Well now, last time it was the Elizabethan
settlement, if you remember, and I was trying
to put you an Elizabethan picture of it,
and explain to you some of the factors
which made her resolve that she wasn't going
to change her religious settlement, she wasn't going
to give the Puritans any rope, if one
may put it that way.
Now we are going to look at the
Puritans themselves, carry on with the story seen
through their eyes, and consider the first of
the engagements in which the Puritans tried their
strength, the controversy concerning ceremonies.
Let's pick up this story with the return
of the exiles from the Swiss cities to
which they'd gone, Geneva, Zurich, Strasbourg, well of
course they're not all Swiss, Strasbourg and Frankfurt
are Germany, so is Worms, Basel, Switzerland, cities
in Germany and Switzerland I should be saying,
to which they'd gone.
They came back in 1558, hoping that reformation
would be carried further under Elizabeth than it
had been under Edward VI.
John Knox, that Kenny fellow, writing from Geneva
as soon as the news of the death
of Leary came through, suggested that they should
all work out a common policy, in effect,
a common policy before they went home, and
in effect go home with an ultimatum in
their corporate pocket, all resolved to stand for
the same thing.
But oddly enough, I think it was because
Knox's personal stock was low in the eyes
of some of the exiles, nobody took this
suggestion seriously, and they just went back one
by one, not as an organised body, not
with any organised policy, simply waiting and hoping
and looking to see what in the providence
of God would be forthcoming in the way
of a settlement.
Knox himself wrote a little tract called Admonition
to England, summoning the Queen and the Parliament
of England to set up a preaching ministry,
church discipline, and schools, interesting the humanist touched
there, schools in England as soon as possible.
It seems that nobody in England took any
notice of it.
You'll note, by the way, from what I've
said already, that these Marian exiles have a
Lutheran approach to questions of church order, they've
no objection to bishops, no objection to taking
over an established form of ecclesiastical hierarchy, no
objection to the idea, I should be saying,
of a book of common prayer.
More radical objections were to be developed later,
but they didn't exist at this stage, provided
that the gospel was established, the Marian reformers
would be happy, really, with any form of
church order.
And certainly they're happy that the civil power,
the Queen and her Parliament, should establish the
form of church order that England was going
to exhibit.
They were happy, in other words, to acknowledge
the royal supremacy in matters of religion, and
this must be understood, this was part of
their point of view.
So back they went to England, and what
did they find?
Well, they found, as the years went by,
that Elizabeth, though when she came to the
throne she was only a girl in her
middle twenties, a person you would have expected
to be vulnerable to persuasion, Elizabeth proved unexpectedly
strong-minded for reasons of her own, which
she didn't always make public to her subjects,
she would not go any further in reforming
the prayer book than her act of uniformity
of 1559.
Right from the start, she showed her spirit
by refusing to allow John Knox into the
kingdom, and she showed it also by refusing
to offer any official positions, bishoprics, deaneries, or
what not, to those of the Marian exiles
who had come back from Geneva.
Those who had been of Geneva had been
with that wretched fellow Knox, and they'd been
able to drink of the tradition of their
equally wretched fellow Kelvin, and they were not
fit to hold office in the Church of
England.
That was Elizabeth's mentality, that was her attitude.
At Nathans, fairly common, on page 178 of
Tudor Puritanism, she preferred to see the English
Protestant Church sink into a state of mildly
scandalous torpor, I like that phrase, most of
world Anglicanism is still in it, mildly scandalous
torpor, than to give it capable leadership that
might in time disturb her political equilibrium.
So the Geneva group, who were in fact
the largest group of returned exiles, were not
given any positions of eminence in the Church
of England at all.
But she gave bishoprics to some of the
returned exiles.
The most distinguished of, and the most distinguished
of the exiles who received bishoprics at that
time were Parker, Cox, whom we met at
Frankfurt, Grundle, who'd been at Frankfurt, G-R
-I-N-D-A-L, by the way,
and Jewell, John Jewell, who became Bishop of
Salisbury.
