[Simon Worrall is the author of The Poet and the Murderer. He is writing a book about the Pilgrim Fathers.]

RELIGIOUS FUNDAMENTALISM of the sort that lay behind the July 7 outrages in London is nothing new to Britain. We’ve seen it before, or something very like it, in the early 17th century, when a fanatical group of extremists sought to transform England into a theocracy governed by a strict interpretation of scripture. These were the Protestant Christians remembered as the Pilgrim Fathers.

Their story begins in the village of Scrooby, in Nottinghamshire, the birthplace of William Brewster, the leader of the small band that eventually sailed to America on the Mayflower. William Bradford, an orphan from nearby Austerfield, would become the first governor of the New England colony, and write the only eyewitness account of the Pilgrim Fathers in America, Of Plimoth Plantation. Other members of the group came from local villages.

Though most accounts of Brewster portray him as a worthy who chose to devote his life to God out of profound religious conviction, in fact he turned to God more because of worldly failure than piety.

Brewster had become interested in radical religious reform while studying at Cambridge University in the 1570s. After graduating he got a job as an assistant to one of the most powerful politicians of the day, Sir William Davison. But Davison — who signed the death warrant of Mary Queen of Scots — suffered a spectacular fall from grace and Brewster returned to Scrooby a broken man. Like many before and since, he found God. To make a living, he took over his father ’s job as village postmaster and devoted the rest of his time to creating a New World Order ruled by God’s commandment. With him, perhaps inevitably, as its first leader.

His first step was to establish an underground cell — a small group of men who met in secret in the villages around Scrooby. These were the Separatists, who formed the core of the group of pilgrims who were to found a new country over the Atlantic.

They were known as Separatists because they planned to found a church outside the official Church of England. Sounds harmless? It wasn’t. In their fundamentalist theocracy pubs would be closed, maypole dancing and gambling would be banned, men and women would be forced to dress in a sober and godly way and, above all, the Bible would become the foundation of civil society. ...

Now, at a time when fanatics are seeking to turn back the wheel of history, when twice as many Americans are said to believe in the Devil as Darwin’s theory of evolution, and the most powerful nation on earth has a President described by The New York Times as a “messianic American Calvinist”, it is worth looking over our shoulders at the fanatics who fled these shores to America in 1620.

Related Links

Ralph Luker: Some Religious and Political Bloviations