This month marks the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the Mayflower to America in 1620. The story of the Mayflower and the Pilgrim Fathers has become a kind of creation myth for the United States; but reality is far more complex than the myth seems to let on.
The very long background to this moment in history is the result of serial philanderer and angry ginger, King Henry VIII. One of the popes wouldn't let Henry get a divorce from his wife and being a man with enough chips on his shoulder to fill an entire bag, Henry made himself head of his own church, the Church Of England, got his divorce by virtue of being able to make up all of the rules, and promptly went around confiscating the Catholic Church's stuff and had their monasteries burned.
England entered a period of slight chaos after the death of Henry VIII and after all the odd imprisonment and beheading and three monarchs later, Elizabeth I became Queen and continued the anti-Catholic purge. Quite frankly, the Puritans which had sprung up as a fanatical sect, quite liked the idea of destroying Catholic stuff and paraphernalia and sort of developed their own brand of asceticism.
After Elizabeth I died, there was no one left to succeed her as she had had polio as a child and remained sterile. James VI of Scotland was installed as James I of England and his attitude was far more permissive than what had been under the Tudor monarchs.
James who knows himself to be a foreign king, tried to consolidate his power through the instrument of the church, by allowing a greater degree of pluralism but at the same time, opened up the availability of the Bible to more people by commissioning his own Authorized Version of the Bible. The Puritans upon realising that they have the ability to impose their will on society, more or less immediately began to do so; and it is in this climate that witches are burned across the north of England and why eventually it will be the same Puritans who grow increasingly annoyed at what they see as the degeneracy of Charles I and why they will have his head cut off and one of their own installed as the de facto king in Oliver Cromwell.
The Puritans are a kind of radical expression of Protestantism which arrive at the conclusion that the reformation hasn't gone far enough; so not only do they think that the ornamental frippery of the church should be done away with (stained-glass windows, kneeling, the vestments etc.) but they also reject the episcopal nature of the church and monarch and think that a local church should be the authority that is answerable to nobody. The Puritans will rage against the increasing tolerance of society in England, as well as being more nativist and racist (they absolutely hate the Jews), as well as the bishops and county magistrates and the King and parliament in Westminster.
This is where the story gets weird. The core group of Puritans which will become the Mayflower group, came from a town called Scrooby in Nottinghamshire and in order to raise enough capital to get to America, they depart for the Netherlands which is the then trading capital of the world. The Scrooby group of Puritans were strict Sabbatarians who objected to a whole host of activity on Sunday; including the playing of sport and their repeated interference in shutting down things on Sunday, eventually caught the ire of the Archbishop Tobias Matthew, who in 1607 raided homes and imprisoned several members of the congregation for repeated disturbances of the peace and under the provisions of the 1558 Recusancy Acts. They eventually got the point that English society was far more tolerant of various practices than they were prepared to allow and left England in 1609, to emigrate to the Netherlands. Unfortunately for them, they found out that Dutch society was even more permissive than English society and while they were tolerated in the Netherlands, they become even more determined to start an even more hard line society in America.
Some of the group ended up being in the Netherlands for about nine years before they finally raised enough capital, through investors who were keen to get in on the North American fur and fishing trade business; and so of the 102 people who end up leaving on the Mayflower after one of their ships (which was amusingly called the Speedwell) started taking on water before it had even left the harbour, roughly half were a kind of adventure merchant class of people. They left the Netherlands in August of 1620, ended up collecting more people in Plymouth and left September of 1620 and didn't arrive until the 11th of November 1620.
What I find strange about the mythologising of the Mayflower in particular, is that the settlement of Jamestown in Virginia happened in 1607 which is thirteen years before the Mayflower shows up. That colony had already been through winters and famines and war with first peoples and yet this weird myth about the Pilgrim fathers trying to escape persecution seems to have entered the public consciousness.
Even weirder is the idea that they were escaping religious persecution; especially in the light that the Mayflower group and the so-called Pilgrim Father, would eventually have their colony at Plymouth merge with other Puritan groups to form the Massachusetts Bay Colony; which showed even harsher intolerance to other religious views, including Anglican, Quaker, and Baptist theologies; which would have been tolerant to them. That same strand of Puritanism led to the English Civil War (which they won) and in the capital of colonial Massachusetts, a return to accusing people of witchcraft, which culminated in the Salem witch trials of 1692.
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