I wish I
could believe that this final repentance of the resilient captain were
sincere--but I cannot. Nor did Boston people believe it either, though that
noble and generous-minded man, Winthrop, thought he saw at the time of
confession evidences of a truly contrite heart. The Puritans sternly and
eagerly cast out the gay captain to the Dutch when he became an Antinomian,
and he came to live and fight and gallant in a town on the western end of
Long Island, where he perhaps found a church-home with members less severe
and less sharp-eyed than those of his Boston place of martyrdom, and a
people less inclined to resent and punish his frailties and his ways of
amusing himself.
In justice to Underhill (or perhaps to show his double-dealing) I will say
that he left behind him a letter to Hanserd Knollys, complaining of the
ill-treatment he had received; and in it he gives a very different account
of this little affair with the Boston Church from that given us by Governor
Winthrop. The offender says nothing about his hypocrisy, his public and
self-abasing confession, nor of his sanctimonious blubbering and wishes for
death. He explains that his offence was mild and purely mental, that in an
infaust moment he glanced (doubtless stared soldier-fashion) at "Mistris
Miriam Wildbore" as she sat in her "pue" at meeting. The elders, noting his
admiring and amorous glances, thereupon accused him of sin in his heart,
and severely asked him why he did not look instead at Mistress Newell or
Mistress Upham.
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