ABSTRACT
Some puritan ministers were now ready for an honourable reconciliation with the bishops; others were on the point of repudiating their government altogether. On June 24th, Whitgift could still certify forty-nine ‘recusants’ in his province, without taking into account the puritan strongholds of East Anglia, Essex, Northamptonshire, Warwickshire and London. Colchester was the home of the puritan lawyer James Morice, who would later head the campaign in Parliament against this procedure, and it was perhaps from this source that die Dedham brethren were already informed that ‘the judgment of the lawyers is that the oath offered by the bishops is not to be allowed.’ The mass defection of the conditional subscribers enabled the apologists for the bishops to claim that the puritan ministry as a whole had ‘allowed all’ and retracted. Typical of this disturbing propaganda was the preface to a commentary on the Thirty-nine Articles published by Thomas Rogers, Hatton s chaplain.
