PART I.
FIRST SETTLEMENT--ROYAL CHARTER GRANTED.
English Puritanism, transferred from England to the head of Massachusetts Bay in 1629, presents the same characteristics which it developed in England.

In Massachusetts it had no competitor; it developed its principles and spirit without restraint; it was absolute in power from 1629 to 1689, and during that sixty years it assumed independence of the Government to which it owed its corporate existence; it made it a penal crime for any emigrant to appeal to England against a local decision of Courts or of Government; it permitted no oath of allegiance to the King, nor the administration of the laws in his name; it allowed no elective franchise to any Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Baptist, Quaker, or Papist.

Every non-member of the Congregational Churches was compelled to pay taxes and bear all other Puritan burdens, but was allowed no representation by franchise, much less by eligibility for any office.
It has been seen that the "_Pilgrim_ Fathers" commenced their settlement at New Plymouth in 1620--nine years before the "_Puritan_ Fathers" commenced their settlement on the opposite side of Massachusetts Bay, making Boston their ultimate seat of government.

The Pilgrim Fathers and their descendants were professedly congregational separatists from the Church of England; they had fled by stealth, under severe sufferings, from persecution in England to Holland, where they had resided eleven years and upwards, and where they had learned the principles of religious toleration and liberty--the fruit of Dutch Arminian advocacy and suffering.

The Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Company emigrated directly from England, on leaving which they professed to be members of the Church of England; their emigration commenced in 1628, the very year that Charles the First, having quarrelled with and dissolved the last of three Parliaments in less than four years, commenced his eleven years' rule without a Parliament.