Perth Assembly was a controversial book published by the
Pilgrims in
Leiden
Leiden (; in English and archaic Dutch also Leyden) is a city and municipality in the province of South Holland, Netherlands. The municipality of Leiden has a population of 119,713, but the city forms one densely connected agglomeration wit ...
in 1619 the year before they departed in the
Mayflower
''Mayflower'' was an English ship that transported a group of English families, known today as the Pilgrims, from England to the New World in 1620. After a grueling 10 weeks at sea, ''Mayflower'', with 102 passengers and a crew of about 30, r ...
for Massachusetts; the book was smuggled into Scotland in wine vats. King
James I James I may refer to:
People
*James I of Aragon (1208–1276)
*James I of Sicily or James II of Aragon (1267–1327)
*James I, Count of La Marche (1319–1362), Count of Ponthieu
*James I, Count of Urgell (1321–1347)
*James I of Cyprus (1334–13 ...
was offended by the book which was critical of the
Five Articles of Perth
The Five Articles of Perth was an attempt by King James VI of Scotland to impose practices on the Church of Scotland in an attempt to integrate it with those of the Church of England. This move was unpopular with those Scots who held Reformed vi ...
which had been ratified by the General Assembly in Perth in 1618 and forced the episcopacy form of church governance on Scotland. The printer was Johannes Sol ("Soule") and the primary publishers were Thomas Brewer and
William Brewster who went into hiding in 1619 before surreptitiously departing for Plymouth to escape threat of arrest. Other Pilgrims, such as
George Soule (presumably the brother of the printer Johannes Sol), were also believed to have been involved in the printing of the book, and the controversy caused them to flee on the Mayflower and disguise their origins. Johannes Sol's apprentice, Edward Raban, fled to Scotland in 1620 with Sol's pregnant widow after his death in a printing ink accident.
[Soule Kindred Newsletter Vol. XXXXV, No. 4 Fall 2011 https://soulekindred.org/resources/Documents/Newsletters/PDF-Newsletters/Vol.-45-No.-4-Fall-2011.pdf]
References
External links
Full copy of the Perth Assembly online{{Mayflower passengers and related topics, state=expanded
1619 books
17th-century Christian texts
Puritanism in England
English emigration
English colonization of the Americas
History of the Church of England
17th century in the Dutch Republic
Calvinism in the Dutch Republic
British expatriates in the Dutch Republic
Plymouth Colony
New England Puritanism