Religious Quarrels
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hope of getting its support against the Commons, but without much success.
Religious quarrels; dangers from Rome again.First then, for the quarrels about religion. England was growing more Puritan every day. Men saw that the Church of Rome had ‘set its house in order’ since the Reformation, and so was regaining its ground everywhere. It was catching hold of kings and courtiers, even in lands that had been soundly Protestant fifty years before. Spain backed it up with sword and gun; and Spain, though the old men who had beaten the Armada might laugh at her, still seemed to be a gigantic power. James’s leaning to Spain.James I was bent on keeping peace with Spain and wished his son to marry a Spanish princess. This, said the Puritans, would simply bring back the Pope and Popery to England. The ‘Gunpowder Plot’, 1605.Once some wicked and hot-headed Catholics made a plot to blow up the King and both Houses of Parliament with gunpowder (1605). I think you have all heard of Guy Fawkes and the ‘Fifth of November’, but perhaps, when we see his absurd figure carried about in the streets, we are apt to forget that, on that day in the year 1605, he was actually found in a cellar under the Houses of Parliament, watching a lot of barrels of gunpowder to which he was going to set light the next morning when Parliament should have met. The King and the Prince of Wales, and all the Bishops, Lords and Commons would have met a horrible death, and the friends of Fawkes would then have seized the government on behalf of the Catholics. No wonder Protestants hated and feared a religion in whose name such things could be planned. Growth of the Puritans; ‘High Church’ and ‘Low Church’.The Puritans also said that the English Church was getting too much like the Catholic Church; or becoming, as we should say now, too ‘High Church’. The bishops were