A Man Most Driven: Captain John Smith, Pocahontas and the Founding of America

Also by Peter Firstbrook

The Obamas: The Untold Story of an African Family

Surviving the Iron Age

Lost on Everest: The Search for Mallory & Irvine

The Voyage of the Matthew: John Cabot and the Discovery of North America

A Oneworld Book

First published by Oneworld Publications 2014

This eBook edition published by Oneworld Publications 2014

Copyright © Peter Firstbrook 2014

The moral right of Peter Firstbrook to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

All rights reserved

Copyright under Berne Convention

A CIP record for this title is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-85168-950-7

Ebook ISBN 978-1-78074-107-9

Jacket design by Holly McDonald

Typesetting and eBook design by Tetragon, London

Map artwork copyright © Peter Firstbrook

Oneworld Publications

10 Bloomsbury Street, London WC1B 3SR, England

Contents

Author’s Note

Prologue

1. Apprentice (1580–1600)

2. Pirate (1600–1601)

3. Mercenary (1601–1602)

4. Knight-Errant (1602)

5. Slave (1603–1604)

6. Entrepreneur (1605–1606)

7. Colonist (1606–1607)

8. Survivor (1607)

9. Prisoner (1607)

10. Trader (1608)

11. President (1608–1609)

12. Dictator (1609)

13. Admiral (1609–1615)

14. Grandee (1615–1631)

Epilogue

Appendix 1. Timeline of key events

Appendix 2. John Smith’s writings

Appendix 3. John Smith’s letter to Queen Anne (1616)

Acknowledgements

Note

s

For the two Georges in my life,

Father and Grandson

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Author’s Note

Nobody who writes about John Smith could do so without acknowledging two biographers from the past. Bradford Smith, together with his Hungarian colleague, the historian Laura Striker, published John Smith: His Life & Legend in 1953. Philip Barbour dedicated much of his later life to writing about Smith, including The Three Worlds of Captain Smith (1964) and many papers. Barbour’s three-volume set, The Complete Works of Captain John Smith (1986), represents a lifetime’s passion for the subject, and was published six years after his death.

For simplicity, all quotes from John Smith’s writings have been taken from The Complete Works. Reading original Jacobean writing in its original form is demanding, so Barbour’s typographic changes to Smith’s original writings remain here. These include altering u to v where appropriate, and v to u where needed. The archaic vv has been changed to the modern w, and I have used the modern s to replace ƒ. The many italicized words in the first editions have been set in roman.

Quotations from other individuals have been taken from Barbour’s two-volume set, The Jamestown Voyages 1606–1609 (1969), and from Edward Wright Haile’s Jamestown Narratives: Eyewitness Accounts of the Virginia Colony (1998). The references make these selections clear.

Dates during this period can cause confusion. By the 1600s, the Julian calendar had drifted by ten days from the solar calendar, so some European countries had already adopted the more accurate Gregorian calendar. Italy, France, Portugal and Spain approved this new calendar in 1582, but England retained the Julian calendar until 1750. This biography is predominately about English history, so the old-style Julian calendar has been retained for English dates. Spanish, Italian and eastern European dates have been retained in the new style Gregorian calendar, and are indicted (NS).

However, the calendar is more complicated than this. During the period in question, the New Year also varied. Throughout this book, the modern day for New Year on January 1 is used, rather than the old-style New Year, which began in March. In the old-style, John Smith’s baptism day was January 9, 1579, and appears in some modern sources as January 9, 1579/80; here I have used the simpler form, January 9, 1580.

The name of Virginia’s first settlement is variously called James Fort, James Towne, Jamestowne and James Cittie in the literature. For consistency, Jamestown has been used throughout. Foreign words are shown in italics.

The correct terminology used to describe the indigenous peoples of the Americas is a topic of ongoing debate. When the English colonists arrived, the region was settled by a confederation of tribes led by a mamanatowick, or paramount chief, called Wahunsenacawh. He was known more commonly by the English as Powhatan, after the name of the village where he was most likely born. Each tribe within the Powhatan empire had its own name, and whenever possible I have referred to these peoples by their tribal affiliation. Collectively they are known as Algonquian-speaking peoples, Tidewater people, or most simply the Powhatan.

