The Puritans: Who They Were and Why They Left England

The Puritans were English Protestants of the late 1500s and 1600s who wanted to purify the Church of England of what they saw as the leftovers of Roman Catholic worship. Most of them never left England: they stayed and pressed for reform at home, and in the 1640s they came to power there. But from 1630, with the king’s bishops pressing them to conform and the king ruling without a Parliament, as many as 20,000 of them sailed for America, most to New England, believing that God was offering them a place across the sea where they could worship him as they believed Scripture taught. The Pilgrims who came on the Mayflower in 1620 were a smaller and separate company, Separatists who had already left the Church of England.

The Puritans who sailed had not left that church, and they wrote as much on their way out. On 7 April 1630, at Yarmouth, John Winthrop and the leaders of the company signed a farewell aboard the Arbella to “the rest of their Brethren in and of the Church of England.” They called it “our deare Mother,” and said they could not part from their native country “without much sadnes of heart, and many teares in our eyes,” and they told the brethren they were leaving behind, “wee leave it not therfore, as loathing that milk wherewith we were nourished there.” They called themselves “a weake Colony from your selves,” and asked the church at home to pray for them without ceasing, because its prayers would be “a most prosperous gale in our sailes.”

They were members of the Church of England who believed its reformation had stopped halfway. The first signs of them are seen in 1563, when ministers, English exiles home from Geneva among them, refused to wear the surplice in church and the cap and gown in the street, and by 1565 some had lost their livings over it. The historian Maitland called them “those who strove for a worship purified from all taint of popery.” As the quarrel went on they divided over how the church should be governed, for some would keep the bishops, some wanted Presbyterian rule, and some wanted each congregation to govern itself.

Only some of them ever went to New England, mostly between 1629 and 1640, and the rest stayed to carry on the struggle in England. The Long Parliament brought them to power, the Westminster Assembly met in 1643 to try to settle their own disagreements, and after the monarchy was restored in 1660 their faith lived on in England’s Nonconformist churches. What they believed about grace, the Bible, worship and the Lord’s Day is set out in our page on how the Puritans differed from other Protestants.

Through the 1620s the leaders of church and crown grew less and less willing to bear with them. Puritans were told to conform to ways of worship they abhorred, their ministers were put out of office, and they were threatened with “extirpation from the earth” if they did not fall in line. The punishments could be terrible, and in 1630 one man was sentenced to life imprisonment, his property was taken, his nose was slit, an ear was cut off, and his forehead was branded “S.S.”, for sower of sedition.

The churchman who rose highest in those years was William Laud. When Charles I came to the throne in 1625, Laud drew up for him a list of the clergy with an O or a P beside each name, the Orthodox to be promoted and the Puritans to be suppressed, and in July 1628 he became bishop of London. He saw the Church of England in his own way. To him it was a branch of the whole Christian church, one and the same with the church of the apostles, and he wanted its worship kept in order and the same in every parish, with the communion table, rather than the pulpit, at its heart. He held that the foundation of belief was the Bible, and in a debate with a Jesuit in 1622 he said that when Christians disagree, “a lawful and free council, determining according to Scripture, is the best judge on earth.” The Puritans looked at a church built around the communion table and saw in it the very leftovers they had prayed to be rid of.

Most of what Laud did as master of the church came after Winthrop had sailed. He became archbishop of Canterbury in August 1633, and from then on the Puritan lecturers were silenced, the Puritan Sabbath was opposed and the Book of Sports was issued again, and he even tried to reach the colonists in New England. His rule shut large numbers of faithful churchmen out of communion with their church and out of their country, and the ships that carried them kept sailing until 1640.

The Puritans’ other hope at home had been Parliament. When it met in January 1629 the Commons were alarmed at “innovations in religion,” and angry too that the king had gone on collecting the customs duties called tonnage and poundage. On 2 March, when the king ordered them to adjourn, the Speaker, Sir John Finch, was held down in his chair and the doors were locked while they passed resolutions condemning those innovations and declaring that anyone who levied or paid those duties was an enemy to his country. Charles dissolved Parliament and ruled without one for eleven years. Two days after that scene in the Commons, on 4 March 1629, he granted a charter to “the Governor and Company of the Mattachusetts Bay in Newe-England,” and it named as “the principall Ende of this Plantacion” that the settlers’ good lives might win the native peoples to “the onlie true God” and the Christian faith.

John Winthrop, a lawyer who would become the colony’s governor, wrote out his reasons for going in 1629, and his drafts survive. The first was the Gospel. It would be a great service to the church, he wrote, to carry the Gospel into those parts of the world, and to raise a bulwark against the kingdom of Antichrist, which the Jesuits were labouring to build everywhere. The second was fear for his own country. All the other churches of Europe had been brought to desolation, and he was sure the same judgment was coming on England. Who knew, he asked, whether God had not provided this place to be “a refuge for manye,” whom he meant to save out of the general destruction?

