Manny Pereira

October 21, 2026 9 min read

he Puritans were English Protestants of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries who believed that the Reformation in England had stopped halfway. J. I. Packer defines Puritanism as “that movement in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England which sought further reformation and renewal in the Church of England than the Elizabethan settlement allowed.”¹ They wanted the church’s worship, government, and daily life brought into line with the Word of God, and they wanted England’s people converted. A preacher of Saint Albans drew the portrait of the kind of man the movement produced:

The Old English Puritan was such an one, that honored God above all, and under God gave everyone his due. His first care was to serve God, and therein he did not what was good in his own, but in God’s sight, making the word of God the rule of his worship. John GereeThe Character of an Old English Puritan (1659)²

The Very Root and Rise

When William Bradford sat down to write the history of Plymouth Colony, he did not begin with the Mayflower. He began, he said, “at ye very roote & rise of ye same,” and the root he found was the Reformation:

It is well knowne unto ye godly and judicious, how ever since ye first breaking out of ye lighte of ye gospell in our Honourable Nation of England… what warrs & opposissions ever since, Satan hath raised, maintained, and continued against the Saincts, from time to time, in one sorte or other. William BradfordOf Plimoth Plantation, chap. 1³

Packer traces the movement to the same source. Puritanism, he writes, “was at heart a spiritual movement, passionately concerned with God and godliness. It began in England with William Tyndale the Bible translator, Luther’s contemporary, a generation before the word ‘Puritan’ was coined.”⁴ Tyndale gave England the Word in English, and the martyrs of Mary’s reign, men like John Rogers and Thomas Cranmer, sealed it with their blood. Erroll Hulse judges that the burnings under Mary “must be the primary influence molding the Puritans who followed from 1558 to 1662 and beyond.”⁵

Hundreds of English Protestants fled abroad during Mary’s reign. In Geneva they sat under the ministry of John Calvin and John Knox, and there they produced the Geneva Bible. Hulse writes that these refugees “caught the vision for the complete reformation of the Church in its form of government and its form of worship.” Their Bible became the Bible of the Puritans: “Between 1579 and 1615 at least 39 editions of the Geneva Bible were printed in England.”⁶

“Half Reformed”

When Elizabeth came to the throne in 1558, the exiles came home full of hope. They were disappointed. Her Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity (1559) restored a Protestant Church of England, but on her own terms. Joel Beeke explains that many felt the settlement “left the church only ‘half reformed,’ since she failed to rid England of the clerical vestments and ceremonies remaining from Catholicism.”⁷ In her own chapel the queen kept a crucifix and candles on the altar.⁸

The doctrine was Reformed; the worship lagged behind. John Jewel, soon to be bishop of Salisbury, told Peter Martyr that “as to ceremonies and maskings there is a little too much foolery,” and added a vivid line: “The slow-paced horses retard the chariot.” When Convocation met in 1563, Archbishop Matthew Parker opened it with the words, “Behold the opportunity come for reforming the Church of England!” Convocation revised the articles of doctrine that became the Thirty-Nine Articles, and on doctrine both sides agreed. But a motion to relax the ceremonies, carried by those present, was lost when the proxies were counted, fifty-nine to fifty-eight. As John Brown puts it, the matter was settled “by the vote of one man, who was not present at the debate.”⁹

A Name of Scorn

It was in these years that the name appeared. “The term Puritan,” Beeke writes, “was first used in the 1560s of those English Protestants who considered the reforms under Queen Elizabeth incomplete and called for further ‘purification’ (from the Greek word katharos, ‘pure’).”¹⁰ It was never a compliment. Packer says it plainly:

‘Puritan’ as a name was, in fact, mud from the start. Coined in the early 1560s, it was always a satirical smear word implying peevishness, censoriousness, conceit, and a measure of hypocrisy. J. I. PackerA Quest for Godliness¹¹

By 1641 Henry Parker could complain that “papists, bishops, court flatterers, stage-poets, minstrels, jesting buffoons, all the shameless rout of drunkards, lechers, and swearing ruffians, and many others took delight in deriding people as puritans.” When Archbishop William Laud reviewed clergy for promotion, he marked some names “O” for orthodox and others “P” for Puritan, as a warning.¹² The name was a label put on them by their enemies, and Packer notes that between 1564 and 1642 it was pinned on “at least five overlapping groups of people.”¹³ What united them was not a party platform but a burden for the glory of God in the church.

