of New-England, in the Form of Annals ..., Boston, 1826, p. 238).
This would make the cathedral church of St. Peter's (the great Pieterskerk, 1593) the
Pilgrims' church, for here, as Sumner found from its records, Robinson was buried
(although not in the chancel). What must have been pointed out by the Leydeners to
Prince and later American visitors as the Pilgrim Church was the English (often and
perhaps more correctly called the Scotch) Presbyterian or Reformed Church, which by
coincidence had been founded at the same time that Robinson's congregation came to
Leyden. With state approval and support, this church conducted public worship for
almost two hundred years in a chapel allotted to it in a church on the grounds of
the Cloister of the Veiled Nuns or Beguines (the Falyde Beguynhof). This church, as
the Dutch scholar Plooij has pointed out, was “a part of the Dutch Reformed Church,
organized as a separate congregation merely on account of the language used in its
meetings.” It was “Presbyterian, nonepiscopal, and Non-conformist,” but was “a State
Church” (D. Plooij,
The Pilgrim Fathers from a Dutch Point of View, N.Y., 1932, p. 47). The building the city provided backed up on the garden plot
of Robinson's house on the Kloksteeg and in modern times has been used as part of
the University's library; eventually most of the Leyden Pilgrims who stayed behind,
including Robinson's widow and children, joined this congregation (same, p. 48, 90–91,
103). Sumner, who located the records of this church in Leyden for the period 1609–1807,
concluded that “it is this chapel which, from being shown to American travellers as
the old church of the English, has, I believe, been sometimes supposed by them to
have been the church of the Pilgrims” (
MHS, Colls., 3d ser., 9 [1846]:49; see also p. 63–69).
Clearly this is what happened in the case of the Adamses, and it is confirmed by the
extensive researches of the Dexters; a diagram in their monograph, though it is in
part conjectural, shows the close physical relationships among the Pieterskerk, John
Robinson's house (long since gone) where the Pilgrims conducted their private religious
meetings without state support or interference, the large lot behind it on which small
houses for some of Robinson's people were built, and the Beguine Cloister abutting
that lot (Henry Martyn Dexter and Morton Dexter, The England and Holland of the Pilgrims, Boston and N.Y., 1905, p. 500 ff.).