Penguin History of the United States of America by Hugh Brogan Page A

decisions necessary for its safety and her own. Therefore to disobey her too conspicuously, or to question her decisions too publicly, or too frequently to demand more than she was prepared to give, was to verge on disloyalty, if not rebellion.
    Unfortunately many Englishmen and Englishwomen did demand more. Protestantism had a built-in democratic tendency in that it encouraged the literate to search the Scriptures for themselves and act in the light of what they found there. Thus strengthened by what they took to be God’s word, the Puritans frequently refused to conform their conduct to the Queen’s views: some of them dared to rebuke her to her face. Nor was even she wholly reasonable, consistent or realistic. Her own religious tastes (it would probably be excessive to speak of her convictions) were conservative, and as her reign continued she gradually found bishops who, sharing them, were happy to attempt to force them on her subjects. Hence the promotion to Canterbury of the bullying Whitgift and to London of the policeman-like Bancroft. Furthermore Elizabeth, like almost everyone else, clung to the old medieval dream of religious unity. The Church of England must be the Church of all Englishmen: the whole nation at prayer. She would not admit that the ideals of uniformity and comprehensiveness were at war with each other, but even in her lifetime Archbishop Whitgift’s conservatism and rigidity drove many of the devout to ‘separate’ from the sinful national church – to resign from it, as it were, and organize little ‘separatist’ churches of their own (they were called ‘conventicles’). Bishops grew more and more unpopular; and in the seventeenth century the ideal of a comprehensive national church crashed to the ground, bringing the dream of national religious uniformity (whether episcopalian or presbyterian) to ruin with it.
    At the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign the Puritans were, in a sense, no less (and no more) than the Protestant party itself. They saw that the country was still for the most part either Catholic or indifferent. Their business was to bring the full Reformation to pass; to achieve the conversion of England. For years and years they tried to persuade their Queen to join them in the work by reorganizing the church on presbyterian lines and byusing her unquestioned right to compel her subjects to be saved. They quite agreed with her that a uniform, all-embracing national church was demanded by both reason and religion; only it must be governed on the lines that Calvin inferred from the Bible. Elizabeth, however, steadily refused to co-operate. So the Puritans were compelled, after some nasty brushes with the law, to turn from political to purely pastoral labours. As they were not to have the chance to compel their countrymen to come in, they tried to preach them in. By 1603 they were succeeding spectacularly.
    The English Reformation had many causes, but its soul was the desire to renew the Christian life of the people, and Puritanism was that soul’s instrument. Episcopacy was resisted because it acted as an umbrella for such abuses as pluralism, non-resident clergy, corrupt church courts and a ‘dumb dog’, non-preaching, unlearned ministry, all of which came between the English and the good news of salvation. Even before their rebuff at the Queen’s hands the Puritan ministers had shown themselves adept at pastoral work; thereafter they moved through the land, devoted to uprooting sin from the hearts of the congregations. Their chief tool was the sermon. It had played little part in pre-Reformation church life. Now a conscientious minister would expect to have to preach once every day, and at least twice on the Sabbath; and preaching was extraordinarily popular. It was something new, and people flocked to hear good speakers – so much so that ‘gadding about to sermons’ was a vice much denounced by the conservative. 2 But the godly had the last word. Serious and