Now, all these men took office as bishops
in the Church of England only after deep
heart-searching.
Because in fact, they disliked the ceremonies of
the Book of Common Prayer, specifically the use
of the surface, and the use of the
Eucharistic vestments, and the sign of the cross
in baptism, and the fact that any saint's
days at all were kept, even scriptural ones,
and the use of the ring in marriage,
and the practice of kneeling at communion.
They wished, as heartily as any of the
brethren at Frankfurt had wished, to get rid
of these features.
They'd become so associated with superstition in the
days when Rome held sway, that it really
didn't seem appropriate, to state it no more
strongly, that a reformed church should retain them.
Furthermore, these nominated bishops found that one condition
which the Queen imposed upon them of taking
office was that they should exchange some of
the endowments of their fees for less wealthy
endowments.
So, in effect, the Queen and her royal
treasury would make on the exchange.
This was something which Elizabeth imposed off her
own bet as a condition of a man
becoming a bishop.
Legally, she was entitled to do that as
supreme governor of the church.
So, the price of taking office for these
men was that they accepted certain ceremonial features
in worship which they didn't like, and they
had to accept the impoverishing of the endowments
of their fees.
They didn't like it one little bit, but
they accepted it, hoping, as, of course, they
were quite entitled to hope, after the state
of things in English religion had changed so
many times in the previous thirty years, they
hoped that there would soon be more reformation
under Elizabeth.
Nobody realised that Elizabeth intended to stand past.
So they took these jobs, they resolved, as
Grimdal wrote in a letter that's quoted on
that in page 179, if you want to
look it up, not, quote, not to desert
our churches for the sake of a few
ceremonies and those not unlawful in themselves.
Well, that sums up the mentality, and so
these men accepted office.
Bishop Ricks ordineries were offered to some others,
too, but they declined them.
Bishop Coverdale, who's taken up the work on
the English Bible where Tyndale left it off,
declined to be an Elizabethan bishop on these
terms.
John Fox, the martyrologist, declined to have a
job in the ecclesiastical establishment, so did Thomas
Sampson, whom we met, you remember, as the
convert, friend and biographer of John Bradford.
And these men simply lived on occasional fees
for preaching and occasional payments for pieces of
writing.
Sampson eventually got a job in Oxford University
as Dean of Christchurch.
But there were quite a number of exiles,
a lot of the Geneva party, who just
weren't offered any jobs of significance at all.
Or rather, who just didn't take the jobs
of significance.
The Geneva people, I'm sorry, that's a misleading
sentence.
The Geneva people, as I said, weren't even
offered them.
These other men, though offered them, didn't take
them.
Well, what happened during the first two or
three years while Elizabeth's establishment was settling down
is that those who didn't want to use
the offensive ceremonies and where the surplus and
the Eucharistic vestments just didn't.
Communications throughout England, remember, at this time were
bad.
It was hard in any case to keep
tabs on what men were doing in the
parish churches of the country.
And it was easy enough to get away
with this kind of non-conformity.
But in any case, for the first few
years nobody was taking any action against it.
But that situation didn't last too long.
And now we get to the controversy proper.
Understand again, before we go any further, what
precisely was the issue here.
It wasn't at this stage that a reformed,
well, at least what has gone down in
the books, as a reformed line as contrasted
with a luceran line on ceremonies was being
taken by the Puritans.
They hadn't got at the issue as clear
as that.
And incidentally, this so-called reformed line was
not the line of Calvin, but that's the
detail.
They weren't, in other words, arguing that nothing
ought to be done in the worship of
God for which there isn't explicit scripture precepts
or at any rate approved scripture examples.
All they were saying, at least when the
controversy started, is that these particular ceremonies are
associated with superstition to such an extent that,
on the one hand, nobody ought to be
compelled to use them and, on the other
hand, every wise and right-minded minister will
surely want to discontinue them and ought to
be allowed to do so.