The term Indian results from an historic error made by the Europeans, and where possible I have tried to avoid perpetuating this terminology. Likewise, I have preferred to use the name Wahunsenacawh rather than Powhatan or Chief Powhatan. However, for historical reasons these words do creep into the text occasionally, particularly when referring to the contemporary English or European view of their neighbours (and of course they also appear in the colonists’ quotes). When used, no disrespect is intended.

A Man Most Driven

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Prologue

Yet God made Pocahontas the Kings daughter the meanes to deliver me: and thereby taught me to know their trecheries to preserve the rest

John Smith, New England Trials (1622)

An apocryphal tale? John Smith Saved by Pocahontas, painted by Alonzo Chappel, circa 1865

On December 30, 1607, an Englishman was dragged before the paramount chief of the native Powhatan tribes of Virginia. His abductors brought out two large rocks, and placed him with his head resting on the boulders. He lay prostrate, waiting for a mercifully swift execution. It was dark inside the longhouse, and as the prisoner’s eyes adjusted slowly to the gloom he became aware that, around him, about two hundred people were looking on in fascination. For most, it was their first sight of a European.

The prisoner was strong but not tall, standing only as high as his guards’ shoulders. His thick beard mainly covered the ruddy complexion of someone who had spent most of his life in the open. The man was a few days short of his twenty-eighth birthday, an anniversary he did not expect to celebrate. As he lay on the ground, the guards raised their war clubs above his head, waiting for the command from their chief to execute the prisoner in their traditional manner – by beating the brains out of his skull.

From the shadows of the smoke-filled longhouse, a young girl of perhaps ten or twelve emerged, naked from the waist up, and with only a wisp of black hair hanging down from the back of her shaved head. She turned to the great man presiding over the ceremony, with a familiarity and self-confidence that suggested she knew the chief well. She did, for he was her father. The girl pleaded for the stranger’s life to be spared. The Englishman understood little about what was being said, for his comprehension of the Algonquian language was still rudimentary.

The chief considered his daughter’s appeal carefully. He was an old man, perhaps sixty or seventy years, broad-shouldered, fit and powerfully built for his age. He wore a robe of raccoon skins with the tails still attached, and around his neck a chain of pearls. He was clearly held in awe by all those present, and at the least frowne of his brow, their greatest will tremble with feare.¹

The chief was dispassionate as he considered the young girl’s request, his face showing such a grave and Majesticall countenance.²

The Englishman had no option but to await the judgement that would soon enough seal his fate.

The rescue of Captain John Smith, English soldier and adventurer, by the Indian princess Pocahontas is one of the oldest and most enduring legends to come out of the colonization of America. Smith wrote that at the minute of my execution, she hazarded [risked] the beating out of her owne braines to save mine.³

Since that bitterly cold afternoon in late December 1607, the story has been celebrated worldwide in books, paintings, feature films and animated cartoons.

The only European witness to the event was Smith himself, and his account has been questioned ever since it was first published in 1624. If the only debatable episode in Smith’s extraordinary life was this encounter with Pocahontas, then his version of events might not have attracted quite so much attention – or derision. But this was not the case.

Smith’s autobiography, The True Travels, Adventures and Observations of Captain John Smith, is packed full of the most incredible incidents: that he fought, defeated and beheaded three enemy commanders in duels; that he was sold into slavery, only to murder his master and escape; that he was captured by pirates, survived shipwrecks and marched up to the gallows to be hanged – only to be reprieved at the last moment. All this happened, or so John Smith claimed, even before he met Pocahontas and her father.

