“Puritans, spew forth the venom of your dull inventions. A toad swells with thick troubled
“Puritans, spew forth the venom of your dull inventions. A toad swells with thick troubled poison; you swell with poisonous perturbations; your malice hath not a clear dram of any inspired disposition.” - The Unfortunate Traveller, Thomas Nashe (1594) . A great portrayal by our friends at @past_pleasures_ltd of a clergyman attending King Charles. He is likely to be an ‘Arminianist’, staunchly opposed to 'Puritan’ preachers whom he no doubt blamed for helping spark the civil wars. . 'Puritan’, like so many of the names we use to describe people in the 17th Century, was actually an insult. These 'Godly’, as they would have referred to themselves, believed that the work of the 16th Century Reformation - which saw the English church break from Roman Catholicism - was not yet done. Some wanted the English church to be more like the Calvinists churches of northern Europe, while others wanted merely the last vesitages of Catholicism - alter rails, crucifixes, decoration - removed from churches. Their critics mocked them as 'Puritans’, but the term was so broadly applied as to now be almost meaningless. Puritans did not dress differently and were not the homogeneous black-clothed killjoys of popular imagination - they came from all strata of society. . At the dawn of the century these critics were, by and large, adherents to the church as it had been under Elizabeth I - her settlement had tried to accommodate radicals, moderates, and conservatives under a single national church. However, as the 17th Century progressed and the Stuarts came to the throne, this coalition began to fall apart. Although James I/VI worked hard to keep Puritans on board, many came to see his unwillingness to support the Protestant cause in Europe and willingness to form an alliance with Spain as signs of secret Catholic sympathies. Meanwhile, Puritan-minded peers and politicians began to grow in power, in opposition to Royal favorites such as the Duke of Buckingham. These divisions would eventually contribute to the causes of the Civil Wars of the 1630s, 1640s, 1650s, and 1680s. . David Fisher https://www.instagram.com/p/CAd9zLdH_OB/?igshid=bscfb2q3t7ut -- source link