a provincial accent, full of
barbarism and of ignorance.

The most effectual expedient for paying court to the zealous Scots, was
to promote the Presbyterian discipline and worship throughout England;
and to this innovation the popular leaders among the commons, as well as
their more devoted partisans, were of themselves sufficiently inclined.
The Puritanical party, whose progress, though secret, had hitherto been
gradual in the kingdom, taking advantage of the present disorders,
began openly to profess their tenets, and to make furious attacks on
the established religion. The prevalence of that sect in the parliament
discovered itself, from the beginning, by insensible but decisive
symptoms. Marshall and Burgess, two Puritanical clergymen, were chosen
to preach before them, and entertained them with discourses seven hours
in length.[**] It being the custom of the house always to take the
sacrament before they enter upon business, they ordered, as a necessary
preliminary, that the communion table should be removed from the east
end of St. Margaret's into the middle of the area.[***] The name of the
"spiritual lords" was commonly left out in acts of parliament; and the
laws ran in the name of king, lords, and commons. The clerk of the upper
house, in reading bills, turned his back on the bench of bishops; nor
was his insolence ever taken notice of.

* Clarendon, vol. i. p. 189.

** Nalson, vol. i. p. 530, 533.

*** Nalson, voL i. p. 537

On a day appointed for a solemn fast and humiliation, all the orders
of temporal peers, contrary to former practice, in going to church took
place of the spiritual; and Lord Spencer remarked that the humiliation
that day seemed confined alone to the prelates.

Every meeting of the commons produced some vehement harangue against
the usurpations of the bishops, against the high commission, against the
late convocation, against the new canons. So disgusted were all lovers
of civil liberty at the doctrines promoted by the clergy, that these
invectives were received without control; and no distinction at first
appeared between such as desired only to repress the exorbitancies of
the hierarchy, and such as pretended totally to annihilate episcopal
jurisdiction. Encouraged by these favorable appearances, petitions
against the church were framed in different parts of the kingdom. The
epithet of the ignorant and vicious priesthood was commonly applied to
all churchmen addict