Some of Smith’s achievements are beyond dispute, most especially his success in saving the Jamestown settlement in Virginia during its first two brutal winters. The surviving settlers recognized that Smith had exercised his skill and experience to help them survive. But he was also a difficult and argumentative man, and he clashed constantly with his fellow colonists. One leader of the colony called Smith an ambitious, unworthy, and vainglorious fellow.⁴

Centuries later, this reputation lived on. Rather than being universally lauded for saving England’s first permanent settlement in the Americas – which ultimately led to North America becoming part of the English-speaking world – Smith was vilified, maligned and pilloried. Was he really such a villain? Or might he be the victim of envy, internal division and misrepresentation, both in his own day and in the historical record?

Indeed, Smith never lost his capacity to stir indignation among his detractors, or to arouse great loyalty in his supporters. He combined admirable strengths with great weaknesses: he was authoritarian and autocratic, yet also vulnerable and insecure. His life was a catalogue of defiance and confrontation, disorder and contradiction. It is these flawed and very human characteristics that make him such a fascinating character.

In his own writings, Smith did little to endear himself to a sceptical reader, or to an assiduous historian. He frequently claimed he was in the right, and that others were grossly incompetent. His spelling was chaotic, his grammar confused, and his dates and timelines an embarrassment to any self-respecting chronicler. In his defence, Smith neither claimed to be an historian, nor would have expected scholars or writers to be poring over his memoirs more than four hundred years after his birth. Nevertheless, given his inflated ego, he would most certainly have taken great satisfaction from knowing that one day this would be the case.

Smith left many diaries and memoirs of his astonishing exploits, but which of his more fanciful claims are the writings of a deceitful self-publicist – and which are anchored in the historical record?

This new evaluation of John Smith combines an appraisal of his life with a detective story, as we follow in his footsteps, constantly challenging and assessing his claims. In doing so, we can test his writings against the local history and geography, about which he wrote so much.

In every sense, Smith was a true Renaissance man: a soldier of fortune, captain of cavalry, colonist, adventurer, diplomat, surveyor and mapmaker; he was also a pirate, a mercenary and a self-confessed murderer. Unravelling the facts from the fiction is complex, but the truth is more revealing and intriguing than you might ever have imagined.

So what can we make of this man? Is he villain or victim? Even making exception for his archaic writing style, it remains to be seen whether Captain John Smith deserves such redemption.

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1

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Apprentice

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1580–1600

His minde being even then set upon brave adventures, sould his Satchell, bookes, and all he had, intending secretly to get to Sea

John Smith, The True Travels (1630)

Smith spent his childhood in the village of Willoughby, Lincolnshire, and many of the sights he would have known, including the font in which he was baptized, still stand today (photo by Peter Firstbrook).

On the evening of July 26, 1588,¹

130 Spanish galleons and armed merchant ships anchored off Calais, a small town on the northwest coast of France. It was the largest fleet ever seen in European waters. The Armada Invencible – literally the Invincible Great Fleet – had been sent by King Philip II of Spain to rendezvous with a sixteen-thousand-strong army under the command of the Duke of Parma, the governor of the Spanish-occupied Netherlands. Philip’s plan was for the invasion fleet to secure a landing zone in the Thames estuary, and then ferry Parma’s army across the Channel in barges. Their combined forces of over thirty thousand soldiers would then march on London and claim the English crown for Philip, removing the Protestant English queen from the throne and replacing her with a Catholic monarch. It was an audacious scheme but one that many felt was long in the coming.

For decades, much of the European continent had been torn apart by religious wars fought between the mainly Protestant north and the largely Catholic south. Now Europe’s rulers awaited word from the Channel with fascination and fear, as mighty Spain decided to wield its formidable power against its rival.

