PROVIDENCE ISLAND is a small volcanic island off the coast of Nicaragua. A colony was planted there in 1630 by a small jointstock company composed of the most prominent lay puritans in England. This venture, the exact contemporary of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, was intended to be the great puritan colony. Providence Island Company members were also intimately involved in helping Massachusetts to get started, but they expected the disappointed New Englanders eventually to leave their cold, rocky refuge for the far more promising Caribbean location.

John Pym, Lord Saye and Sele, the Earl of Warwick and his brother the Earl of Holland, their cousin Sir Nathaniel Rich, Lord Brooke, Lord Mandeville (the Earl of Manchester from 1642), Sir Benjamin Rudyerd, Oliver St. John, Sir Gilbert Gerard, Sir Thomas Barrington, Richard Knightley, Henry Darley, Sir William Waller, Lord Robartes, John Gurdon, and Christopher Sherland made up the core of the company membership; William Jessop was the company secretary. These men drew on the traditions of the great Elizabethan imperialists such as Ralegh but represented broad experience of recent, less individualistic, and more successful ventures through having had leading roles in the Virginia and Bermuda (Somers Islands) Companies. They are well known to history because of their centrality in the resistance to Charles I and in the English Civil War. Their Providence Island venture preoccupied them during the period of Charles I's personal rule and the long interval between the parliaments of 1629 and 1640, and it helped to cement the working relationship that allowed them to move easily into military and parliamentary command as war came to England in the early 1640s.