Rise of Presbyterianism
he Nonconformists objected to what the church wore and did. The Presbyterians went to the root and asked who should govern it. Their answer was elders. In place of archbishops and lord bishops ruling many parishes from above, they sought a church in which each congregation was overseen by its own minister and elders, joined with other congregations in ascending assemblies of elders. John Geree summed up the conviction in one sentence:
He thought God had left a rule in his word for discipline, and that Aristocratical by Elders, not Monarchical by Bishops, nor Democratical by the people. John GereeThe Character of an Old English Puritan (1659)1
Packer lists “advocates of the Presbyterian reform programme broached by Thomas Cartwright and the 1572 Admonition to the Parliament” as one of the groups first called Puritans.2 This page tells their story, from the lecture hall at Cambridge to the Jerusalem Chamber at Westminster.
From Geneva and Scotland
The pattern came from abroad. English exiles under Mary had worshiped in Calvin’s Geneva, where the church was governed by a consistory of ministers and elders. Hulse writes that they “caught the vision for the complete reformation of the Church in its form of government and its form of worship.”3 North of the border the vision was already being realized. John Knox, who had pastored the English congregation at Geneva, returned to Scotland, and in 1560 the Scottish Parliament adopted the Scots Confession. The Church of Scotland would become the model English Presbyterians pointed to for the next eighty years. The First Admonition would ask Parliament, “Is discipline meet for Scotland and is it unprofitable for this realm?”4
Cartwright’s Lectures on Acts
The movement found its leader in 1570. Thomas Cartwright, Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, lectured on the first chapters of Acts and drew from them the government of the apostolic church. Beeke writes that Cartwright “convinced many through his Cambridge lectures in 1570 that the road to reform required the more disciplined Presbyterian model practiced in Geneva.”5 Archbishops and archdeacons should be removed. “Every church should be governed by its own minister(s) and elders, who should be chosen by the church rather than the state.”6
The response was swift. John Whitgift, master of Trinity College, answered him from the pulpit, and Cartwright lost his professorship in 1570 and his fellowship the next year. He went to Geneva, where Theodore Beza said of him, “I think the sun does not see a more learned man.”7 For the rest of his life Cartwright moved between exile, prison, and quiet ministry. Yet he never separated from the Church of England. Beeke notes that “he still regarded the Church of England as a true church, and by 1576 he held that ministers should not abandon their posts for the sake of offensive ceremonies, since preaching is always more important than rituals or ceremonies.”8
An Admonition to the Parliament
Having failed with the queen and the bishops, the Presbyterian Puritans turned to Parliament. In 1572 two young London ministers, John Field and Thomas Wilcox, published An Admonition to the Parliament. Its preface claimed that the English church was so far from being rightly reformed that “we are scarce come to the outward face of the same.” It called for ministers chosen with the consent of the congregation, for the three New Testament offices of pastor, elder, and deacon, and for “equality of ministers” in place of archbishops and lord bishops.9 A writer of the day said that it was “fleeing as a firebrand from place to place and setting all the country on fire.”10
Field and Wilcox were committed to Newgate on October 2, 1572. When the archbishop’s chaplain rebuked the sharpness of their language, Field replied:
The Scriptures of the Old and New Testament use such vehemency; we have used gentle words too long, which have done no good; the wound grows desperate, and wants a corrosive; it is no time to blanch or sew pillars under men’s elbows, but God knoweth we meant to touch no man’s person, but their places and abuses. John Fieldin Newgate, 157211
A Second Admonition followed, commonly attributed to Cartwright. It answered the charge of rebellion with a sentence that could stand over the whole movement: “Whatsoever is said or done against them, that is not the matter; but the equity of the cause, that is the matter.”12 Not all the zeal was wise. Packer, no enemy of the Puritans, admits that “the theoretician’s rigidity and over-arguing arrogance that usually appear when youthful revolutionaries get the bit between their teeth were much in evidence.”13
Cartwright and Whitgift
Whitgift published a learned answer to the Admonition, and the debate between him and Cartwright ran to thousands of pages. Brown states Whitgift’s two main positions: “that we are not bound of necessity to keep to the same form of church government as obtained in the time of the Apostles,” and that nothing need be removed “simply because it was to be found in the Roman Church previously.”14 Cartwright replied that Whitgift had shortened the arms of Scripture:
I say that the word of God containeth the direction of all things pertaining to the church, yea of whatsoever things can fall into any part of man’s life. Thomas CartwrightA Replye to an Answere Made of M. Doctor Whitegifte (1573)15
