twenty shillings, land, Wentworth on forty shillings, land, and Brewster on sixty shillings, goods, as if he had no freehold. This shows that he was a man of good substance, paying to the tax, which was a species of income tax, more than his neighbor, the esquire.

The name of Brewster is no old Nottinghamshire name, and the circumstances which brought them to Scrooby can only be matter of conjecture. It could not be any connection with the family of Sandys, for Sandys did not become Archbishop of York till 1576; and in the absence of any more plausible theory it may be suggested that they were brought into these parts of Nottinghamshire as a consequence of the acquisition of an estate at Sutton upon Lound, the adjoining parish to Scrooby, by one of the Welbecks who had other large possessions in these parts of Nottinghamshire, - the Welbecks being a Suffolk family, in which county there were many Brewsters of the rank to which the Nottinghamshire Brewsters belonged, and there having been a marriage between a Brewster and a Welbeck.

We do not, however, find in any accounts of the Brewsters of Suffolk any notice of the settlement of any part of the family in Nottinghamshire. Yet it seems little probable that any other family of the name beside that in Suffolk should have sent a son to the University, and then have placed him in so advantageous a position as that of an Under-secretary of State, which is usually the first step in political advancement. However, as at present this is only a conjecture, a very brief notice of the Brewsters of Suffolk, who were contemporary with Elder Brewster, may suffice. Their chief places of residence were Rushmore and Wrentham. Robert of Rushmore married one of the coheiresses of Christopher Edmonds, of Cressing Temple, in Essex, and had two sons, Henry and James. The latter died without issue; but Henry, who transferred his residence to Wrentham, had four daughters and two sons, Francis, who succeeded him at Wrentham, and Humphrey, who died at Hadley in 1614. Francis married Elizabeth Snelling, a daughter of Robert Snelling of Whatfield, near Ipswich, (of which family of Snelling were the wives of Edmund Calamy and Matthew Newcomen, two of the most eminent Puritan divines of the reign of Charles the First, and both concerned in the Smectymnuus,) and had Robert, of Wrentham, who was a member of Cromwell's Parliaments. We see, therefore, that the political leaning of the Suffolk Brewsters would coincide with that of your venerable Elder.

The descent of the Welbecks from Suffolk is shown in Harl. MS. 891; but they were rather possessors of estates in the neighborhood of Scrooby, than residents upon them, the person who acquired them dying in early life in 1556, leaving an infant daughter and heir, who became married in the great Yorkshire family of Savile.

I have said that there was an intermarriage between the Brewsters and the Welbecks. And this brings under our notice another Brewster, named James, who had the living of Sutton upon Lound, and who was also for a time Master of the Hospital of St. Mary Magdalene at Bawtry. Of his ejection from the mastership we shall next speak; but I observe here that Slack, who has left in manuscript an account of the transaction, which has been printed by Hearne,* says that he, James Brewster, married a daughter of a Mr. Welbeck. How far this may be supposed to strengthen the probability that the Brewsters were originally of Suffolk, from which county so many of the best of the early emigrants to North America went, and were brought into Nottinghamshire to look after the affairs of the Welbecks, must be left to the reader. But conjectures are sometimes valuable as suggesting lines of inquiry, even though, on a first view, they may not wear the stamp of high probability.

That James Brewster was at all connected in blood with William Brewster, is itself only a probable supposition; yet when we consider that they both appear in the same neighborhood, that they are both connected with the family of Sandys, and that there is a remarkable similarity between them in respect of ecclesiastical discipline and the affairs of the Church generally, it is hardly too much to assume that they were nearly related to each other, and even that they stood in the relation of brothers. However, it will not be thought a digression if we speak of a dispute with the ecclesiastical authorities of the province of York, in which James Brewster was involved ; and as the inatter in dispute was close at the door of William Brewster, it must at least have been a question, of the whole proceedings in which he must have been cognizant, and in which he must have felt a deep interest.

