The Puritans And Their Colonies

Upon researching the Puritans I found many interesting things such as their origins, their colonies, their religion and their way of life. Through extensive research I found that their origin goes back deeper than I thought it did. The process through which Puritanism developed had been initiated in the 1530s when King Henry VIII repudiated papal authority and transformed the Church of Rome into a state Church of England. But the Church of England retained much of the liturgy and ritual of Roman Catholicism and seemed, to many dissenters, to be insufficiently reformed. The Church of England wasn't good enough so some people broke away from that church in hopes to reform it and make a better and purer church. The Puritans were a group of English Reformed Protestants in the 16th and 17th centuries who broke away and sought to "purify" the Church of England from its "Catholic" practices because they thought that the Church of England was only partially reformed.

They also wanted to escape being persecuted for their faith. The King of England gave them a charter to make a settlement along the Massachusetts Bay. The Puritans played leading roles in establishing the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1629, the Connecticut Colony in 1636, and the New Haven Colony in 1638. The first group of puritan settlers was led by John Endecott and his group settle in Salem, Massachusetts. In 1630 John Winthrop led a group of 1,000 settlers to come to that settlement, and John Winthrop became the Governor of that colony. This is one of the nonfictional facts that is present in The Scarlet