They sailed to Southampton, England, and on September 6, with backing from a London merchant and a patent to settle in the Virginia Colony, they set sail on the Mayflower, headed for the mouth of the Hudson River, which at that time was part of the Virginia Colony. The Embarkation of the Pilgrims (1857), a romanticized painting by Robert Walter Weir at the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C. They would come to be known as the “Pilgrims.” So in 1620, a fraction of the congregation - about 37 Separatists - decided to sail to America to form a new religious colony. They also worried that Dutch youth were corrupting their children. They spent 10 years living in the city of Leiden, but hard work and poor living conditions began to take a toll on their health. In 1608, about a hundred separatist Puritans fled to the Netherlands, where they hoped to be able to practice their faith freely. “But in every other respect, the Separatists are part of the Puritan movement. And so, technically, they aren’t Puritans,” he said. But the Separatists had given up on that goal. “The Puritans had a formal aim of purifying or reforming the Church of England. The terms “Puritan” and "Separatist" are sometimes used interchangeably, but as Silverman explained to VOA, they are different groups. “The English state also banned the publication of dissenting tracts.” “That involved the arrest and imprisonment of dissenting ministers and lay dissenters who failed to attend the state church or who refused to conduct their marriages and baptisms there,” Silverman said. They wanted to select their own ministers and decide on their own rules while remaining a part of the Church of England.īut a small group of radical Puritans broke away from the Church of England entirely, a breach of English law for which they were persecuted. The Puritans also opposed state interference in matters of religion and centralized religious control. “They felt these features distracted from the word of God as preached from the Bible,” Silverman said. 1530 - 1535.The Puritans rejected his Church of England, which they believed contained too many trappings of Roman Catholicism. Joos van der Beke portrait of English King Henry VIII, painted ca. Silverman, an expert in Native American and colonial history and author of “This Land is Their Land.” “The Puritans wanted to do away with a set of prayers as in the ‘Book of Common Prayer,’ stained glass, incense, priestly vestments and the like,” said George Washington University professor David J. Membership in the new church was mandatory.īut a faction of worshipers, the Puritans, believed Henry’s church held onto too many of the trappings of Catholicism and needed to revert to the simpler worship of the early Christians. When the Roman Catholic pope refused to annul Henry’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon, Henry severed relations with Rome and formed the Church of England, naming himself its supreme leader. To understand what motivated their journey, historians point back a century to King Henry VIII of England. The Pilgrims were the first group of Puritans to sail to New England 10 years later, a much larger group would join them there. If the passengers landed safely, they faced “famine and nakedness” and “continual danger of … savage people” and “wild beasts,” as Plymouth founder and Governor William Bradford later wrote in his “History of Plymouth Plantation.” The voyage was fraught with risk: if rough seas didn’t take them, pirates might.
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