What They Sought

Packer sums up the Puritan aim in a single paragraph:

The Puritan goal was to complete what England’s Reformation began: to finish reshaping Anglican worship, to introduce effective church discipline into Anglican parishes, to establish righteousness in the political, domestic, and socio-economic fields, and to convert all Englishmen to a vigorous evangelical faith. J. I. PackerA Quest for Godliness¹⁴

At the center of it all was the pulpit. Geree’s Puritan “accounted preaching as necessary now as in the Primitive Church: God’s pleasure being still by the foolishness of preaching to save those that believe.” He “esteemed that preaching best wherein was most of God, least of man.” He kept the Lord’s Day as “the Mart day of the Soul,” and what he heard in public “he repeated in private, to whet it upon himself and family.”¹⁵ Puritanism was not first a protest against surplices. It was a hunger for God, fed by the preached Word, that would not be content with less than a church shaped by that Word.

Three Paths

The Puritans agreed on the goal. They did not always agree on the road. Most stayed in the Church of England and labored to reform it from within. Geree’s Puritan could bear much that grieved him: “yet would he not separate, where he might partake in the worship, and not in the corruption.”¹⁶ Within and beyond that loyal majority, three paths emerged. The pages that follow tell each story.

From Hampton Court to Westminster

Puritan hopes rose again when James VI of Scotland, raised a Calvinist, became James I of England in 1603. On his way south he was handed the Millenary Petition, which Beeke says was “signed by a thousand ministers.” At the Hampton Court Conference the next year, James granted one great request, a new translation of the Bible, which became the King James Version. But he would not touch the bishops. “Recognizing that his royal supremacy was tied to the English episcopacy,” Beeke writes, “James openly declared his fears: ‘No bishop, no king.’”¹⁷ He closed the conference with a threat:

If (said he) this be all your party hath to say, I will make them conform themselves, or else I will harrie them out of the land, or else do worse. King James IHampton Court, 1604¹⁸

He kept his word, and some of the harried became the Pilgrims (see The Separatists). Under his son Charles I, pressure grew into persecution. William Laud, archbishop from 1633, was an Arminian who loved ceremony. Hulse records that Laud believed the altar was “the greatest place of God’s residence upon earth—yea, greater than the pulpit.”¹⁹ Thousands of Puritans sailed for New England in the 1630s rather than submit.

Then the tables turned. The Long Parliament, the Civil War that began in 1642, and the Solemn League and Covenant with Scotland gave the Puritans their one great opportunity. From 1643 the Westminster Assembly produced the Westminster Confession of Faith and the Shorter Catechism. Hulse writes that the story of the Puritans “reached its apex in this period, especially as is seen in the Westminster Assembly.”²⁰ The doctrine they taught was the Calvinism the Synod of Dort had defended in 1619. The confession outlived the Commonwealth and still shapes Presbyterian, Congregational, and, through the Second London Confession, Baptist churches today.

Black Bartholomew

The Commonwealth did not last. With the return of Charles II in 1660, the bishops returned, and the Act of Uniformity of 1662 required every minister to give his “unfeigned assent and consent” to all of the Book of Common Prayer by St. Bartholomew’s Day. Beeke records the result:

Nearly two thousand ministers (a fifth of all the clergy) refused to conform and were ejected from their parishes on St. Bartholomew’s day, August 24, 1662. Joel R. BeekeMeet the Puritans²¹

Among them were Richard Baxter, Thomas Watson, Thomas Manton, and John Flavel. Philip Henry, ejected in Wales, wrote that “our sins have made Bartholomew-day, in the year 1662, the saddest day for England since the death of Edward the Sixth, but even this [is] for good.”²² It was for good. Driven from their pulpits, the Puritans wrote. A century later George Whitefield explained why their books still burned:

Ministers never write or preach so well as when under the cross; the Spirit of Christ and of glory then rests upon them.… When cast out by the black Bartholomew-act… and driven from their respective charges to preach in barns and fields, in the highways and hedges, they in an especial manner wrote and preached as men having authority. Though dead, by their writings they yet speak. George Whitefieldpreface to Bunyan’s Works (1767)²³

The full story of the ejection and the long years of dissent that followed is told under Nonconformity.

A Legacy to Steward

Packer compares the Puritans to the giant redwoods of California:

As Redwoods attract the eye, because they overtop other trees, so the mature holiness and seasoned fortitude of the great Puritans shine before us as a kind of beacon light, overtopping the stature of the majority of Christians in most eras. J. I. PackerA Quest for Godliness²⁴

His verdict on our own day is blunt: “The Puritans exemplified maturity; we don’t. We are spiritual dwarfs.”²⁵ They were not perfect men. They could be contentious, and in power some were as unwilling to tolerate dissent as the bishops had been. But they loved Christ, they trembled at His Word, and they counted no cost too high to worship Him as He commanded. Every American who gives thanks in November inherits something of their faith, for the Pilgrims who kept the first Thanksgiving at Plymouth were Puritans of the separating kind.

Legacy Next: Nonconformity