1. The Church of England was already turbulent with the tension between the antiquated Catholics and the emerging Protestants. The Puritans were part of a subset of Protestants, so naturally one would expect them to have resolved their issues with the Church of England throughout Protestant control. While the Puritans certainly favored Protestant rule over the Catholics, with whom they had a diametric set of beliefs, they were never favored by the Protestant rulers in turn. Obviously, the Puritans regarded themselves as worthy of their opinions and of a higher place in government. The Protestants also believed that the core focus of a human’s life must be god. The Church of England, however, did not share in this belief. A multitude of English …show more content…
When King Charles I nullified the Puritans further by the dissolution of Parliament, all the tentative notions they had thought up regarding escaping to the Americas were validated. Earlier, the Puritans “were drawn into uneasy complicity in a regime they considered no more than half right” (page 17). In other words, as discussed previously, the Puritans felt as though the beliefs of the government they lived under did not align with their own. Naturally, as God’s servants the Puritans were unable to escape England until they were positive that it was what God himself would want. The Puritans tried to rationalize this theory by deciding whether they could be the salvation of the Anglican Church, “If, as all Protestants maintained, the Roman Church was incurable in the sixteenth century, perhaps the Anglican Church would prove so in the seventeenth. There would be no virtue in cleaving to it any longer than God did, yet to desert sooner would be equally wrong” (page 28). For that reason, even before King Charles I disbanded Parliament, the Puritans had begun to bolster support for their voyage to the American Continent. They had begun to allow themselves to be tempted with the promise of religious freedom, a pure government, and power by deciding to volunteer for the colonizing effort. Still, some Puritans were attributing their efforts to the scouring the English government and church through Parliament. The last shreds of faith in the scouring effort was lost when the disbanding of Parliament repudiated the