The rest of his list is about England itself. The land was growing weary of its people, he wrote, so that man, the most precious of all creatures, was held cheaper there than the earth he walked on. Children and neighbours, the poor above all, were counted the greatest burdens, when, if things were right, they would be the chief blessings of this life. A good and upright man could hardly keep his family and live in comfort by any trade, and the schools and churches were so corrupted that even the brightest children were being spoiled by bad examples. Taken together, they are the reasons of a man who saw England failing its children, its schools and its churches, and who thought God was opening a place where a church could be planted fresh. What better work could a Christian do, he asked, than help to raise and support a particular church while it was still in its infancy?

He wrote down the objections as well, with his answers. One of them asks what right they had to take a land that had long been held by “other sonnes of Adam.” He gave four answers: that land common to all is proper to none, and the natives roamed over much land without title; that there was more than enough for them and for the English; that God had consumed the natives with “a miraculous plague,” so that a great part of the country lay empty; and that the English would come in with the natives’ good leave. So his answer rested partly on the deaths of the people who had lived there, and he put the question to himself before he ever sailed.

On 26 August 1629 Winthrop and eleven others met at Cambridge and bound themselves “in the word of a Christian and in the presence of God who is the searcher of all hearts” to be ready by the following March “to inhabite and continue in new England,” on one condition: that the charter and the whole government of the company first be legally transferred to New England with them. With that, the colony would be governed in New England by the people who lived there, and not by a company in London.

Winthrop began his journal “Riding at the Cowes, near the Isle of Wight, in the Arbella,” and he dated that first entry by the church’s calendar: Easter Monday, 29 March 1630. Eleven ships are named in that first entry, the Arbella, Talbot, Ambrose and Jewel sailing together and seven more still waiting at Southampton. The minister John Cotton came to Southampton to preach the departing fleet a farewell sermon, God’s Promise to His Plantation, on the words God gave David, “I will appoint a place for my people Israel, and will plant them, that they may dwell in a place of their own, and move no more” (2 Samuel 7:10). God plants his people, Cotton told them, “when he giveth them the liberty and purity of his Ordinances. It is a land of promise, where they have provision for soul as well as for body.”

There is also a charge to the company from that year, A Model of Christian Charity. A copy printed in 1838 heads it “Written on board the Arbella, on the Atlantic Ocean,” and gives it to Winthrop. Most people know one line of it, and the words that lead up to that line are about love: “wee must be knitt together, in this worke, as one man,” and “Wee must delight in eache other; make other’s conditions our oune; rejoice together, mourne together, labour and suffer together.” Then comes the warning. “For wee must consider that wee shall be as a citty upon a hill. The eies of all people are uppon us,” and if they dealt falsely with God, “wee shall be made a story and a by-word through the world.” The picture is Jesus’ own, from the Sermon on the Mount: “A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid” (Matthew 5:14).

On Saturday 12 June 1630 the Arbella anchored among the islands off Naumkeag, now Salem. Isaac Allerton, a leading man of Plymouth, came aboard on his way to Pemaquid, and that evening Winthrop and some of the company went ashore and “supped with a good venison pasty and good beer.” The months that followed were hard, and Winthrop set down the deaths in a few words each. Under 2 July he wrote, “My son, Henry Winthrop, was drowned at Salem.” In August the Lady Arbella Johnson died, the woman the ship was named for, and on 30 September her husband Isaac died too. He had signed both the Cambridge Agreement and the farewell to the Church of England, and Winthrop wrote of him, “He was a holy man, and wise, and died in sweet peace.” Then came the first winter, when many of the poorer sort, who had lain long in tents, died of scurvy at Boston and Charlestown.

Still the ships kept coming. Beginning in 1630, as many as 20,000 Puritans went over to America, most of them to New England and some as far as the West Indies, and the stream of them ran on until 1640. Some came “to catch fish,” as one New Englander put it, but the great majority came to worship God in the way they believed was right. They were not the only English Christians who left home for their faith in those years, for English Catholics were harassed at home too, and in 1634 the Ark and the Dove carried about two hundred settlers to Maryland, two Catholic priests among them.

