Why pilgrims came

The Plymouth Colony finally gained its financial footing thanks to beaver pelts, which were in great demand back in England to make felt hats and other luxurious fashion accessories. Not until did the Pilgrims pay off their debt. The Plymouth Colony ultimately faced a similar fate to many struggling businesses. It was consumed by a larger, more successful corporate entity when it was merged with other colonies to form the Province of Massachusetts Bay in But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us!

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Government of the people, by the people, for the people, was a political ideal unknown in European society and the political rules that organised it were hierarchic. Nothing was more feared not only by those at the upper levels than rebellion. Nothing but chaos could ensue if subjects were free to believe whatever they wished.

Several Protestant groups had emerged, each with its own definition of the faith. One senior English ecclesiastic complained:.

Those who would eventually set sail for America were part of the harlequin radical fringe. But they did not challenge the right of every sovereign to dictate the worship and doctrine in his or her dominions. In a letter of encouragement to the Pilgrims in , the Reverend John Robinson, one of the venerable pioneers of their movement though he remained in the Netherlands , revealed an ongoing commitment to traditionally hierarchic political and social conventions. Listen: Stephen Tomkins discusses the rise of Puritanism in England and the origins of the Mayflower voyage to North America in , on this episode of the HistoryExtra podcast :.

When James VI of Scotland became James I of England in he was determined to put an end to all the divisions that had plagued the national church for many years.

He convened a conference at Hampton Court in and made clear that he would yield no ground to the separatists and would use the law to make them conform. However, he was better at issuing threats than at putting in place the machinery of consistent and effective persecution.

This was left largely to the bishops and local magistrates, some of whom were in sympathy with the radicals. As a result, fines and other penalties were applied only sporadically. What did make life difficult for many Puritans was the hostility of their neighbours. In part they brought this on themselves, by criticising not only the religious beliefs of the majority population but also their prevailing moral standards and cultural preferences.

They condemned the theatre, popular music and even contemporary styles of dress. The radicals were metaphorically pilloried by playwrights, balladeers, preachers, pamphleteers and others in charge of 17th-century media.

Many of those who went into voluntary exile held strong beliefs backed by their own understanding of the Bible; they had suffered much for their beliefs and were not prepared to compromise them in the interests of harmony with other religious migrants.

The Pilgrims were just one group of radicals among several who left England for the Netherlands or North America and who were divided amongst themselves over points of doctrine or church order.

One such group were the disciples of Francis Johnson, a Yorkshireman who suffered imprisonment for his beliefs in the s. He obtained permission to establish a settlement in Newfoundland but when that failed he joined a group of religious exiles in Amsterdam and ran a church with Henry Ainsworth, a fellow Cambridge graduate.

This resulted, in , in Johnson excommunicating Ainsworth and his supporters, who moved to another building. Though this was a rather extreme example of friction among the separatists, it was not the only one. The authorities, fearing a backlash of public opinion, quietly let the families go. Brewster and John Robinson, another leading member of the congregation, who would later become their minister, stayed behind to make sure the families were cared for until they could be reunited in Amsterdam.

Over the next few months, Brewster, Robinson and others escaped across the North Sea in small groups to avoid attracting notice. Settling in Amsterdam, they were befriended by another group of English Separatists called the Ancient Brethren. This member Protestant congregation was led by Francis Johnson, a firebrand minister who had been a contemporary of Brewster's at Cambridge.

He and other members of the Ancient Brethren had done time in London's torture cells. Although Brewster and his congregation of some began to worship with the Ancient Brethren, the pious newcomers were soon embroiled in theological disputes and left, Bradford said, before "flames of contention" engulfed them. After less than a year in Amsterdam, Brewster's discouraged flock picked up and moved again, this time to settle in the city of Leiden, near the magnificent church known as Pieterskerk St.

This was during Holland's golden age, a period when painters like Rembrandt and Vermeer would celebrate the physical world in all its sensual beauty. Brewster, meanwhile, had by Bradford's account "suffered much hardship But yet he ever bore his condition with much cheerfulness and contentation.

The congregation took whatever jobs they could find, according to William Bradford's later recollection of the period. He worked as a maker of fustian corduroy. Brewster's year-old son, Jonathan, became a ribbon maker. Others labored as brewer's assistants, tobacco-pipe makers, wool carders, watchmakers or cobblers.

Brewster taught English. In Leiden, good-paying jobs were scarce, the language was difficult and the standard of living was low for the English immigrants. Housing was poor, infant mortality high. After two years the group had pooled together money to buy a house spacious enough to accommodate their meetings and Robinson's family. Known as the Green Close, the house lay in the shadow of Pieterskerk.

