The Anglican Church became England’s official church during Queen Elizabeth’s reign from 1558 to 1603. At this time there was growing tension between Catholics and Protestants dating back to when Queen Elizabeth’s father, King Henry VII, broke from the Catholic Church in the 1530s. English Catholics wanted the Church of England to stress traditional Catholic practices while English Protestants following Calvinist ideals wanted to return to the “pure” Christianity of the New Testament and remove the Catholic additions. The church under Queen Elizabeth tried to balance between the Anglo-Catholic factions and the Protestant groups. The solution was a compromise between the Catholic and the Protestant extremes allowing for some latitude as long as the monarch was accepted as the head of the church.
However, the more radical Protestants felt that the Anglican Church was still too much like the Church of Rome. This group wanted to “purify” Anglicanism, so they were called Puritans. As a guide for what they felt Christianity should be, they embraced the ideas of the sixteenth century French religious leader, John Calvin, who felt God was all-powerful and all-good and that humans were naturally weak and wicked. Calvinism also proposed that from the beginning of time everyone was either predestined for eternal bliss or eternal torment. Calvin advocated a society of the “elect” of God who chose their own leaders and who did not need the elaborate rituals of Catholic and Anglican worship.
The Puritans wanted the Church of England completely de-Catholicized. Puritans believed that only “visible saints,” or those who could demonstrate the grace of God to fellow Puritans, should be church members. Since the Church of England continued to accept all of the royal subjects, the Puritans had to share their churches with the “damned.” Puritans were not satisfied with the slow progress of the Protestant Reformation in England and what they felt was a corrupt and worldly Church of England. A small group of extreme Puritans called Separatists broke away from the Church of England completely.
In 1603, when King James I succeeded Queen Elizabeth I, the Puritans feared that England might slide farther back to its Catholic roots. At the same time, King James began to feel that if the Puritans did not see him as their spiritual leader, they might defy him as their political leader. So James began pressuring the Puritan Separatists to conform.
Finally, in 1606, the Separatists severed all ties to the Church of England. In an age when church and state were united, dissenting from the practices of the official Church of England was seen as treason. The Separatists went into exile departing for Holland in 1608 so that they did not have to conform to the beliefs set out by the Church of England. As fellow Calvinists, the Dutch tolerated the Separatists—and many others. After living with the Dutch customs and liberal ways for 12 years, the Separatist longed for their English lifestyle. Since they could not go back to England, they decided the next best option was to transplant their customs in the New World.
These “Pilgrims” negotiated with the Virginia Company of London and secured rights to establish a settlement near the mouth of the Hudson River. King James did not promise toleration, but he agreed to leave them alone if they went to Virginia. In 1620, about 100 people boarded the Mayflower for the New World, and less than half of them were Separatists. A storm made the group miss their destination, pushing them north of the Virginia Company where they settled off the coast of New England in Plymouth Bay. Rather than brave the stormy seas and try to make it south to the Virginia Company location, they stayed where they were.
The Pilgrims believed that Plymouth Bay was outside the jurisdiction of the Virginia Company. Although they did not have the monarch’s authority to establish a government, they drew up a formal agreement called the Mayflower Compact before going ashore. This compact established the first standard in the New World for written laws and was signed by forty-one adult men on the Mayflower.
The Pilgrims who signed the compact met as the General Court in open-discussion town meetings and chose John Carver as their first governor. They also chose his council of assistants and eventually others were admitted as members, or “freemen,” but only if they were church members. In April 1621, John Carver died and William Bradford was elected governor. Bradford served many terms as governor and was largely responsible for the infant colony's success through great hardships.
Having landed on the Massachusetts shore in the middle of winter, the Pilgrims’ first months spent trying to build the settlement were very difficult. About half of the settlers died during the first winter, but when the Mayflower returned to England in the spring all of the remaining Separatists stayed in Plymouth.
That spring, the Separatists met an Indian named Squanto who spoke English. Squanto introduced the Pilgrims to Massasoit, the leader of the Wampanoag tribe. The two groups formed an alliance to help protect one another from other Indian tribes. Squanto and his fellow Indians showed the Pilgrims where to fish and how to farm. The settlers worked hard and had a bountiful harvest in the fall of 1621. To celebrate their good fortune they prepared the first Thanksgiving feast for themselves and their Indian friends.
While the Pilgrims developed an economy based on fur, fish, and lumber, the colony never grew to be very large. In 1650 there were still fewer than one thousand settlers at Plymouth, and in 1691 it merged with the Massachusetts Bay Colony because the Crown refused to grant the Plymouth Plantation a legal charter.