(1567–April 1644), was a founder of the Plymouth Colony in New England. He helped lead the Separatist movement in England, 1606, allowing the nonconformists to meet for worship at his home in Scrooby, England. He escaped religious persecution by fleeing with the Separatists to Holland, 1608. There he taught at the University of Leyden, Holland, and published religious books which were banned in England. Sailing with the Pilgrims on the Mayflower, he signed of the Mayflower Compact, 1620. Elected a ruling elder of the Plymouth Colony, he performed a major role in the civil and religious affairs of the colony.
Governor William Bradford gave account of William Brewster’s influence on the Separatist movement from its early beginnings:
Mr. Brewster went and lived in the country … till the Lord revealed Himself further to him. In the end, the tyranny of the bishops against godly preachers and people, in silencing the former and persecuting the latter, caused him and many more to look further into things, and to realize the unlawfulness of their episcopal callings, and to feel the burden of their many antichristian corruptions, which both he and they endeavoured to throw off. …
After they had joined themselves together in communion, as was mentioned earlier, he was a special help and support to them. On the Lord’s day they generally met at his house, which was a manor of the bishop’s, and he entertained them with great kindness when they came, providing for them at heavy expense to himself. He was the leader of those who were captured at Boston in Lincolnshire, suffering the greatest loss, and was one of the seven who were kept longest in prison and afterwards bound over to the assizes.
After he came to Holland he suffered much hardship, having spent most of his means. … Towards the latter part of those twelve years spent in Holland, his circumstances improved … for through his knowledge of Latin he was able to teach many foreign students English. By his method they acquired it quickly and with great fluency, for he drew up rules to learn it by, after the manner of teaching Latin; and many gentlemen, both Danes and Germans, came to him, some of the beings sons of distinguished men. …
He labored in the fields as long as he was able; yet when the church had no other minister he taught twice every Sabbath, and that both powerfully and profitably, to the great edification and comfort of his hearers, many being brought to God by his ministry.149
In 1608, after the agreement to separate from the church of England, the Separatists of the Scrooby congregation covenanted together to form a church:
They shook off the yoke of antichristian bondage, and as ye Lord’s free people, joyned themselves (by a covenant of the Lord) into a church estate, in ye fellowship of ye Gospel, to walke in all his wayes, made known or to be made known unto them, according to their best endeavours, whatsoever it should cost them, the Lord assisting them.150
On December 15, 1617, William Brewster and the congregation’s pastor, John Robinson, wrote a letter from Leyden, Holland, to Sir Edwin Sandys, a London financier, in which they explained the Separatists’ situation and plans:
Knit together as a body in most strict and sacred bond and covenant of the lord, of the violation whereof we make great conscience, and by virtue whereof we so hold ourselves straitly tied to all care of each other’s good, and of the whole by everyone and so mutually.151
In 1629, when a church was founded at Salem in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, William Brewster made this comment:
The church that had been brought over the ocean now saw another church, the first-born in America, holding the same faith in the same simplicity of self-government under Christ alone.152
In 1644, Governor William Bradford wrote of the death of Mr. William Brewster:
About the 18th of April died their reverend elder, my dear and loving friend, Mr. William Brewster, a man who had done and suffered much for the Lord Jesus and the gospel’s sake, and had borne his part in the weal or woe with this poor persecuted church for over thirty-five years in England, Holland, and this wilderness, and had done the Lord and them faithful service in his calling. Notwithstanding the many troubles and sorrows he passed through, the Lord upheld him to a great age.153