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Under Charles I, the Puritans became a political force as well as a religious tendency in the country. Opponents of the royal prerogative became allies of Puritan reformers, who saw the Church of England moving in a direction opposite to what they wanted, and objected to increased Catholic influence both at Court and (as they saw it) within the Church.
In the 17th century, the word Puritan was a term applied not to just one group but to many. Historians still debate a precise definition of Puritanism. [6] Originally, Puritan was a pejorative term characterizing certain Protestant groups as extremist. Thomas Fuller, in his Church History, dates the first use of the word to 1564.
In the early 17th century, thousands of English Puritans settled in North America, almost all in New England.Puritans were intensely devout members of the Church of England who believed that the Church of England was insufficiently reformed, retaining too much of its Roman Catholic doctrinal roots, and who therefore opposed royal ecclesiastical policy.
The Puritan's main purpose was to purify the Church of England and to make England a more Christian country. History of the Puritans under Elizabeth I, 1558–1603; History of the Puritans under James I, 1603–1625; History of the Puritans under Charles I, 1625–1649; History of the Puritans from 1649; History of the Puritans in North America
In the United States, the Puritan settlement of New England was a major influence on American Protestantism. With the start of the English Civil War in 1642, fewer settlers to New England were Puritans. The period of 1642 to 1659 represented a period of peaceful dominance in English life by the formerly discriminated Puritan population.
The "business" of the first settlers, a Puritan minister recalled in 1681, "was not Toleration, but [they] were professed enemies of it." [33] Puritans expelled dissenters from their colonies, a fate that in 1636 befell Roger Williams and in 1638 Anne Hutchinson, America's first major female religious leader. [34] [35]
From 1630 through 1640, approximately 20,000 Puritans emigrated to New England in a Great Migration. [20] In 1642, after the English Civil War began, a sixth of the male colonists returned to England to fight for Parliament, and many stayed, since Oliver Cromwell was himself a Puritan. [21]
The Eleutheran Adventurers were a group of English Puritans and religious Independents who left Bermuda to settle on the island of Eleuthera in the Bahamas in the late 1640s. . The small group of Puritan settlers, led by William Sayle, were expelled from Bermuda for their failure to swear allegiance to the Crown and left in search of a place in which they could freely practice their fa