many thousand
Dutch refugees found homes during the reign of Elizabeth; and it was in
Norfolk that a kind of unofficial, lay religion had been for many
decades a marked feature of craft gild activities. Dutch influence and
the practice of the gilds may have furnished a fruitful soil for the
propagation of Separatism; but the leaders who formulated its doctrines
and ideals were mainly educated Englishmen, graduates of Cambridge many
of them, whose deliberate thinking carried them from Anglicanism to
Nonconformity, and from Nonconformity to Separatism. Such was Robert
Browne the founder, John Greenwood, Henry Barrowe, and John Penry; and
such were the later leaders, William Brewster and John Robinson. These
men, like the Puritans, were Calvinistic in doctrine; like the Puritans,
they held that true Christians formed an ideal commonwealth, whose ruler
Christ was, and whose law was the Bible; like the Puritans, they
believed that the test of the true Christian was an inner spiritual
condition bearing fruit in right living, rather than external conformity
to established custom. But the Separatist was at once less aggressive
and more radical than the Puritan Nonconformist. Desiring toleration for
himself, he accorded it to others; submitting to persecution, he refused
to practice it; and convinced that no purification of the Established
Church could make it the true house of God, his cardinal doctrine was
the separation of the spiritual and the temporal commonwealths. It was
the merit of the Separatist to have caught that inspiring vision which
was denied to most Protestant sects--the vision of the day when it
belongeth not to the magistrate "to compell religion, to plant churches
by power, and to force a submission to Ecclesiasticall Government by
lawes and penalties."

When the seventeenth century opened, exile for opinion's sake was no new
thing for this despised and persecuted sect; and the little Separatist
congregation of Scrooby which John Robin son led out of England in 1608
had doubtless read in Foxe's _Book of Martyrs_ of the many early
Protestants who had removed in the days of Mary to live unmolested at
Basel or Geneva. They themselves could endure persecution with a
steadfast heart. But they were unable to prevail against the "errors,
heresies, and wonderful dissentions" which the devil had begun to sow
even among the elect, and so crossed to Holland and settled in
Amsterdam. In Amsterdam they were, indeed, free