The punishment for being captured: imprisonment, torture, and in some cases, public execution. Seeing no other outlet, they decided to “separate” from both the Puritans and the Church of England, forming congregations in the countryside where they secretly practiced their faith in basements and farmhouses. These people only wanted to worship as they pleased and be left alone. For them, the Puritan movement was becoming just as strict and oppressive as the Church of England. Yet they remained loyal to the Church of England, hoping to change it from the inside.Ī few of the Puritans, however, saw the attempt as hopeless. Called Puritans by their enemies, they were shunned -often brutally. By then, some English Protestants had already banded together to “purify” the Church from its Roman Catholic traditions. Now that people could read the Bible for themselves, they questioned why they needed religious leaders to explain the Scripture to them at all. (Seventy years later, in 1611, King James I commissioned a new English version -now known as the King James Bible.) But having a Bible in English just added more fuel to an already growing fire of dissent. Henry VIII also had the Bible officially translated into English for the first time. So in 1534, he created a new state religion, the Church of England, proclaiming himself as its leader. Henry defied the pope: he divorced Catherine and married Anne anyway… and was promptly excommunicated.
His aging wife, Catherine, hadn’t given birth to any male heirs, so the king wanted to divorce her and marry his “consort,” Anne Boleyn. Henry’s reason: The pope wouldn’t grant him a divorce. The Bible was supreme, they said, and wanted it translated into common German (instead of Latin) so that common people could read and interpret it for themselves. Luther and the other Reformers broke from Rome on religious principles -they wanted a Church without a pope, or bishops, not to mention corruption. By 1534 the discontent had spread to England, where King Henry VIII cut ties with Rome and founded the Church of England, also known as the “Anglican” Church.īut Henry had a personal reason for the break. Sharply critical of the corruption of the Church, Luther’s writings (which spread throughout Europe thanks to another new invention, the printing press) ignited the growing contempt for the Church in other countries. It all began with the Protestant Reformation, which traces it roots to the German monk Martin Luther, who in 1517 mailed his 95 Theses do the door of the Castle Church in Wittenburg. But by the 16th century, things were beginning to change. Although there were periods of tolerance for other religions scattered throughout the era, intolerance was largely the norm.
The Roman Catholic Church was the state church in most of Western Europe. Most modern democracies regard freedom of religion as a basic human right, but if you lived in Europe in the late Middle Ages, it was a very different story.
Here’s part one, which begins more than a century before the Pilgrims ever set sail. But after doing a little research, we found ourselves immersed in a much more fascinating story than we anticipated -the tale of the Pilgrims’ journey to the New World and religious freedom. This article started off as a short list of facts about the Mayflower, the ship that brought the Pilgrims to America in 1620. The following is an article from Uncle John's Curiously Compelling Bathroom Reader.
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