ABSTRACT
With characteristic insightfulness, Peter Lake has suggested that the end of the threat from presbyterianism in the mid-1590s is actually a bigger problem for Whitgift, Bancroft and Harsnett than it is for the godly. When John Darrell emerged from obscurity in the Midlands in 1596-7, Lake suggests, the trio of godly-bashers fell upon him joyfully as 'an alternative focus for anti-puritan polemic'. Lake's analysis suggests that the impulse behind the controversy over John Darrell's activities is something rather like contention for its own sake. John Darrell is passionately committed to the ideal of brotherhood as the cause of great disunity in the Church of England. In an extended metaphor of Spanish and English ships, Dialogicall Discourses is an unwieldy 'galeasse' which Darrell can defeat with a 'poore fisher boate'.
