Conference was followed by the Convocation of 1604, and the passing of the famous hundred and forty-one canons, which enforced uniformity under more rigorous penalties than ever. The Puritans beheld all their burdens bound with a double and galling force upon their necks.

Bancroft, moreover, was made primate in the same year, and they well understood the significance of this fact. Ever since the notorious sermon at Paul's Cross in 1588-a sermon, the purport of which James, then in the heat of his Presbyterian zeal, had protested against from Scotland-Bancroft was known as the leader of the extreme Prelatist party. He had announced, so far back as that year, the new ground which the controversy was destined to take up on the Church side. He had struck the chord of a hostile dogmatism, which, however strange in its first utterance, gradually passed into a general argument and watchword. Bishops, he maintained, were a distinct order from priests, and possessed superiority over them jure divino. Prelacy, in short, was of special divine appointment. This was a shaft into the ranks of the Puritans which could scarcely fail to excite commotion, considering the course which the argument had hitherto taken.

It was some time, however, before the new dogmatism took root in the ecclesiastical mind, and germinated into strength and consistency. It scarcely did so during the course of Bancroft's own primacy. His archiepiscopal rule was less distinguished by any intellectual change in the character of the controversy, than by its coarse and imperious system of repression. He himself proved more of an ecclesiastical dictator than anything else. Persecution was his active weapon.

In the previous reign there had no doubt been persecution, but there had also been argument—a fair field of debate, in which the highest intellects of the respective sides were pitched against one another-by no means to the disadvantage of the Church. But mere offence and violence now became the order of the day. Hundreds of ministers were suspended, and laymen as well as clergymen imprisoned. A bencher of Gray's Inn ventured to defend a minister who had petitioned the House of Commons, and he himself, at Bancroft's instance, was apprehended and immured in jail for life. The Puritans suffered, but did not yield, and their sufferings gradually won them popular sympathy and respect.

Hitherto they had been only an insubordinate faction in the Church. They had constituted an active but by no means a large party in the country. They were respected for their conscientiousness-they were influential from their clear convictions and their energetic combination; but there is no evidence that in Elizabeth's reign they represented any very general national feeling. Elizabeth herself and her policy were more popular than anything else, while the old Romanism was still in various districts substantially the prevailing religion. But it was the natural tendency both of James's civil and ecclesiastical policy, to invest the Puritan cause with a national and widely spread interest. The indecision of the one, and the want of magnanimity in the other, created an increasing sympathy for those who steadfastly upheld the principles of Protestantism, and were exposed to sacrifices for their consistency. Such a sympathy especially spread among the burgher or citizen class, who had already begun to incline this way in the previous

reign. Many circumstances contributed to the growth of this spirit from the very accession of the Stuarts; but it was only in the reign of Charles that it reached its full increase.

The oppression of James's reign drove many of the more zealous Puritans from the country, first to Holland, and then to the great Western Continent, where they were destined to plant their faith as the seed of a new and powerful civilisation. In 1620 the Mayflower and the Speedwell sailed from Delft Haven, bearing the first Saxon colonists of America, the Pilgrim Fathers. Many were disposed to follow their example. To the Puritan mind, in its stern loyalty to the Bible, and love of self-government according to its own ideal, there was something peculiarly fascinating in the thought of erecting a model state on a distant and unexplored shore. Had free egress been granted, in this and the succeeding reign, to the proud spirits that groaned restlessly under prelatic tyranny at home, it may be a question whether the dangerous element would not have been eliminated from the home society, and the shock of civil war averted. The story of the eight ships that lay in the Thames, bound for New England, in the spring of 1638, on board of which were John Hampden, Oliver Cromwell, and Arthur Haselrig, may serve at least to suggest the possibility of such a result.

It was the whole aim of Bancroft's policy, as we have said, to crush the Puritans. It was inspired by the spirit of the royal saying, "I will make them conform, or else I will harry them out of the land, or else do worse." And Clarendon seems to have believed that, had Bancroft lived, he would have subdued these unruly spirits, and extinguished that

fire in England that had been kindled in Geneva; for "he understood the Church excellently well, and had almost rescued it out of the hands of the Calvinian party."

But it was the fatal destiny of the Stuarts not to be consistent even in misgovernment. On Bancroft's death in 1610, Abbot was appointed to the primacy, and he, Clarendon adds, "unravelled all that his predecessors had been doing for many years. He considered the Christian religion no otherwise than as it abhorred and reviled Popery, and valued those men most who did that most furiously. He inquired but little after the strict observation of the discipline of the Church, or conformity to the articles and canons established, and did not think so ill of the Presbyterian discipline as he ought to have done. His house was a sanctuary to the most eminent of the factious party, and he licensed their most pernicious meetings." Abbot, in fact, was a semi-Puritan, and it is difficult to understand under what mistake James appointed him to the office. It is certainly a singular circumstance in the history of the movement, that it should twice have received a special impulse from the very quarter that was designed to check it. As Grindal undid the work of Parker, so Abbot undid the work of Bancroft, or at least both of them acted as far as they could in the same direction. The primacy was substantially Puritan in the case of both; and had they been permitted a free exercise of their functions, it is difficult to say what might have been the result to the Church of England. This, however, was not permitted to Abbot any more than to Grindal. Like his predecessor, the former not only soon lost the royal favour, but sank into a pitiful and half-disgraceful obscurity, as the uninten

While hunting

tional agent in a mournful disaster. in a park of Lord Zouch's, in Hampshire, he unwarily let fly his arrow, and killed the keeper on the spot. James showed him personal kindness in the circumstances; but the primate, deeply distressed in mind, withdrew altogether from the Council board, where before "his advice was but little regarded."

During the ten years, however, that Abbot retained his place at the head of ecclesiastical affairs, there was a great relaxation in the system of prelatic oppression inaugurated by Bancroft. The Puritan was left in comparative tranquillity. The well-known character of the primate, as in Grindal's time, served as a conscious support to him. He was still left to feel that he belonged to the Church of England, and to cherish the hope that it might one day be comformed to his desires. In any case, while the hand of actual persecution was lifted from him, and his principles not laid under ban, he was content to cherish them in peace, and to wait for their triumph.

That triumph was still distant; and new principles and shapes of party were in the mean time springing up in more menacing and formidable opposition than ever. The spirit which Bancroft had introduced into. the controversy thirty years before, had been silently taking root and growing up in many minds. It would be absurd to ascribe too much importance to the memorable sermon at Paul's Cross; but the echo of it long outlived the preacher, and sentiments in conformity with it had now begun to characterise a large portion of the Anglican clergy. A change of spirit was gradually creeping over the Church. The deeper thoughtfulness and manlier sense of the Elizabethan age had faded away, and given place to a theological intellec