Episcopacy would have no countenance from Williams. While in prison, he had scouted the idea of a reformation of the English Church after the Scottish model; and, since his release, he had been heard to say of the Presbyterian system that it was "a government fit only for tailors and shoemakers, and the like, and not for noblemen and gentlemen."1In short, if a new organization of the Church of England was wanted, differing from the existing organization, or from anything that Laud or Hall would have considered tolerable, but still preserving the features of Episcopacy and stopping short of ecclesiastical democracy, Williams was the man to offer to be the inventor.

Distinct from both the High Church party and the Moderate or Middle Party was a third and extreme mass of Englishmen, to whom may be given the name of the ROOT-ANDBRANCH PARTY. I adopt this name because "root-andbranch" was a favourite phrase of their own; but, with almost equal accuracy, I might, for the nonce, call them simply The Presbyterian Party. They desired the abolition of Episcopacy, "root and branch," the annihilation of all dignities in the Church above that of simple presbyter or parish-minister, a simplification of the ritual of the Church to correspond, and the appropriation of all the ecclesiastical revenues that would be available after the abolition of Bishoprics, Deaneries and Chapters, Archdeaconries, and the like, to humbler religious uses, or to the general uses of the State. As the recent revolution in the Scottish Church was the freshest and nearest example for imitation in this direction, and as, indeed, sympathy with that revolution was for the time the omnipotent feeling of the party, the aim which it mainly proposed to itself was the establishment in England of a Church, as nearly as might be, of the Scottish Presbyterian fashion. There was no perfect or precise agreement as to the degree of similarity to the Scottish Kirk which might be consistent with the conditions of English life. There were even seeds, as we shall see, of theories which were in the end to declare Presbyterianism insufficient and to quarrel with it. But at the exact time now 1 Clarendon, Hist. 140.

under notice (Nov. and Dec. 1640) the collective tendency of the party was indubitably to such a total re-organization of the English Church as should bring it into union and correspondence with that of the Scots on the basis of a common Presbyterianism for the whole island.This Radical or Root-and-Branch party was numerically, perhaps, the strongest of the three. Among the Clergy, indeed, it was comparatively very weak. About thirty of the clergy then assembled in Convocation were considered to belong to it or to be tending to it; and, if as many as 1,000 or 1,500 of the more extreme Puritans among the parish clergy of England were considered as either belonging to it or convertible to it by circumstances, that was perhaps an exaggerated calculation. But among the laity it was enormously and growingly powerful. Not without a sprinkling among the nobility and wealthier gentry, it had a large number of adherents among the minor gentry, while in the great body of the people it counted its tens of thousands. London was its stronghold and head-quarters, the traditional Puritanism of that city having now almost avowedly taken the form of a phrenzy for Presbyterianism. Most of the other considerable towns were centres of the same feeling; and there were particular counties, more especially the eastern counties of Essex, Suffolk, Cambridge, Huntingdon and Bedford, and the north-western counties of Lancaster and Chester, where Root-and-Branch principles were distinctly predominant among the farmers and tenantry.2And who were the leaders of this powerful popular party? On first thoughts it might be supposed that those who had done and suffered so much as pioneers of the party during the recent ascendancy of "Thorough "-the Leightons, the Prynnes, the Burtons and the Bastwicks-would now step forth as the leaders. But public feeling is capricious, and at the same time shrewd, in such matters. Though it had been for expressing sentiments which thousands of their fellow

1 Baillie, I. 282: "There is some thirty of them well minded for removing of Episcopacy, and many more for paring of Bishops' nails and arms too:" Dec. 12, 1640.

