♂William Brewster

William Brewster (died 1590) was the receiver and bailiff of the Archbishop of York’s manor at Scrooby in Nottinghamshire and, in his last years, postmaster there under the Crown, keeping a stage on the line that carried the government’s letters. His son William became the ruling Elder of the Pilgrim church and sailed on the Mayflower in 1620. He was the tenth great-grandfather of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through his son William Brewster^W (1564–1644).

Scrooby

A William Brewster was assessed to the subsidy^W of 1571 in the township of Scrooby-cum-Ranskill, on goods valued at three pounds, and the historian Henry M. Dexter took that entry to place him at Scrooby by then. According to the 1908 Brewster genealogy, Archbishop Sandys appointed him in January 1575/76 receiver of Scrooby and bailiff of the archbishop’s manor house there, with life tenure of both offices; Dexter judged that the post evidently meant living in the manor house. In or before 1588 he was given the further office of postmaster under the Crown. The “post” of Scrooby was not a post office in the modern sense: the letters sent by post were almost always government dispatches, passed from messenger to messenger at each stage, while private letters went by hand.

He died in the summer of 1590, leaving a widow, Prudence, and his son William was appointed administrator of his estate. By Dexter’s account no other child of the couple was then living. Sir John Stanhope, who had become Postmaster General in June 1590, named one Samuel Bevercotes to succeed him, but through the influence of William Davison, the Secretary of State whom the son had served, the son soon had the office himself and held it until 1607. An online grave index gives his death as 10 August 1590 and his burial at Scrooby; no parish record of either survives, as the Scrooby registers begin only in 1695.

Notes

His widow is the woman entered in the family tree as Mary Prudence Smyth; the 1908 genealogy calls her only Prudence. Family trees date the marriage to about 1552 at Scrooby; the date rests on those trees alone.

His own origin is not known. Dexter wrote that proof of it was lacking, and that the search was especially hard because it ran back beyond the surviving parish registers, though there was clearly a family of the name in the neighborhood. The Dictionary of National Biography (1886) was less certain still of the Elder’s parentage: it called his father a conjecture between three men, William Brewster, tenant at Scrooby of Archbishop Sandys; Henry Brewster, vicar of Sutton-cum-Lound; and James Brewster, who succeeded Henry. The 1908 genealogy and Anderson’s The Great Migration Begins both name the father as William Brewster.

An online grave index, and family trees that follow it, give him a birth on 24 January 1535, a title of nobility, the double forename William Henry, and a line of ancestors running back through Yorkshire into Suffolk gentry. None of this rests on a record. The double forename appears to join two of the three men the dictionary named, and the Suffolk descent seems to have grown from the dictionary’s remark that the coat of arms kept by the Brewsters in America matched that of an ancient Suffolk family, which is a likeness of arms, not evidence of descent.