The King of England, Henry VIII, noted the anger and began a reform in the Catholic Church. He took the Church in Rome and reformed it. He changed some of the policies and renamed it the Church of England. However, some felt that the reform did not go deep enough. They were still upset.
King Henry VIII repudiated papal authority and transformed the Church of Rome into a state Church of England. But the Church of England retained much of the liturgy and ritual of Roman Catholicism and seemed, to many dissenters, to be insufficiently reformed. (Delbanco)
The people who felt this way, soon to be nicknamed the puritans, for their desire to purify the church, endured this for another thirty years, through the reigns of two new rulers, King Edward, a protestant who introduced a few reforms, such as the vernacular prayerbook, and Queen Mary, a Catholic, who was not as tolerant of corrupt clergymen. The puritan movement through these two reigns grew exponentially. They continued to gain more and more numbers and influence, those who were not part of the movement still outnumbered the puritanical peoples and nicknamed them puritans. They were portrayed as, “ hairsplitters who slavishly followed their Bibles as guides to daily life; or they were caricatured as licentious hypocrites who adopted a grave aspect but cheated the very neighbors whom they
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Christmas changed from this crazy time of frivolity and immorality. They turned it into, “a day of ‘fasting and humiliation’” instead (Klein). When the people in New England, the austere and super dedicated puritans, heard of this they were all too happy to instate their own ban in 1659. The New England puritans were much more strict in their anti-Christmas attitude. It appears that in Old England, Christmas celebrations were more taboo, but in New England it was straight out