clergy and magistrates as teachers of insubordinate and dangerous
doctrines. Thenceforward, outcroppings of dissatisfaction with the
clergy appear from time to time both in English life and
literature. This dissatisfaction was silenced by various acts of
Parliament which were passed to enforce conformity and to punish
heresy. Their character and intent were the same whether the head of
the church wore the papal tiara or the English crown. Two hundred
years after Wyckliff, in 1582, laws were still fulminated against
"divers false and perverse people of certain new sects," for
Protestant England would support but one form of religion as the moral
prop of the state. She regarded all innovations as questionable, or
wholly evil, and their authors as dangerous men. Chief among the
latter was Robert Browne. But before Browne's advent and in the days
of Henry the Eighth, there had been a large, respectable, and steadily
increasing party whose desire was to remain within the English church,
but to purify it from superstitious rites and practices, such as
penances, pilgrimages, forced oblations, and votive offerings. They
wished also to free the ritual from many customs inherited from the
days of Rome's supremacy. It was in this party that the leaven of
Protestantism had been working. Luther and Henry, be it remembered,
had died within a year of each other. Under the feeble rule of Edward
the Sixth, the English reform movement gained rapidly, and, in 1550,
upon the refusal of Bishop Hooper to be consecrated in the usual
Romish vestments, it began to crystallize in two forms, Separatism and
Puritanism.[c] In spite of much opposition, the teachings of Luther,
Calvin, and other Continental reformers took root in England, and
interested men of widely different classes. They stirred to new
activity the scattered and persecuted groups, that, from time to time,
had met in secret in London and elsewhere to read the Scriptures and
to worship with their elected leaders in some simpler form of service