The English had first sighted Philip’s warships off the coast of Cornwall just eight days previously, although the arrival of the fleet had been expected for some time. Beacons were lit across the south to warn the Queen of the impending invasion. This was the moment England had dreaded, for the country was ill prepared for war against Spain, easily the most powerful nation in Europe at the time. Panic spread across the capital. Mobs attacked foreigners at random, and a force of ten thousand men roamed the streets, hunting out papists and spies. Spanish agents were everywhere. One reported back to Philip that the local militia drilled twice a week and were certainly very good troops considering they are recruits.²

When the Spanish fleet arrived off Calais, they found Parma’s army was not ready for action – he needed at least another six days of preparations for his forces. Today, Calais is a busy cross-channel ferry port, but in 1588 there was no deep-water harbour where a large fleet might find protection. Instead, the Armada anchored between Calais’ sandy beaches and the treacherously shallow banks offshore. The admiral of the fleet, the Duke of Medina Sidonia, understood well enough that his ships were vulnerable at anchor, but there was little else he could do.

As darkness fell, Sidonia did not have to wait long for the English to seize their opportunity. At midnight, his lookouts were horrified to see eight fire-ships bearing down on them in the freshening southwesterly breeze. The vessels lit up the night sky, their decks cracking and buckling as the inferno engulfed the wooden hulls. The Spanish commanders feared the fire-ships were packed with gunpowder, which could obliterate their anchored fleet. In fact gunpowder was in short supply in England, and the fire-ships were filled mostly with pitch, brimstone and tar – all highly combustible but not dangerously explosive. Nevertheless, the tactical effect on the Spanish fleet was immediate.

The well-organized commanders of the principal warships held their positions, but the rest of the fleet – mostly merchant ships with less disciplined crews – cut their anchor cables and took flight. In the panicked confusion, many ships collided, although all managed to avoid the fire-ships. Unable to restore order to the fleet, Sidonia’s force was vulnerable. It was time for the English warships to close for action.

The two navies clashed a few miles northeast of Calais, off Gravelines. The English commanders had learned much about the strengths and weaknesses of the Spanish fleet during previous skirmishes in the Channel. They knew, for example, that the large quantities of supplies carried below decks made it difficult for the Spaniards to reload their heavy guns. So the English captains held off at a distance and provoked the enemy gunners into wasting their shot. Then the smaller but more manoeuvrable English ships moved to within one hundred yards of the enemy. After eight hours of close bombardment, the English themselves began to run short of ammunition. Some gunners resorted to using chains in their guns when they ran out of cannon balls. By four in the afternoon, the English sailors’ gunpowder was running low, and they withdrew.

Five Spanish ships were lost and several others severely damaged. As the wind veered to the south and strengthened, the Invincible Great Fleet was unable to muster a counter-attack, and had no choice but to sail north. Every one of Sidonia’s precious warships survived its retreat into the North Sea, but many of the weaker armed merchant vessels were wrecked off the coasts of Scotland and Ireland; nearly half the Armada was lost. King Philip’s plan to join forces with Parma’s army had been thwarted, and the English gained some breathing space in their undeclared war with Spain.

With the Armada repulsed, England celebrated, and bells rang out from every church in the land. A whole generation of young men and boys grew up, inspired by the heroes of the day: Lord Howard, Sir Francis Drake, Sir Walter Raleigh, Sir John Hawkins. All were renowned for their expertise on the sea, but now the Spanish dreaded them. With men like this commanding the English navy, God must surely be on the side of the Queen. A thanksgiving service was held at St Paul’s Cathedral, and a commemorative medal struck, which carried the words: God blew and they were scattered.³

The English people genuinely believed the tempest that overwhelmed the Armada was no ordinary storm, but the work of their Protestant God.

Although the Spanish Empire remained dominant for several decades to come, the routing of the Armada marked the beginning of a shift in the balance of naval and global supremacy. England no longer considered itself a second-rate power. The year 1588 was a hinge point in the nation’s history, as it opened prospects abroad for a new generation of adventurous young men. Prospects perhaps best displayed in one of the enduring icons of that year: an oil painting of Queen Elizabeth by George Gower, called the Armada Portrait. The window to the left of the seated queen shows English ships bearing down on the Spanish fleet; the window on her right depicts the Armada wrecked on a rocky shore. Most tantalizing of all is Elizabeth’s right hand, which rests, relaxed and confident, on a globe. Her fingers point towards the Americas, as if to encourage her loyal and exuberantly joyous subjects to take up the next great challenge of her reign – the English expansion overseas.

