‘The Journey to the Mayflower: God’s Outlaws and the Invention of Freedom’, by Stephen Tomkins (2020) “This is the story of people, but it is also the story of an idea: that religion should be free, and that the church of Christ is a voluntary community, not an entire church state. This was a truly dangerous and frightening idea, one that Separatists variously groped towards, stumbled over, retreated from and proclaimed from the rooftops.”

So writes the historian Tomkins in his introduction to this book, which is a well written, engaging narrative and analysis of this time. It is based on the author’s PhD research, bringing to life the people and their stories in an accessible way.

Purchasers of this book need to pay careful attention to the title. The book has clearly been written to coincide with 400th anniversary of the sailing, but the focus of the book is on the people, events and ideas that led towards that sailing. This is, therefore, principally about the Elizabethan Puritans, or more properly, Separatists, than about those individuals who sailed to America and survived. The Mayflower indeed only appears in the last two chapters in the book.This does not mean that the book is not worth reading or that it does not have important things to say, but the title is ambiguously misleading.

It explores the beginnings of the idea that religion should be a personal choice, not a state-sanctioned forced conformity, looking at it through the eyes of a historian with a particular interest in the individuals who struggled to find ways to live out their faith in a repressive environment.

Tomkins has done a lot of reading of the religious argumentative pamphlets of the 1570s-1620s and indeed in some cases made corrections to some contentious issues as a result of this careful study. This is good work. It is spoiled however by inadequate referencing. There were numerous times when I read something interesting in the text and turned to the notes to see where a point was coming from to find there was no reference to it. Whereas he makes extensive reference to nineteenth century collections of source material, such as pamphlets, there are almost no contemporary scholarly references, even when in the text he might refer to modern authors.

One is left though with a great sadness for the lost lives of those who stood out against the state in its determination to have one approved church. These people are unknown to the general public and deserve to be known. Tomkins highlights their lonely and forgotten deaths in prison and it is good to be told of their fight for, in effect, freedom of choice in religion. Elizabeth herself comes across very poorly in this story and it may be about time that her negativity to ‘real’ religion is portrayed.

But, equally, the wonder of the willingness of ordinary men and women to die for such freedom is marred by the interminable arguments of the saints one with another. Some of the infighting Tomkins reveals would be laughable were it not so sad.

Freedom of religion and conscience remains as much an issue relevant to today as it did in Elizabethan England, and therefore the stories, both inspiring and cautionary, of the Separatists are a timely reminder of the need to uphold religious freedom.

'The Journey to the Mayflower' is published by Hodder & Stoughton and is available from Amazon. Also available on Kindle.