On a large lot behind the house, a dozen or so Separatist families occupied one-room cottages. On Sundays, the congregation gathered in a meeting room and worshiped together for two four-hour services, the men sitting on one side of the church, the women on the other. Attendance was compulsory, as were services in the Church of England.

Not far from the Pieterskerk, I find William Brewstersteeg, or William Brewster Alley, where the rebel reformer oversaw a printing company later generations would call the Pilgrim Press. Its main reason for being was to generate income, largely by printing religious treatises, but the Pilgrim Press also printed subversive pamphlets setting out Separatist beliefs. These were carried to England in the false bottoms of french wine barrels or, as the English ambassador to the Netherlands reported, "vented underhand in His Majesty's kingdoms.

He was already an experienced printer in England when, at age 22, he joined Brewster to churn out inflammatory materials. The Pilgrim Press attracted the wrath of authorities in , when an unauthorized pamphlet called the Perth Assembly surfaced in England, attacking King James I and his bishops for interfering with the Presbyterian Church of Scotland. The monarch ordered his ambassador in Holland to bring Brewster to justice for his "atrocious and seditious libel," but Dutch authorities refused to arrest him.

For the Separatists, it was time to move again—not only to avoid arrest. They were also worried about war brewing between Holland and Spain, which might bring them under Catholic rule if Spain prevailed. And they recoiled at permissive values in the Netherlands, which, Bradford would later recall, encouraged a "great licentiousness of youth in that country.

About this time, , Brewster disappears briefly from the historical record. He was about Some accounts suggest that he may have returned to England, of all places, there to live underground and to organize his last grand escape, on a ship called the Mayflower. There is speculation that he lived under an assumed name in the London district of Aldgate, by then a center for religious nonconformists. When the Mayflower finally set sail for the New World in , Brewster was aboard, having escaped the notice of authorities.

But like their attempts to flee England in and , the Leiden congregation's departure for America 12 years later was fraught with difficulties. In fact, it almost didn't happen. In July, the Pilgrims left Leiden, sailing from Holland in the Speedwell , a stubby overrigged vessel.

They landed quietly in Southampton on the south coast of England. There they gathered supplies and proceeded to Plymouth before sailing for America in the ton Speedwell and the ton Mayflower , a converted wine-trade ship, chosen for its steadiness and cargo capacity.

But after "they had not gone far," according to Bradford, the smaller Speedwell , though recently refitted for the long ocean voyage, sprang several leaks and limped into port at Dartmouth, England, accompanied by the Mayflower. More repairs were made, and both set out again toward the end of August. Three hundred miles at sea, the Speedwell began leaking again. Both ships put into Plymouth—where some 20 of the would-be Colonists, discouraged by this star-crossed prologue to their adventure, returned to Leiden or decided to go to London.

A handful transferred to the Mayflower , which finally hoisted sail for America with about half of its passengers from the Leiden church on September 6. On their arduous, two-month voyage, the foot ship was battered by storms. One man, swept overboard, held onto a halyard until he was rescued.

Another succumbed to "a grievous disease, of which he died in a desperate manner," according to William Bradford. Finally, though, on November 9, , the Mayflower sighted the scrubby heights of what is known today as Cape Cod.

After traveling along the coast that their maps identified as New England for two days, they dropped anchor at the site of today's Provincetown Harbor of Massachusetts. Anchored offshore there on November 11, a group of 41 passengers—only the men—signed a document they called the Mayflower Compact, which formed a colony composed of a "Civil Body Politic" with just and equal laws for the good of the community.

This agreement of consent between citizens and leaders became the basis for Plymouth Colony's government. John Quincy Adams viewed the agreement as the genesis of democracy in America. Among the passengers who would step ashore to found the colony at Plymouth were some of America's first heroes—such as the trio immortalized by Longfellow in "The Courtship of Miles Standish": John Alden, Priscilla Mullins and Standish, a year-old soldier—as well as the colony's first European villain, John Billington, who was hanged for murder in New England in Two happy dogs, a mastiff bitch and a spaniel belonging to John Goodman, also bounded ashore.

It was the beginning of another uncertain chapter of the Pilgrim story. With winter upon them, they had to build homes and find sources of food, while negotiating the shifting political alliances of Native American neighbors. With them, the Pilgrims celebrated a harvest festival in —what we often call the first Thanksgiving.

Perhaps the Pilgrims survived the long journey from England to Holland to America because of their doggedness and their conviction that they had been chosen by God. By the time William Brewster died in , at age 77, at his acre farm at the Nook, in Duxbury, the Bible-driven society he had helped create at Plymouth Colony could be tough on members of the community who misbehaved.