Had the Tudor aristocracy been a martial caste, they would doubtless have organized an army, and governed by the sword; but they instinctively felt that, upon the field of battle, they might be at a disadvantage, and therefore they attempted to control the popular imagination through the priesthood. Thus the divine right of primogeniture came to be the distinguishing tenet of the Church of England. James felt the full force of the current which was carrying him onward, and expressed the situation pithily in his famous apothegm, “No bishop, no king.” “I will have,” said he, “one doctrine, one discipline, one religion in substance and ceremony;” and the policy of the interest he represented was laid down as early as 1604, at the conference at Hampton Court. Passive obedience was to be preached, and the church filled with men who could be relied on by the oligarchy. Six weeks after the conference at Hampton Court, Whitgift died, and Bancroft, Bishop of London, was translated to Canterbury. Within a week he was at work. He had already prepared a Book of Canons with which to test the clergy, and this he had ratified by the convocation which preceded his consecration. In these canons the divine origin of episcopacy was asserted; a strange departure from the doctrine of Cranmer. In 1605 there are supposed to have been about fifteen hundred Puritan clergymen in England and Wales, and at Bancroft’s first winnowing three hundred were ejected. Among these Puritans was a certain John Robinson, the teacher of a small congregation of yeomen, in the village of Scrooby, in Nottinghamshire. The man’s birth is unknown, his early history is obscure, but in him, and in the farmers who heard him preach, the long and bitter struggle against the pressure of the class which was destroying them, had bred that stern and sombre enthusiasm which afterward marked the sect. By 1607 England had grown intolerable to this congregation, and they resolved to emigrate. They had heard that in Holland liberty of conscience was allowed, and they fondly hoped that with liberty of conscience they might be content to earn their daily bread in peace. Probably with them, however, religion was not the cause, but the effect of their uneasiness, as the result proved.