The Strangers and the Leiden Connection

William White had joined a Separatist congregation in Amsterdam under Henry Ainsworth by 1608 — a different congregation from John Robinson's, which moved on to Leiden the following year. Susanna Jackson, whom he married around 1614, was the daughter of Richard Jackson of Scrooby, Nottinghamshire: the same village where the original congregation, including William Brewster, had worshipped. On 7 December 1607, Richard Jackson and Brewster were named together in a warrant for "Brownism" and fled England around the same time — a documented link between the White family and Brewster that predates the Leiden years entirely.

William White died on 21 February 1621, during the first winter at Plymouth. Susanna, left with a young son and the infant Peregrine (born aboard ship off Cape Cod), remarried on 12 May 1621 — to Edward Winslow, of the Leiden congregation. Bradford records it directly: "the first marriage in this place," carried out, "according to the laudable custom of the Low Countries," by the magistrate rather than a minister.

Bradford states plainly that John Howland crossed as manservant to John Carver — deacon of the Leiden congregation and its chief negotiator in London before 1620. It isn't documented whether Howland actually lived in Leiden himself or only entered Carver's service once in England for the voyage; both are argued in secondary sources, and neither is settled. What is certain is the working relationship: Howland served in Carver's household through the crossing (he famously went overboard in a storm and was hauled back in by a halyard) and after landing.

After Carver's death in 1621, Howland stayed in Plymouth and around 1623/24 married Elizabeth Tilley — herself part of a family with documented Leiden residence. It's a second, independent tie to the Leiden group, this time by marriage rather than service.

Francis Eaton, a house carpenter from Bristol, brought skills the fledgling colony needed badly — he's credited with work on Plymouth's earliest common buildings. Sarah Eaton died in the general mortality of the first winter, one of roughly half the passengers who didn't survive to spring 1621.

The clearest Leiden tie for this family comes a decade later, in the colony's own land records: on 30 December 1631, Francis Eaton sold William Brewster twenty acres "at the place commonly called Nothingelse," for £21 12s. It's a genuine documented transaction — a business relationship between a Stranger and a core Leiden leader, built up over years in Plymouth rather than brought from England.

Little is known of John Billington's life before 1620 beyond a possible Lincolnshire background. He wasn't part of the Separatist congregation, and his relationship with its leadership was troubled from the start: historians identify the Billingtons among the "discontented and mutinous" voices Bradford describes as challenging the Adventurers' authority once the ship anchored outside its intended patent area — part of what pushed the Leiden leadership toward drafting the Mayflower Compact.

The friction continued for a decade. In 1621, Billington was disciplined for defying Myles Standish's military authority. In an undated letter, Bradford himself called him "a knave, and so will live and die." In 1630, Billington killed fellow colonist John Newcomen; Bradford wrote to Massachusetts Bay governor John Winthrop for advice, was told Billington "ought to die, and the land be purged from blood," and presided over his trial and execution — the first for murder in English North America. This is not a story of alliance, but it is a sustained, well-documented relationship between a Stranger and the Leiden-led government, right up to its end.