![]() ![]() In 1630, John Winthrop led some 1,000 English Puritans in the initial wave of the Great Migration to the Massachusetts Bay Colony, north of Plymouth. These Puritans remained at home during the 1620s and, through participation in Parliament, tried to prod the Stuart kings toward toleration. The far larger group, those we know as Puritans or Nonseparating Episcopalians, reluctantly retained attachment to the English Church but were determined to cleanse it of remnants of Roman Catholicism. Around a hundred Separatists left England in 1607-08 in search of religious freedom in the Netherlands many of them later migrated to America in 1620 aboard Mayflower. Their desertion was an ecclesiastical insult to the king as head of the Anglican Church and a crime punishable by jail or death. While both followed the teaching of John Calvin, a cardinal difference distinguished one group from the other: Pilgrims were Puritans who had abandoned local parishes and formed small congregations of their own because the Church of England was not holy enough to meet their standards. Pilgrims and Puritans were Protestants who differed in degree. He was playing a parlor pastime, but her answer confirms the confusion most of us have in sorting out New World newcomers, their sartorial choices and the myths they fostered-particularly concerning the origins of Thanksgiving. My friend said, "It's a bit more complicated than that." She squirmed and, after a moment, sputtered: "They're both English, aren't they? Big black hats with broad brims. A benign smile filled his face as the woman to his right, a successful business executive, suddenly found herself in a predicament similar to that of the lepidopterist's mounted butterfly. One night I eavesdropped when he posed the question. At dinner parties, after exhausting insignificant chatter, he would lean conspiratorially to his table companion and ask, "Can you tell me the difference between a Pilgrim and a Puritan?" ![]() An elderly man I knew in Newport, Rhode Island, relished social gamesmanship. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |