The persecutions of the Puritans, however, somewhat abated before the death of Elizabeth, as a change of policy towards them was looked for on the accession of James, from whom the puritan party might even expect favour. But a very short time sufficed to prove how mistaken were these hopes. James, though brought up in the strictest accordance with the Calvinistic doctrines of the Scottish kirk, and though he had thanked God, while in Scotland, that he was at the head of the best and purest church in the world, by which he would stand to the death, and who abused the English establishment, “with its ill-sung mass,” as “wanting nothing of popery but the liftings;” yet no sooner had he arrived in England, and was met by the servile obeisance of bishops, who knelt before him and offered the most abject flattery, than he thanked God that he was now the head of a church where the bishops knew how to reverence a king. The bishops rejoiced; they had dreaded that in James, England would have had a presbyterian monarch; they found him a shallow boaster, whom their flatteries could make the tool of their will. Within nine months of his accession his key-note was “No bishop, no king;” and at the desire of his favourite bishops, he called a conference between them and the Puritans, when on the Puritans requesting permission to hold their assemblies for worship, the king interrupted them: “You are aiming,” said he, “at a Scotch presbytery; there Jack, and Tom, and Will, and Dick shall meet, and at their pleasure censure me and my council, and all our proceedings. Then Will shall stand up and say ‘it must be;’ then Dick shall reply, ‘nay, marry, but we will have it thus.’ And therefore I repeat my former speech, and say, the king alone shall decide.” “I will have one doctrine,” said he, “and one discipline; one religion in substance and in ceremony;” adding, “that he had lived among such sort of men as the Puritans were since he was ten years old, but might say of himself as Christ said, ‘though I lived among them, I was none of them;’ nor did anything make me more detest their courses than that they disallowed of all things which had been used in popery.” Then, turning to his bishops, he declared that, “by his soul he believed Ecclesiasticus was a bishop, and that a Scottish presbytery agreed as well with monarchy as God and the devil.” And of the Puritans he said, “I will make them conform, or I will harry them out of the land, or else worse—only hang them, that’s all!” Bishop Bancroft fell on his knees, and exclaimed, “I protest my heart melteth for joy, that Almighty God, of his singular mercy, has given such a king as has not been since the time of Christ!”