William Bradford

William Bradford was baptised on 19 March 1590 at Austerfield in the West Riding of Yorkshire, the son of a prosperous yeoman farmer; the day he was born is not recorded. His father died when he was a year old and his grandfather and mother within the next six years, and he grew up in the care of two uncles who meant him for the farm. A long sickness in boyhood turned him to books instead, above all the Bible, and at twelve he began walking to Babworth to hear the Puritan preacher Richard Clyfton, against his uncles' wishes. Through William Brewster of Scrooby manor he joined the Separatist congregation that met there in secret, and in 1608, after a betrayed escape and a spell in prison, he followed it to Holland. In Leiden he came into his inheritance at twenty-one, set up as a fustian weaver, and in 1613 married Dorothy May. In 1620 he sailed on the Mayflower and signed the compact drawn up off Cape Cod; while he was away exploring the coast, Dorothy fell from the ship and drowned. When John Carver died in April 1621, the survivors of the first winter chose Bradford as governor, and he held the office for all but five years until his death. He married Alice Southworth in 1623, kept the colony's alliance with the Wampanoag sachem Massasoit, and in 1630 began writing Of Plymouth Plantation, the history of the congregation from Scrooby to 1646, which he worked on until about 1650. He died at Plymouth on 9 May 1657. His manuscript vanished from Boston during the Revolution, surfaced in the Bishop of London's library at Fulham, and was first printed in 1856. No portrait of Bradford made in his lifetime survives. The image shown here is a later imagining, a conjectural likeness published as a postcard at Plymouth in 1904.

In 1607 the Scrooby Separatists paid an English captain at Boston, in Lincolnshire, to carry them secretly to Holland. He had arranged beforehand to hand them over. Officers searched their goods and their persons, paraded them through the town for the crowd to stare at, and jailed them for a month. Bradford, seventeen, was among the first released.