The Separatists
The fire of the Puritan revolt only grew hotter. A determined group broke openly from the Anglican Church and formed independent congregations that chose their own ministers and recognized no bishop. Robert Browne, once Cartwright's pupil and later his opponent, became the chief spokesman of these "Independents," "Separatists" or Congregationalists. In 1581 he went to the Netherlands and wrote two treatises calling for democratic church government. Every Christian congregation, he held, should be free to gather for worship, frame its beliefs from Scripture, elect its leaders, manage its religious affairs without outside interference, and accept no law but the Bible and no authority but Christ. In 1583 two of Browne's followers were arrested in England, tried for questioning the queen's religious supremacy, and executed.
Puritans in Parliament
In the election campaign of 1586 the Puritans attacked every unfriendly candidate with vivid eloquence. They called one a gambler and a drunkard, another a papist who seldom went to church and kept disreputable company. It was an age of robust speech. When Parliament met, John Penry presented a petition for church reform, blaming the bishops for the misconduct of the clergy and the irreligion of the people; Whitgift had him arrested, though he was soon released. Anthony Cope introduced a bill to abolish episcopacy and govern English Christians on Presbyterian lines, but Elizabeth forbade Parliament to debate it. Peter Wentworth rose to defend the liberties of Parliament and four members supported him; Elizabeth sent all five to the Tower.
Martin Marprelate
Despairing of Parliament, Penry and other Puritans turned to the press. Despite Whitgift's strict censorship they circulated secretly printed pamphlets in 1588 and 1589 signed "Martin Marprelate," which mocked the power and morals of the bishops. Whitgift and the High Commission set their whole network of spies to find the authors and printers, but the presses moved from town to town, and sympathizers protected them until April 1589. Professional writers such as John Lyly and Thomas Nashe were hired to answer "Martin" and competed with him in abuse. When the season of invective had passed, the quarrel cooled, and moderate men lamented that Christianity had been soiled with insult.
The Crackdown of 1593
Angered by the pamphlets, Elizabeth gave Whitgift a free hand against the Puritans. The Marprelate printers were found; many were arrested and a number punished. Cartwright was condemned to death, but the queen pardoned him. Two Brownist leaders, John Greenwood and Henry Barrow, were executed in 1592 according to the book, and John Penry soon met the same fate. In 1593 Parliament decreed that anyone who questioned the queen's religious authority, stubbornly refused to attend Anglican services, or took part in secret conventicles "under color of any exercise of religion" should be imprisoned and then banished, never to return on pain of death, unless he promised to conform.
Richard Hooker
In this time of anxiety and anger a modest clergyman recast the dispute as a blend of philosophy and religion and argued it in noble prose. Richard Hooker was one of two preachers appointed to the Temple Church in London; the other was Walter Travers, Cartwright's friend. Hooker defended Elizabeth's church government in the morning sermon, and Travers attacked it in the afternoon, and each later turned his sermons into a book. Hooker, devoted both to letters and to theology, asked his bishop for a quiet country living. At Boscombe in Wiltshire he wrote the first four books of his great work, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (1594); three years later, at Bishopsbourne, he sent the fifth to press, and there he died in 1600 at the age of forty-seven.
Law, Reason and Consent
The Laws, solidly argued and written in an almost Latin grandeur, astonished the English. Cardinal Allen called it the best book yet published in England; Pope Clement VIII praised its learning and eloquence; Elizabeth saw it as a magnificent justification of her church; the Puritans were calmed by its gentle tone; and a later generation regarded it as a noble attempt to reconcile religion and reason. Hooker surprised his contemporaries by allowing that even a pope might be saved, and startled theologians by admitting that our certainty of faith in God's word is not as sure as what we perceive by the senses. Human reason too, he held, is a divine gift and revelation.
He based his theory of law on the philosophy of Saint Thomas Aquinas, and his Laws anticipated the social contract of Hobbes and Locke. After showing the benefits and necessity of social order, he argued that voluntary membership in a society implies obedience to its laws, but that the ultimate source of law is the community itself: king or Parliament legislate only as its representatives. It is the law, he wrote, that makes the king; a royal grant contrary to law is void; the consent of the governed is needed; and laws not made by consent are not laws at all. Yet he also wrote a passage Charles I might have used: the Parliament of England, together with its church convocation, is the body on which all government in the realm depends, comprising the king and all his subjects, since all are present in it either in person or through those they have empowered.
Religion as Part of the State
For Hooker religion was inseparable from the state, because social order and even material progress rest on moral order, which cannot last without the teaching and support of religion; every state, therefore, must provide religious instruction. The Anglican Church might be imperfect, but so are all human institutions. He observed that anyone who tries to persuade people that they are not as well governed as they ought to be will never lack attentive and favorable listeners, because people see the many defects of every government but rarely perceive the hidden difficulties that public affairs inevitably involve.
The Puritans Go Their Own Way
Hooker's logic, resting on circular reasoning, did not persuade; his masterly learning did not meet the issues of the age; and his love of order kept him from understanding people's hunger for freedom. The Puritans admired his eloquence but went their own way. Many of them, forced to choose between country and creed, went into exile, and the earlier flight of Continental Protestants into England was reversed. The Netherlands welcomed them, and English congregations formed in Middelburg, Leiden and Amsterdam. There the exiles and their children labored, taught, preached and wrote, preparing with quiet zeal for their future triumph in England and America.