Among the Puritans themselves, indeed,
there was no definite agreement on this point. Some would have stopped
short with Presbyterianism, while others held that "new presbyter was
but old priest writ large," and so pressed on to Independency. It was
early in Elizabeth's reign that the zeal of these extreme brethren,
inflamed by persecution, gave rise to the sect of Separatists, who
flatly denied the royal supremacy over ecclesiastical affairs, and
asserted the right to set up churches of their own, with pastors
and elders and rules of discipline, independent of queen or bishop.
[Sidenote: Puritanism was not intentionally allied with liberalism]
In 1567 the first congregation of this sort, consisting of about a
hundred persons assembled in a hall in Anchor Lane in London, was
forcibly broken up and thirty-one of the number were sent to jail and
kept there for nearly a year. By 1576 the Separatists had come to be
recognized as a sect, under the lead of Robert Brown, a man of high
social position, related to the great Lord Burleigh. Brown fled to
Holland, where he preached to a congregation of English exiles, and
wrote books which were smuggled into England and privately circulated
there, much to the disgust, not only of the queen, but of all parties,
Puritans as well as High Churchmen.
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