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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.
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.
On a larger level, eschatology was the lens through which events such as the English Civil War and the Thirty Years' War were interpreted. There was also an optimistic aspect to Puritan millennianism: Puritans anticipated a future worldwide religious revival before the Second Coming of Christ.
The major Whig historian, S. R. Gardiner, popularised the idea that the English Civil War was a "Puritan Revolution" [193] that challenged the repressive Stuart Church and prepared the way for religious toleration. Thus, Puritanism was seen as the natural ally of a people preserving their traditional rights against arbitrary monarchical power.
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]
This eventually led to the further alienation of Anglicans and Puritans from one another in the 17th century during the reign of King Charles I (1625–1649), that eventually brought about the English Civil War (1642–1651), the brief rule of the Puritan Lord Protector of England Oliver Cromwell (1653–1658), the English Commonwealth (1649 ...
The Puritans were originally members of a group of English Protestants seeking "purity", further reforms or even separation from the established church, during the Reformation. The group is also extended to include some early colonial American ministers and important lay-leaders.
King James I and Charles I made some efforts to reconcile the Puritan clergy who had been alienated by the lack of change in the Church of England.Puritans embraced Calvinism (Reformed theology) with its opposition to ritual and an emphasis on preaching, a growing sabbatarianism, and preference for a presbyterian system of church polity, as opposed to the episcopal polity of the Church of ...