Came to Plymouth, Mass. on the Mayflower, December 22, 1620 (Stuart, Inglis. The Mayflower ancestry of Elizabeth Ely Goodrich and her descendants. Rhinebeck, NY : Rhinebeck Gazette Press, 1932).
Brewster, William
b. 1567, England
d. April 1644, Plymouth, Mass.
Leader of the Plymouth Colony in New England.
Brewster spent his early life at Scrooby, Nottinghamshire, and acquired his first Separatist ideas while at Peterhouse College, Cambridge, which he attended for a short time. In 1583 he became the personal secretary to William Davison, an Elizabethan diplomat. Because of disillusionment with diplomatic and court life, and
because of his father's illness, he returned to Scrooby (1589), where he became the leader of the Puritan congregation that separated from the established church in 1606.
He and John Robinson led the Puritan migration to Amsterdam in 1608 and the move to Leiden in 1609. While in Holland, Brewster made his living by printing Puritan books by English authors and exporting them to England; pressure by the English government eventually forced him to abandon that enterprise. He accompanied the first group of Pilgrims on the Mayflower in 1620. Brewster, the only university-trained member of the Plymouth community, was the real leader of the church. As its senior elder he dominated the formulation of its doctrines, worship, and practices. He was not a magistrate, but by virtue of his close association with the governor, William Bradford, he played a major role in civil as well as religious affairs (www.britannica.com)
William Brewster was 10 years old when his father was appointed postmaster and bailiff at Scrooby Manor, an official resting place on the main road from London to Edinburgh. In 1580 Brewster entered Cambridge University but left without a degree. He served briefly in the diplomatic service, returned to Scrooby to assist his father, and became postmaster upon his father's death in 1590. Brewster probably became a Puritan at Cambridge; but how he turned to Separatism, an extreme form of Puritanism, is unexplained. Nonetheless, when a Separatist congregation was formed at Scrooby, Brewster was its most important member, and services were held in the manor house.
The harassment of religious dissenters by James I convinced the Scrooby congregation to search for religious freedom in Holland, and certainly Brewster influenced that decision. Imprisoned while trying to emigrate, he was one of the last to reach Holland. The congregation eventually settled in Leiden, where Brewster taught English to students at the university. In 1617 he entered the printing business, specializing in Puritan tracts whose publication was prohibited in England. More importantly, Brewster was the congregation's ruling elder, second only to the minister, John Robinson. As elder, he would have influenced the important decision to leave Holland for North America, but he was unable to participate in the preparations for emigration because the King's opposition to his printing activities had forced him into hiding.
Smuggling aboard the Mayflower, Brewster next appeared as one of the leaders of the infant Plymouth Colony in New England. He was one of the few who remained healthy during the early months of settlement, and he ministered to the many sick and dying. A trusted confidant in all matters regarding the colony's survival and progress, Brewster served as its religious leader. He led prayers and preached sermons, but without a university degree he could not become an ordained minister and thus could not administer the sacraments of communion and baptism. Despite this deficiency, however, he led the church well.
Of Brewster's life in Plymouth little else is known. Like virtually all other men in the colony, he was a farmer. Certainly he assisted Governor William Bradford in making major political and economic decisions. However, perhaps because he was one of the oldest of the Pilgrims, had a large family to care for, and bore the responsibility for the religious life of New Plymouth, his name rarely appears in the records of the colony. At his death in 1644, Governor Bradford praised him for being "sociable and pleasant amongst his friends, of a humble and modest mind, and tenderhearted and compassionate."
(Encyclopedia of World Biography)
The lineage from William Brewster down through Katharine Stuart is listed in "The Mayflower Index," rev. edition, 1960, published by The Genealogical Society of Mayflower Descendants.
They had another child buried at St. Pancras, Leiden, Netherlands, June 20, 1609 (Ancestry.com Great migration begins site).