“If Separatists were per force to undertake the enterprise, it was desirable that they should be persons not individually conspicuous, or obnoxious to displeasure in high quarters; and when Brewster, and not Robinson, accompanied the first settlers to New England, it was a result, if not due to the intrigues of the Adventurers, certainly well according with their policy. Brewster was forgotten in England; nor had he ever been known as a literary champion of his sect. The able and learned Robinson was the recognized head of the _Independents_, a rising and militant power. He had an English, if indeed it may not be called a European reputation. No name could have been uttered in courtly circles with worse omen to the new settlement. The case was still stronger when, having lost their way, and in consequence come to need another patent, the colony was made a dependency of the Council for New England, instead of the Virginia Company. In the Virginia Company, laboring under the displeasure of the king, and having Sandys and Wriothesley for its leaders, there was a leaven of popular sentiment. The element of absolutism and prelacy was more controlling in the councils of the rival corporation. “From these circumstances the quick instinct of trade took its lesson. To the favor of the Council for New England, with Sir Ferdinand Gorges at its head, and the king taking its part against Sir Edward Coke and the House of Commons, the Merchant-adventurers were looking for benefits which some of them had no mind to hazard by encouraging their colony to exhale any offensive odor of schism. This gives us an insight into the policy of that action to which Robinson referred when, in a letter to Brewster, now brought by Winslow, he wrote: ‘I persuade myself that for me, they of all others are unwilling I should be transported, especially such of them as have an eye that way themselves, as thinking if I come there their market will be marred. And for these Adventurers, if they have but half the wit to their malice, they will stop my course when they see it intended.’ “In these circumstances, also, we find an explanation of the selection of a minister ‘not the most eminent and rare,’ and such as Cushman and Winslow could agree to take only ‘to give content to some in London.’ To send a clergyman avowedly of the state church was a course not to be thought of. The colonists could not be expected to receive him. The best method for their purpose was, to employ some one of a character and position suited to get possession of their confidence, and then use it to tone down their religious strictness, and, if circumstances should favor, to disturb the ecclesiastical constitution which they had set up.