Queen Elizabeth after the defeat of the Armada, in a portrait attributed to George Gower (circa 1588); her hand rests on a globe as if to encourage her great naval heroes to broaden their horizons (courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London)

One hundred and forty miles north of London, in the county of Lincolnshire, lies the small village of Willoughby. In the year of the Armada, the village comprised a handful of thatched cottages clustered around the church of St Helena, the patron saint of archaeologists. The parish church, built of square-coursed greenstone, has its origins in the early fourteenth century.

A short walk across the fields from the church is a red-brick house called Covells Farm House. The house has been substantially rebuilt from the traditional thatched, mud and stick dwelling of 1588, when the bells of St Helena were peeling to announce the defeat of the Armada. In those days, the residents of the house were tenant farmer George Smith and his wife, Alice.

There is no record of the actual birth date of their first-born son, John, but the parish register shows he was baptized on January 9, 1580. In those times, superstitions as well as infant mortality ran high, and parents christened their children on the day of their birth if they possibly could.⁴

It was believed a baby was born with original sin, and if the infant died before baptism, it would remain in limbo – on the edge of Hell – for eternity. No God-fearing family would wish such a fate on their newborn. The octagonal stone font baby John was baptized in is still in use, and the remnants of metal hasps once used to secure a wooden lid to prevent witches from stealing the holy water, are still visible on top.

John was followed by a second son, Francis, baptized November 6, 1581. A third son, Richard, and a daughter, Alice, were christened together on July 16, 1586, so they must have been twins; baby Richard only lived for ten days.

The village of Willoughby (or Wilgebi or Willebi, according to the Domesday Book of 1086) lies on the edge of the Lincolnshire Wolds, an area of low, rolling hills and steep valleys. Here, the mix of poor and good land had long been shared fairly between tenant farmers, even before the Domesday Book was written. George Smith’s fields were divided into strips, each a furlong long (660 feet), the distance a team of oxen could plough without resting. The fields were a chain wide (66 feet), giving a cultivated area of an acre, which was as much as a man could till in a day. Because the good and poor land was distributed evenly between the farmers, Smith’s fields were scattered around the parish. Like most English villages of the period, the pasture grazing was common land, shared by all.

The parish recorder offered a meticulous accounting of the contents of the Smith home in 1596.⁵

The family ate from pewter plates, rather than the wooden platters typically used in poorer households. There were at least four feather beds; not the poorer man’s straw mattress equivalents. The kitchen contained eight kittles, five pannes, three brass pots and on[e] pot of butte[r] that hath vi [six] cakes. In the farm, the inventory lists three young horses, four mares, two oxen, six cows, and five calves. There were two ploughs plus other farming implements, hay in the yard and corn in the barn. George Smith’s chattels were listed as being worth £77 16s 2d (about two years’ wages for a craftsman).⁶

Such relative wealth meant he could employ a servant girl, and probably a farm labourer or two. George Smith was no impoverished peasant farmer, reliant on the vagaries of storm and drought, or the whims of a capricious landlord. His house was well equipped, and his farm fully stocked with animals, equipment and foodstuffs.

Even so, George claimed to be a poore tenant of Peregrine Bertie, the 13th Baron Willoughby de Eresby. Like any typical English tenant farmer, he did not own the land he worked, but instead paid an annual tithe to his landlord. However, George also had his own land, for his will listed seven acres in Great Carlton, Lincolnshire, plus two tenements and a house in Louth. Despite these acquisitions, George did not aspire to the title of gentleman, nor even that of yeoman. Either title would have brought with it greater social responsibilities – and higher taxes. In the inventory of his estate, he is referred to simply as a husbandman, a term for a free tenant farmer or small landowner.

Nevertheless, George was for the most part a respected and trusted figure in the community. The court rolls show he was called to be a juror several times between 1584 and 1591.⁷

He did run afoul of the law himself on several occasions, appearing before the same court in which he sometimes served as a juror.