The thought of the surplus, sorry, the use
of the surplus, was supposed to carry with
it the thought that ministers, the people who
used to be called priests, are a quite
distinct sort of person from lay folks with
a special holiness all their own which the
surplus symbolically expressed.
And the sign of the cross on the
child's forehead in baptism was associated with the
thought of mechanical baptismal regeneration, the idea that
when the sign of the cross was made
it did something to the child.
And the use of the ring in marriage,
though it was held, was bound up with
the thought that marriage was a sacrament and
that this was the sign of the sacrament,
the matter, if you like, of the sacrament.
No theologian had ever said this, but it
was a popular idea and the Puritans felt
it important that people be disabused of it.
Equally, kneeling to receive the communion was held
to imply veneration of the elements even despite
the black rubric which now, of course, was
gone.
And the Puritans were simply saying that in
holy worship, in a reformed church, it was
inexpedient to have ceremonies that were so tainted
in people's minds with superstitious ideas as were
these.
So that was the contention and here's the
account of the controversy.
Elizabeth, remember, is convinced that uniformity is necessary
for peace in the nation and she is
convinced that the church ought to be, she's
convinced that as a matter of loyalty to
herself, church people ought to be content with
the establishment that she set up.
She was convinced, in other words, that non
-conformity was disloyalty and indeed, when people began
to separate from the church that she regarded
as her church, well, she regarded it as
a positively treasonable action.
In 1564, she resolved that she would take
up the slack where the ceremonial non-conformity
was concerned and get everyone to conform as
they should.
So she told her bishop, whom she regarded,
you remember, as her lackeys there to execute
her will in the church, that she wanted
uniformity of clerical dress enforced.
In a matter of the surface, she didn't
insist on everyone wearing the last vestment, but
she did insist on every minister wearing the
surface.
She passed on the news to the Archbishop
of Canterbury, Parker.
He was in a difficult position.
He knew that many men had a conscience
about wearing the surface and he didn't want
to precipitate any trouble.
So his first move was to write a
letter to Samson, who is now installed in
his deanery at Christchurch, Oxford, and to a
friend of Samson's, another Puritan, Laurence Humphrey, who
is president of Magdalen College, Oxford.
Spelled M-A-G-D-A-L-E
-N, by the way, in case you didn't
know.
But in Oxford and Cambridge, it's pronounced Magdalen.
Well, as they parted, Parker sent this letter
to Samson and Humphrey, asking them this question.
Is the surface a thing indifferent?
A thing, therefore, about which, according to Lutheran
theory, as Melanchthon had set it out, the
governor, the supreme governor of the church, the
civil power, could lawfully prescribe uniformity for the
sake of good order and edification.
Well, that is the right question for him
to ask.
Is the surface a thing indifferent that may
be lawfully prescribed?
If it's not a thing indifferent, then why
not?
If, in other words, it ought to be
a matter of conscience, well, you explain the
reason why.
The answer which Samson and Humphrey sent to
this letter from Parker was along this line.
It was stated in terms of an ideal,
set out in terms of an ideal for
a reformed church.
Granted, they said, the surface is a thing
indifferent in itself.
It hasn't got any necessary doctrinal meaning attached
to it.
It isn't a thing necessarily and intrinsically either.
But yet, no one can deny that it's
been defiled by association.
That it has been so associated with this
false idea of the extra-special holiness of
the clergy that it's inexpedient to use it.
And therefore, in the best sort of reformed
church, it won't be imposed and made compulsory
upon anybody.
Because the church will be in a less
than ideal state if it is.
Well, that, as you see, was a theologically
good and discreet answer which could be defended
in debate if need be.
Parker's reply was also, however, judicious.
He made the point, which is obviously true,
that the abuse of a thing doesn't destroy
the right use of it.
