♀Mary (surname unknown)

Mary (about 1568 – 17 April 1627) was the wife of Elder William Brewster, the leader of the separatist congregation of Scrooby, and followed him to Leiden in Holland and then, past the age of fifty, across the Atlantic on the Mayflower in 1620, one of the few grown women aboard to live through the first winter at Plymouth. She was the ninth great-grandmother of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through her son Love Brewster (about 1612–1650).

Scrooby and Leiden

Her maiden name and her parents are not known. She was married to William Brewster (1566–1644) by 1593: their eldest son, Jonathan, was born at Scrooby in Nottinghamshire on 12 August that year. The family lived in the old manor house at Scrooby, where her husband was the postmaster, and where the members of the separatist congregation^W, as William Bradford later wrote, “ordinarily mett at his house on ye Lords day”.

When the congregation left England for Holland, she went with it, and by 1609 the family was at Leiden. On 20 June 1609 a child of the couple was buried in St Pancras’s church there, and five days later, in a sworn statement, William, Mary and Jonathan gave their ages as 42, 40 and 16. That statement is the only record of her age, and places her birth between the middle of 1568 and the middle of 1569. Her children were Jonathan, Patience, Fear, Love and Wrestling, besides the child buried at Leiden; the names of the four younger ones follow the Puritan fashion for names drawn from virtues.

Plymouth

In 1620 she sailed on the Mayflower with her husband and their two youngest sons; Bradford’s list of the passengers names “Mr. William Brewster, Mary, his wife, with two sons, whose names were Love and Wrestling”. Their other children followed on later ships. About half of those who came on the Mayflower died in the first winter, and most of the married women among them; she survived it.

She died at Plymouth on 17 April 1627, and was buried there. Bradford, counting the families of the first comers in 1651, wrote of her husband that “though his wife died long before, yet she died aged”. William Brewster did not marry again.

Notes

The question of her maiden name has drawn a good deal of research without result. A 1965 article argued that she was Mary Wentworth, a daughter of Thomas Wentworth of Scrooby; that claim was rejected by other scholars and later withdrawn by its author, who then proposed a Mary Wyrrall, an identification that has not been accepted either. A standard modern reference on the early New England settlers concludes that her maiden name “remains unknown”.