We can infer from this information that George Smith was a humble man, content with his position in life and with little ambition to improve it. His father’s lack of social ambition probably rankled with John, who spent much of his life fighting the archaic and rigid system of class mobility in England.

Elizabethan society had a well-defined hierarchy: the monarch was God’s representative on Earth; the nobility ranked second; the gentry third; then merchants, yeomanry and labourers in descending order. It was believed God had ordained this structure, and each group had specific privileges and responsibilities. Parliament regulated the clothes each class could wear, and it was considered insolent for a member of a lower order to dress in the apparel of the rich. The lords in Parliament claimed these rules helped ensure the maintenance of social order, and they also provided a quick and easy way to identify those of rank and privilege.

It was, however, sometimes possible to move up (or down) the social ladder. The titled nobility recruited from the ranks of wealthy merchants, and bankrupts and defaulters continuously renewed the lowest levels of society. Still, movement between social classes was not straightforward. One route, which no doubt appealed to John Smith, was through profitable ventures. Francis Drake, for example, was the eldest son of a Devonshire farmer; he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 1581 for his success as a privateer. The fact that Drake’s godfather was Francis Russell, 2nd Earl of Bedford, had, of course, helped matters. Yet despite Drake’s strong family connections and his undoubted achievements as a sailor, he was not exempt from derision. As late as 1592, when Drake’s triumphs were more than obvious, the Spanish military officer Gonzalo González del Castillo claimed in a letter to King Philip II: The people of quality dislike him for having risen so high from such a lowely family.⁸

Such was the snobbery of late sixteenth-century England.

Despite the shining example of heroes such as Drake, John Smith was reminded regularly of the social ceiling through which a freeman found it all but impossible to rise. Breeding and contacts were everything. No matter how experienced, intelligent, well-informed and competent you might be, if you were not born into the right family, sent to a good school and then a university where you would make valuable contacts, the opportunity to elevate yourself was very limited.

John understood this. He was born into a comfortable but unpretentious household, which held few obligations for the family – but also few opportunities for the son.

In Willoughby, as in every small village across the land, households aimed to be self-sufficient except for an occasional visit to the flourmill or blacksmith. During the long days of summer, the men were in the fields from daybreak to dusk. During the winter, they spent their time making and mending, repairing implements, tanning leather, carving wooden spoons and bowls, and preparing for the new season. By today’s standards, life was tough, tenuous and mind-numbingly tedious.

John’s youth was marked by a repetitive annual cycle of hard labour: ploughing, sowing, planting, felling, lambing, shearing, harvesting, slaughtering and then ploughing again. From an early age, John and his brother Francis would have worked in the fields alongside their father. Meanwhile, their sister, Alice, was at their mother’s side, helping to cook, preserve, spin and darn. Covells Farm House still has its original vast fireplace, where Alice would have gently stirred a cast-iron stew pot and hung freshly slaughtered legs of pork to preserve in the wood smoke.

However, by 1588, the year that St Helena’s bells rang out news of the Armada’s defeat, John was already attending a free petty school in the market town of Alford, a four-mile walk from home. (The term petty probably derived from the French word petit.) Schooling might have relieved him of the drudgery of the fields, but life as a schoolboy in sixteenth-century England was no easy option either.

For the next four years, John’s day followed the highly structured routine prescribed in the manner books of the period. The explosion in printing during the sixteenth century produced manuals on behaviour for every imaginable social situation. As soon as he woke, the young schoolboy would pray, wash, dress, clean his shoes, comb his hair and make his bed; he would then greet his parents and pack his satchel with quill and ink, a penknife, books and paper. There was no breakfast, so his morning walk to school was on an empty stomach. Smith would then have worked until eleven, when the children paused for a midday meal. Lessons resumed at one o’clock and continued until five, when the boys had prayers and were released. John would rarely have been home before early evening.

