The voyage of the Mayflower four centuries ago is a foundational event in American history, but the story began as an English one—full of subterfuge and danger, prison and persecution—inspired by the revolutionary idea of religious freedom. In Stephen Tomkins's riveting account, the Protestant underground movement began under Catholic Queen Mary. When Elizabeth's reforms in the Church of England didn't go far enough, radical Protestants left for the Netherlands, willing to endure poverty for their beliefs. But fearful of losing their "Englishness," they finally founded a colony in the New World, and made religious freedom a bedrock principle of America.