The overthrow of the Pequots was a cardinal event in the planting of New England. It removed the chief obstacle to the colonization of the Connecticut coast, and brought the inland settlements into such unimpeded communication with those on tide-water as to prepare the way for the formation of the New England confederacy. Its first fruits were seen in the direction taken by the next wave of migration, which ended the Puritan exodus from England to America. About a month after the storming of the palisaded village there arrived in Boston a company of wealthy London merchants, with their families. The most prominent among them, Theophilus Eaton, was a member of the Company of Massachusetts Bay. Their pastor, John Davenport, was an eloquent preacher and a man of power. He was a graduate of Oxford, and in 1624 had been chosen vicar of St. Stephen's parish, in Coleman street, London. When he heard that Cotton and Hooker were about to sail for America, he sought earnestly to turn them from what he deemed the error of their ways, but instead he became converted himself and soon incurred the especial enmity of Laud, so that it became necessary for him to flee to Amsterdam. In 1636 he returned to England, and in concert with Eaton organized a scheme of emigration that included men from Yorkshire, Hertfordshire, and Kent. The leaders arrived in Boston in the midst of the Antinomian disputes, and although Davenport won admiration for his skill in battling with heresy, he may perhaps have deemed it preferable to lead his flock to some new spot in the wilderness where such warfare might not be required. The merchants desired a fine harbour and good commercial situation, and the reports of the men who returned from hunting the Pequots told them of just such a spot at Quinnipiack on Long Island Sound. Here they could carry out their plan of putting into practice a theocratic ideal even more rigid than that which obtained in Massachusetts, and arrange their civil as well as ecclesiastical affairs in accordance with rules to be obtained from a minute study of the Scriptures. [Sidenote: The colony of New Haven]