2 The proofs for these statements are various and scattered. Some exist in the shape of petitions from counties in printed collections of the time, or still in MS. in the S. P. O.

countrymen were now expressing without danger that these men had had their noses slit and their ears cropped off, yet there was a feeling that men who had fared so ignominiously, however it had happened, would not do for leaders. Accordingly, though Prynne continued to be an indefatigable writer of Presbyterian pamphlets, of the heavy and learned sort, in his Lincoln's Inn chambers, and although young Lilburne continued to be a popular favourite under the name of "Free-born John," it was among men of a different stamp that the Root-and-Branch party sought its real chiefs. Quite as unfit for the duty were most of those new pamphleteers who, availing themselves of the sudden liberty of writing by the break-down of the censorship, were now daily venting, and for the most part anonymously, repetitions of Prynne's and Bastwick's arguments. It was among the members of the two Houses, and among such of the Puritan clergy of the most advanced type as had the greatest reputation for sagacity and learning, that the true leaders presented themselves. In the Upper House there were Viscount Saye and Sele, Viscount Mandeville, and Lord Brooke, all three in advance of the Earl of Bedford in their notions of Church-Reform, and in effect, for the present, Presbyterians. In the Lower House, gradually influencing Pym himself, whose constitutional inclinations were more moderate, were men like Hampden, Cromwell, and Vane. Cromwell, we find, was about this time expressing his interest in certain papers which the Scots had put forth, arguing for a conformity of Religion between the two countries.1 Among the English Puritan clergy were some half-dozen or more, either ministers of London parishes, or then up in London for the Convocation or for other purposes, who formed a kind of working committee of the Root-and-Branch party. A chief man among these was Mr. Cornelius Burges, rector of St. Magnus, London, and vicar of Watford; but also notable individually were these five-Mr. Stephen Marshall, minister of Finchingfield in Essex; Mr. Edmund Calamy, minister of St. Mary Aldermanbury, London; Mr. Thomas Young, vicar of Stow

1 Carlyle's Cromwell (edit. 1857), I. 85.

market in Suffolk, once Milton's preceptor; Matthew Newcomen, minister of Dedham in Essex; and Mr. William Spurstow, minister of Hampden in Bucks, the parish of John Hampden. In constant intercourse with these ministers, and with conspicuous London citizens of similarly Presbyterian tendencies, were the clerical members of the Scottish deputation, Henderson, Baillie, Blair, and Gillespie. They shared in all the counsels of the Root-and-Branch party, and were its Scottish advisers and auxiliaries. "The root of Episcopacy," Baillie writes home, in December 1640, to the brethren of his Presbytery in Ayrshire, "will be assaulted "with the strongest blast it ever felt in England. Let your hearty prayers be joined with mine and of many millions "that the breath of the Lord's nostrils may join with the "endeavours of weak men to blow up that old gourd wicked "oak." 1

Properly, I ought now to go on to narrate in this chapter the first efforts made in Parliament and out of it to accomplish the feat which Baillie thought so desirable. That story,

however, though chronologically it belongs in part to this chapter, will be best reserved for the chapter after next.

1 Baillie, I. 286-7.

CHAPTER II.

THE HOUSE IN ALDERSGATE STREET.

WITHOUT as yet knowing it, the Root-and-Branch party had a possible leader at hand in one Englishman who, though neither in the Church nor in Parliament, and though with a character and thoughts of his own which might have made his party services at any time difficult either to obtain or to keep, yet did at this time assent with his whole soul to the Anti-Prelatic movement. He hailed that movement among his countrymen, and he was willing to bring to its aid a genius compared with which the utmost clerical abilities of the Burgeses, Calamys and Spurstows, and even the higher and more liberal intellect of the Parliamentary Hampdens and Vanes, were but as honest homely web, or some richer native fabric, compared with cloth of Arras. He was a man well known to Mr. Thomas Young of Stowmarket, for he had been Young's pupil some eighteen years before; and, had it been necessary, Young could have introduced him to his associates in the committee of English Puritan ministers, then acting, along with the Scottish Commissioners, in behalf of Root-and-Branch opinions. Probably no such introduction was necessary. London was a smaller place then than it is now; and John Milton, M.A. of Cambridge, and a Londoner born and bred, was probably, at thirty-two years of age, better known among the clergy and scholars of the city than Young himself.

We left Milton in lodgings in St. Bride's Churchyard near Fleet Street, among his books and papers, with his younger nephew, Johnny Phillips, boarding with him, and the other