He did not claim that the Bible prescribes every detail. “We deny not,” he wrote, “but certain things are left to the order of the church, because they are of the nature of those which are varied by times, places, persons, and other circumstances.”16 But even those must be ordered by the general rules of Scripture. Behind the debate lay a deeper claim. Neal quotes Cartwright on the royal title of supreme head of the church: “It is a title not fit for any mortal man; for when the apostle says Christ is κεφαλή, the head, it is as much as if he had said, Christ and no other, is head of the church.”17
Presbytery in Episcopacy
Shut out of Parliament, the Presbyterians began to build quietly from below. In 1574 Walter Travers published his Ecclesiasticae Disciplinae… Explicatio, which Brown calls “the most memorable book on the puritan side.” Travers became afternoon lecturer at the Temple Church in London, while Richard Hooker was master there, and, as Thomas Fuller put it, “Some say the congregation ebbed in the morning and flowed in the afternoon.”18
Ministers began meeting in local conferences, or classes, the best known at Dedham in Essex. By 1586, Beeke writes, “a Book of Discipline began to circulate quietly among concerned ministers.”19 Its rules show how they meant to work within the Church of England:
But such as are called by some church, let them impart it to the classis or conference, of which they are members, or to some greater church-assemblies; and if the called be approved, let them be commended by letters to the bishop, that they may be ordained ministers by him. The Book of Disciplinec. 158620
Brown calls the plan “setting up a discipline within a discipline, Presbytery in Episcopacy.”21 It could not last. The anonymous Marprelate tracts of 1588–89, which mocked the bishops in coarse and clever prose, gave the authorities their excuse. Cartwright and other leaders were brought before the Court of High Commission and the Star Chamber in 1590 and 1591, and the classical movement was broken up. Beeke records that the High Commission under Whitgift “suspended hundreds of clergy, accusing them of sedition and disloyalty in her Act Against Puritans issued in 1593.”22
“No Bishop, No King”
The Presbyterians hoped for better from James I, who had been raised in the Church of Scotland. They were disappointed. At Hampton Court in 1604, when one of the Puritan spokesmen proposed that ministers meet in synods with their bishop, Neal records that the king “broke out into a flame”:
…which (says he) agrees with monarchy as well as God and the devil; then Jack and Tom, Will and Dick, shall meet, and at their pleasure censure both me and my council. King James IHampton Court, 160423
Neal comments that within nine months of reaching the English throne James “renounced presbytery, and established it for a maxim, No bishop, no king.”24 For the next forty years English Presbyterianism survived mainly as a conviction held by preachers who kept their pulpits and their peace.
The Westminster Assembly
The opportunity came in the 1640s. To win Scottish help in the Civil War, Parliament accepted the Solemn League and Covenant in 1643. It bound both nations to “the reformation of religion in the kingdoms of England and Ireland, in doctrine, worship, discipline, and government, according to the word of God and the example of the best reformed Churches.”25 The Westminster Assembly, already meeting since July 1643, now had to frame a form of church government. The debate with the small group of Independents, the “Dissenting Brethren,” was long and earnest. Warfield’s verdict on the Assembly’s conduct is that “the Assembly manifested the highest dignity, firmness, and courage.”26
On August 19, 1645, Parliament ordered Presbyterian government established in England. London’s parishes were grouped into twelve classes, and congregations were told to choose elders.27 The Assembly’s greatest work, however, was not its plan of government but the Westminster Confession of Faith and the Shorter Catechism. The government itself never took deep root in England. Brown observes that “it is one thing to create a constitution by Parliament and quite another to make it a vital part of the nation’s life.” From one London parish came the report that “the minister hath endeavoured to get elders chosen, but cannot move his parishioners to it.”28 Parliament itself kept a tight hold on the church’s discipline, and Cromwell’s army favored the Independents. After 1660 the bishops returned, and in 1662 Presbyterian ministers such as Edmund Calamy, Thomas Manton, and William Bates were among the two thousand ejected (see Nonconformity).
The Crown Rights of Christ
English Presbyterianism never won the national church. Yet its convictions went around the world. The Westminster Standards became the doctrinal foundation of Presbyterian churches in Scotland, Ireland, America, and beyond, and the Second London Baptist Confession and the Savoy Declaration of the Congregationalists adapted the same confession for their own churches.
At its best the movement was not a quarrel about committees. It was a confession that the church belongs to Christ and must be ordered by His Word, and that no king, bishop, or Parliament may take His place as its Head. Geree’s Puritan held that conviction with charity. “He esteemed those Churches most pure where the Government is by Elders, yet unchurched not those where it was other ways.”29 That is a word for every church that loves its own order: hold the truth firmly, and hold it in love.
