The resolution so evidently taken by the court, to admit of no half conformity in religion, especially after Laud had obtained an unlimited sway over the king's mind, convinced the puritans that England could no longer afford them an asylum. The state of Europe was not such as to encourage their emigration, though many were well received in Holland. But, turning their eyes to the newly-discovered regions beyond the Atlantic Ocean, they saw a secure place of refuge from present tyranny, and a boundless prospect for future hope. They obtained from the Crown the charter of Massachusetts Bay in 1629. About three hundred and fifty persons, chiefly or wholly of the independent sect, sailed with the first fleet. So many followed in the subsequent years, that these New England settlements have been supposed to have drawn near half a million of money from the mother country before the civil wars.[104] Men of a higher rank than the first colonists, and now become hopeless alike of the civil and religious liberties of England, men of capacious and commanding minds, formed to be the legislators and generals of an infant republic, the wise and cautious Lord Say, the acknowledged chief of the independent sect, the brave, open, and enthusiastic Lord Brook, Sir Arthur Haslerig, Hampden, ashamed of a country for whose rights he had fought alone, Cromwell, panting with energies that he could neither control nor explain, and whose unconquerable fire was still wrapt in smoke to every eye but that of his kinsman Hampden, were preparing to embark for America, when Laud, for his own and his master's curse, produced an order of council to stop their departure.[105] Besides the reflections which such an instance of destructive infatuation must suggest, there are two things not unworthy to be remarked: first, that these chiefs of the puritan sect, far from entertaining those schemes of overturning the government at home that have been imputed to them, looked only in 1638 to escape from imminent tyranny; and, secondly, that the views of the archbishop were not so much to render the Church and Crown secure from the attempts of disaffected men, as to gratify a malignant humour by persecuting them.