Genealogy of the Olmsted family in America : embracing the ...

Introduction xvii
Meanwhile, the Puritans remaining in England had fallen upon bitter
days, by the accession in 1625 of Charles I to the throne of his father. The
new monarch's chief religious advisor was Wm. Laud, Bishop of London,
and later Archbishop of Canterbury. This eminent but narrow-minded divine
was a formalist by temperament and education. The crude simplicity of the
reformed church was repugnant to him, and he determined to restore to the
Church of England the pomp and ceremonial that he deemed was its rightful
possession, as a branch of the great Catholic Church of the world.
"Bowing to the altar was introduced into all cathedral churches." The
communion table was given its pre-Reformation position in the chancel,
instead of the position it had occupied for more than half a century in the middle
of the nave. Most shocking of all to Puritan standards, diversions on the
Sabbath day were not only encouraged by Laud and his supporters, but every
English pastor was compelled by royal order to read from the pulpit a
declaration in favor of Sunday pastimes. Refusal to comply with these
and similar orders was met with fines, imprisonment, confiscation of property,
and even execution.
Such was the condition of affairs in 1630, when in the County of Essex,
in the neighborhood of our Olmsted ancestors, the Reverend Mr. Thomas
Hooker, a preacher of great ability and renown, was silenced for non-conformity.
To escape imprisonment and worse, he fled to Holland. Indeed, it
was well that he fled, for he might have met the fate of another non-conformist
minister who was that same year "pilloried, whipped, branded, slit in the nos-
trils, and deprived by successive mutUation of his ears."
Up to this time emigration to America had been slow, and the colony in
New England numbered only some few hundred souls, but now the Puritan
exodus began upon ah unprecedented scale. Two hundred Puritans had recently
embarked for Salem. These were soon followed by eight hundred more
under John Winthrop. These in turn were followed by seven hundred more.
In all, seventeen ships had beaten their way across the seas before the close
of the year 1630. " Nor were these emigrants," as Green declares, "like the
earlier colonists of the South, 'broken men,' adventurers, bankrupts, criminals;
or simply poor men and artisans, like the Pilgrim Fathers of the Mayflower.
They were in great part men of the professional and middle classes; some of
them men of large landed estate."
Of the latter class was the family of our honored relative, James Olmsted,
who, together with two sons, Nicholas and Nehemiah, two nephews, Richard
and John, and a niece, Rebecca, arrived in New England, on the Lord's Day,
Sept. 16, 1632, in the ship Lyon, under Capt. Pierce, after a voyage of 12 weeks
from Braintree, England. There were 123 passengers, of whom 50 were
children.
" They settled first at Mount Wallaston, now Quincy, near Boston, but
in the course of the year, 'by order of the Court,' they removed to Newtown
now Cambridge."
" The recent settlers of Newtown," says Holmes, "had, while in England,
attended the ministry of the Reverend Thomas Hooker, who, to escape fines
and imprisonment for his non-conformity, had now fled into Holland." So,
as Mather, another contemporary, remarks, " immediately after their settlement
at Newtown, they expressed their earnest desires to Mr. Hooker that he
would come over into New England and take the pastoral charge of them. At
their desire he left Holland, and, having obtained Mr. Samuel Stone ....
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