the chief; inveighing against the established
church discipline, accounting everything from Rome that was not from
Geneva, endeavoring in all things to conform the government of the
English Church to the Presbyterian Reformation."

Actually, in 1572, Fuller proceeds to tell us, a presbytery, the first
in England, was set up at Wandsworth in Surrey; _i.e._, in that year a
certain number of ministers of the Church of England organized
themselves privately, without reference to bishops or other authorities,
into a kind of presbyterial consistory, or classical court, for the
management of the church business of their neighborhood. The heads of
this Presbyterian movement, which gradually extended itself to London,
were Mr. Field, lecturer at Wandsworth, Mr. Smith of Mitcham, Mr. Crane
of Roehampton, Messrs. Wilcox, Standen, Jackson, Bonham, Saintloe,
Travers, Charke, Barber, Gardiner, Crook, and Egerton; with whom were
associated a good many laymen. A summary of their views on the subject
of church government was drawn out in Latin, under the title _Disciplina
Ecclesiae sacra ex Dei Verbo descripta_, and, though it had to be printed
at Geneva, became so well known that, according to Fuller, "_Secundum
usum Wandsworth_ was as much honored by some as _secundum usum Sarum_ by
others."

The English Presbyterianism thus asserting itself and spreading found
its ablest and most energetic leader in the famous Thomas Cartwright
(1535-1603). No less by practical ingenuity than by the pen, he labored
for presbytery; and under his direction Presbyterianism attained such
dimensions that between 1580 and 1590 there were no fewer than five
hundred beneficed clergymen of the Church of England, most of them
Cambridge men, all pledged to general agreement in a revised form of the
Wandsworth Directory of Discipline, all in private intercommunication
among themselves, and all meeting occasionally, or at appointed times,
in local conferences, or even in provincial and general synods. In
addition to London, the parts of the country thus most leavened with
Presbyterianism were the shires of Warwick, Northampton, Rutland,
Leicester, Cambridge, and Essex.

Of course such an anomaly, of a Presbyterian organization of ministers
existing within the body of the prelatic system established by law, and
to the detriment or disintegration of that system, could not be
tolerated; and, when Whitgift had procured sufficient information to
enable him to seiz