A Brill Calendar: March 1

The Death of John Robinson

Few Servants of the Lord are dearer to Anglo-Saxon traditions in the United States of America than John Robinson.

When he died in Leyden, on March 1 1625, his flock mourned the shepherd who had guided them through hard times. Seventeen years earlier, in 1608, anti-Puritan policy of the Anglican State Church caused these ‘Nonconformists’ to flee from Nottinghamshire as separatists, where Reverend Robinson had been their Pastor in Scrooby village, to Amsterdam; a metropolis used to tolerance, if not nonchalance, in religious affairs.

Keeping largely to themselves, the country-dwellers found it difficult to survive in the ‘boom-town’ of a young Republic. 1609 saw them arrive in Leyden, where this small English community increased in size and zeal, comprising eventually of some three hundred people. Feeling safe from persecution, their Reverend even matriculated in the Theology faculty of Leyden University in 1615. Born & bred in the isolated village of Sturton-le-Steeple, Notts., the University faculty was his first exposure to academic insight in religion.

Not much later, the idea dawned on them to seek God’s Kingdom; not as a pious metaphor, but literally, across the Atlantic. The story of the Book of Exodus always fosters religious inspiration...

So, in July 1620, some 35 brothers & sisters in Christ and their children sailed from Holland in the ‘Speedwell’: first to England where that barely seaworthy ship was joined by a better vessel, the ‘Mayflower’. They embarked on a perilous pilgrimage across the watery wastes of the Atlantic to the Promised Land, arriving there on November 21 1620, on Cape Cod. It is seldom that a biblical parallel corresponds so strikingly to the original. Just like Moses, who could not enter that Promised Land himself, John Robinson could only see in his God-fearing mind the future home of his people. He died before he could join them. A generation later, in 1658, his Leyden congregation was quietly absorbed into the Dutch Reformed Church.