Whitgift had been a vocal opponent of Cartwright. He believed that the matter of church governance was
adiaphora, a "matter indifferent", and that the church should accommodate with the state in which the church was located. The Church of England was located in a monarchy, so the church should adopt an episcopal style of government.
Renewed calls for Presbyterianism (1545–1622), a Scottish churchman who came to England to avoid the effect of Scotland's Black Acts of 1583–1585, encouraged the English Puritans to seek further reforms to the Church of England. The years 1583–1585 saw the brief ascendancy in Scotland of
James Stewart, who claimed the title of Earl of Arran. This period saw Scotland pass the Black Acts, which outlawed the
Second Book of Discipline. As a response, many Scottish ministers, including
Andrew Melville, sought refuge in England. These refugees participated in the English conventicles (as did John Field, once released from prison) and convinced many English Puritans that they should renew their fight to establish presbyterianism in England. As such, in the 1584 Parliament, Puritans introduced legislation to replace the
Book of Common Prayer with the
Genevan Book of Order and to introduce presbyterianism. This effort failed. At this point, Field, Travers, and Cartwright were all free and back in England and determined to draft a new order for the Church of England. They drafted a
Book of Discipline, which circulated in 1586 and which they hoped would be accepted by the 1586 Parliament. Again, the Puritan effort failed in Parliament.
Martin Marprelate, 1588–1589, and response In 1588–1589, a series of virulently anti-episcopal tracts were published under the
pseudonym of
Martin Marprelate. These Marprelate tracts, likely published by
Job Throckmorton and Welsh publisher
John Penry, denounced the bishops as agents of
Antichrist, the strongest possible denunciation for Christians. The Marprelate tracts called the bishops "our vile servile dunghill ministers of damnation, that viperous generation, those scorpions." In the mid- to late-1580s several defenders of the Puritans in the English government died: Francis Russell, 2nd Earl of Bedford in 1585; Robert Dudley, 1st Earl of Leicester in 1588; and
Francis Walsingham in 1590. In these circumstances,
Richard Bancroft (Whitgift's
chaplain) led a crackdown against the Puritans. Cartwright and eight other Puritan leaders were imprisoned for 18 months, before facing trial in the
Star Chamber. The conventicles were disbanded. Some Puritans followed Browne's lead and withdrew from the Church of England. Several of those separatists were arrested in the woods near
Islington in 1593, and
John Greenwood and
Henry Barrowe were executed for advocating separatism. Followers of Greenwood and Barrowe fled to the Netherlands and formed the basis of the
Pilgrims, who later founded the
Plymouth Colony in North America. 1593 also saw the English parliament pass the
Religion Act (35 Elizabeth c. 1) and the
Popish Recusants Act (35 Elizabeth c. 2), which provided that those worshipping outside the Church of England had three months in which to either conform to the Church of England or else abjure the realm, forfeiting their lands and goods to the crown, with failure to abjure being a capital offence. Although these acts were directed against Roman Catholics who refused to conform to the Church of England, on their face they also applied to many of the Puritans. Although no Puritans were executed under these laws, they remained a constant threat and source of anxiety to the Puritans.
Drive to create a preaching ministry (bef. 1523–1589), who founded
Emmanuel College, Cambridge in 1584 to promote the training of Puritan ministers. One of the most important aspects of the Puritan movement was its insistence on having a preaching ministry throughout the country. At the time of the Elizabethan religious settlement, less than 10 per cent of the 40,000 English parish clergy was licensed to preach. (Since the time of the repression of the
Lollards in the 14th century, it had been illegal for an
ordained parish priest to preach to his congregation without first obtaining a licence from his bishop.) Elizabeth had been no fan of preaching and preferred a church service focused on the
Prayer Book liturgy. However, many of Elizabeth's bishops did support the development of a preaching ministry and, aided by wealthy laymen, were able to dramatically expand the number of qualified preachers in the country. For example, Sir
Walter Mildmay founded
Emmanuel College, Cambridge in 1584 to promote the training of preaching ministers. The great Puritan preacher and scholar
Laurence Chaderton was the principal of the college. He was close friends and associates of Cartwright,
Richard Rogers,
Richard Greenham,
John Dod, and
William Perkins, each of whom had a major influence on the rise of English Puritanism.
