It has long been well known that Governor Bradford wrote and left behind him a history of the settlement of Plymouth. It was quoted by early chroniclers. There are extracts from it in the records at Plymouth. Thomas Prince used it when he compiled his annals. Hubbard depended on it when he wrote his "History of New England." Cotton Mather had read it, or a copy of a portion of it, when he wrote his "Magnalia." Governor Hutchinson had it when he published the second volume of his history in 1767. From that time it disappeared from the knowledge of everybody on this side of the water. All our historians speak of it as lost, and can only guess what had been its fate. Some persons suspected that it was destroyed when Governor Hutchinson's house was sacked in 1765, others that it was carried off by some officer or soldier when Boston was evacuated by the British army in 1776.
In 1844 Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford, afterward Bishop of Winchester, one of the brightest of men, published one of the dullest and stupidest of books. It is entitled "The History of the Protestant Episcopal Church in America." It contained extracts from manuscripts which he said he had discovered in the library of the Bishop of London at Fulham. The book attracted no attention here until, about twelve years later, in 1855, John Wingate Thornton, whom many of us remember as an accomplished antiquary and a delightful gentleman, happened to pick up a copy of it while he was lounging in Burnham's book store. He read the bishop's quotations, and carried the book to his office, where he left it for his friend, Mr. Barry, who was then writing his "History of Massachusetts," with passages marked, and with a note which is not preserved, but which, according to his memory, suggested that the passages must have come from Bradford's long-lost history. That is the claim for Mr. Thornton. On the other hand, it is claimed by Mr. Barry that there was nothing of that kind expressed in Mr. Thornton's note, but in reading the book when he got it an hour or so later, the thought struck him for the first time that the clew had been found to the precious book which had been lost so long. He at once repaired to Charles Deane, then and ever since, down to his death, as President Eliot felicitously styled him, "the master of historical investigators in this country." Mr. Deane saw the importance of the discovery. He communicated at once with Joseph Hunter, an eminent English scholar. Hunter was high authority on all matters connected with the settlement of New England. He visited the palace at Fulham, and established beyond question the identity of the manuscript with Governor Bradford's history, an original letter of Governor Bradford having been sent over for comparison of handwriting.
How the manuscript got to Fulham nobody knows. Whether it was carried over by Governor Hutchinson in 1774; whether it was taken as spoil from the tower of the Old South Church in 1775; whether, with other manuscripts, it was sent to Fulham at the time of the attempts of the Episcopal churches in America, just before the revolution, to establish an episcopate here,—nobody knows. It would seem that Hutchinson would have sent it to the colonial office; that an officer would naturally have sent it to the war office; and a private would have sent it to the war office, unless he had carried it off as mere private booty and plunder,—in which case it would have been unlikely that it would have reached a public place of custody. But we find it in the possession of the church and of the church official having, until independence was declared, special jurisdiction over Episcopal interests in Massachusetts and Plymouth. This may seem to point to a transfer for some ecclesiastical purpose.
The bishop's chancellor conjectures that it was sent to Fulham because of the record annexed to it of the early births, marriages and deaths, such records being in England always in ecclesiastical custody. But this is merely conjecture.
I know of no incident like this in history, unless it be the discovery in a chest in the castle of Edinburgh, where they had been lost for one hundred and eleven years, of the ancient regalia of Scotland,—the crown of Bruce, the sceptre and sword of state. The lovers of Walter Scott, who was one of the commissioners who made the search, remember his intense emotion, as described by his daughter, when the lid was removed. Her feelings were worked up to such a pitch that she nearly fainted, and drew back from the circle.
As she was retiring she was startled by his voice exclaiming, in a tone of the deepest emotion, "something between anger and despair," as she expressed it: "By God, no!" One of the commissioners, not quite entering into the solemnity with which Scott regarded this business, had, it seems, made a sort of motion as if he meant to put the crown on the head of one of the young ladies near him, but the voice and the aspect of the poet were more than sufficient to make this worthy gentleman understand his error; and, respecting the enthusiasm with which he had not been taught to sympathize, he laid down the ancient diadem with an air of painful embarrassment. Scott whispered, "Pray forgive me," and turning round at the moment observed his daughter deadly pale and leaning by the door. He immediately drew her out of the room, and when she had somewhat recovered in the fresh air, walked with her across Mound to Castle Street. "He never spoke all the way home," she says, "but every now and then I felt his arm tremble, and from that time I fancied he began to treat me more like a woman than a child. I thought he liked me better, too, than he had ever done before."
There have been several attempts to procure the return of the manuscript to this country. Mr. Winthrop, in 1860, through the venerable John Sinclair, archdeacon, urged the Bishop of London to give it up, and proposed that the Prince of Wales, then just coming to this country, should take it across the Atlantic and present it to the people of Massachusetts. The Attorney-General, Sir Fitzroy Kelley, approved the plan, and said it would be an exceptional act of grace, a most interesting action, and that he heartily wished the success of the application. But the bishop refused. Again, in 1869, John Lothrop Motley, then minister to England, who had a great and deserved influence there, repeated the proposition, at the suggestion of that most accomplished scholar, Justin Winsor. But his appeal had the same fate. The bishop gave no encouragement, and said, as had been said nine years before, that the property could not be alienated without an act of Parliament. Mr. Winsor planned to repeat the attempt on his visit to England in 1877. When he was at Fulham the bishop was absent, and he was obliged to come home without seeing him in person.
In 1881, at the time of the death of President Garfield, Benjamin Scott, chamberlain of London, proposed again in the newspapers that the restitution should be made. But nothing came of it.
Dec. 21, 1895, I delivered an address at Plymouth, on the occasion of the two hundred and seventy-fifth anniversary of the landing of the Pilgrims upon the rock. In preparing for that duty, I read again, with renewed enthusiasm and delight, the noble and touching story, as told by Governor Bradford. I felt that this precious history of the Pilgrims ought to be in no other custody than that of their children. But the case seemed hopeless. I found myself compelled by a serious physical infirmity to take a vacation, and to get a rest from public cares and duties, which was impossible while I stayed at home. When I went abroad I determined to visit the locality, on the borders of Lincolnshire and Yorkshire, from which Bradford and Brewster and Robinson, the three leaders of the Pilgrims, came, and where their first church was formed, and the places in Amsterdam and Leyden where the emigrants spent thirteen years. But I longed especially to see the manuscript of Bradford at Fulham, which then seemed to me, as it now seems to me, the most precious manuscript on earth, unless we could recover one of the four gospels as it came in the beginning from the pen of the Evangelist.
The desire to get it back grew and grew during the voyage across the Atlantic. I did not know how such a proposition would be received in England. A few days after I landed I made a call upon John Morley. I asked him whether he thought the thing could be done. He inquired carefully into the story, took down from his shelf the excellent though brief life of Bradford in Leslie Stephen's "Biographical Dictionary," and told me he thought the book ought to come back to us, and that he should be glad to do anything in his power to help. It was my fortune, a week or two after, to sit next to Mr. Bayard at a dinner given to Mr. Collins by the American consuls in Great Britain. I took occasion to tell him the story, and he gave me the assurance, which he has since so abundantly and successfully fulfilled, of his powerful aid. I was compelled, by the health of one of the party with whom I was travelling, to go to the continent almost immediately, and was disappointed in the hope of an early return to England. So the matter was delayed until about a week before I sailed for home, when I went to Fulham, in the hope at least of seeing the manuscript.