![]() ![]() ![]() These Brownists were prisoners whose lives were on the line, escaping their fate by going to a continent where no English settler had survived. This first attempt was a more desperate gamble than the 1620 journey, though. The Separatists’ own reasons for going were similar to the later Mayflower pilgrims – to found a settlement where they would be free to practise the faith that made them outlaws in their homeland, transforming them into state-sanctioned pioneers and gaining their church a measure of authorisation for the first time. The colony would claim fishing and hunting territory for England, the Separatists said, and ‘greatly annoy that bloody and persecuting Spaniard’, ensuring that the Americas did not fall entirely into the hands of the Catholic empire. The imprisoned Brownist leaders proposed to the Privy Council that they should be released into colonial expedition to Canada. They petitioned the government for release, to no avail, until in March 1597 they came up with a new plan. The more dangerous members, however, including their pastor Francis Johnson, were kept in prison in London. The surviving Brownists were effectively banished by the Act, on pain of death, and so a large part of the underground church moved to the Netherlands. The idea for a Canadian colony came out of the crisis surrounding the execution of the Separatist leaders Henry Barrow and John Greenwood on 6 April 1593, the morning after Parliament passed the Seditious Sectaries Act against them. They had attempted to become the pilgrim fathers as early as 1597, trying to settle in Newfoundland. What is less well known is that the Brownists themselves had made a previous expedition to North America. The officially sanctioned colony of Jamestown, Virginia, was 13 years old in 1620 and Roanoake colony, founded in the 1580s, had disappeared. The pilgrims were not the first British settlers in North America. For their refusal to submit to the Church of England they had faced raids, prison, exile and death for the previous 60 years. They believed church should be a voluntary community rather than a compulsory state religion. The Mayflower pilgrims had been outlaws in England, members of an underground church known as the Brownists or Separatists. B.This year, the US looks back four centuries to an intrepid band of refugees making a perilous home in New England. Turner ends with the fitting story of the fate of Plymouth Rock, the granite boulder that was moved, split in half, reunited, and heralded by 19th-century mythmakers as a symbol of American freedom, democracy, and perseverance. Other forms of bondage and slavery targeting Native Americans, convicts, and Africans were never questioned and rarely mentioned. It was the absence of liberty that defined freedom for Pilgrims: they chafed at their own bondage (seven years of daily labor, except for the Sabbath) to the “Adventurers” who financed the Pilgrims’ dangerous journey across the Atlantic. Published in time to commemorate the 400-year anniversary of the Pilgrims’ arrival in New England, this book explores the well-known story of the English Separatists, their sojourn in the new Dutch Republic, the Mayflower Compact, the Wampanoag communities that lived in the area claimed by the Plymouth Colony, the first Thanksgiving, and the emergence of what historian Perry Miller famously termed the “New England mind.” Yet the story is far more complicated and fascinating, as Turner (George Mason Univ.) demonstrates, detailing how Puritans debated the meaning of liberty, which rarely meant liberty of conscience, but more often political liberties for free Englishmen. ![]()
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