Other Pilgrims in Leiden: Hugh Goodyear and the English Reformed Church

Abstract

When the citizens of seventeenth-century Leiden spoke of “the English church here,” they referred in most cases to the English Reformed Church, not to the historically-famous church of the Pilgrim Fathers. In the first decades of the seventeenth century, the Dutch city of Leiden included a sizable English and Scottish community, but one divided into two distinct religious factions, namely the Separatist Pilgrims and the non-separating Reformed Church. The enthusiasm to celebrate the deeds of the Mayflower Pilgrims may obscure Leiden's larger community of British strangers and sojourners; and not Leiden alone, for the English churches of Leiden were but two of more than two dozen such churches in early seventeenth-century Netherlands. John Robinson and his congregation arrived at Leiden in 1609, two years after the older English-Scottish community of the city had begun its own church life.