But through the later years of James’s reign, and throughout the whole of his son’s reign, puritanism grew, and threatened to either modify or to disintegrate the English Church. A calvinistic divine, George Abbot, was even appointed Archbishop of Canterbury;[3] and many holding church livings were virtually nonconformists. A system of doctrines, which denied the divine right of kings to govern as above the law, was hateful to Charles Stuart. And the Queen, Henrietta Maria of France, was a rigid Catholic; she detested the Puritans, and had inherited from her father high notions of absolute rule; and all through Charles’s life she goaded him on in the dangerous path which issued in his destruction. And Laud, almost a Catholic in opinion, and as intolerant as any Spanish inquisitor, directed the affairs of the Church; whilst Strafford was scheming for royal despotism, and to undermine the privileges of Parliament. Clergymen preaching absolute obedience were sure of preferment; the more zealous advocates of _Thorough_ were made bishops. Footnote 3: Refusing to licence the publication of some especially slavish sermons, on the royal prerogatives, Abbot was suspended from office, and confined to his country-house. An old levy on the maritime towns and counties, to equip vessels for the protection of the coasts in time of war, was, in time of peace, and on the Kings sole authority, extended under the name of ship-money to inland counties, and applied—not to the equipment of a fleet, but to the support of a standing army; and, before this army, all constitutional privileges were to be swept away. In 1637, a Buckinghamshire gentleman, John Hampden, refused to pay the guinea-and-a-half levied on his estate; but the Court of Exchequer upheld the tax. And, hunted and persecuted, dragged before Laud’s High Commission on the most paltry charges, and by it subjected to fines, to personal injuries and imprisonment, many Puritans emigrated; some went to Holland, but the greater number to America: and these became a considerable factor in shaping the social, political, and religious history of the Greater Britain beyond the Atlantic. Three men who came to be of special note in our home history—John Hampden, John Pym, and Oliver Cromwell, were on board, bound for New England, when a government order came to stop the sailing of the vessel.