2015-08-31 Pastor John Robinson Memorial Tablet

Pilgrim Monuments in Leiden

Jean Pesynhof Plaque
neither clean nor beautiful
John Robinson Stone
the First Pilgrim Memorial in Leiden
Pilgrim Fathers Monument De Vliet
their names mark the spot?
John Robinson Memorial Tablet
more than a stone...
Pilgrim Press Plaque
William Brewster Alley
Strangers and Pilgrims
Separatists buried in Leiden
Pastor John Robinson Memorial Tablet
Mayflower Descendants
Vrouwekerk Plaque
new plaque unveiled

Mayflower Descendants

Pieterskerk

This memorial can be found inside the Pieterskerk in Leiden. It was commissioned by the General Society of Mayflower Descendants. Mayflower Society members are official descendents of one or more Pilgrim Fathers, including John Robinson.

Pastor John Robinson Memorial Tablet

The Mayflower
1620

in memory of
John Robinson
pastor of the English Church in Leyden
1609 1625
his broadly tolerant mind
guided and developed the religious life of
the Pilgrims of the Mayflower

Of him these walls enshrine all that was mortal
His undying spirit
still dominates the consciences of a mighty nation
in the land beyond the seas

This tablet was erected by the General Society of Mayflower
Descendants in the United States of America A.D. 1928

unveiling

Pilgrim Fathers Genootschap

The stone was unveiled on 1928 Sep 8, a date choosen to coincide with the annual meeting of the recently founded Pilgrim Fathers Genootschap (Pilgrim Fathers Society), a Leiden-based society founded in 1921 and dissolved in 1968.

ceremony

The unveiling was a huge ceremony that included local, national and international dignitaries. Addresses were delivered by the American ambassador Richard Montgomery Tobin (1866-1952), Dutch envoy to Washington Jan Herman van Roijen (1905-1991), and co-founder of the Pilgrim Fathers Genootschap prof. dr. Hendrik Marinus van Nes (1862-1946). The two main addresses were by prof. dr. Albert Eekhof (1884-1933) of Leiden University and rev. dr. Edgar Franklin Romig (1890-1963) of New York.

publications

The two main addresses were published by Martinus Nijhoff in The Hague, in 1928, as John Robinson, Two Addresses delivered in the Pieterskerk in Leyden on the Occasion of the Unveiling of the Memorial Tablet in the Baptismal Chapel, on Saturday September 8th 1928.

The year 1928 happened to be the tercentenary of the Dutch Reformed Church in America. Edgar Franklin Romig wrote about it in The Tercentenary Year: A Record of the Celebration of the Three Hundredth Anniversary of the Founding of the First Church in New Netherland, now New York, and the Beginning of Organized Religious Life under the Reformed (Dutch) Church in America.