Close to the town of Bawtry was an endowed Hospital, of great antiquity. Its endowments were a little tainted with what was called superstition; for the chaplain had to pray for the souls of Robert Morton and Joan, his wife, who had been great benefactors in the reign of King Richard the Second. There was an act passed in the reign of Edward the Sixth, by which all such foundations were suppressed, and their sites and revenues given to the Crown. A few, which were mixed, partly eleemosynary and partly religious, escaped sequestration; and this Hospital at Bawtry was one of these. The service of the chapel was purged of its superstition, and went on under the guidance of Protestant Masters. To this Mastership in 1584 Archbishop Sandys presented James Brewster. This was at a time when commissions were sitting in all parts of the kingdom to inquire about what were called concealed lands, that is, lands which ought to have been forfeited under the acts for the suppression of religious foundations, but which had escaped. To a body of these commissioners, some persons, with the connivance and approval of the new Master, presented the Bawtry Hospital. The commissioners declared it a concealment, seized the Hospital and all its property, and so put an end to the foundation. Brewster, upon this, left Bawtry, and went to reside at Chelmsford, in Essex.

Now comes a passage in this history which is not easily explained. As soon as the Queen had obtained possession, she granted the Hospital and its lands, as a private possession, to Brewster and other persons, but, as it seems, with a beneficial interest to Brewster only. To all this Archbishop Sandys, who was the patron of the Hospital, seems to have made no resistance. He, however, died in August, 1588, and was succeeded by Piers, a prelate of a very 4TH s. - VOL. I.

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different spirit. He set himself with very little delay to attempt to undo what had been done, and he was supported by the Commissioners for Causes Ecclesiastical in the Province of York, who were at that time beginning to act with vigor against every species of uncanonical irregularity.

His first step was to depose Brewster from the Mastership, on the ground of his having suffered the overthrow of the Hospital, and having removed himself a hundred miles or more from the place at which he was bound to reside. He next appointed a new Master. Brewster, with Thomas Short, Thomas Robinson, and others, were summoned before the High Commissioners at York for having profaned and destroyed the chapel. But the question was soon brought before a higher tribunal. A bill was filed in the Court of Exchequer in Easter term, 1591, The Archbishop of York against Robinson and others, in which the whole state of the question is set forth, and it is prayed that Brewster and the rest may be commanded to yield peaceable possession to the new Master. An order to that effect is made; to which the defendant Robinson demurred; and the question, which it is evident was not without its difficulties, was left undetermined for several years, in the course of which Archbishop Piers died; but in Hilary term, 1596, a final judgment was pronounced, establishing the new Master, and annulling all the proceedings of Brewster and his friends.

If

We may be quite sure that William Brewster could not be an unconcerned spectator of these proceedings. he took a favorable view of the case of his namesake, it would appear to him like a resistance to a powerful oppressor, and the proceedings of Piers and Hutton would seem to him to approach to the confines at least of ecclesiastical persecution. Yet if any wrong were done, it was not by the ecclesiastics concerned, but by a court which was composed entirely of laymen, some of whom were of especial fame for virtue and wisdom. Yet it seems but too probable that the success of the Archbishop in this suit, and the heavy costs which the losers must have incurred, may have tended to quicken your Brewster in his advance on the road on which he was going.

James Brewster showed himself in other respects not a very dutiful son of the Church in which he was a minister. Either contumaciously or through neglect, at the beginning of the reign of James the First he had not paid his share of the subsidy granted to the late Queen by the Clergy of the Province of York, and when cited in his own church of Sutton to do so, he still neglected, and was returned as a defaulter into the Exchequer. This did not, however, prevent him from obtaining another living, for on the 13th of March, 1604, he was instituted to the vicarage of Gringley on the Hill, a well-known place on the high road between Bawtry and Gainsborough. In 1610 he had not paid his first-fruits, either for this or some other benefice. And this is the latest notice I have met with of James Brewster.

Returning, then, to William Brewster, and his connections and affairs, we may observe that this story of the Bawtry Hospital comes in aid of the fact that the Brewsters were tenants of the family of Sandys, to show that, long before there was any thought of calling in the aid of any member of that family in the project of settling a colony on the American shores, there had been a friendly correspondence between the Brewsters and the Sandyses, who may justly be considered as persons at this time of near equality of position. Sir Edwin Sandys could not but, even in the times before Brewster left England, have observed the course which a gentleman, whom no doubt he esteemed, was taking, and if we may rely upon certain passages in his Europæ Speculum, written by him at Paris in 1599, he must then have been to a considerable extent like-minded with Brewster. There was another link between them; for Cranmer, who had been with Brewster in the service of Davison, accompanied Sir Edwin Sandys in his Continental tour undertaken for the purpose of observing the state of religion in the different countries of Europe, of which the Speculum exhibits the result. Whether Brewster outran Sandys, or Sandys outran Brewster, there seems to have been a friendly race between them for a time, though ultimately Brewster's was the more decided conduct. Even the old Archbishop was not himself averse