ay, 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
embark