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the sixteenth century or, in other words, too few bishops prepared to pursue God’s interests.32 Once Protestant ideas began to filter into France from the 1520s, the reformers saw the need to remedy the episcopate’s ills as especially pressing. Part of their response to the anti-episcopal stance of French Protestants was to emphasise the necessity for bishops within the institutional church and for successful reform with even greater urgency. Their plan of campaign was uncompromising: they agreed that episcopal residence was vital, and believed that the major
into Civil War during the early 1640s. Then as now a run at the bishops presaged a run at the king; then as now the collapse of licensing allowed the puritans to mobilise the mob behind fears of ‘popery and arbitrary government’; and then as now those puritan claims to defend the realm from ‘popery’ cloaked their doing the pope’s work, collapsing the realm into disorder and weakening the central institutions (church and Crown) which history showed to be the best defence against Antichrist. 49 Puritanism and
abandonment of the institutional Church and resignation to a non-interventionist God, the question of the level of forms of non-elite dissent from the Church in the early modern period cannot be irrelevant. It is surprising – with the partial exception of England – that such a question is so infrequently addressed in Enlightenment studies. Elite opinion is usually portrayed as developing without influence from the lower echelons and, in so far as elite ideas were passed down the social scale, without any intellectual reciprocity. Yet how many historians are prepared to