That order in the church is a good
thing and, so he maintains, the use of
the surface makes for a more decent order
in worship than there'd otherwise be for if
you didn't make men wear the surface, says
Parker, there's no telling what they would wear
in conducting divine service.
And Parker went on, the argument that these
things are defiled by association shouldn't be taken
too seriously because this particular clerical garment goes
back long before the Roman abuses came in.
It goes right back in its history to
the patristic period and has not got any
necessary association with Roman era at all.
So, in my judgment, says Parker, this argument
that these things are so evil that they
mustn't be enforced fails.
And the argument that the surface makes for
good order is a sufficiently strong argument to
warrant the present legal order of the Church
of England.
Well, Naphon was deftly right to say that
in the mouth of Parker and other bishops
who were later to reason in this way,
what you were seeing was, I quote his
phrase, a rationalization by reluctant men of a
position forced on them from without.
For one knows from their reaction to the
prospect of becoming bishops and accepting the surface
that they weren't really too thrilled by it.
But yet they thought it could be defended
and that it as bishops they were bound
to defend it as best they could against
the Puritan objections.
Well, that was the exchange, that was the
learned discussion that went on in 1564.
But then Elizabeth told Parker that he must
start using the big stick.
She sent him a letter instructing him to
enforce conformity and no messing.
He didn't want to do it, but in
1566 he issued a document called simply Advertisement,
which prescribed for all clergymen in the Church
of England and obliged all bishops to enforce
of the Church of England the wearing of
this surface.
And a few refused and were deprived of
their living, which they accepted.
They didn't rebel, they simply worked on the
principle on which all the English reformers had
worked up to this date, the principle of
passive resistance.
If the civil authority tells you to do
what in good conscience you can't do, well,
you decline to do it, but then, recognising
God's ordinance of civil government, you submit to
the punishment which this particular civil government imposes
upon you.
There were a lot of pamphlets published regarding
this.
A lot of petitions sent up to Parliament
and to bishops asking that this rule be
not enforced against such and such a person.
To which the bishops replied by invoking the
further argument, which hadn't come into the debate
as yet, that it was a Christian duty
to obey the Queen.
To obey, that is, the one whom God
had set on the throne to order the
Church's affairs.
And that it really was an act of
disloyalty and a consummation act to resist the
Queen's wishes as well as resisting the letter
of the law in this particular matter.
The Puritans, from their side, retorted, Has the
Queen any right to command things which are
doubtfully scriptural and further ought not, they pressed
the point, ought not the individual minister to
be allowed to use his discretion on things
indifferent?
But the arguing achieved nothing.
Parker persisted in enforcing the requirements of the
advertisement and in fact only a very small
number of those who were deprived stayed permanently
out of their livings.
Most of them climbed down, conformed, got livings
again and carried on.
At a certain stage in the debate the
Puritans wrote to continental divines, Bullinger and Walter,
his assistants in Zurich.
But the Zurich divines had already been written
to by Anglican divines and they wouldn't support
the Puritans in their stand against the surface.
And the other what do you call it
ceremonies which came into the dispute.
So really this particular Puritan protest fizzled out
and this round of the battle ended with
the Puritans quite definitely having lost.
They climbed down.
Their protest failed.
They weren't an organised body.
And they weren't in fact able to maintain
their position beyond 1566 1567.
The dispute subsided.
Conformity was enforced.
But the argument about the vestments went on
until the prayer book was made illegal in
1645.
But into the situation had come the argument
which the Puritans used to each other that
in a situation like this the lesser of
two evil of two evil should be chosen
and rather than be deprived for non-conformity
it was right to conform under protest so
that men might still retain the benefits of
their ministry.
Cartwright, whom you'll meet in a moment the
leader of the Presbyterianising Puritans in 1570 and
Cartwright's successor as the head of that group,
a man named Travers and several other Puritans
including a Jacobean Puritan named Prince, who wrote
a book on this subject in 1618 all
argued this point and carried the party with
them.
