INDEPENDENTS, The, Sylvester Hassell The Independents, originating in England about the year 1581 under the leadership of Robert Browne (hence first called Brownists), and being deserted by Browne, who in 1590 conformed to the “Church of England,” chose John Robinson, a pious Calvinist, as their pastor in 1603, and in 1608, to secure liberty of conscience and worship, fled to Amsterdam, and in 1609 to Leyden, in Holland; and one hundred and one of them, for the same purpose, emigrated, with their Ruling elder William Brewster, in the Mayflower, in 1620, to Plymouth, Massachusetts.
These emigrants (forty-one men, with their families) are known as the “Pilgrim Fathers;” they were mostly poor men and artisans; they advocated the self-government of each local church, and the admission of none but true believers to the Lord’s Supper; and they were not much disposed to persecute others for having different religious views and practices from themselves.
But in 1629 the “Puritans,” or Episcopalians, who wished to purify the discipline and worship of the “Church of England,”and still not separate from that “Church,” began emigrating to Massachusetts. They consisted in great part of the professional and middle classes; and, though establishing a system of Congregationalism, yet like their brethren in England they set up a sort of theocratic state, and strove to secure uniformity of worship by rigorous laws for the civil punishment of heresy and schism. They unscripturally retained the pedobaptism of the “Church of England;” and they therefore wreaked their peculiar vengeance on Baptists and Quakers.
The “Church of England” was established by law in Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia, in Maryland after the decline of the Roman Catholic influence, and in New York after its cession by the Dutch;” and its tyrannical and persecuting spirit, combined with its lack of “Bishops” and its dependence on England, caused it to languish in a country destined by Providence to be the home of religious liberty. (Hassell’s History ppg 518, 519)