Thomas Cartwright (1535–1603), “the incarnation of Presbyterianism,” and for some time a thorn in the side of Whitgift, was born in Hertfordshire. He encountered Whitgift at Cambridge, and was worsted, being deprived of the Lady Margaret Professorship and of his fellowship in Trinity, and thus driven from the University in 1572. After spending some years as English Chaplain at Antwerp, he returned, got into trouble with the Church, and was imprisoned. In his later years he seems to have been conciliated by Whitgift, and to have made a less violent opposition. His works are—“An Admonition to Parliament,” 1572; “An Admonition to the People of England,” 1589; “A Brief Apology,” 1596; also “A Directory of Church Government,” and “A Body of Divinity,” published after his death. Cartwright was a very popular preacher. He writes with great fervour, but his style is much more involved and antiquated than Whitgift’s, and he has much less argumentative force.

  For a polished, and garnished stile, fewe go-beyonde Cartwright.

  Early in life a disappointed man, the progress was easy to a disaffected subject. At a Philosophy Act, in the University of Cambridge, in the royal presence, the queen preferred and rewarded his opponent for the slighter and more attractive elegancies in which the learned Cartwright was deficient. He felt the wound rankle in his ambitious spirit. He began, as Sir George Paul, in his “Life of Archbishop Whitgift,” expresses it, “to kick against her Ecclesiastical Government.” He expatriated himself several years, and returned fierce with the republican spirit he had caught among the Calvinists at Geneva, which aimed at the extirpation of the bishops. It was once more his fate to be poised against another rival, Whitgift, the Queen’s Professor of Divinity…. Cartwright was now to be confuted by other means. The University refused him his degree of D.D.; condemned the lecturer to silence; and at length performed that last feeble act of power, expulsion. In a heart already alienated from the established authorities, this could only envenom a bitter spirit. Already he had felt a personal dislike to royalty, and now he had received insult from the University: these were motives which, though concealed, could not fail to work in a courageous mind, whose new forms of religion accorded with his political feelings. The “Degrees” of the University, which he now declared to be “unlawful,” were to be considered “as limbs of Antichrist.” The whole hierarchy was to be exterminated for a republic of Presbyters; till, through the church, the republican, as we shall see, discovered a secret passage to the Cabinet of his Sovereign, where he had many protectors…. Cartwright, chilled by an imprisonment, and witnessing some of his party condemned, and some executed, after having long sustained the most elevated and rigid tone, suddenly let his alp of ice dissolve away in the gentlest thaw that ever occurred in political life. Ambitious he was, but not of martyrdom!

  The ostensible founder of this new school (though probably its tenets were by no means new to many of the sect) was Thomas Cartwright, the Lady Margaret’s professor of divinity at Cambridge. He began about 1570 to inculcate the unlawfulness of any form of church-government, except what the apostles had instituted, namely, the presbyterian. A deserved reputation for virtue, learning, and acuteness, an ardent zeal, an inflexible self-confidence, a vigorous, rude, and arrogant style, marked him as the formidable leader of a religious faction. In 1572 he published his celebrated Admonition to the Parliament, calling on that assembly to reform the various abuses subsisting in the church. In this treatise such a hardy spirit of innovation was displayed, and schemes of ecclesiastical policy so novel and extraordinary were developed, that it made a most important epoch in the contest, and rendered its termination far more improbable.

  No leader of a religious party ever deserved less of after sympathy than Cartwright. He was unquestionably learned and devout, but his bigotry was that of a mediæval inquisitor. The relics of the old ritual, the cross in baptism, the surplice, the giving of a ring in marriage, were to him not merely distasteful, as they were to the Puritans at large—they were idolatrous and the mark of the beast…. With the despotism of a Hildebrand, Cartwright combined the cruelty of a Torquemada.

  In August 1564, the queen’s interest in the university was further indicated by a visit extending over five days, and characterised by a series of quaint ceremonies and not a few amusing incidents. In one of the “acts” or disputations performed in the royal presence, a disputant took part who was destined to exercise no small influence over the subsequent history of the university. This was Thomas Cartwright, afterwards Lady Margaret professor, to whom the distinction may fairly be conceded of having been the founder of the Puritan party in England.

  That exhaustive controversy between the ablest advocate of the Puritan view of Church discipline, and one of the chief supporters of Queen Elizabeth’s Church policy—both men of high character, much learning, and fervent zeal—gave the whole case on each side. The causes of the separation that broke the dream of unity in the Reformed Church of England are to be found in our literature, so fully stated in these volumes that whoever studies them can be as well informed as any Englishman then living. We have in them the never-ending action and reaction of the two opposing forms of thought. Whitgift’s bias was Conservative, and Cartwright’s that of the Reformer. The end of their controversy is not yet, though many now think they can tell what it will be.