Under protest the Puritans conformed.
This became the standard Puritan line.
Most of the Puritan ministers about whom I'm
going to tell you, I shall probably begin
telling you next class, were conformists.
Their Puritanism didn't consist in ceremonial non-conformity
it consisted in something else.
But they all of them, as Richard Dexter
who knew many of them, said on one
occasion, they all conformed under protest and all
of them, I quote his phrase, would rather
be excused.
This is then what the majority did.
A few didn't.
A few stuck out and got into trouble
down the years for ceremonial non-conformity, but
the majority did.
And that's all that I need to tell
you about the debate concerning ceremony.
Except for this final point that the leaders
in this round of the conflict were Marian
exiles.
Older men that is who after the 1660s
were really too old to do any more
fighting and moved out of the leadership of
the movement.
In the next round about which I'm going
to tell you the controversy concerning Presbyterianism, leadership
was passed to a new generation, a younger
generation, men literally of a different generation from
the other men.
And this means a certain change of spirit
amongst the Puritans.
The young men had more heart for fighting
and they had I think it's fair to
say more truculence in the way in which
they argued their case.
Well let's get on to this now.
Unless there are questions first that you want
to ask or points you want to raise
about the dispute.
Everybody happy?
No, it was during these years the 1560s
that the first non-conformist appeared and I
think I'm right in saying it was during
this time that the word it simply denotes
you see a person in the Church of
England who doesn't do all that the prayer
book tells him he should in the conduct
of worship.
He is a non-conformist to the established
order.
And the word just became part of the
English religious vocabulary.
Baxter writing in the 1660s speaks regularly of
the old non-conformists and the old non
-conformity.
And the word is in contemporary documents.
It changed its meaning I may say in
English usage after 1662 then it was applied
to the people who had actually left the
Church of England because they couldn't accept all
the established order.
And then it became a regular name for
the so-called English free churches.
Oh, well
the system is this.
That the Church of England in the medieval
period when the parish system was being extended
throughout the country was endowed by various lords
of the manor.
You see from the Middle Ages onwards most
of the land in England belonged to somebody
and most of the parish churches in England
planted and built as they were in the
centres of population were under the special patronage
of somebody.
Well the somebody in question if he was
a wealthy lord would regularly endow the church.
That is he would make over to the
parish church and to the incumbent of the
living so much land from which the income
should be given to the incumbents.
Or if he didn't make the land over
it would be enacted and sort of written
into the title deeds of the parish church
that on so much of the land of
the particular area of population where the church
was and the man served tithes should be
paid to him.
Tithes of all the crops you see 10%.
And he would then have a tithe barn
near the church in which he could store
it and that would be his salary.
This of course was modelled on the Old
Testament system of supporting the Levites.
And with the land and their income that
were made over to the churches and the
tithes and sometimes the endowments came in other
forms, in financial forms.
But this was the standard thing, the standard
pattern of tithes and endowments.
With this you see you had an income
which the incumbent of the parish church knew
he would get.
And it would keep him alive.
That was his income.
This meant that in the medieval period a
parson lived on his tithes and he didn't
live on any of the money that was
given by members of the parish in what
we would now call the collection.
Such money as was given in those days
was put to the relief of the poor.
This idea actually of using monetary collections in
the church only really got off the ground
in the Reformation.
Luther made it a big thing in the
Lutheran churches that you have a church chest
and people are expected to live in the
collection as part of their service of God
and this must be used for the relief
of the poor.
And the parish chest on the Lutheran pattern
became a standard thing in the English churches
of the Reformation.
But I say this simply to make the
point that the money didn't in fact go
to the minister's salary.
He got his salary from the tithes.
And in the case of bishops and their
bishoprics the bishops had in many cases in
the Middle Ages themselves.
And by fair means or foul they'd acquired
to themselves enormous estates from which all the
income in terms of crops and what was
paid by tenant farmers and so on went
into their own episcopal treasuries.
