This was a time in England and Europe in which religious intolerance was the norm. There were fairly few people who would actually try to maintain that every person had the liberty to follow his or her own conscience. Most followed the direction given by a hierarchy of religious leaders very much in the same way they followed the direction of a hierarchy of lords, earls and kings, and someone who disputed the dominant authority could expect to have problems. But how severe those problems were depended very much on the time and place. In some Catholic countries like Italy or Spain, the problems would be very large. Anyone disputing the Catholic Church's dogma or authority would be reported, interrogated and told to stop. If they agreed, they would be monitored to make sure they were sincere. If they refused to stop, if there was evidence they continued to be heretics, they would be killed to prevent them from endangering the salvation of other people.

England was less harsh. The Church of England had less rigidity than the Catholic Church. Its response to dispute could vary with whoever was Archbishop of Canterbury, and also would vary with the dispute. There were Puritans, who wanted to stay within the church and reform it upon more or less Calvinist lines. But there were also Separatists, who felt they should form a religious community apart from the Church and not try to reform it. The Pilgrims were Separatists, following the preaching of Robert Browne. That they were made to feel unwelcome in England is quite true. Browne and various Brownists were often jailed and sometimes attacked- though they were never burned. Brown and many ( but not all) of the Brownists moved to Leiden to escape this. But though Holland was more tolerant than England ( later Spinoza would live there) , it was not completely welcoming, either. Many of the Brownists were rather poor, and they began to become poorer. After about ten years in Leiden, all the Brownists, both in England and in Holland, had good reason to contemplate crossing the Atlantic for somewhere better.

There were few possibilities presented, like what's now French Guyana. But in 1607 James I had granted tow charters for two joint-stock companies to essentially make money with colonies . One would be called the Virginia Company, and would start Jamestown. The other would be called the Plymoth Company. It tried in 1607 to start a very small colony in what's now Maine, under George Popham. That lasted about a year before falling apart and being abandoned. By 1620, the Plymoth Company was pretty much just a charter. Thomas Weston, a merchant /entrepreneur sympathetic to the Brownists, helped them raise the necessary funds and get James I's authorization to start a colony under the long-disused Plymoth charter. The king didn't "send" them, therefore. They were assured they could worship how they liked, but he also did not endorse their religious beliefs. To say that the Brownists presented enough of a threat to make it desirable to send them away is debatable: they were relatively few, relatively powerless, and ( unlike many English Catholics) thought to be loyal subjects. James could have thought it would tidy up the realm a bit if some of them left. But religion was not the only motivation for the new colony. The joint-stock companies were financial enterprises, and some people joined the Plymoth Company as such. Early 17th c. England was getting pretty overpopulated, and times were getting pretty hard . Even within that first Plymoth colony, there numerous people who weren't Brownists, people simply hoping to make a better living than they'd been able to get in England.

Bernard Bailyn: The Barbarous Years