Once they got to America, they did an excellent job of persecuting each other and the American Indians who saved them from starving to death. Prior to that, they were persecuted by the Catholics. Whether or not they were persecuted by other Protestant sects in Europe, I do not know.
The Puritans (of Plymouth Colony fame) fled Protestant England.
Need to brush up on your religious history a bit there, buddy. England was a protestant (Anglican) country, not a Catholic one. Catholics were prevented by law from even owning property.
To set the record straight, the Indians may have saved the Puritans in Massachusetts from starvation that first winter, but the colonists were pretty much on their own. One of their major problems with the Indians was getting ambushed while they were working in their own fields they themselves had cleared and planted.
Journals from those times are replete with accounts of whole families and settlements being killed or kidnapped. Many were marched off to Canada in the dead of winter and held as hostages.
I would say that the Indians of those times were "terrorists" but we only hear one side of the story today. The reason tribes were decimated and driven further west was mostly a matter of self-preservation on the part of the settlers.
And just where were the Catholics supposed to have done this persecuting. The Pilgrims were English, you know, and there hadn't been a Catholic ruler in England since before Queen Elizabeth. The Pilgrims migrated over 50 years after the time of Mary Tudor, during her reign the Pilgrims hadn't come into existence. The Pilgrims were persecuted by the Anglicans (Episcopalians).
Go back and put on your hood and burn another cross.
Anachronism. Puritanism sprang up several decades after Roman Catholicism was outlawed in England.
In the colonies, Maryland's royal charter permitted freedom of religion, which allowed Catholics to worship unmolested by the authorities. Puritans from New England moved into Catholic-but-tolerant Maryland and, after procuring a Protestant legislative majority, managed to outlaw Catholicism even there. This image of "biting the hand that feeds you," is similar to what the Albanian immigrants did to Kosovo.
Lovely people, the Puritans. Real role models.