Some writers call them Puritans too, since they came out of the same longing for a purer church, but they took it further than the Puritans would go. They were a congregation from the village of Scrooby and the nearby towns of Nottinghamshire, Lincolnshire and Yorkshire, and they had decided they could not stay in the Church of England at all. In the words of William Bradford, who was one of them and later their governor, they joined themselves “by a covenant of the Lord” into a church of their own, “to walke in all his wayes, made known, or to be made known unto them.” That made them Separatists. They were “hunted & persecuted on every side,” Bradford remembered, and in 1607 and 1608 they slipped away to Holland, “wher they heard was freedome of Religion for all men.”

They lived in Leiden, “a fair & bewtifull citie,” for eleven or twelve years. Bradford says they left it because the work was so hard that few would join them, because old age was stealing on, and because their children were bent under labour or “drawne away by evill examples,” and last, and not least, because of “a great hope & inward zeall they had of laying some good foundation” for the gospel in the new world, even if they were only “stepping-stones unto others.” When they went down to the ship at Delfshaven, “they knew they were pilgrimes,” he wrote, and “looked not much on those things,” but lifted their eyes to heaven, “their dearest cuntrie.” Beside that word he wrote in the margin “Heb. 11.”, the chapter where the faithful “confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth” (Hebrews 11:13).

The Mayflower left Plymouth, by Bradford’s reckoning, on 6 September 1620, with about a hundred passengers. At Cape Cod “they fell upon their knees” and blessed God for bringing them over the “vast & furious ocean,” and on 11 November they signed the compact by which they combined themselves into “a civil body politic,” undertaken “for the glory of God, and advancement of the Christian faith.” In the first two or three months half of them died. “Of 100. & odd persons, scarce 50. remained,” Bradford wrote. The colony lived, and ten years later it was there to meet Winthrop’s fleet.

	The Pilgrims	The Puritans of Massachusetts Bay
The Church of England	Left it as Separatists	Stayed in it, “our deare Mother”
Sailed	1620, the Mayflower, about 100	From 1630, as many as 20,000 by about 1640
Route	England, then Holland (1607–1620)	Straight from England
Leader	William Bradford	John Winthrop

The meal Americans remember at Thanksgiving, which in 2026 falls on Thursday, 26 November, was the Pilgrims’, not the Puritans’. Edward Winslow described it in a letter home in December 1621: “Our harvest being gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling, that so we might after a special manner rejoice together after we had gathered the fruit of our labors.” The Wampanoag leader Massasoit came “with some ninety men, whom for three days we entertained and feasted,” and his men brought five deer. Winslow gives no date, and he never calls it a thanksgiving. He writes, in a year when the colony had lost half its people, that “by the goodness of God, we are so far from want that we often wish you partakers of our plenty.” If you would like words to pray at your own table, we have gathered twelve prayers for Thanksgiving.

The Puritans came nine years after that harvest, and they had set out with thanksgiving already promised. Their farewell from the Arbella asked the church at home to pray them safely over, and promised that if God gave them that passage they would bring him “such daily returnes of Thanks-givings” as his goodness deserved. It promised, too, that they would go on praying for the church at home from “our poore Cottages in the wildernesse.” In the first week of July 1630 the rest of the fleet came in, eight ships in six days, and on Thursday the 8th Winthrop wrote, “We kept a day of thanksgiving in all the plantations.” He does not say what the day was for.

They built churches in which every congregation governed itself, with no hierarchy over it, and in which full members, at least at first, were men and women who had undergone a conversion and could show it to the others. In 1648 Richard Mather drafted the Cambridge Platform, which set out this New England Way, and its leaders hoped England would one day copy it, which it never did.

They also brought with them the conviction of their age, held by Protestants and Catholics alike, that a society must have one religion. In 1636 Massachusetts expelled Roger Williams, in the dead of winter, and in 1638 Anne Hutchinson, and between 1659 and 1661 four Quakers were put to death. Williams, who had been a Puritan leader himself, answered from Rhode Island, the colony he founded, that “God requireth not an uniformity of Religion to be inacted and inforced in any civill state,” and that “forced worship stinks in God’s nostrils.” People who had crossed an ocean for freedom to worship had not yet learned to grant it, and it was one of their own who told them so. The Church of England they had hoped to purify still stands, and its story is told in our page on what the Church of England is.

Winthrop had warned that the eyes of all people would be on them, and the world did watch, the banishments along with the faith. Bradford’s margin pointed further, to the city no colony can build. The pilgrims of Hebrews, the letter says, “desire a better country, that is, an heavenly: wherefore God is not ashamed to be called their God: for he hath prepared for them a city” (Hebrews 11:16).

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• What the Church of England Is: a Prayer Book, and a Man Who Burned for It
• What Denominations Are Calvinist? Presbyterian, Reformed and Some Baptist Churches
• 12 Prayers For Thanksgiving
• 15 Bible Verses About Thanksgiving and Gratitude