The colony of Massachusetts came into existence as a religious enterprise. It was never a colony in the way that colonies such as South Carolina and Virginia were; it was a Puritan Commonwealth. Massachusetts would never fit into the commercial and colonial plan that Mother Country England had originally intended. Massachusetts had no staple crop that interested England and the colony was full of settlers who would do everything in their power to resist the authority of England. With all these problems and disadvantages that seemed to have plagued colonial Massachusetts, none of them would defer Massachusetts from becoming a successful colony to Mother Country England.
The appointment of William Laud, by Charles I, as the Bishop of Wells in 1626 and the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1633 changed the relationship between the Puritans and the hierarchy of the Church of England forever. Laud was intolerant to the Puritan religion and began the drive to rid England of the religion. The re-emerging of the Catholics and their rituals also worried the Puritans. Before the appointment of Laud, the Puritans had no intentions of disassociating themselves from the Church of England. They wanted only to purity it, to purge from it the "popish" elements of ceremony. The Puritans than began secure their escape to America as their fate in England seemed dim.
The Massachusetts Bay Company was founded in 1629 by one hundred-ten Puritans. Unlike any company before it, the Massachusetts Bay Company sent five ships led by John Endcott filled with supplies one year before the permanent settlers arrived to build up a town and clear the area for settlement. While the land was being cleared in the New World for the coming settlers, William Fiennes, Viscount Saye, and Sele acquired the necessary legal charter, known as the Cambridge Agreement, for colonizing the area. Within a year eleven ships filled with over a thousand Puritans, would be bound for the New World.
