The greater number of those who attacked the episcopal organization of the church advocated the system of Presbyterianism which had been extensively adopted on the Continent and recently introduced into Scotland by the Book of Discipline. November 20, 1572, was erected at Wandsworth, in Surrey, the first presbytery in England; [Footnote: Bancroft, Dangerous Positions, chap, i., quoted in Prothero, Statutes and Constitutional Documents, 247.] from this time forward presbyteries were established here and there by groups of neighboring parishes. Some ten or fifteen years later the larger group, known as the "classis," was introduced; provincial and national "synods" were contemplated by many of the Puritan clergy; and the English church bade fair to be reorganized on Presbyterian lines, without the authority of the law.
This action met the stern opposition of the queen and the Court of High Commission. In 1583 Elizabeth appointed Whitgift archbishop of Canterbury, and under him the law was enforced with rigor. Individual clergymen were deposed or forced to conform; the devotional practices called "exercises," on which Puritanism throve, were forbidden; and although the contest continued, the introduction of Presbyterianism was held in check.
The latter years of Elizabeth's reign saw Puritanism within the church taking on a new activity, by turning from questions of ceremony and church government to questions of morals. The Puritans always stood for greater earnestness and for the abolition of abuses in the church, but as time passed on they brought into greater prominence the ascetic ideal of life; the strict keeping of the Sabbath borrowed from the Jewish ritual became customary; [Footnote: Eggleston, Beginners of a Nation, 123-132.] prevailing immoralities and extravagances were more bitterly reprobated in books, sermons, and parliamentary statutes; and Puritanism took on that unlovely aspect of exaggerated austerity which characterized its most conspicuous manifestations in the seventeenth century.
The great body of men of Puritan tendencies, both clergymen and laymen, were deeply interested in reforming the church of England in liturgy, in organization, and in practices; but they had no wish or intention to break it up, to divide it into different bodies, or to withdraw individually from its membership. They were as completely dominated by the ideal of a single united national church, one in doctrine, organization, and form of worship, as was the queen herself. Nevertheless, a group of men arose among them, under the general name of Independents, to whom the very idea of a national church seemed idolatrous; who found in the Scriptures, or were driven by the logic of their position, to one plan of church government only—the absolute independence of each congregation of Christian believers. They looked back to the little groups of chosen believers in Syria and Asia Minor, the shadowy outlines of whose organization are found in the New Testament; their imagination gave definite shape and their reverence for the Scriptures gave divine authority to these as examples. According to the analogy of biblical times, they looked upon themselves as a remnant of saints, sacred and set apart from a wicked and persecuting world.
Some of these extreme Puritans were under the influence of Robert Browne, a zealous advocate, whose activity lay principally between 1581 and 1586. Others came under the somewhat more systematic teachings of Barrow and Greenwood. Thus it became a fundamental principle of several thousand persons, between 1580 and 1600, to separate themselves from the established church. They are, therefore, known as "Separatists," though they were more commonly called at that time, as a term of reproach, by the names of their leaders, "Brownists" or "Barrowists." They met in "conventicles," and even strove to form more permanent congregations by gathering in secret places, or sometimes openly, in defiance of the authorities. A churchman of the time says that they teach "that the worship of the English church is flat idolatry; that we admit into our church persons unsanctified; that our preachers have no lawful calling; that our government is ungodly; that no bishop or preacher preacheth Christ sincerely and truly; that the people of every parish ought to choose their bishop, and that every elder, though he be no doctor nor pastor, is a bishop." [Footnote: Paule, Life of Whitgift (1612), 43, quoted in Prothero, Statutes and Constitutional Documents, 223.]
In times when church and state were one, such teaching could not be endured. If the Puritans were scourged with whips the Separatists were lashed with scorpions. Their teachers were silenced and imprisoned, and Barrow and Greenwood were, in 1587, hanged at Tyburn. Their congregations were broken up and attendants at their conventicles were fined, deprived of their property, and thrown into prison, where they died by the score. Before Elizabeth's reign was over, the Separatists had gone into exile or become but a persecuted remnant, so far, at least, as outward manifestation extended; though one can scarcely doubt that among Puritans generally, and even, perhaps, among those who still adhered to the established church, were many who shared their convictions. It is to be remembered that the Independents and all the new sects which were formed in England later in the seventeenth century, as well as the Puritans of New England, organized themselves on the basis of independent congregations of Christian believers.
The close of the sixteenth century saw the contrast between the Anglican churchman on the one hand and the Puritan and Separatist on the other becoming more harsh, their incompatibility more evident. Fifty years earlier episcopacy and ceremonialism seemed to most Anglicans comparatively unimportant in themselves. They rather blamed the Puritans for making a difficulty about matters indifferent, and for opposing the civil authority in things pertaining to conscience; but did not quarrel with them on religious questions. But a generation of disputes, the development of fundamental principles, the need for justification of a position already taken, drove both parties into a more dogmatic attitude. The high-church party in the established church now began to assert the divine appointment of the episcopal office, to lay stress on the doctrine of the apostolic succession, and gradually to reintroduce much symbolic ceremonial.
The Puritans, on the other hand, were more than ever convinced that the system they advanced was based upon divine authority; and that the church as it stood was founded upon human regulation only and must be forced, if it could not be persuaded, to change its system. Still greater clearness was given to this division of parties by the theological contest that came into existence between 1600 and 1620. The Puritans were almost completely Calvinist, and they claimed that the established church itself had always been so. On the other hand, the Anglican leaders of the early seventeenth century were Arminian, and this form of theological doctrine was asserted by all those who defended the existing organization and ceremonial practices of the church. [Footnote: Makower, Constitutional History of the Church of England, 75.] Thus the breach between the Puritan and the churchman was now so wide that James I., indolent and arrogant for all his toleration and learning, did nothing—perhaps could do nothing—towards its closing. He said of the Puritans, at the Conference at Hampton Court in 1604: "I shall make them conform themselves or I will harry them out of this land, or else do worse." [Footnote: Gardiner, Hist, of England, I., 157.] He disappointed and angered them, drove them into opposition to his civil rule as well as to his church policy, and strengthened their number and their position by his treatment of Parliament, whose interests and theirs had come to be inseparable.
All the "antagonisms, religious and political," of the reign of James were intensified in that of Charles I. The new king was more autocratic and more unsympathetic with his subjects; Parliament was more self- assertive and more determined to impose its wishes upon king and ministers; the authorities of the established church were more intolerant towards the Puritans and milder towards the Catholics. The Puritans, on the other hand, were more convinced that the Anglican church was retrograding towards Catholicism, and more determined to destroy episcopacy if they should ever be able to do so.
The freest opportunity of the established church to destroy Puritanism came during the period of the personal government of Charles, from 1629 to 1640, when Parliament had no meetings, and when the Court of Star Chamber, the High Commission, and the Privy Council were the all- powerful instruments of an administration sympathetic with the high- church party. The oppressions of the Puritans were now at their height, and the prospect of ever obtaining freedom to worship as they chose seemed the darkest. With the most prominent liberal and Puritan leaders imprisoned for their political opinions, like Sir John Eliot, or lying in prison, crushed under enormous fines, like Prynne; with the courts subservient to the royal will; with court preachers declaring the duty of passive obedience to the government; with Laud guiding the policy of the king in all ecclesiastical matters,—the state of the Puritans might well seem hopeless, and they might well look towards some distant land as a place for the establishment of a purified national church.