Your majesty would be misinformed if any man should deliver that
the Kings of England have any absolute power in themselves either
to alter religion, or to make any laws concerning the same,
otherwise than as in temporal causes, by consent of Parliament.

It was the extravagant claims for himself and his bishops, coupled
with his lawless overriding of justice and his profligate use of the
national wealth, that undermined the king's throne and prepared the
downfall of the House of Stuart. Notwithstanding the remonstrance of
Parliament, James's insistence upon his divine right, by very force of
reiteration, whether his own or that of the clergy who favored
royalty, won a growing recognition from a conservative people. For
his king as the political head of the nation, the Puritan had all the
Englishman's half-idolatrous reverence, until James's own acts
outraged justice and substituted contempt.

The self-restraint for which every Separatist, every Puritan, strove,
was characteristic of the great reform party. They asked only for
ecclesiastical betterment, for the reform of the ecclesiastical
courts, for provision for a godly ministry, and for the suppression of
"Popish usages." These requests of the "Millenary Petition" were,
after the Guy Fawkes plot, urged with all the intensity of a people
who, as they looked abroad upon the feeble and warring Protestantism
of Europe, and at home upon the attempt to revive Romanism, believed
themselves the sole hope and savior of the Protestant
cause. Persecution had created a small measure of tolerance throughout
all nonconformist bodies. Fear of the revival of Catholicism, the
renewed attempt to enforce the Three Articles, the dismissal from
their parishes of three hundred Puritan ministers, and the hand and
glove policy of the king and his bishops, welded together the variants