Those who continued to refuse to conform were fined, cast into filthy prisons, beaten, and often half starved, so that the old and feeble soon died.  Strange to say, this kind of treatment did not win over the Puritans to the side of the bishops and the King.  On the contrary, it set many of them to thinking more seriously than ever of the true relations of the government to religion.

The result was that not a few came to the conclusion that each body of Christians had the right to form a religious society of its own, wholly independent of the state.  That branch of the Puritans (S378) who held this opinion got the name of Independents, or Separatists, because they were determined to separate from the Established Church of England and conduct their worship and govern their religious societies as they deemed best.

In the little village of Scrooby, Nottinghamshire (see map opposite), Postmaster William Brewster, William Bradford, John Carver, and some others, mostly farmers and poor men of the neighborhood, had organized an independent religious society with John Robinson for its minister.  After a time they became convinced that so long as they remained in England they could never be safe from persecution.  They therefore resolved to leave their native country.  They could not get a royal license to go to America, and for this reason they emigrated to Holland, where all men were free to establish societies for the worship of God in their own manner.  With much difficulty and danger they managed to escape to that country.

After remaining in Holland about twelve years, a part of them succeeded in obtaining from King James the privilege of emigrating to America.[1] A London trading company, which was sending out an expedition for fish and furs, agreed to furnish the Pilgrims passage by the Mayflower, though on terms so hard that the poor exiles said the “conditions were fitter for thieves and bondslaves than for honest men.”

[1] See “Why did the Pilgrim Fathers come to New England?” by Edwin D. Mead, in the New Englander, XLI, 711.

These Pilgrims, or wanderers, set forth in 1620 for that New World beyond the sea, which they hoped would redress the wrongs of the Old.  Landing at Plymouth, in Massachusetts, they established a colony on the basis of “equal laws for the general good.”  Ten years later, John Winthrop, a Puritan gentleman of wealth from Groton, Suffolk (see map opposite), followed with a large number of emigrants and settled Boston (1630).  During the next decade no less than twenty thousand Englishmen found a home in America.  But to the little band that embarked under Bradford and Brewster in the Mayflower, the scene of whose landing at Plymouth is painted on the walls of the Houses of Parliament, belongs the first credit of the great undertaking.