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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 July 2009
Congregational polity first appeared in New England in 1620 with the arrival of a small company of Separatists from Scrooby, England. In 1607 or 1608, after many difficulties arising from the policies of King James I, the Scrooby congregation migrated to Amsterdam in Holland. In 1609 they transferred to Leyden, where John Robinson ministered as their pastor. After a decade in Leyden, the congregation negotiated a charter or patent with the Virginia Company to go to Virginia; it was approved in September 1619. Volunteers for the voyage to the New World were sought from the Leyden congregation. Robinson planned to accompany them if a majority agreed to go. However, since only a minority chose to make the journey, he disappointedly conformed to his prior agreement and remained in Holland, where he died six years later in 1625. Traveling on the Mayflower, which sailed off course, the Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony arrived on 6 December 1620 in Cape Cod harbor. At this time they were under the pastoral leadership and ecclesiological influence of Robinson, and they remained so until his death.
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4. Cyclopaedia of Biblical, Theological, and Ecclesiastical Literature, s.v. “Pilgrim Fathers.”
5. Endecott to Bradford, 11 May 1629, quoted in Langdon, George D., Pilgrim Colony: A History of New Plymouth, 1620–1691 (New Haven, 1966), p. 108.Google Scholar
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8. Dexter, Henry Martyn, The Congregationalism of the Last Three Hundred Years (New York, 1880);Google ScholarWalker, Williston, A History of the Congregational Churches in the United States (New York, 1894).Google Scholar See also Yarbrough, Slayden, “Henry Jacob, a Moderate Separatist, and His Influence on Early English Congregationalism” (Ph.D. diss., Baylor University, 1972), pp. 159–160.Google Scholar
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13. In Robinson, John, The Works of John Robinson, Pastor of the Pilgrim Fathers, ed. Robert, Ashton, 3 vols. (London 1851), 1:Google Scholar xxi, Ashton, stated that Robinson arrived in Scrooby in 1604. According to the Dictionary of National Biography, s.v. “Robinson, John,” this event took place about 1607. Burrage, Champlin, New Facts Concerning John Robinson, Pastor of the Pilgrim Fathers (London, 1910), p. 25,Google Scholar concluded that Robinson must have lived in Norwich between 1604 and 1606 (or possibly 1607).
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26. Ibid., pp. 482–484.
27. Ibid., p. 480.
28. Ibid., pp. 480–481.
29. Whitley, W. T., “Records of the Jacob-Lathorp [sic]-Jessey Church, 1616–1641,” Transactions of the Baptist Historical Society 1 (1908-1909), p. 225;Google ScholarBurrage, , Early English Dissenters, 2: 301.Google Scholar
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31. Miller, p. xiii.
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36. Ibid., p. 83.
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46. Christianson, Paul, Reformers and Babylon (Toronto, 1978), pp. 73–74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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