Well, what happened right from the start of
the English Reformation was that church lands began
to be pillaged no, not pillaged, just appropriated
by one means or another by a series
of legal tricks in very many cases by
the crown and by the new nobility who
were growing up in the country the new
nobles.
Henry VIII started it when he closed down
all the English monasteries as one of his
first acts after breaking with the Pope and
confiscated all their lands and all their revenues.
They simply went to the crown to swell
the royal treasury.
And then the nobles of England got the
same idea and they found ways and means
of appropriating church lands and this is simply
Elizabeth carrying on with the same pattern.
The bishoprics, they'd been already deprived, most of
them at any rate had been deprived of
some of their lands but Elizabeth wanted more
still and the point of the exchange was
to leave the bishop with less in the
way of lands and income than they had
before so that she would make on the
exchange.
Another thing incidentally that I may say at
this point since we've started talking about this
in the Middle Ages when churches were founded
in England, as I say they were founded
on somebody's land in centres of population of
which a particular lord of the manor was
the boss and normally he took to himself
the right of appointing a priest to be
the priest in that church and serve this
particular group of people and this also became
part of the English common law that such
and such a nobleman has the right of
presentation to the living, as we say, in
such and such a church.
This isn't of course the Presbyterian pattern of
churches electing their own, choosing their own ministers.
This is quite a different pattern.
It goes right back to the feudal system.
Just as the lord of the manor looked
after his tenants in other ways, so he
gave them their minister.
This system actually was to benefit the Puritans
very much at a later stage because where
a nobleman was in sympathy with the Puritan
movement, he would appoint Puritans to the living
of which he had the right of presentation
and he was usually strong enough, I mean
he had enough lawyers on his side and
strings he could pull to prevent the bishop
from taking any effective steps against these chaps
to enforce conformity.
So you get individual Puritans living under the
protection of rich noblemen and if you read
their writings you find that treatise after treatise
is dedicated to such and such a nobleman
sir something or lord something else.
My honoured and esteemed patron and the lord.
You see?
This was part of the system and it
was to help the Puritans at a later
stage.
Any more queries or shall we move on?
Oh yes, it's just a loose-sleeved white
sack.
We've only seen a presbyter before.
Now the sack usually stops.
Then, according to the older rules, there's no
it's certainly true, well wait a minute, this
is true.
When Anglo-Catholic the Anglo-Catholics immediately said
you could tell a man's church
ideals by looking at them.
Also they introduced the clerics but they
set the fashion of having very shallow little
round collars like their Roman brethren had this
is mid-nineteenth century so
that you could tell the difference between one
sort and the other by the depth of
the perhaps you
don't care but I thought you might be
interested.
It was called it was
about not simply setting up church courts and
this is the story as I told you
there was a new generation emerging the first
generation of Elizabethan Puritans as distinct from the
old generation, excuse me, generation of Edwardian Puritans
Cambridge in particular in the 1560s became a
hotbed of Puritans who wouldn't wear the surplus
and generally showed their sympathy with the Puritan
protesters in a number of ways It is
to be remembered I think before we embark
on this part of the story that young
men men of university age, men in their
twenties are inclined to be enthusiasts and extremists
they're ready sometimes too ready to follow any
active leader who waves the flag they don't
always act judiciously and they are prone to
riot, excess satire criticism of their elders and
all kinds of what we might call umpty
action I don't know if you use that
word over here we do in England umptiness
is an English word to describe this ebullient
contentious frame of mind I expect you know
what I'm talking about and it was this
sort of chap who was right at the
centre of this next chapter of the story,
where we divide the story into three paragraphs
first the leaders, second the arguments third the
activities of the Puritan Presbyterianizing movement.
