William Bradford (March 19, 1590 – May 9, 1657) was an English leader of the Separatist settlers of the Plymouth Colony in Massachusetts, and was elected thirty times to be the Governor after John Carver died. He was the second signer and primary architect of the Mayflower Compact in Provincetown Harbor. His journal (1620–47), was published as Of Plymouth Plantation. Bradford is credited as the first to proclaim what popular American culture now views as the first Thanksgiving. William Bradford was born on March 19, 1590 near Doncaster, in Austerfield, Yorkshire. At an early age, he was attracted to the "primitive" congregational church, in nearby Scrooby, and became a committed member of what was termed a "Separatist" church, since the church-members had wanted to separate from the Church of England. By contrast, the Puritans wanted to purify the Church of England. The Separatists felt the Church was beyond redemption due to unbiblical doctrines and teachings. When James I began to persecute Separatists in 1609, Bradford fled to the Netherlands, along with many members of the congregation. These Separatists went first to Amsterdam before settling at Leiden. Bradford married his first wife, Dorothy May (d. December 7, 1620), on December 10, 1613 in Amsterdam. While at Leiden, he supported himself as a fustian weaver. Shifting alignments of the European powers (due to religious differences, struggles over the monarchies and intrigues within the ruling Habsburg clan) caused the Dutch government to fear war with Catholic Spain, and to become allied with James I of England. Social pressure (and even attacks) on the separatists increased in the Netherlands. Their congregation's leader, John Robinson, supported the emerging idea of starting a colony. Bradford was in the midst of this venture from the beginning. The separatists wanted to remain Englishmen (although living in the Netherlands), yet wanted to get far enough away from the Church of England and the government to have some chance of living in peace. Arrangements were made, and William with his wife sailed for America in 1620 from Leiden aboard the Mayflower. On December 7, 1620, before the colony was established, Bradford's wife died. [1] Dorothy Bradford died while the Mayflower was at anchor in Provincetown Harbor. However, there are no contemporary accounts of the circumstances of her death, only a later mention of drowning by Cotton Mather in Magnalia Christi Americana. [2] Bradford included only brief mention of her passing in his own writing. There is a widely circulated story that she committed suicide because the Mayflower was a moored ship, but this is derived from a work of historical fiction published in the June, 1869 issue of Harper's New Monthly Magazine. This claims that they had decided to leave their young son in the Netherlands, and his wife was so stricken with sadness that she took her own life. Regardless of this fictional treatment, there is no proof of suicide. Although it is more likely to be referred to as an accident of her falling off the front side of the ship. [3] The first winter in the new colony was a terrible experience. Half the colonists perished, including the colony's leader, John Carver. Bradford was selected as his replacement on the spring of 1621. From this point, his story is inextricably linked with the history of the Plymouth Colony. William Bradford's second wife, Alice Carpenter Southworth, came to Plymouth aboard the Anne in July 1623 following the death of her first husband, Edward Southworth.[4] Governor Bradford married Carpenter on August 14, 1623 at Plymouth. Bradford and Carpenter had three children, William, Mercy, and Joseph. Alice also helped to raise John, the son of his first marriage; Alice's sons from her first marriage, Constant and Thomas, arrived in Plymouth sometime after 1627 and presumably lived with their mother and stepfather.[5] William Bradford died at Plymouth, and was interred at Plymouth Burial Hill. On his Grave is etched: "qua patres difficillime adepti sunt nolite turpiter relinquere" “What our forefathers with so much difficulty secured, do not basely relinquish.” William Bradford's life displayed a mixture of the commonplace and the extraordinary that was characteristic of the Puritan experience. Bradford was the son of a prosperous farmer in Yorkshire, England. He received no higher education but instead was taught practical arts of farming. Despite his lack of formal training (or perhaps because of it), Bradford was to become a successful, longstanding Colonial governor in America, dealing out justice and settling disputes. Growing up in England, Bradford took a radical step when he was twelve years old. Inspired by his reading of the Bible and by the sermons of a Puritan minister, Bradford began attending the meetings of a small group of Nonconformists, despite the vehement objections of his family and friends. It was illegal for Nonconformists to worship publicily, so the group met furtively in a private house in the nearby town of Scrooby. In 1606, when the group organized as a separate Congregational church, Bradford joined them. In 1608, under increasing pressure of persecution and fearful that they would be imprisoned, the Scrooby group crossed the North Sea to Holland, the group was aided by Longdon profiteers and merchants, who lent them a ship and a crew as an investment. In September the Nonconformists sailed for America in order to found a community where they would be free to worship and live according to their beliefs. For Bradford the hardships of the long ocean voyage did not end with landing at Plymouth. In December, while the Mayflower was anchored in Provincetown Harbor, Bradford and other men took a small boat ashore to scout for a place to land and build shelter. When they returned, Bradford learned that his young wife had fallen or jumped from the ship. Perhaps Dorothy Bradford was in despair when land was finally sighted and she did not see the hoped-for green hills of an earthly paradise. Beyond the ship lay only the bleak sand dunes of Cape Cod. That bitter winter, half the settlers were to die of cold, disease, and malnutrition. The following year, Bradford was elected governor of the plantation. "If he had not been a person of more than ordinary piety, wisdom, and courage," the Puritan preacher Cotton Mather later recorded, Bradford would "have sunk" under the difficulties of governing such a shaky settlement. Bradford proved to be an exemplary leader, and he went on to be elected governor of the Colony no fewer than thirty times. As the Plymouth Colony prospered and grew, it also gradually disintegrated as a religious community, despite Bradford's efforts to hold it together. The ideal of the "city upon a hill," the Pilgrims' dream of an ideal society founded on religious principles, gradually gave way to the realities of life in the new land. Bradford's record of this grand experiment ends in disappointment. When more fertile areas for settlement were found and after Boston became a more convenient port to England, Plymouth then lost much of its population. "Thus was this poor church left," Bradford wrote in 1644, "like an ancient mother grown old and forsaken of her children...Thus, she that had made many rich became herself poor." Bradford kept a handwritten journal detailing the history of the first 30 years of Plymouth Colony. Large parts of this journal were published as Of Plymouth Plantation, and have been republished a number of times. (It is currently in print as ISBN 0-07-554281-1.) Bradford, along with Edward Winslow and others, contributed material to George Morton, who merged everything into a book, published in London in 1622, nicknamed Mourt's Relation, which was primarily a journal of the colonists' first years at Plymouth. Hugh Hefner, media and pornography executive, is a claimant of descent from William Bradford[38], but his claims have been disproved by The Mayflower Society.[39]