In his hand was the letter from his brother Eliot, telling him that their father was dead. Tom was too honest to pretend he was sorry. He was twenty-two, and now he was free.

So which should it be? England or America?

On his left lay the great, gray mass of the Tower of London, silent, giving nothing away. Behind him, as he glanced back, the long, high roof of Old St. Paul’s suggested disapproval. But of what? Of himself, no doubt. After all, he’d been sent to London in disgrace.

Thirty years ago, when Adam Master from England’s East Coast and Abigail Eliot from the West Country had first met in London, these two earnest young Puritans had agreed that England’s capital was a shocking place. King Charles I was on the throne; he had a French Catholic wife; he was trying to rule England like a despot, and his new henchman, Archbishop Laud, was determined to make all Englishmen conform to the high ceremonies and haughty authority of an Anglican Church that was papist in all but name. After they married, Adam and Abigail had stuck it out in London for a few years, in the hope that things might get better. But for Puritans the times had only got worse. So Adam and Abigail Master had joined the great migration to America.

Englishmen had been going to Virginia for two generations. By the time Shakespeare’s Globe Theater was performing his plays on the Thames’s south bank, half the population of London were smoking clay pipes of Virginia tobacco. But the number who’d actually left for Virginia was still modest. A few hardy souls had ventured to Massachusetts; other settlements had also started. But it was hardly a migration.

In the second half of King Charles’s reign, however, something completely different occurred. The Puritans of England started leaving. From the south, the east, the west, they gathered in groups, sometimes families, sometimes whole communities, and took ship across the Atlantic. There was hardly a week when a vessel wasn’t sailing from somewhere. From the mid-1630s, King Charles of England lost about a fiftieth of all his subjects in this manner. Gentlemen like Winthrop, young men of means like Harvard, merchants and craftsmen, laborers and preachers, with their wives and children and servants—they all took ship for America, to avoid King Charles and his Archbishop. This was the first real peopling of the American colonies, and it took place in little more than a decade.