ABSTRACT
In an account of the war in Derbyshire which was written or commissioned by Sir John Gell the point was made that some of the royalists there were popish in religion while others were of lewd life and little fortune; and there was also a reference to the king’s northern popish army. Although Puritan divines were generally depicted as ‘seditious levites’ in royalist literature, they were far from unanimous in the way in which they viewed the Civil War. Cornelius Burgess and Edmund Calamy were leading figures among the Presbyterian majority in the Westminster Assembly which wanted a national Church without bishops and strongly opposed the concept of religious toleration. Ministers of the persuasion, who were for the most part beneficed clergy with a university background, had close ties with many of the well-to-do Puritan gentry for whom they were the principal source of spiritual guidance.
