Abstract
It wasn’t that they didn’t want to send their kids to school, but Amsterdam had a bit of a reputation even in 1608. In November 1607 the first flank of a group of Protestant separatists left their home in the village of Scrooby, England, for Amsterdam in hopes of finding enough religious toleration to allow them to follow God’s revealed pattern of church government. They were called (rather derisively) “Brownists” after Robert Browne, who had achieved notoriety for his powerful tracts written in his youth against the established Church of England and in favor of the founding of separate congregations of the faithful without any episcopal oversight. Led by a few Cambridge intellectuals, they were mostly farmers ill suited to urban life in Holland. But Amsterdam was at the time one of the most tolerant places on earth, and there were already several hundred separatists there who had fled earlier persecutions, so it seemed a good idea at the time.1
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Notes
My account in this and the following paragraphs draws on Francis Dillon, The Pilgrims (New York: Doubleday, 1973)
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© 2008 Milton Gaither
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Gaither, M. (2008). The Family State, 1600–1776. In: Homeschool. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-230-61301-0_2
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