1567.
Indications of Presbyterian sentiments in the England of Elizabeth are very numerous.[124] They wrought within the Episcopal establishment without producing a severance. Cartwright was a Presbyterian. He contended for the abolition of archbishops, and archdeacons, and would retain only bishops or presbyters to preach the word and pray, and deacons to take care of the poor. Every Church, by which he meant a "certain flock," was to be governed by its own ministers and presbyters, and these were not to be created by civil authority, but chosen by popular election. The directory of government, found in the study of that eminent Puritan after his death, said to be composed by Travers, is in perfect harmony with this Presbyterian scheme. Certain clerical meetings, under the auspices of Cartwright and Travers, took a decided synodical shape.[125] This element continued in the Church under the Stuarts, notwithstanding the efforts of bishops to extinguish it.[126]
Presbyterianism.
Certain Puritans of a Presbyterian turn, formally separated themselves from the Establishment so early as 1567, and met together for Nonconformist worship in Plumber's Hall.[127] An organized Presbytery appears at Wandsworth in 1572,—in the Channel Islands, where the Government of England could not reach it, the system was fully established in 1577; and Presbyterian classes may be traced in Cheshire and Lancashire, Warwick and Northampton, during the last few years of the Tudor dynasty. Organized Presbyterianism is seen but faintly in the early part of the seventeenth century, but Presbyterianism, as a sentiment within the Established Church, is distinctly visible. Nonconformity of another kind was also on the increase at this period. Churches of the Independent and Baptist order may be discovered in Tudor times, but they became more apparent and numerous in the days of the Stuarts. Their rise and progress will be afterwards described.
1640.
How Puritanism glided into a state of separation, and the nonconformist in the Church became a dissenter outside its pale, is curiously illustrated in the Records of the Church assembling in Broadmead, Bristol. In those records is a story of a certain zealous lady of that city named Kelly.[128] "She kept a grocer's shop in High Street, between the Builders' Inn and the High Cross," and that she might bear a testimony against superstitious observances, "she would keep open her shop on Christmas Day, and sit sewing in the face of the sun, and in the sight of all men." Afterwards, when she heard a clergyman she did not like at the parish church, "away she went forth before them all, and said she would hear no more, and never did." Puritan emigrants to New England embarked at Bristol, and would abide with Mrs. Hazzard "if they waited for a wind." Women actually sought to be confined in the parish of a Puritan clergyman, to avoid the ceremonies of "churching and crossing." "The consciences of the good people began to be very weary." Then "it pleased the Lord to stir up some few of the professors of this city to lead the way out of Babylon." "Five persons began to go further, and scrupled to hear common prayer, even four men and one woman." So that in the year 1640, those five persons met together at Mrs. Hazzard's house, "at the upper end of Broad Street, in Bristol, and came to a holy resolution to separate from the worship of the world and times they lived in, and that they would go no more to it."[129] In this case, we see how dissatisfaction with the Established Church gradually led to positive separation, and how extremely feeble, in some instances, was the commencement of organized dissent. But the spirit working in the way just indicated, slowly, and without much notice, came suddenly and boldly on the surface, soon after the Long Parliament had opened.
Presbyterianism.
Though the incumbents of the metropolis were almost all High Churchmen, there were many Puritan lecturers in the city with strong Presbyterian sympathies, supported by wealthy citizens, and in high repute with the multitude. Amongst them, Dr. Cornelius Burgess is a very noticeable man—already mentioned as the fast-day preacher—who, in connection with a lectureship at St. Paul's, held other Church preferment. To him and his brother lecturers may be ascribed the inspiration of much intense public feeling against prelatical assumptions, and against Episcopacy itself,[130] out of which arose an extraordinary memorial, which has attained no small notoriety under the name of the Root and Branch petition.
This petition complained that the offices and jurisdictions of archbishops were the same as in the papal community, "little change thereof being made, except only the head from whence it was derived;" that there was great conformity of the English Church to the Church of Rome in vestures, postures, ceremonies, and administrations; that the liturgy, for the most part, is framed out of the Romish Breviary, Ritual, and the Mass Book; and that the forms of ordination and consecration were drawn from the Romish pontifical.[131] Whoever prepared this document, it was soon submitted to Mr. Bagshawe, of the Inner Temple, member for Southwark, who had obtained great popularity by his lectures against the temporalities of bishops—lectures which brought on him the displeasure of Laud. But Bagshawe, though zealous for the reform of Episcopacy, did not desire to see it abolished. He therefore declined to take charge of the petition, when Mr. John White, his fellow-burgess for Southwark—afterwards the famous chairman of the committee for scandalous ministers—arranged its delivery to the Commons, not however by his own hands, but through Alderman Pennington, a citizen well known for his extreme dislike to the Episcopal Bench.[132]