Growth of party spirit. The party line between Anglican and Puritan was not at once sharply drawn. It was only after debates growing ever more acrimonious, after persecutions and numberless exasperations, that the parties in the Church of England fell into well-defined and hostile camps. If there had been some relaxation of the requirements of uniformity, if a conciliatory policy had been pursued by the government, the ultimate division might have been postponed until party spirit had cooled; but in that day blows took the place of words, and words had the force of blows. The queen herself could write to a bishop who scrupled to do what she desired, "By God, I will unfrock you!" and moderation in debate was not to be expected from lesser folk.
Puritanism the party of opposition. When the reformer has warmed to his work he looks about him for new abuses to fall upon. The dominant discontent of any age is prone to spread its wings over other grievances, and feebler movements seek shelter from the strong. Puritanism no doubt gathered momentum from the widespread agrarian and industrial disturbance in this and the preceding reigns. The profit from sheep-raising had induced many manor lords to inclose the wastes on which the peasants had pastured their cattle for ages. The humble copy-hold tenant, having no longer grass for his cows or mast for his pigs, was driven to distress by agricultural progress. In some cases even the common fields, cultivated in allotments from ancient times by the members of the village communities, first as serfs and later as tenants, were turned into sheepwalks, and hamlets of tenants' cottages were torn down to make room for more profitable occupants of the soil. [Note 5.] The worst offenders were the greedy courtiers who had secured the estates of the English monasteries. Workmen ruined by the dissolution of the guilds were added to the ranks of the unhappy. All the discontent begotten of these transitions from mediæval life tended to strengthen the leading opposition—and that leading opposition was Puritanism.
VI.
Widening the field of protest. Puritanism also progressively widened its field of protest. Beliefs that Protestants rejected were symbolized by the vestments of bishop and clergy. Advanced Protestants insisted that the shadows should be banished with the substance, that the symbol should disappear with the dogma. We have seen that in Frankfort the inchoate Puritan party wished to abolish the litany and purge the service book of all the remains of the old religion. This controversy raged in England, and the Puritan side did not at first lack support even among the bishops. But Elizabeth, the real founder of Anglicanism, molded the church to her will, putting down Catholics and Puritans with a hard hand. The more advanced of the party came at length to believe that all "stinted" prayers "read out of a book" were contrary to the purity and simplicity of Christian worship. The hostility of the bishops to that which the Puritans believed to be the cause of God no doubt helped to convince the persecuted party that the episcopal office itself was contrary to Scripture.
Puritanism becomes dogmatic. Most of the Puritans of Elizabeth's time, under the lead of the great Cartwright, became Presbyterian in theory and sought to assimilate the Church of England to the Calvinistic churches of the Continent, holding that theirs was the very order prescribed by the apostles. [Note 6.] Another but much smaller division of the Puritans tended toward independency, finding in the New Testament a system different from that of Cartwright. Both the Presbyterians and those who held to local church government wished to see their own system established by law. Neither faction thought of tolerating Anglican practices if the Anglicans could be put down. The notion of a state church with prescribed forms of worship enforced by law was too deeply imbedded in the English mind to be easily got rid of, and the spirit of persecution pervaded every party, Catholic or Protestant. Every one was sure that divine authority was on his side, and that human authority ought to be.
VII.
Anglicanism becomes dogmatic. A corresponding change began to take place in the Episcopal party. The earlier defenders of Elizabeth's establishment argued, somewhat as Hooker did later, that the "practice of the apostles" was not an "invariable rule or law to succeeding ages, because they acted according to the circumstances of the church in its infant and persecuted state." Episcopal government they held to be allowable, and maintained the attitude of prudent men who justify their compromise with history and the exigency of the time, and advocate, above all, submission to civil authority. But the tendency of party division is to push both sides to more positive ground. There arose in the last years of Elizabeth a school of High-churchmen led by Bancroft, afterward primate, who turned away from Hooker's moderation and assumed a more aggressive attitude. Like the Presbyterians and the Independents and the Catholics, these in turn maintained that their favorite system of church economy was warranted by divine authority, and that all others were excluded.
Failure of Elizabeth's policy. When the High-church leaders had reached the dogmatic assertion of apostolic succession and a divinely appointed episcopal form of government as essentials of a Christian church, the fissure between the two ecclesiastical parties in England was complete. Each had settled itself upon a supposed divine authority; each regarded the other as teaching a theory contrary to the divine plan. Elizabeth's policy of repression had produced a certain organic uniformity, but the civil war of the seventeenth century was its ultimate result.
VIII.
Bitterness of the debate. The controversy between the two Protestant parties naturally grew more bitter as time went on. The silencing of ministers, the Fleet Prison, the inquisitorial Ecclesiastical Commission, and other such unanswerable arguments did not sweeten the temper of the Puritans. The bitterness of the controversy reached its greatest intensity in 1588, when there appeared a succession of anonymous tracts, most of them signed Martin Marprelate. They seem to have been written mainly by the same hand, but their authorship has been a matter of debate to this day.