Henry Nicholis

In 1540 he moved to Emden, where he prospered in business for twenty years, though he traveled to the Netherlands, England and elsewhere with commercial and missionary objectives.

[2] His activities in England contributed to the Puritan controversies that formed the backdrop of Queen Elizabeth I's reign.

He worked through powerful friends to bring about change: Christopher Plantin, Abraham Ortel who called himself Ortelius, and the genre painter and political cartoonist Pieter Brueghel the Elder.

The outward trappings of his system were merely Anabaptist; but he anticipated a good many later speculations, and his followers were accused of asserting that all things were ruled by nature and not directly by God, of denying the dogma of the Trinity, and repudiating infant baptism.

They held that no man should be put to death for his opinions, and apparently, like the later Quakers, they objected to the carrying of arms and to anything like an oath; and they were quite impartial in their repudiation of all other churches and sects, including Brownists and Barrowists.