t of
13,000, including no less than seventy clergymen of the Church of
England, and many men of rank, and wealth to the amount of some
L300,000. All these emigrants, or "adventurers," as they were called,
left England with a stinging sense of royal and episcopal despotism, and
with a corresponding hatred of royalty and episcopacy, but with no
conception of the principles of religious toleration or liberty beyond
themselves.

During the eight years' interval between the settlement of the Pilgrims
at New Plymouth to that of the Puritans at Salem and Boston, trade had
largely increased between England and Massachusetts Bay,[22] and the
climate, fisheries, furs, timber, and other resources of northern New
England became well known, and objects of much interest in England.

King James had divided all that part of North America, 34 deg. and 45 deg. of
North latitude, into two grand divisions, bestowing the southern part
upon a London Company, and the northern part upon a Company formed in
Plymouth and Bristol. The Northern Company resolved to strengthen their
interests by obtaining a fresh grant from the King. A new patent was
issued reorganizing the Company as the Council for the Affairs of New
England, the corporate power of which was to reside at Plymouth, west of
England, under the title of the "Grand Council of Plymouth," with a
grant of three hundred square miles in New England. The Company formed
projects on too large a scale, and did not succeed; but sold that
portion of its territory which constituted the first settlements of the
Massachusetts Bay Company to some merchants in the west of England, who
had successfully fished for cod and bartered for furs in the region of
Massachusetts Bay, and who thought that a plantation might be formed
there. Among the most active encouragers of this enterprise was the Rev.
John White, a clergyman of Dorchester, a maritime town, which had been
the source of much commercial adventure in America.[23] One special
object of Mr. White was to provide an asylum for the ministers who had
been deprived and silenced in England for nonconformity to the canons
and ceremonies imposed by Laud and his associates. Through Mr. White the
guarantees became acquainted with several persons of his religious
sympathies in London, who first associated with them, and afterwards
bought rights in their patent. Among these was Matthew Cradock, the
largest stockholder in the Company, who was appointed its fir