ved. But
there was as yet no general demand for any change in the form of its
government, or of its relation to the State. Though the wish to draw
nearer to the mass of the Reformed Churches won a certain amount of
favour for the Presbyterian form of organization which they had adopted,
as an obligatory system of Church discipline Presbyterianism had been
embraced by but a few of the English clergy, and by hardly any of the
English laity. Nor was there any tendency in the mass of the Puritans
towards a breach in the system of religious conformity which Elizabeth
had constructed. On the contrary, what they asked was for its more
rigorous enforcement. That Catholics should be suffered under whatever
pains and penalties to preserve their faith and worship in a Protestant
Commonwealth was abhorrent to them. Nor was Puritan opinion more
tolerant to the Protestant sectaries who were beginning to find the
State Church too narrow for their enthusiasm. Elizabeth herself could
not feel a bitterer abhorrence of the "Brownists" (as they were called
from the name of their founder Robert Brown) who rejected the very
notion of a national Church, and asserted the right of each congregation
to perfect independence of faith and worship. To the zealot whose whole
thought was of the fight with Rome, such an assertion seemed the claim
of a right to mutiny in the camp, a right of breaking up Protestant
England into a host of sects too feeble to hold Rome at bay. Cartwright
himself denounced the wickedness of the Brownists; Parliament, Puritan
as it was, passed in 1593 a statute against them; and there was a
general assent to the stern measures of repression by which Brown
himself was forced to fly to the Netherlands. Two of his
fellow-congregationalists were seized and put to death on charges of
sedition and heresy. Of their followers many, as we learn from a
petition in 1592, were driven into exile, "and the rest which remain in
her Grace's land greatly distressed through imprisonment and other great
troubles." The persecution in fact did its work. "As for those which we
call Brownists," wrote Bacon, "being when they were at the most a very
small number of very silly and base people, here and there in corners
dispersed, they are now, thanks to God, by the good remedies that have
been used, suppressed and worn out; so that there is scarce any news of
them." The execution of three Nonconformists in the following year was
in fact followed by th