From Russell Shorto’s review of author Nick Bunker’s Making Haste from Babylon: The Mayflower Pilgrims and Their World: A New History in today’s Sunday New York Times Book Review:

…Bunker, an Englishman devote[s] himself largely to the prehistory of the men and women who founded the colony. His book roams through archives and repositories in the British Isles. From county record offices and church account books, he teases out traces of William Brewster, William Bradford and the other principals who would later found the colony. His objective is to answer the very good question, Who were these people?

In their day the men and women we refer to as Pilgrims were called Separatists or Brownists, but what was the nature of their separation from the Puritan Protestantism that had rooted itself in England, and who was the Robert Browne who gave rise to the movement? How well known were these religious radicals? What was their role in English society? Exactly how were they persecuted? Where did they flourish? And how, one might add, could this new information alter the Pilgrims’ legacy?

…It is certainly true that religious belief—the desire not merely to purify the Church of England, as the Puritans wanted, but to break away altogether—was central to the Pilgrims. Separatism, however, was rooted not simply in the Bible. It was, Bunker shows, a form of Christianity blended “with ideas about gentility and good government, and seasoned with Greek and Roman ideals of republican virtue.”

And the Pilgrims were also businessmen. Unlike many other populist religious movements, Separatism, Bunker tells us, “was never the creed of the penniless.” Its founders were of the gentry. But what did that mean? The leaders of the American Pilgrims hailed from in and around Nottinghamshire in the East Midlands. It was a troubled land — not a place of mythic sentimentality, Bunker says, but “the old, feral England.” Unyielding forests, soggy fields, poor harvests and epidemics created a situation in which landowning gentlemen, desperate to maintain honor, could slip into debt, despair, sin, ruin. In such a vortex, Bunker argues, some people got religion and began pointing moralistic fingers at their neighbors.

The decision to flee thus had both religious and financial motivations. The Pilgrims’ voyage to America was a business venture whose backers — few of them especially religious — expected a return on their investment. And like millions after them, the Pilgrims themselves had a real-world American dream in mind, which was centered on the North American beaver. In the 1620s, a single beaver pelt fetched the same amount of money required to rent nine acres of English farmland for a year. For a time, the Pilgrims capitalized on that raw material: in the 1630s, they shipped 2,000 beaver pelts to England.

Bunker, a former investment banker, also shows the Pilgrims as pawns in a larger geopolitical game. James I despised both them and the Puritans (“very pestes in the Churche & common-weale,” he called them). The king might well have forbidden the Mayflower from sailing, but his secretary of state, Sir Robert Naunton, spoke to him on behalf of the religious radicals and their colonizing mission. “Without bases in America, England could not challenge Spanish control of the western ocean,” Bunker writes. “And without the supplies New England might provide, the Royal Navy could not put to sea. For Naunton, most likely it was all a matter of politics and naval doctrine, with Calvinism adding the impetus of zeal.” Bunker’s research reveals that the Pilgrim leaders were quite connected to events in England, and also that Separatism had a broader geographic scope than has long been thought.

…Having set himself the task of discovering who the real Pilgrims were, Bunker leaves it to others to square his findings against the Pilgrims of legend. So how do they measure up? Bunker shows them to be heartfelt Christians, but at the same time sectarians, as small-minded as any others, intent on getting their way within the petty struggles that split wattle-and-daub villages dotting the English countryside a long, long time ago. Pinned to the canvas of history by the points of so many archival records, they come across as relevant, certainly. But mythic? Not so much.