The Presbyterians were for forcing on the Church of England, the Covenant, the Westminster Confession, and the deposition of the Bishop by the Presbyter, or a board of Presbyters. The Independents conceived that every Christian congregation had, under Christ, supreme jurisdiction in things spiritual; that appeals to provincial and national synods were scarcely less Scriptural than appeals to the Court of Arches or to the Vatican, and that Popery, Prelacy, Presbyterianism, were merely three forms of one great apostacy. In politics the Independents were, to use the phrase of their time, "root and branch men," or, to use the kindred phrase of our own time, radicals: not content with limiting the power of the monarch, they were desirous to erect a commonwealth on the ruins of the old English polity. Macaulay's vigorous words explain the difference between the Presbyterians and the Independents: that difference is explained also by Wood in words as vigorous but less dignified and scholarly. "The Presbyterians," he says, "with their disciples seemed to be very severe in their course of life, manners or conversation, and habits or apparell; of a Scoth (_i.e._, Scotch) habit, but especially those that were preachers. The other (the Independents) were more free, gay, and, with a reserve, frollicsome, of a gay habit, whether preachers or not." John Owen, Dean of Christ Church--to be distinguished from Thankful Owen, President of St John's--seems to have been of a specially gay habit; when Vice-Chancellor "he had alwaies his hair powdred, cambric bands with large costly band strings, velvet jacket, his breeches set round at knee with ribbons pointed, Spanish leather boots with cambric tops, &c.,--all this was in opposition to prelattical cutt." The habit of a Vice-Chancellor, even in full dress, is nowadays far less gay, and of the Presbyterian rather than the Independent fashion. Whatever may have been their difference in dress, both parties were "void of public and generous spirits: the Presbyterians for the most part preached nothing but damnation, the other not, but rather for libertie; yet both joyne together to pluck downe and silence the prelattical preachers, or at least to expose their way to scorne." Wood carries his comparisons further, and tells, perhaps invents, many things about their common hatred of Maypoles, players, cassocks, surplices, and the use of the Lord's Prayer in public religious service. He more than hints at darker sins,--drunkenness, and immorality cloaked by hypocrisy, the favourite theme of the Restoration dramatists. His account of the Puritan domination in Oxford is, despite his bitter prejudices, historically important, and must have been used by Scott when he wrote 'Woodstock.'