The year after the Virginia legislature was established, another band
of emigrants went out from England, not west, but east; not to seek
prosperity, but greater religious freedom. James's declaration that
he would make all men conform to the Established Church, or drive them
out of the land, was having its due effect (S418).
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.
Of that enterprise one of their brethren in England wrote in the time
of their severest distress, with prophetic foresight, "Let it not be
grievous to you that you have been instruments to break the ice for
others; the honor shall be yours to the world's end." From this time
forward the American coast south of the Bay of Fundy was settled
mainly by English emigrants, and in the course of a little more than a
century (1620-1733), the total number of colonies had reached
thirteen. Thus the nation of Great Britain was beginning to expand
into that *greater* Britain which it had discovered and planted beyond
the sea.
Meanwhile a new power had arisen in England. It was mightier even
than that of kings, because greater for both good and evil. Its
influence grew up very gradually. It was part of the fruit of
Caxton's work undertaken nearly two centuries earlier (S306). This
power appeared in the spring of 1622, under the name of the _Weekly
News_,--the first regular newspaper.