Excerpt from The Life of Richard Baxter, of Kidderminster: Preacher and Prisoner

James I. Ascended the throne with the determination to enforce among his subjects implicit obedience to his will, both in Church and in State. To his innate love of arbitrary power were added the obstinacy of a perverse mind and the vanity which is fed by adulation. Without the advantage of a tuition, he never had the good fortune to see truth at first hand, to acquire self-control, and to learn the better method of managing men. He was educated among persons, with one signal exception, of the narrowest views, and of little knowledge of affairs, who held one part of their creed with little heed of the other; adding to natural asperity the bitterness of theological rancour. At the Hampton - Court conference, James acted on the principles in which he had been trained, and which always more or less governed him.

He said to the assembled divines, I will have one doctrine, one discipline, one religion in substance and ceremony never speak more to that point, how far you are bound to obey. N o bishop, no king. I will make them conform, and that quickly too, or they shall hear of it. If they are of an obstinate and turbulent spirit, I will have them enforced to conform. The king's conduct at that conference confirmed the resolution of several of the younger members of the House of Commons to demand from their sovereign civil and religious freedom.

On the accession of Charles I. Two opposing currents moved English thought. On the one hand, the Hampton Court conference had revived in some of the Anglican clergy more or less sympathy with the ceremonial of the Latin Church, and had produced an increasing aversion to the particularist doctrines of the French and Swiss Reformers which they regarded as limiting the extent of the Divine mercy, and as denying to a great degree the free-agency and responsibility of man. Some of them desired to subordinate the Church to the State, and thus to make the king supreme in both; so that he should not only bear the august title, Defender of the Faith, which the most despotic of the Tudors had received from the Pope; but that he should be acknowledged to have both the Divine right to rule, and to determine for his subjects the standard of truth and belief.

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