The petty school in Alford was established in 1566 with a donation of fifty pounds from a local merchant. It was later granted a charter by Queen Elizabeth, for the Education, Instruction and bringing up of children and Youth for ever to continue.⁹

Today, it is a successful grammar school with nearly six hundred students; when John attended, the classroom held barely a dozen pupils.

The school was in a tiny room over the front porch of Alford’s parish church, St Wilfrid’s. The church is built on a slight rise and has dominated the small market town ever since it was established in the fourteenth century. Remarkably, the schoolroom Smith attended still exists. To reach it involves climbing a narrow, stone spiral staircase before pushing open a heavy oak door to reveal a tiny room with a small fireplace in one corner.

In Elizabethan England, religion was an essential part of a child’s education, and so too was Latin – the language of law and the clerics, even after the English Reformation. Every English schoolboy learned from Lily’s Grammar of Latin – a primer prescribed by Queen Elizabeth since 1559. Lessons at petty school were correspondingly prescriptive, and John’s education involved learning to read and write English, to use good manners and behaviour.¹⁰

The Catechism, a critical part of the recent religious reforms, outlined the particulars of the English Protestant faith; children were expected to learn its passages by heart. John read his lessons from a hornbook, a parchment usually pasted to a wooden board with a handle, and covered with a thin sheet of transparent horn, which made it both durable and inexpensive to produce. The board itself presented the fundamentals of learning: the alphabet in uppercase and lowercase letters, together with the Lord’s Prayer (in English) and the sign of the Christian cross.

Notwithstanding these Christian teachings, young John grew into an argumentative and truculent man who regularly questioned those in authority. He is unlikely to have picked up these qualities from his father, who by all accounts was self-effacing and modest. Nor was he likely to have learned them from a close reading of the Bible or the Catechism. However, his schoolmaster, the Reverend Francis Marbury, set a very different example.

The Cambridge-educated Marbury proved to be an irritating thorn in the side of the Anglican Church early in his career as a cleric and teacher. The Reformation was still in its infancy, and many Protestants believed fervently that the reforms had not gone far enough to cleanse the church of Catholic rites. The most vocal of these critics were the Puritans, and Marbury was a member of one of the most radical of their factions – the Presbyterians. The fiery cleric often found himself called upon by God to accuse the bishops of placing badly educated and poorly trained ministers in parish churches.

His bishops took understandable exception to his views, but even more to his outspokenness. On November 5, 1578, Marbury was tried at an ecclesiastical court in St Paul’s Cathedral in London. It seems this was a rancorous exchange between the deacon and the Bishop of London, who called him a very ass, an idiot, and a fool.¹¹

Marbury was found guilty of heresy and locked up for two years in the notorious Marshalsea Prison, on the south side of the River Thames in Southwark.¹²

(The appalling conditions there became widely known after Charles Dickens featured the prison in his novel Little Dorrit.)

Marbury was released from Marshalsea in 1580 at the age of twenty-five. Now considered reformed, he was sent to what was then considered a remote posting: Alford. It was close to his ancestral home, and in that there was a small blessing. He rose to be curate (deputy vicar) of St Wilfrid’s parish church, and was then appointed master of the petty school in 1585, not long before John Smith arrived.

Marbury must have been a formidable figure, towering over his impressionable young students as he lectured them. Unfortunately, the schoolmaster could not hold his tongue, and by 1590 he was in trouble again. This time the outspoken curate accused the bishops of being self-seeking soul murderers – these blasphemous words articulated from the pulpit of St Wilfred’s, no less! In return, the incensed Bishop of Lincoln called Marbury an impudent Puritan, removed him from preaching and teaching, and put him under house arrest for the next three years.¹³

The Jesuit motto Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man is allegedly based on the words of Francis Xavier. It is certainly a reminder of the power of early teaching. While there is no direct evidence of how Marbury might have influenced John Smith, Marbury’s daughter, Anne Hutchinson – born the year after her father was removed from his teaching post at Alford – may provide some clues. Anne was better educated than most girls of the period, and her father kept a close rein on the direction of her schooling, particularly during her earliest years when he was under house arrest. Like her father, Anne held deep religious convictions that were at odds with the established clergy, and she had the self-belief to challenge the orthodoxy of the time. Later, at her own trial in America, the Reverend Hugh Peter of Salem said Anne had stepped out of [her] place. He went on to accuse her of being more of a preacher than a hearer; and a magistrate than a subject.¹⁴

She too was subsequently banished by the court for her outspoken beliefs – not to a rectory garden like her father, but to Rhode Island.

