Derek Wilson is a well-known British historian who has earned many honors for his 70 books. However, The Mayflower Pilgrims will not be counted among his best works. If you are interested in the Pilgrims and think the Pilgrims might have been noble, devout, courageous people, do not read this book. Wilson is out to debunk those notions, to apply secularistic interpretations to sift “fact from fiction.” Wilson discounts the notion that the Pilgrims were fleeing religious persecution, despite the fact that his own book documents that almost all of them were persecuted, mocked, imprisoned, exiled, or executed if they did not worship in ways that violated their own conscience. What then would it take to be experiencing religious persecution? Furthermore, the narrative never gets to the Pilgrims’ settlement in Plymouth. After wandering through a century of British history, we finally get to the Pilgrims in the last chapter of the book. The narrative ends when the Mayflower leaves Britain for the New World. We never reach the Mayflower Compact, the first Thanksgiving, or any such famous events associated with the Pilgrims. Actually, Wilson delves much more into the Jamestown settlement than the Plymouth settlement.

Wilson clearly does not offer a sympathetic perspective on the Pilgrims; his is a British/Anglican take on a fundamentally American event. Wilson’s thinly-disguised disdain for the Pilgrims comes through on almost every page. He accuses the Puritans and their forerunners such as the Lollards of “heresy,” yet offers no specific doctrine which these devout Christians violated. He accuses John Wycliffe (an early forerunner of the Reformation) of rejecting “some basic orthodox doctrines” (p. 10) without suggesting what any of these purported heretical doctrines might be. Likewise, he calls the Bible translator William Tyndale an “arch-heretic” (p. 32)! Wilson’s criteria for “heresy” is doing “what the heretics of earlier generations had done: gathering round the word” (p. 71, referring to the proclamation of the Word of God). This is indeed a strange kind of heresy, because it sounds fascinatingly like doctrinal orthodoxy! Wilson repeatedly (over 40 times) uses “extremist” or “radical” to describe these humble, devout Puritans, above all those who were educated at that “radical” Cambridge University! The Puritans did not seek to overthrow any church or government. They sought to reform it from within (hence the name “Puritans”). When it became impossible to continue within the Church of England as a matter of conscience, they did become “separatists” (people who worshipped apart from the state church). But these separatists never sought to overthrow the Anglican Church or its sponsoring government; they merely sought to reform it. When at last these separatists sought religious freedom in other countries, they became “Pilgrims.” Wilson delights in pointing out disagreements and ethical shortcomings of the separatists, although all he accomplishes is establishing that they are human beings. Evidently an apologist for the “non-radical” Anglican church, Wilson appears content with the fact that an Anglican rector of a parish in Kent found stunning theological ignorance among its four hundred congregants, with “scarcely 40” having any knowledge of sin, Christology, death, the afterlife, the Bible, or the Lord’s prayer (pp. 100-101). Evidently Wilson prefers this Anglican ignorance to the Bible-believing devout religion of those “radical” Puritans!

Wilson imbibes deeply of the “key man” historiography. He gives little attention to the rank-and-file Puritan, or the hundred people who crowded the Mayflower. What were their motivations? Why did they risk their lives to go to the New World? Wilson’s focus is the key leaders of various factions, not on the majority of the more typical people involved. Wilson also strives to write revisionist history. He discounts religious motivations, instead seeking political, economic, or social factors which might have motivated the separatists. Wilson’s secularist perspective is probably one of the main reasons he does not grasp the raison d’etre of the Puritans. As Wilson notes in the introduction, he is attempting to describe the sociological, economic, and political setting from which the Puritans arose by laying upon each other a series of parallel slices of time, which he admits produces “a rather jerky narrative” (p. xi), and this is true. Each of these slices has their own interest, but there is little effort to pull all these disparate elements into a comprehensive whole. The book indeed suffers from this “jerky,” disjointed narrative.

There are hundreds of excellent books about the Pilgrims. This is not one of them. While this volume does offer some well-written sociological, economic, and political background for the seventeenth century setting, it has little to offer about the Pilgrims themselves.