The course of the Anglican strand of Protestantism looks, on the surface, to be a very simple one. Actually, nothing could be farther from the truth. By appearances alone, the Church of England was established in the mid-1530s and continues, today. So far, so good. Indeed, even the governance scheme is unchanged from those early (and even earlier) days. Parishes and Missions report to a geographic Bishop, as determined by the Emperor Constantine in the 320s, and those Bishops, while independent in theory, are actually under the supervision of an Archbishop. In England, there are two such Archbishops: he of York (formerly known as Eboracum, the seat of Constantine when he was notified that he had been elected Emperor), and Canterbury. York is in the north and Canterbury in the south. Because Canterbury lies much closer to London and the seat of civil government, that Archbishop eventually became more important in the English Church, but even today, he has no right of seniority over York. When the English Church was subordinate to Rome, as it was between the mid-1100s and 1530s, both English Archbishops reported to the Pope, in Rome. After Henry VIII separated from the Popes, the Archbishops became the most senior prelates in the land. The scheme seemed to work, and after Henry died, his minor son “ruled”, and the Archbishops took care of religious affairs. Then he died and Queen Mary came to the throne. Called “Bloody Mary because she had so many Protestant Churchmen executed (she was a staunch Roman Catholic), any movement towards either Luther of Calvin was met with her stern disapproval. Mary didn’t reign very long, though. Her younger sister Elizabeth came to the throne and, through the Elizabethan Settlement, established the Church of England as it stands, today.
That’s not to say that everybody in the Church agreed with her. There were hundreds of clergy and probably thousands of laymen who had their own ideas about Church governance!
Among them were a great many Scots who, though they were amenable to being governed by English Kings, insisted that they govern themselves in terms of religion. In this, they were staunchly Reformist, or Calvinist. The Scots, and many Englishmen, saw the biggest problem in the Church of England as being rule by Bishops. English Bishops, you see, were members of the nobility. The Scots rejected Bishops altogether, and set up elected councils of the second order of clergy mentioned in the Bible, “Presbyters”, which means “elders”. This was a very Calvinist idea, and in direct conflict with the Queen’s “settlement” as well as the Bishop-Archbishop governance plan. For two hundred years, Englishmen and Scots fought other Englishmen and Scots over this very issue, whether or not the fighters actually understood the cause they were fighting over. When the American Colonists declared independence in 1776, King George III is said to have remarked, “so now I am to have a Presbyterian war, too?” Well, many Americans were Presbyterians, but most were not, but George III couldn’t tell the difference! To him, Protestants and Presbyterians were one and the same. Big mistake!