Early in the seventeenth century, James I. was king of England. He was a very self-willed man and was unwilling for his subjects to differ from him in religious or political matters. Naturally, all men were not willing to accept his opinions. Some were so unwilling to be dictated to by the king that they preferred to leave their homes in England and go where they could worship according to their own preferences. Some of these men, called Separatists because they had separated themselves from the established church of England, went in 1607 to Holland. There they had full liberty in religious matters, but after a time they became dissatisfied. The Dutch people were not strict enough in the observance of Sunday to please them, and their children were learning Dutch language and customs and would grow up to be Dutch men and women instead of English. These Separatists loved their native land and wanted their children to grow up English, but with their own religious views. Moreover, fighting between Spain and Holland was beginning again after ten years of peace and the Englishmen did not wish to become involved in this war. So they resolved to go to the New World and establish a settlement there. They discussed many places before they decided where to go. They thought of Guiana which Raleigh had described as being fertile of soil and mild of climate, but they remembered his fights with the Spaniards and wished to avoid so troublesome a neighbor. There was the same objection to Florida, where a French colony had been destroyed by the Spaniards. They did not care to go to the English settlement at Jamestown, where the people were devoted to the Established Church of England and observed its forms even more strictly than people in England. They did not wish to go to the far north, for some Englishmen had already tried to settle in Maine and had come home with pitiful tales of their suffering during the severe winters. The Pilgrims, as these English religionists began to be called, from traveling about so much, at last decided to settle between Jamestown and Maine, about the coast of what is now New Jersey. They obtained a charter from the “North Virginia Company,” the Plymouth branch of the Virginia Company, which controlled from 41 to 45 degrees, giving them permission to settle in the southern part of North Virginia. One hundred and two Pilgrims sailed in the Mayflower from Plymouth, England, in September, 1620. One of the men on board the Mayflower was Miles Standish, who was to be the soldier-savior of the northern English colony as John Smith was of the southern one.