Free The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728 by Robert Middlekauff

Thomas Cartwright from Cambridge in 1570, by Dean Whitgift, Vice Chancellor of the University and the future Archbishop of Canterbury. But Commons provided the main arena for this contest and Parliament, encouraged by the Queen, rejected all the Puritan demands for reform of doctrine and ecclesiastical polity. 5
The Commons contained Puritans and men sympathetic to their cause. One, William Strickland, in 1571, made the mistake of introducing a bill to reform the Prayer Book, and was temporarily barred from the House at the order of the Council for his temerity. The Queen also squelched other attempts to modify the established religion in the next year. 6
The Puritans could not stop trying to make the Church godly but they couldand didgive up most of their attempts to work through Parliament. When they realized that they could not make Parliament serve reform, they began to work from within the Church, first by holding "prophesyings," weekly discussion meetings which brought clerics and laymen together to open the Scriptures. Elizabeth recognized that such devices threatened her control of the Church, and when in 1577 Archbishop Grindal refused to halt them she suspended him from his administrative duties. His successor, John Whitgift, despised Puritans and took on the task of stopping these meetings without any hesitation. Whitgift invigorated the Court of High Commission and set it after clergymen who refused to subscribe to key articles. In particular the Court demanded that they accept Royal Supremacy,

 

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the Thirty-nine Articles, the Prayer Book, and the Ordinal. He also presecuted the leaders of the "Classical Movement," so named after the Presbyterian "classis," or synod, which had as its objective the transformation of episcopal polity into Presbyterian organization. By the early 1590's Whitgift had succeeded: Puritanism had not been killed, but it was stifled as Presbyterian leaders, including Cartwright, were jailed and their oganization smashed. Spurred on by the disdainful laughter of Martin Marprelate, who directed his scorn at the bishops, Whitgift pushed his inquisition as far as he could. For the remainder of the reign, the Puritans were in flight. 7
Their hopes for James I in 1603 were touchingly like those they held fifty years before at the accession of Elizabeth. James had been bred on Calvinism and might prove receptive to their appeals for modest reformand for a toleration of their differences. James denied their appeals at the Hampton Court Conference and thereafter their way was rough. Most Puritan clergy conformed but hundreds did not. James's bishops drove them from their pulpits, suppressed their meetings, and rejected their suggestions that pluralities be abolished and the clergy be educated. But the worst was to come under Charles I, a pious but dull and vindictive man who left them no hope at all.
So matters stood in England before the Puritan migration. Events had settled very little as far as the critics of the established Church were concerned. In fact they disagreed with the orthodox on the meaning of the events themselves. They also disagreed among themselves. These disagreements were important, for how the Church's history was understood determined in part the attitude held toward the Church as it was presently constituted.
Anglican divines traced the founding of the Church to the time of the Apostles when, they said the Church of Christ was established in England. But though they argued for the Apostolic founding, they denied that the polity of the Church must be identical with that of the primitive Church. They dismissed such a view as one of the many delusions of the Puritans. Nor did they see any reason to discard any practice just because it had fallen into corruption under the Pope. The Puritans were much too rigid: GodJohn Whitgift asserteddid not impose any particular Church organization on men, but rather left it to be

 

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varied according to circumstances of time