One of these early nuclei of Puritanism was fomented by Thomas Cartwright, and Thomas Aldrich, Master of Corpus, became the leader of the Cambridge Puritans. Cartwright was one of the first Presbyterians, and canvassed the English counties in the interest of that form of Church government. The movement was checked by Elizabeth, and Cartwright was driven from his professorship. Later on the Puritan Tuckney was Regius professor of Divinity as Cartwright had been Margaret Professor. Presbyterianism was not congenial to the university: Hall Bishop of Norwich, the satirist who was a contemporary of Shakespeare, and Archbishop Williams the life-long opponent of Laud, both went to the Tower for protesting against the acts of the Long Parliament, and Hall though he was a noted 'low-churchman' remonstrated against the proposed abolition of episcopacy. Among still more eminent Cantabrigians, Jeremy Taylor was as much opposed to its abolition as Milton favoured it: but when, in 1643-4, the Westminster Assembly met, Wallis the Cambridge scientist acted as its secretary, the Oxonian Selden being another of the thirty laymen present at its deliberations.
[Sidenote: The Brownists or Independents.]
Milton had no liking for the Westminster Assembly; with Cromwell he sympathised with the rising Independent Congregations who took their principles from the Brownists of Elizabeth's time. Of the five movements which were still to sweep over the face of religious England, two originated in Cambridge. How inept the university is to the creation of such schools of thought, how alien to its genius such creations are, may be gauged by the comparatively puny character of these two movements. The Brownists and the Cambridge Platonists do not suggest a world set ablaze; but though ineffective as schools both of them represented far-reaching principles, and have left a lasting impression on Anglo-Saxon religion. It is easy to show this in the case of the Brownists: for Browne was the spiritual father of the Pilgrim Fathers, of the men who colonised a continent to obtain space to form those free Church communities which many Englishmen regarded as the logical completion of the principles of the Reformation. The English refugees at Amsterdam were disciples and adherents of Robert Browne, and it was a little company