In the spring of 1603, queen Elizabeth I died. The Religious Settlement that was agreed upon during her reign had settled nothing, and the two sides of the conflict, the Protestants and the Catholics, remained resolute in the wish to restle control of the religious life of the English people. As I mentioned in the previous chapter, Protestant exiles that had lived in Geneva returned home. These would form the core of a new line of Protestantism, Puritanism, one that was even more fierce in its defence of sola scriptura. Elizabeth needed to walk a path a moderation, so as not to anger either the Protestants in Germany, nor the Catholic kings of Spain and France. The Act of Supremacy, which required everone to take an oath to her satified neither …show more content…
Here, king James I met with delegations formed of moderate Protestants, led by Richard Bancroft, bishop of London and soon to be Archbishop of Canterbury, and the Puritans, led by John Reynolds, the Master of Corpus Christ College. From the onset, the king showed favouritism towards the moderate camp, as he spoke to them first, in private. They argued that the Church of England had been functioning well for the past forty years, thus, why would any changes be made? James, not willing to be corralled, sharply rebuked them. He wanted to be a moderate and he wanted to remind the bishops that they and the church they served were not immune to degradation. This first meeting did not end on an ambigous note though. At the end, it was obvious that James was merely mimicking what the Puritans might have said, his intention was to support the church as it was, for it was a very solid foundation for his authority. The Puritan part was ushered in on the next day of the conference. They were in for a rough time, as the king showed almost no sympathy towards them. Adam Nicolson describes the dreary situation in which the four Puritan representatives, led by Reynolds found themselves (cf. Nicolson 38-40). Their wishes were quite known to James, for he had heard them countless times from Scotish Presbyterians and more extreme English Protestants. Reynolds even commited a heinous blunder, by way of proposing that the bishops share power with the regular priests. This infuriated James, who could not govern Scotland in any proper way precisely because of this covenant. This led him to utter his famous phrase : "No bishop, No king!" At the very end of these discussions, Reynolds presented the king with one last wish: that a new English translation of the Bible should be developed. Bancroft, who was sitting in on the discussion, immediately castigated such an endevour, declaring it to be a whim, not an honest desire. James fiddled