417.  The Great Puritan Petition (1603).

During the latter part of Elizabeth’s reign, the Puritans (S378) in England had increased so rapidly that Archbishop Whitgift told James he was amazed to find how “the vipers” had multiplied.  The Puritans felt that the Reformation had not been sufficiently thorough.

They complained that many of the forms and ceremonies of the Church of Engalnd were by no means in harmony with the Scriptures.  Many of them wished also to change the Episcopal form of Church government, and instead of having bishops appointed by the King, to adopt the more democratic method of having presbyters or elders chosen by the congregation.

While James was on the way from Scotland to London to receive the crown, the Puritans presented the “Millenary Petition” to him.  It was so called because it purported to have a thousand signers.  The ministers presenting it asked that they might be permitted to preach without wearing the white gown called a surplice, to baptize without making the sign of the cross on the child’s forehead, and to perform the marriage ceremony without using the ring.  Bishop Hooker and Lord Bacon had pleaded for a certain degree of toleration for the Puritans.  They even quoted the words of Christ:  “He that is not against us is for us.”  But the King had no patience with such a plea.

418.  Hampton Court Conference (1604).

The King convened a conference at Hampton Court, near London, to consider the Petition, or rather to make a pedantic display of his own learning.  The probability that he would grant the petitioners’ request was small.  James had come to England disgusted with the violence of the Scotch Presbyterians or Puritans (S378), especially since Andrew Melville, one of their leading ministers in Edinburgh, had seized his sleeve at a public meeting and addressed him, with a somewhat brutal excess of truth, as “God’s silly vassal."[1]

[1] Gardiner in the “Dictionary of National (British) Biography,” “James I,” thinks that by “silly” Melville meant “weak.”  But that is not much improvement.

But the new sovereign had a still deeper reason for his antipathy to the Puritans.  He saw that their doctrine of equality in the Church naturally led to that equality in the State.  If they objected to Episcopal government in the one, might they not presently object to royal government in the other?  Hence to all their arguments he answered with his favorite maxim, “No bishop, no king,” meaning that the two must stand or fall together.

At the Hampton Court Conference all real freedom of discussion was practically prohibited.  The Conference, however, had one good result, for the King ordered a new and revised translation of the Bible to be made (SS254, 357).  It was published a few years later (1611).  This translation of the Scriptures excels all others in simplicity, dignity, and beauty of language.  After more than three hundred years it still remains the version used in the great majority of Protestant churches and Protestant homes wherever English is spoken.