Puritans

Puritans. Those members of the late 16th-cent. church in England who were dissatisfied with the Elizabethan Settlement of Religion. The term was one of abuse coined in the 1560s to describe ‘a hotter sort of Protestant’. These included people who had returned to England after exile under Queen Mary (1553–8), some of whom refused to be bishops, and who held strong views about worship, as well as others who pressed vigorously for the purification of the Church. The term ‘Puritan’ thus describes attitudes to the Church of England which changed through time. In the early 17th cent., the lines separating Puritans and English Protestants became more blurred as they continued, in the main, to worship in the same churches and espouse the same basic theology. The appointment by Charles I of a number of bishops who were Arminian in much of their theology, together with the seeming alliance of court and church in promoting high church practices, alienated many: it raised questions about the episcopate, the liturgy, and the proper way of life for the elect (cf. election), which had largely lain dormant for half a century. Not so by 1642, when these issues figured in the English Civil War, the so-called Puritan Revolution. After the restoration, some Puritans became Separatists, believing in a Congregational form of church government. Several of these Separatist leaders were executed, whilst others were compelled to leave the country (e.g. the Pilgrim Fathers) in order to enjoy religious liberty.

Under the auspices of the Massachusetts Bay Company, Puritans settled in all the new colonies, but especially in New England and Virginia. Until the end of the 17th cent., the strong Puritan sense of holding authority under God (as God's elect) created a kind of ‘holy commonwealth’, with strong religious control.