1657.] NOBLE CHARACTER OF BRADFORD. 459 others to tend the crop. He was the man of a thousand yea, of many thousands for the especial place which called him to its service. Wonderful indeed was it that a single shipload of yeomen and artisans, cast up like waifs on the shore of an unknown wilderness, should have had not only a Carver, Brewster, and Fuller, but also such a greater trio as Winslow, Standish, and Bradford. Since the earliest thought of emigration from Leyden, as in the hegira from England, Bradford had been among the foremost. In all the early perils and labors of the settlement, he stood side by side with Carver, Standish, and Winslow. In bodily labors he wrought beside the strongest; in action he was of the bravest; and in council he led the wisest. From that sad day when the handful of convalescents fired their matchlocks over the grave of Carver, to that which, more than a third of a century later, saw his own departure, he had gone before the foremost, and stood without a peer. Many pages might well be filled with his eulogy, but the subject may be most fitly left with his own words upon Elder Brewster: "I should say something of his life, if to say a little were not worse than to be silent." This review has from the first been an almost continuous biography of William Bradford, for his life was so interwoven with that of his Colony that the record of either is the history of both. The poetic period of the Pilgrim Republic ended with its adoption of a statute-book and a legislature; and its history rarely rises above the merest common-place after those three consecutive years in which died Winslow, Standish, and Bradford. CHAPTER LVI. Governor Bradford's Family and Others. — Bradford's Widow. — The Carpenters. Constant and Thomas Southworth. The Bradford Children. — Major William Bradford. — Thomas and Mary Cushman, -Elder Faunce. Secretary Morton. - Captain William Pierce.— Massasoit. Deaths. BRADFORD'S WIDOW. OVERNOR BRADFORD'S widow, after long debility, died April 5, 1670 (N. S.), aged about eighty. She asked in her will to be laid as near to her husband "as may conveniently be;" and on the third day after her death her body was borne to the spot with especial ceremony.1 The Colony records tell us that she was a "godly matron, and much loved while she lived, and lamented, though aged, when she died." In Chapter XXIII. was pointed out the absurdity of the tradition as to her youthful relations with Bradford. There is a not more probable tradition that she brought a fair property from England. She is said to have labored diligently for the improvement of the young women of Plymouth, and to have been eminently worthy of her high position. By her first marriage she had two sons, Constant and Thomas Southworth, whom on coming to America she left, probably for education, with their father's relatives. Constant came over 1 Indicated by the record "honorably interred." 2 It has been inferred that her labors were in the direction of literary education; but such training was not then the rule among women below the gentry. Mrs. Bradford, like many genuine ladies of her time, could not write her name; her mark may be found at the bottom of her will, also as witness with her husband to a will in 1651, and to an instrument recorded in 1659. She left £162 175., and made a small bequest to her servant, Mary Smith. 1612-87.] THE CARPENTERS. 461 to her in 1628, and Thomas soon after. Through the former this lady is said to be the ancestress of all the Southworths in this country. The year next after the funeral of this distinguished matron, another Mrs. Alice Bradford was added to the family group on Burial Hill. She was Alice Richards, wife of William Bradford, Jr., and the mother (1654) of a fifth William Bradford. She died Dec. 22, 1671, aged about forty-four, and the record of her burial, two days later, adds, " She was a gracious woman." She left four sons and six daughters. THE CARPENTERS. Governor Bradford's wife had four sisters. It is not known when Alexander Carpenter, her father, died, nor when his family returned from Leyden to their old home at Wrington, in Somersetshire; but about 1644 Mary Carpenter was at the latter place, and had just buried her aged mother. A brother of Winslow's who went on business to Bristol, some eight miles from Wrington, took over a letter from the Bradfords, who invited Mary to come to them; they would be "helpful" to her, though they had grown old and the country was more unsettled than formerly, for the ministers were returning to England, where they now