Every proscription of the Puritans within the church was accompanied by a crusade against the Brownists without, who were counted sinners above all other men. Though Ralegh in 1593 had estimated the Brownists at twenty thousand, they were by this time in consequence of oppression "about worn out," as Bacon said. Upon those who remained the new persecution broke with untempered severity. Badgered on every side by that vexatious harrying which King James and his ecclesiastics kept up according to promise, the little congregation at Scrooby in 1607 resolved to flee into Holland, where they would be strangers to the speech and to the modes of getting a living, but where they might worship God in extemporary prayers under the guidance of elders of their own choice without fear of fines and prisons. [Sidenote: Toleration in the Low Countries.] [Sidenote: Errours and Induration, p. 27.] That which is most honorable to the Low Countries, from a historical point of view, namely, that their cities were places of refuge for oppressed consciences, was esteemed odious and highly ridiculous in the seventeenth century. In one of the plays of that time there is a humorous proposition to hold a consultation about "erecting four new sects of religion in Amsterdam." The Dutch metropolis was called a cage of unclean birds, and a French prelate contemned it as "a common harbor of all opinions and heresies." At a later period Edward Johnson, the rather bloodthirsty Massachusetts Puritan, inveighs against "the great mingle mangle of religion" in Holland, and like a burlesque prophet shrieks, "Ye Dutch, come out of your hodge podge!" Robert Baylie, in a sermon before the House of Lords as late as 1645, says of the toleration by the Dutch, that "for this one thing they have become infamous in the Christian world." [Sidenote: Flight of the Pilgrims.] To the asylum offered by the Low Countries the Scrooby Separatists resolved to flee. The pack of harriers let loose by James and Bancroft were in full cry. The members of the Scrooby church found themselves "hunted and persecuted on every side," having their houses watched night and day, so that all their sufferings in times past "were but as flea bitings in comparison." But the tyranny that made England intolerable did its best to render flight impossible. In various essays to escape, the Separatists were arrested and stripped of what valuables they had, while their leaders were cast into prison for months at a time. [Sidenote: The Pilgrims in Amsterdam.] [Sidenote: Bradford's Plimoth Plantation 16.]