Marbury clearly imparted his contempt for authority on Anne, so it is likely some of his radical beliefs, as well as his temperament, rubbed off on his pupils in Alford. Undoubtedly, ten-year-old schoolboy John Smith would have learned that Marbury had been placed under house arrest for righteously speaking his mind. It was a model of honourable behaviour that Smith would emulate more than once in later life.

In 1592 or 1593, John’s father packed his oldest son off to the King Edward VI grammar school. The school was in Louth, a large market town some fifteen miles northwest of Willoughby, and John was a boarder there from around the age of twelve to fifteen. Louth was certainly a step up from Alford, with its Wednesday and Saturday markets and a fair three times a year. The town was larger, louder and rowdier than anything John had experienced, and to his young eye it must have seemed a metropolis. Today, Louth is a refined Georgian market town, but there are buildings still standing there that give a hint to what it was like in Smith’s day – thatched houses with wattle and daub walls, small windows, and doors so low you have to stoop to enter. John’s father is thought to have owned at least one house in Westgate, and it is possible John lived there when he was at school.

John’s classroom in his petty school in Alford (left), over the front porch of the parish church, as it appears today (photo by Peter Firstbrook). Following the dissolution of the religious guilds in 1548, the King Edward VI Grammar School, Louth (the school seal is shown right) was given a royal charter as well as a handsome endowment. By enrolling John in the King Edward VI Grammar School, John’s father revealed he had grand ambitions for his son. (Courtesy of National Education Network)

King Edward VI is one of the oldest schools in England, tracing its origins back to 1276 or earlier. The school regime was strict, with rigid rules governing behaviour: no taunting of masters, no obscene language, no wearing of daggers and no drunkenness. Indeed, the school’s seal bore a revealing inscription, translated from the Latin: He that spareth the rod hateth his son. To ensure the message was not lost, the seal also showed a pupil being thrashed soundly by his schoolmaster.

Apart from the basics of Latin, English grammar and mathematics, the school drummed into Smith strong moral principles: self-discipline, resilience, moderation and a keen sense of justice. George Smith must have held high ambitions for his son, because the costs to keep his son at grammar school were significant, not to mention the loss of the boy’s labour on the family farm.

However, John was not a diligent student. When he was thirteen, he claimed to have sold his satchel and books with the intention of running away to sea. On his return to school, his punishment would have been only too predictable.

In 1595, George Smith arranged for his son to be apprenticed to a prominent merchant called Thomas Sendall, of King’s Lynn. A young man in John’s position would normally be expected to take over the family farm, and this was likely his father’s plan. However, a life of hard labour in the Lincolnshire fields seemed not to appeal to John. He wrote in The True Travels that as a young boy, his minde being even then set upon brave adventures¹⁵

; he wanted more. A merchant’s apprenticeship might well have been a compromise acceptable to his father; a livelihood based on trade was safe and comfortable and would make good use of the education George had secured for his son. In time, the job might also allow John to rise to be a member of Sendall’s merchant class.

Smith never recorded how he travelled to King’s Lynn to pursue his new path towards adulthood. If he walked, he would have taken a sixty-five-mile course that curved around the edges of the low-lying fens which surround the Wash. Attempts to drain the Fenland did not start until the 1630s, so his journey would have been treacherous, traversing wetlands criss-crossed with creeks and ditches, and flooded frequently by the sea. Daniel Defoe described the area as "a flat, level, and often drowned country, like Holland itself; here the very ditches are navigable, and