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In 1625, shortly before the opening of the new parliament, Charles was married by proxy to Princess Henrietta Maria of France, the Catholic daughter of King Henri IV.In diplomatic terms this implied alliance with France in preparation for war against Spain, but Puritan MPs openly claimed that Charles was preparing to restrict the recusancy laws and even to grant Catholic Emancipation.
It is not typically summarised as a whole, since the political events of the 1640s, sometimes called the Puritan Revolution, have complex roots, not any more than the term "Puritan" can be given a useful and precise definition outside the particular historical context. The Puritan's main purpose was to purify the Church of England and to make ...
The Puritan faction objected loudly and appealed to the continental reformers to support their cause. Many of the continental reformers felt that the Puritans were just making trouble – for example, in a letter to Bishop Grindal, Bullinger accused the Puritans of displaying "a contentious spirit under the name of conscience".
In the 17th century, the word Puritan was a term applied not to just one group but to many. Historians still debate a precise definition of Puritanism. [6] Originally, Puritan was a pejorative term characterizing certain Protestant groups as extremist. Thomas Fuller, in his Church History, dates the first use of the word to 1564.
The Puritan influence on slavery was still strong at the time of the American Revolution and beyond. In the decades leading up to the American Civil War , abolitionists such as Theodore Parker , Ralph Waldo Emerson , Henry David Thoreau and Frederick Douglass repeatedly used the Puritan heritage of the country to bolster their cause.
The major Whig historian, S. R. Gardiner, popularised the idea that the English Civil War was a "Puritan Revolution" [193] that challenged the repressive Stuart Church and prepared the way for religious toleration. Thus, Puritanism was seen as the natural ally of a people preserving their traditional rights against arbitrary monarchical power.
King James I and Charles I made some efforts to reconcile the Puritan clergy who had been alienated by the lack of change in the Church of England.Puritans embraced Calvinism (Reformed theology) with its opposition to ritual and an emphasis on preaching, a growing sabbatarianism, and preference for a presbyterian system of church polity, as opposed to the episcopal polity of the Church of ...
Royalists generally supported a Church of England governed by bishops, appointed by, and answerable to, the king; Puritans believed he was answerable to the leaders of the church, appointed by their congregations. [2] "Puritan" was a term for anyone who wanted to reform, or "purify", the Church of England, and contained many different perspectives.