In the matter of Church government Puritanism passed through three different periods. In the reign of Elizabeth the Church-Puritan was mainly Presbyterian under Cartwright's lead. But there was even then a current that set toward Independency. Separatism was the outward manifestation of this tendency, and according to Ralegh's estimate, cited in the text, there were about twenty thousand declared Separatists in England in 1593. After the suppression of the presbyteries within the Church in the last years of Elizabeth, and the crushing out of the Separatists by rigorous persecutions, questions of the particular form of Church government fell into abeyance among the Puritans for about forty years. "Indiscriminate anti-prelacy was the prevailing mood of the English people," says Masson, "and the distinction between Presbyterianism and Independency was yet caviare to the general." Life of Milton, ii, 590. Richard Baxter, the Puritan divine (as quoted by Masson), confesses in 1641 that until that year he had never thought what Presbytery or Independency was, or ever spoke with a man who seemed to know it. See also Hanbury's Memorials, ii, 69. Writers on this period do not seem to recognize the fact that the two views were in some rivalry among the early Puritans, and that the theory of the independence of the local church seems to have been at least foreshadowed in the opinions at Frankfort. But there was a long generation in which these differences among the Puritans were forgotten in their life-and-death conflict with the Episcopal party. Then, as Puritanism came into power, the example of other Protestant European countries drew England toward Presbyterianism, while the voice of New England came from over the sea pleading for Congregationalism. [Sidenote: Note 7, page 123.]