Leaders first Thomas Cartwright, himself a young man
born in 1535 had been appointed Professor of
Divinity in Cambridge University in 1569 when he
was 34 and in the winter of 1569
-1570 he gave his first course of lectures
and they were on the Acts of the
Apostles they were exegetical lectures with general theological
reflections based upon the exegesis of God and
in the course of his reflections he criticised
the established order of government in the Church
of England and he advocated this was simply
in his classroom, he wasn't agitating he was
just putting out ideas protected no doubt as
he believed by the ordinary conventions of academic
freedom putting out ideas for people to consider.
He was in fact advocating pretty strongly the
following changes in the Elizabethan establishment abandon diocesan
episcopacy and the two provinces of Canterbury and
York, each with its archbishop abandon all the
elaborate paraphernalia of diocesan administration that traditionally went
with them with the bishops that is church
courts centred on the diocese and a lot
of laymen chancellors administering church affairs at the
diocesan headquarters scrub all that, said Cartwright and
replace it by simple Presbyterianism for this, he
maintained, is the apostolic order this is what
we see in the Acts of the Apostles
this means that each parish will choose its
own minister no man will have the right
to call himself a minister who is not
actually a pastor of a church, a man
who that's a little congregational touch as you
see but it was part of Cartwright's platform
each man who wants to be a minister
will seek election by a church as distinct
from going to a bishop and asking him
to ordain him each parish will have its
kirk session and each group of parishes will
have its presbytery meeting and deacons in each
parish church will be men who care for
the poor laymen not junior ministers who are
in practice as it were for the presbyterists
and further said Cartwright all Christian men ought
to seek this reform, each according to his
own vocation ministers should preach the necessity of
it magistrates by which he meant the queen
and parliaments and justices of the peace should
use what legislative and executive authority they'd been
given to work for it and bring it
in well in fact academic freedom didn't protect
Cartwright he was tilting at Elizabeth's establishment his
ideas were widely discussed in the university word
got to the queen's palace in Whitehall, back
came a demand for coercive action so with
the queen having expressed her will Cartwright was
deposed from his professorship for having put out
unlawful views in his lectures and in the
next year he was expelled from the university
he paid a short visit to Geneva to
see how Presbyterianism really works and when he
came back in 1571 or early 1572 he
found that he'd become a Puritan hero because
you see he'd become a Puritan martyr in
the ordinary sense of the word remember the
Puritan ideal of heroism here was a man
who for loyalty to the truth had made
a bold witness had refused to climb down
when he was challenged by authority and had
stuck to his testimony even when it involved
personal loss now such a man became a
hero as we saw amongst the Puritans and
Cartwright found that there was a whole crowd
of young men who regarded him as their
hero, their leader, and who were prepared to
follow him and do anything that he said
but already there were others emerging into the
situation willing to work with him and incur
the responsibility of similar ill-treatment and similar
similar loss that Cartwright had suffered for the
sake of the testimony in 1572 in fact
I gave you the wrong date for Cartwright's
return, he was still at the beginning of
1572, he only came back in the middle
of the year in 1572 a book was
sent up to Parliament called An Admonition to
the Parliament it was the product of a
committee of Puritans that had been written by
two young Puritans named Field and Wilcox it
was a pretty vigorous challenge to Parliament to
do away with the defects of the Book
of Common Prayer and to set up a
Presbyterian form of church order it was tilting
of the establishment and Field and Wilcox could
not have been surprised when they got both
of them a year in prison for writing
this seditious document if you'd like to know
what was in it I could well indeed
next time I will I'll read you a
summary of the contents of the Admonition to
the Parliament it was an important piece of
work it became a kind of Puritan platform
a classic item a sort of classic reference
point in the Puritan controversy it was the
first time that the Puritans had gone directly
to Parliament and it was in fact a
very able if a very vigorous statement of
what they were after so I'll begin next
class by giving you a summary of what
was in the Admonition to the Parliament when
the Presbyterian Puritans in a very real sense
nailed their we'll leave it there any queries
or points of discussion about what I've just
said then all's well, end of class for
today thank you