Laud in power
Most of Laud's changes were a revival of the customs and laws of Elizabeth's age, but to the Puritans, who loved plainness, they looked like a return to Catholicism and a renewal of the old gulf between priest and people. Laud evidently felt that the church had a right to surround religion with ceremony and the priest with an aura of holiness. Rome agreed with his views and was ready to send him a cardinal's hat. Laud politely refused the gift, but the offer from Rome seemed to confirm the Puritans' criticisms. Charles made him Archbishop of Canterbury (the source says 1623, which cannot be right; it was 1633) and appointed him to the Treasury board. Another bishop was made Lord Chancellor of Scotland. People complained that churchmen had again taken power, as in the medieval age of the church's supremacy.
From his palace at Lambeth, the new religious ruler of England resolved to change the religious customs and the morals of the English. By imposing heavy fines on adulterers he made hundreds of enemies. He collected these fines through the Court of High Commission, a tribunal created by Elizabeth, whose members were now mostly clergy. He applied the money, against the wishes of those fined, to repairing St. Paul's Cathedral and to driving lawyers, hawkers and idle talkers out of its nave. Clergymen who would not accept the new ritual lost their church income, and writers and speakers who kept criticizing it, questioned the foundations of Christianity or attacked the new bishops' regime were excommunicated, kept in irons, or maimed as punishment.
To grasp Laud's fate we must keep in view how harsh the punishments of his government were. In 1628 (the date as given in the source), at his instigation, a Puritan minister named Alexander Leighton was brought before the Star Chamber and charged with writing a book that called rule by bishops satanic and contrary to Christianity. He was held in solitary confinement for fifteen days in a cell the source describes as full of rats and mice and open to snow and rain, was physically punished and pilloried in the cold of November, was mutilated and was sentenced to life in prison. In 1633, one Ludowick Boyer (the name, as given, cannot be identified) accused Laud of being a Catholic at heart and received a similar punishment and a life sentence.
William Prynne, a Puritan agitator, wrote a book called News from Ipswich in which he called Laud's bishops servants of the pope and of the devil and said they deserved the gallows. For this he was again branded and mutilated and thrown into prison, until the Long Parliament freed him (1640). A woman who insisted that Sunday should be kept as a day of rest spent eleven years in prison.
The Puritans' own intolerance
Laud's chief enemies, the Puritans, agreed with him about intolerance and religious severity. They believed these followed logically from the divine principle of Christianity and the Bible, and that anyone who opposed such a religion was either a criminal or a fool, so that society had to be protected from the damnation his teaching would cause. The Presbyterians urged Parliament to pass laws under which anyone preaching the views of Catholics, Arminians (followers of the Dutch Protestant scholar Arminius, who criticized Calvin and held that anyone can be saved by God's grace), Baptists or Quakers would be sentenced to life imprisonment, and anyone denying the Trinity or the incarnation would be put to death. Cromwell's followers said that toleration should be given to all who accept the principles of Christianity, but they excluded Catholics, Unitarians and defenders of bishops.
There were so many sects among the Puritans that they are hard to count. Many of them were wholly Calvinist in religion and followed individual liberty in politics. They believed that people should manage their own affairs without the oversight of bishops, and that religion should be free of ceremony, in keeping with the equality of individuals in civil and political matters, and free of the interference of religious arts. They agreed with the Presbyterians in theology but rejected church courts that included both clergy and laymen and in their view held episcopal power. They also favored a literal reading of the Bible and did not accept that reason could judge truths. They revered the Old Testament as much as the New. Like the Jews, they thought of themselves as a chosen people and gave their children the names of the great figures and heroes of the Torah. They thought of God as an angry Jehovah and, following Calvin, held that most people are 'children of wrath', condemned before birth, by the despotic decree of a merciless God, to burn forever in hell, with only a few chosen, not for good works but by God's grace and pleasure. Some of them imagined they spoke with God; others, who thought themselves damned, wandered the streets lamenting and awaiting eternal torment. God's thunder seemed always to roar over people's heads.
The end of Merry England
In the terror that the English had imposed on themselves, 'Merry England' almost vanished. The humanism of the Renaissance and the ardent naturalism of the English in Elizabeth's age gave way to a sense of guilt and a fear of divine vengeance, which regarded most pleasures as devil's snares and as against a person's own will. The fear that monks once had of the flesh came back and spread to more people than before. Prynne held that every kiss of greeting came 'from wantonness' and that any dancing of men and women together was 'lustful'. To many Puritans, music, stained glass, religious pictures, the priests' white linen robes and the anointed clergy were barriers on the road of direct communion between human beings and God.
The Puritans read the Bible with a reverent care and used its sentences on nearly every subject and in nearly every phrase. Some zealots embroidered Bible texts on their clothes, and the most pious used the words 'verily', 'yea' and 'truth' to show their honesty. Zealous Puritans forbade cosmetics and regarded fancy hairstyles as caprice, and because they kept their own hair cropped they were nicknamed Roundheads. They thought the theaters scandalous (the author adds that in fact they were), the baiting of bears and bulls savage, and the morals of courtiers blasphemous. They also condemned merrymaking at festivals, the ringing of bells, gathering round the Maypole (a pole decked with ribbons and flowers and set up on the first of May for dancing, as a translator's note explains), drinking healths, and card games. They banned every kind of game on Sundays as well. They devoted that day to the worship of God and decided that it should be called the Sabbath. When Charles I and Laud renewed one of James I's orders and issued a proclamation known as the Book of Sports, which allowed games on Sundays after morning prayers, the Puritans, Milton among them, protested (1633). They also thought the celebration of Christmas futile, and they regretted that people danced and made merry at that season. Many Christmas customs, they said, truly belonged to pagans, and the day should be set aside for fasting and repentance; in 1644 they got Parliament to endorse this view.
The sermon
Just as Protestants valued preaching more than Catholics did, the Puritans went further than the Protestants in thinking it important. Everyone was eager to hear sermons. The mayor of Norwich traveled to London to hear more of them. A draper withdrew from his guild church in protest because it held only one sermon on Sundays. 'Lecturers' appeared to meet the need: they were men hired by the parish itself to preach on Sundays, besides the minister's regular sermon. Many Puritan preachers took their work seriously and made their listeners tremble with descriptions of hell. Some openly named sinners. One pointed with his hand at the drunkards among the congregation, and another, speaking of vice, cited the wife of a respected parishioner as an example. A third told his hearers that if adultery, swearing, cheating and breaking the Sunday rules took people to heaven, then every inhabitant of the parish would be saved.
Puritan clergy saw it as their duty to prescribe or forbid people's conduct, dress, reading and amusements. They also forbade stopping work on holidays that had been set up by pagan or Catholic custom, and so added fifty working days to the year. The Puritans called everyone to the observance of moral principles and encouraged people to cultivate courage, self-reliance, prudence, thrift and hard work.