ABSTRACT
Puritans who subscribed to the Discipline thereby promised to pray for its establishment, and “as God shall offer opportunities and give us to discern it so expedient’, to make humble suit to the queen, the Council and Parliament, ‘and by all other lawful and convenient means to further and advance’ it. The puritans forgot their earlier disappointments and mounted yet another elaborate campaign. The puritans had had time to prepare for this Parliament as they had not for the session of 1584–5. Even in the parliamentary elections there is evidence of some concerted and not ineffective activity by the puritan conferences. The moderate puritan demands of 1581 and 1584 amounted to a lay programme conceived by laymen and tending to control of the Church by Parliament and the local commissions of the peace, and according to the English Common Law.
