ABSTRACT
At a time when the older nonconformists were repudiating the pretensions of the new upstart leadership, the universities, and especially Cambridge, were beginning to supply the rank and file of a new and larger puritan party, young men who were already accustomed to setting themselves against ecclesiastical and academic authority. Cambridge, wrote John Strype, ‘ran now much divided into two factions, whereof the younger sort, which were the majority, was much for innovations, and such were followers of Cartwright’s principles; which the graver sort, especially the heads, labored to restrain.’ Power had hitherto rested with the regent masters, graduates of up to three years’ standing, who were a majority of the teaching and governing body in a period of rapid university expansion. Perhaps no one knew better than the popular Lady Margaret professor of 1565 die temptation to defer to the opinions as well as to the voting power of the younger element.
