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The King and Protestant parties

We turn from the king's ministers to trace the king's policy, It was on questions of Religion that people in those days felt most acutely, and these were amongst the first to occupy James's attention on his accession. We have already noticed the upshot of his attempt to tolerate the Roman Catholics, and we must now see how he dealt with the Protestants. It may be convenient at this stage to say something of Protestant parties in seventeenth-century England. First, there was the Anglican, or, as it came to be called at the time, the Arminian (After the name of Dr. Arminius, a Dutch divine, who died in 1609) party, the strong party in the Church of England, of which Archbishop Laud was later to be the leader. In politics the members of this party were believers in the "divine right" of kings. In matters of Church govern­ment they were strong upholders of the power of the bishops; and they believed that the bishops, by succession from the Apostles, and the priests, through ordination by the bishops, had been given special powers. With them the Communion service was in a special sense a means of grace. Laud, by his extreme intolerance brought, in later years, much odium upon the Anglican party; and its members, partly because of their liking for vestments and a rather elaborate ritual, and partly because of the doctrines held by some of the more extreme amongst them, were suspected by their enemies of being in sympathy, if not in alliance, with the Church of Rome. But the Anglican party included among its members in the seventeenth century some singularly attractive characters, such as George Herbert, the poet, and Lancelot Andrewes, the Bishop of Winchester, and one of those chiefly responsible for the Authorized Version of the Bible; it had interests in the historic side of the English Church and in preserving its continuity from the Early Church; and it did much to improve the order and beauty of the church services throughout England.

And then, secondly, there were the various bodies of people we may group together under the name of Puritan (These people would, however, have repudiated the name in the earlier part of the seventeenth century; indeed it was regarded as a nickname and term of reproach). In dealing with the Puritans three things must be borne in mind. In the first place, many of the popular views held with regard to the Puritans are erroneous, being due to the caricatures • drawn of the Puritans after the Restoration of 1660. The Puritans, for instance, were not all drawn from the inferior social class; on the contrary, many of the best type of English gentlemen of that day held Puritan opinions. They were not averse to all pleasure and amusement. They did not wear their hair short, and did not speak through their noses. Secondly, we must remember that the great majority of Puritans still belonged to the Church of England; the great and final division between Churchman and Nonconformist did not come till the reign of Charles II. Thirdly, the term Puritan includes a large variety of opinions—just after the Civil War it was estimated that there were a hundred and seventy different sects, nearly all belonging to what we now call the Puritan party. Some Puritans were disposed to acquiesce, for instance, in the rule of bishops, if moderately exercised, whilst others detested and made the most violent attacks upon them. Then, especially during and after the Civil War, the Presbyterians became a great force, and wished to impose their system of government by elders and their doctrines on everyone else. The Independents, however, believed in the right of every man to think for himself, and in what they called "liberty for tender consciences", so long as those consciences were not those of Roman Catholics. And, finally, there were—as there are in every movement—various groups of extremists, who, we shall find, were a dangerous element at the time of the Commonwealth.

Chronology
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