nts,
faithful and conscientious in their employment, and such, I hope, these
will approve themselves." The words paint Cromwell's temper accurately
enough; he is far more of the practical soldier than of the reformer;
though his genius already breaks in upon his aristocratic and
conservative sympathies, and catches glimpses of the social revolution
to which the war was drifting. "I had rather," he once burst out
impatiently, "have a plain russet-coated captain, that knows what he
fights for and loves what he knows, than what you call a gentleman, and
is nothing else. I honour a gentleman that is so indeed!" he ends, with
a return to his more common mood of feeling, but the outburst was none
the less a characteristic one.

[Sidenote: The Independents.]

The same practical temper broke out in a more startling innovation.
Against dissidents from the legal worship of the Church the
Presbyterians were as bitter as Laud himself. But Nonconformity was
rising into proportions which made its claim of toleration, of the
freedom of religious worship, one of the problems of the time. Its rise
had been a sudden one. The sects who rejected in Elizabeth's day the
conception of a National Church, and insisted on the right of each
congregation to freedom of worship, had all but disappeared at the close
of the queen's reign. Some of the dissidents, as in the notable instance
of the congregation that produced the Pilgrim Fathers, had found a
refuge in Holland; but the bulk had been driven by persecution to a
fresh conformity with the Established Church. As soon however as Abbot's
primacy promised a milder rule, the Separatist refugees began to venture
timidly back again to England. During their exile in Holland the main
body had contented themselves with the free developement of their system
of independent congregations, each forming in itself a complete Church,
and to these the name of Independents attached itself at a later time. A
small part however had drifted into a more marked severance in doctrine
from the Established Church, especially in their belief of the necessity
of adult baptism, a belief from which their obscure congregation at
Leyden became known as that of the Baptists. Both of these sects
gathered a Church in London in the middle of James's reign, but the
persecuting zeal of Laud prevented any spread of their opinions under
that of his successor; and it was not till their numbers were suddenly
increased by the return o