sastrous days and to the origin of the ringleaders in those tumults.
But his main object, as we have seen, was to effect compromises and
restore good feeling between members of the one church, reserving the
right of disposing over religious matters to the government of the
respective provinces.

But James had remedied his audacious inconsistency by discovering that
Puritanism in England and in the Netherlands resembled each other no more
than certain letters transposed into totally different words meant one
and the same thing. The anagrammatic argument had been neatly put by Sir
Dudley Carleton, convincing no man. Puritanism in England "denied the
right of human invention or imposition in religious matters." Puritanism
in the Netherlands denied the right of the legal government to impose its
authority in religious matters. This was the great matter of debate in
the Provinces. In England the argument had been settled very summarily
against the Puritans by sheriffs' officers, bishops' pursuivants, and
county jails.

As the political tendencies, so too the religious creed and observances
of the English Puritans were identical with that of the
Contra-Remonstrants, whom King James had helped to their great triumph.
This was not very difficult to prove. It so happened that there were some
English Puritans living at that moment in Leyden. They formed an
independent society by themselves, which they called a Congregational
Church, and in which were some three hundred communicants. The length of
their residence there was almost exactly coeval with the Twelve Years'
Truce. They knew before leaving England that many relics of the Roman
ceremonial, with which they were dissatisfied, and for the discontinuance
of which they had in vain petitioned the crown--the ring, the sign of the
cross, white surplices, and the like--besides the whole hierarchical
system, had been disused in the Reformed Churches of France, Switzerland,
and the United Provinces, where the forms of worship in their view had
been brought more nearly to the early apostolic model. They admitted for
truth the doctrinal articles of the Dutch Reformed Churches. They had not
come to the Netherlands without cause. At an early period of King James's
reign this congregation of seceders from the establishment had been wont
to hold meetings at Scrooby in Nottinghamshire, once a manor of the
Archbishop of York, but then the residence of one William Brewster. This
was a gentle