found peace. The poverty of the Carpenters is indicated by Bradford's offer to pay her passage (about £5), if she needed it. She came; and to the entry of her death in 1687, aged about ninety, the record quaintly adds: "She was a Godly old maid, never married." Another of the sisters, Agnes (or Anna) Carpenter, became the second wife of Dr. Samuel Fuller at Leyden, in 1612; she died before 1617, when Fuller married Bridget Lee, who so long survived him at Plymouth. Juliana, another sister, became George Morton's second wife, also in 1612, at Leyden, and came to Plymouth in 1623 1 See Chapter XXVI. 2 Sixteen miles west-southwest from Bath. with her husband and five children. Her second husband was Manasseh Kempton, who died in 1662, and of whom it is recorded: "He did much good in his place the time God lent him." His widow died Feb. 19, 1665, aged eighty-one, and was buried the next day. The record pays her this tribute: "She was a faithful servant of God." The youngest of the Carpenter sisters was Priscilla, who came to Plymouth soon after 1627, and was married to William Wright, whose death was noticed in the account of the locust year, 1633; in 1634 she became the wife of John Cooper, first of Scituate, and then a leading associate of Lothrop's in founding Barnstable, from which town he was a deputy, and where he bequeathed half his large property to the church. Priscilla, who left children, died in 1689, aged ninety-one. So four of these sisters exceeded an average age of eighty-five years. CONSTANT SOUTHWORTH was about fourteen years old when he rejoined his mother at Plymouth. He and his brother were received by Bradford as own sons, and their advanced studies were under his care. They did him and their mother ample credit, becoming leading citizens. Constant, who settled at Duxbury, was a volunteer for the Pequod War in 1637, and the same year he married Elizabeth, daughter of William Collier. They had five daughters and three sons, the latter being Edward, Nathaniel, and William, — names common among their descendants. Constant for seventeen years was deputy from Duxbury, and for sixteen years was the Colony's treasurer; on the death of his younger brother he succeeded him as an assistant, and served for nine years. At the breaking out of Philip's War he disregarded his sixty-one years and went out as commissary, but soon yielded the arduous place to the famous warrior Church, who had married his daughter Alice, the namesake of his mother. In 1679, while still treasurer, Mr. Southworth closed his useful life, aged about sixty-five. 1651.] CAPTAIN THOMAS SOUTHWORTH. 463 The Southworths of our broad nation should not allow Burial Hill to continue without a memorial to him and his mother. CAPTAIN THOMAS SOUTHWORTH was some two years younger than Constant, but he was even more prominent. Though only twenty-eight when Elder Brewster died, he was proposed as his successor; but Bradford, who designed him for the civil-service, caused the substitution of another of his protégés, Thomas Cushman. Thomas Southworth, in 1651, was a deputy from Plymouth; the next year he became an assistant; and so continued by annual election for the remaining eighteen years of his life, save three years in which he was at Augusta in charge of the Kennebec trading-post. For three years he is recorded in the novel character of a member of each section of the legislative body (1652-3-4), being a deputy from Plymouth and an assistant for the Colony at large. This was practicable, as the two branches sat and acted as one. He was also for nine years a Colonial Commissioner. As a soldier Thomas was as active as his brother, and becoming commander of the trainband in 1659, received the title of captain, by which he is generally mentioned. For several generations those who bore the name of Southworth, and those who married the female descendants, were almost without exception brave soldiers in the Colonial wars. Indeed the family came from a long line of English knights, the Southworths of Southworth, but the descent having, three generations before Edward, passed into the younger line, the title had gone elsewhere. Thomas married an Elizabeth Raynor (not the pastor's daughter); they had but one child, Elizabeth, who became the wife of John Howland's son Joseph, to whom the Captain bequeathed his rapier and belt, while leaving his house and land to his daughter. In 1654 died John Faunce, who had married Southworth's cousin Patience Morton. At the head of his grave during his burial stood a pitiful group of little orphans left in pov |