From his earliest association with this feeble and despised communion, William Bradford was zealous in his readiness to stand boldly for his faith, whatever the risk involved. He was one of the first to appreciate the real meaning of the struggle; he saw that dissent implied not alone a religious opposition, but a political defiance as well, and that its followers, braving the will of England's royal bigot, James Stuart, and denying his assumption of the divine right of kings, would ere long do open battle in the cause of the people against despotism, and stand for that deeper question of liberty which the Pilgrims of Scrooby and Leyden first fully grasped.
Bradford was one of that venturesome company which, in 1607, embarking at Boston, in Lincolnshire, sought to flee from English tyranny, and find a home in Holland. They were betrayed, turned back, and imprisoned. The next year this young eighteen-year old enthusiast escaped from his jailers, and made his way to Amsterdam. Here he apprenticed himself to a silk-weaver, and became an efficient member of the association of English exiles in Holland.
Upon his coming of age in 1610, he sold off the Austerfield lands that had descended to him upon the death of his father, and entered upon an unsuccessful business investment in Amsterdam. This failing, he joined himself to the Pilgrim colony that Brewster and Robinson, the Pilgrim preachers, had established at Leyden.
When those far-seeing reformers awoke to the fact that an English-speaking community in Holland must, in time, become Dutch in manners, speech, and life, and looked across the western ocean with the dream of founding a religious republic of English-speaking folk in the New World, Bradford was one of the most earnest in adopting and carrying out their views, and was one of that famous company which, on September 16, 1620, sailed from Plymouth in England, to cast anchor, three months later, in the harbor of the new Plymouth in New England.
It has been said that if William Brewster was the Aaron of the Plymouth enterprise, William Bradford was its Moses. Certainly he was, almost from its inception, its leader and deliverer. It was his brain that conceived and his hand that executed that memorable compact which the forty-one earnest men signed in the cabin of the Mayflower, as she rode at anchor in Provincetown harbor--"the first instrument of civil government ever subscribed as the act of the whole people." It was into his hands, when Carver, the first governor, died of sunstroke in the spring of 1621, that the colonists gave the guidance of their affairs, electing him governor of the Plymouth colony on April 21, 1621--"the first American citizen of English race who bore rule by the free choice of his brethren." More than this, we may look upon William Bradford, so says Mr. Doyle, the English historian of the Puritan colonies, "as heading that bead-roll of worthies that, from his day, America has never wanted--men who, with no early training in political life, and lacking much that the Old World has deemed needful in her rulers, have yet, by inborn strength of mind and lofty public spirit, shown themselves in all things worthy of high office."
