Radical Puritans separated themselves from the Church of England and were called Separatists.
From early in the 19th century there had always been separatists, reformists and repressionists in the island, but they were individuals rather than groups.
Permanency of occupation, however, dates from the voyage of the " Mayflower," which brought about a hundred men, women and children who had mostly belonged to an English sect of Separatists, originating in Yorkshire, but who had passed a period of exile for religion's sake in Holland.
The last were peninsulars, the others mainly creoles, and among the wealthy classes of the latter the separatists gradually gained increasing support.
This comes out in the writings both of Robinson and of Henry Jacob, both of whom passed gradually from Puritanism to Separatism at a time when the silencing of some 300 Puritan clergy by the Canons of 1604, and the exercise of the royal supremacy under Archbishop Bancroft, brought these " brethren of the Second Separation " into closer relations with the earlier Separatists.
