John Robinson

John Robinson 1576?-1625, English nonconformist pastor of the Pilgrim Fathers in Holland. In 1592 he entered Cambridge; in 1597 he received a fellowship and was ordained. Soon thereafter he became curate of a church at Norwich. He was a member of the group of separatists at Gainsborough and a little later (c.1606) was in the company of the separatists gathered around William Brewster at Scrooby. He became their pastor and was a leader in the removal (1608) of the Scrooby group to Amsterdam. In 1609 he and his flock moved to Leiden, where they set up a church. Robinson actively encouraged the projected emigration (1620) to America and would have accompanied the Pilgrims had the majority of his congregation gone; with their settlement at Plymouth, Congregationalism was founded in the New World. Robinson was the author of a number of essays and polemics on the separatists' position.

Bibliography: See his works (ed. by R. Ashton, 1851); biography by W. H. Burgess (1920); C. Burrage, New Facts concerning John Robinson (1910).

Robinson, John (c.1575–1625), pastor of the Pilgrim Fathers. Though ordained in the C of E, he became a Puritan, joining the ‘gathered Church’ at Scrooby Manor, Notts. In 1608 he and his congregation fled to the Netherlands. In 1609 he settled at Leiden and from 1617 took an interest in the plans of his community to emigrate to America, as their strict Calvinism had brought them into conflict with the Arminianism of which Leiden was a centre. Though he did not sail in the Mayflower, he encouraged the enterprise.