John Calvin (1509-1564) was a French lawyer and Protestant reformer who settled in Geneva where (much as in the Spanish Inquisition) the secular courts enforced what he advised them was Christian morality and orthodoxy. Church worship was stripped of art and ceremony in favour of lectures on Scripture, while in the town dancing and other public entertainments were forbidden. He taught also that God has created some people for heaven and others for hell, and that man has no freedom to choose his own fate. His ideas entered the English Reformation through Thomas Cranmer and the Scottish Reformation through John Knox, and were highly influential in the Interregnum (1649-1660), but were strongly resisted by John and Charles Wesley.

‘Puritans’ has been used over the years as a catch-all term for hardline Calvinists of varying opinions, though a common factor was a belief that strict morality, plain living and modest dress must be enforced by the courts. The Scrooby Puritans were not so much seeking religious freedom as hoping to create a Geneva-like state where they could enforce their morality, and the Massachusetts colony proved quite as intolerant as James had been when the Puritans gained the upper hand.

Samuel was a son of the late Edwin Sandys, Archbishop of York, who was MP for Ripon from 1586 to 1588. Samuel moved to Essex and then to Ombersley in Worcestershire, receiving a knighthood in 1603 and becoming MP for Worcestershire in 1609. In 1612, he joined his brother Edwin on the Council for the Virginia Company, founded in 1606 to develop a colony at Jamestown, Virginia, in the New World.