Frances Sidney, Countess of Sussex similarly founded
Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge in 1596. Emmanuel and Sidney Sussex became the homes of academic Puritanism. (1531–1589), who founded
Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge in 1596 to promote the training of Puritan ministers Although the number of preachers increased dramatically over the course of Elizabeth's reign, there were still insufficient preachers in the country. A layman who wanted to hear a
sermon might have to travel to another parish in order to find one with a preaching minister. When he got there, he might find that the preaching minister had shortened the liturgy to allow more time for preaching. Trained ministers were more likely to offer
extemporaneous prayer instead of reading the set prayer out of the
Prayer Book. Thus two different styles developed in the Church of England: a traditional style, focused on the liturgy of the
Book of Common Prayer; and the Puritan style, focused on preaching with less ceremony and shorter or extemporaneous prayers. One of the greatest of the Elizabethan Puritan preachers was
Henry Smith, whose eloquence in the pulpit won him the epithet "Silver-tongued Smith".
Experimental predestinarianism Following the suppression of Puritanism in the wake of the Marprelate tracts, Puritans in England assumed a more low-key approach in the 1590s. Ministers who favoured further reforms increasingly turned their attention away from structural reforms to the Church of England, instead choosing to focus on individual, personal holiness. Theologians such as
William Perkins of Cambridge continued to maintain the rigorously high standards of previous Puritans but focused on improving individual, as opposed to collective, righteousness. A characteristic Puritan focus during this period was for more rigorous keeping of the Christian Sabbath. Perkins is credited with introducing Beza's version of
double predestination to the English Puritans, a view which he popularized through the use of a chart he created known as "The Golden Chain". (1558–1602), a Puritan theologian who espoused strict moral standards during the reign of
Elizabeth I and championed "experimental predestinarianism" In 1970,
R. T. Kendall labelled the form of religion practised by Perkins and his followers as experimental predestinarianism, a position that Kendall contrasted with credal predestinarianism. Kendall identified credal predestinarians as anyone who accepted the Calvinist teaching on predestination. Experimental predestinarians, however, went beyond merely adhering to the doctrine of predestination, teaching that it was possible for individuals to know experimentally that they were saved and a member of God's elect predestined for eternal life. (The credal predestinarians believed that only some were destined for eternal life, but that it was impossible in this life to identify who was elect and who was reprobate.) Puritans who adopted Perkins' brand of experimental predestinarianism felt obliged, once they had undergone a religious process to attain knowledge of their election, to seek out like-minded individuals who had undergone similar religious experiences. In time, some Puritan clergymen and laity, who increasingly referred to themselves as "the godly", began to view themselves as distinct from the regular members of the Church of England, who had not undergone an emotional conversion experience. At times, this tendency led for calls for "the godly" to separate themselves from the Church of England. While the majority of Puritans remained "non-separating Puritans", they nevertheless came to constitute a distinct social group within the Church of England by the turn of the 17th century. In the reign of King
James I, "the Puritan" as a type was common enough that fiercely Anglican playwright
Ben Jonson could satirize Puritans in the form of the characters Tribulation and Ananais in
The Alchemist (1610) and Zeal-of-the-land Busy in
Bartholomew Fair (1614). So by the end of the Elizabethan era, Anglican and Puritan factions were at times in deep conflict, as many of the Puritans would often satirize the Anglican church, with its rituals and bishops as being subversive of true religion and godliness. At the same time the Puritan movement had ministers and magistrates that held to either congregational, presbyterial, or episcopal forms of church government. The climax and the brilliance of the Elizabethan Puritan movement can be especially seen in three of the greatest men of that era and their works: 1. The theological treatises of William Perkins. 2. The sermons of Henry Smith. And 3. The poetry of
Edmund Spenser. ==Notable Puritans==