The Pilgrims came to America for two very important reasons, religious freedom and giving vent to a latent entrepreneurial spirit. We've all heard over and over their story of how the Church of England persecuted them, forcing their flight to Holland. This is known knowledge. Yet it is in knowing that not all the original Puritans -Separatists - that fled to Amsterdam, Holland sought passage to America. Some were satisfied to stay there and to worship their God freely. It was allowed.
Entrepreneurs as we know them today often get bored and seek new opportunities. The status quo is not for them. I believe this is the principal difference between those that stayed and those that crossed the Atlantic. God and His cause can be served anywhere, but leave it to those who want to hasten His return to earth to get out there and push the boat when it gets sunk in quicksand.
This idea for the above idea surfaced when learning that the pastor of the original group of Puritans stayed in Holland and did not immigrate with the Pilgrims because more of his flock were staying in Holland than were booking passage to America. This pastor, Richard Clyfton, according to the writings of William Bradford in his book Of Plymouth Plantation, was the one who started the group in England, fled with them to Holland and who stayed there rather than go to America.
In Europe Martin Luther was the first to differ with the Church and this division later gave King Henry VIII the courage to break away and start the Church of England with himself as leader. There were problems in the Church and in politics and it was this Church that was having its own internal struggles. The Puritans were not satisfied with the way the Church was keeping many of the old customs of the Catholic Church.
They had at first hoped when the dissolution came that the church would cleanse itself of from all resemblance and this did not happen. The Puritans was the larger group of dissenters and the Pilgrims or Separatists were a smaller group with a few different ideas. Basically, this is what caused the group to settle into Amsterdam and then sail for America. .
The Church leaders were trying to force them to get in line or leave. The left for Holland and stayed there for ten or twelve years. When they heard about the colonization in America and the building of new colonies in America, they signed on; or some of them did. They were free in Holland but their children were becoming too assimilated into Dutch ways and they decided to make a whole new start in a new world. This is the classical reason.
It is not known whether there were regrets later on during their long sixty-five day journey into the unknown, but surely there must have been. They ran into storms and blustery weather and all kinds of problems before settling in Plymouth- not then named that. The precise location the Virginia Company had assigned them farter on to a site on the Hudson.
Whatever their real individual reasons they never gave up on their commitment to God. In all their writings they credit Him for their success and they worked hard. They had their religious freedom and history also shows that ingrained somewhere in their psyche was also something of the religious spirit of their former country. Once they had their church community up and running smoothly and had their church laws in place, they looked unfavorably on dissenters and members who disagreed with them.
Those of course moved on and made way for others of like thinking to be free. Years later, Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlett Letter - while not of the Plymouth area specifically - probes one pastor's refusal to admit the truth about himself. Proving that pride is a destructive vice that can wreck many lives. Whatever truths the story paints about the early history of the area, there is no denying that New England is rich in literature. It has glimpses of the fourteenth Renaissance in England where the previous disruptions gave way to a literary frenzy not seen before or after. England was literally writhing with ideas longing to be free. Isn't discontent the stuff of writing? New England has produced many authors and poets and every one of them shows a love of freedom of thought. And all of them show a part of their English literary inheritance, as just said.