Churches of the Continent; and the attempt to enforce conformity to its
demands resulted in the separation from it of the extremists of both
sections. On the one hand, the English Roman Catholics became a distinct
and persecuted religious body, whose members were generally regarded,
despite repeated evidence to the contrary, as necessarily enemies of
England. On the other, despairing of further changes in the direction
they desired, a large number of the extreme Protestants separated
themselves from the National Church--though by so doing they rendered
themselves liable to be accused not only of heresy, but of high treason,
and to suffer death--and formed themselves into different bodies of
Separatists or Independents, differing on many points among themselves,
but united by a common animosity of all outside ecclesiastical control.
Within the Church the Catholic sentiment crystallised into the
Episcopalian, the Protestant sentiment into the Presbyterian section of
the Church of England. During the reign of Elizabeth the Protestant
element grew steadily stronger, as did also the spirit of political
independence, as manifested in the debates and divisions of the House of
Commons. It is a suggestive and noteworthy fact that during the long
reign of Henry the Eighth the House of Commons only once refused to pass
a Bill recommended by the Crown. During the reigns of Edward the Sixth
and of Mary the spirit of political independence commenced to revive;
and during the reign of Elizabeth the spirit of liberty and sense of
responsibility manifested by the House of Commons were such as
repeatedly to thwart the designs and to alter the policy of this
high-spirited monarch. It was, however, the severity of the policy of
the last of the Tudors and the first two of the Stuart kings against the
dissenting Protestants, that identified the struggle for religious
liberty, for liberty of conscience, with the struggle for political
liberty, and made these men in a special sense the champions of a more
or less qualified religious toleration, and of a constitutional