England was never completely, absolutely, Anglican. Even though Henry VIII intended it to be so, and even though Elizabeth I tried to make it so, the 1500s were, after all, the time of Reformation. Lutheranism was spreading in Germany, Calvinism was spreading in Holland, France and Switzerland, and there were Anabaptist groups springing up all over the place. Rome countered with the Council of Trent, and so there was, in addition to the Protestant Reformation, itself, a Counter-Reformation going on. The Roman Catholic Church organized the Jesuit order, or “The Society of Jesus”, sometimes called “God’s Soldiers”. The Jesuits were founded by Ignatius Loyola, a soldier himself, who organized his black-clad priesthood along military lines. Their first job was to implement the Counterreformation, and their second was to spread the Roman Church back into places where Protestants had taken hold.
In England, one of the first movements within the established, Anglican, Church was Presbyterianism. Presbyterian worship differs little (or at least it differed little in those days) from the Anglican prayerbook standard, but the governance of the Church is dramatically different. It is, it that regard, very definitely Calvinist.
John Knox was a Scottish Churchman with Protestant ideas. He moved to England to get away from Roman Catholicism, and there became an Anglican priest. He then moved on to Geneva, Switzerland, where he became even more firmly committed to Calvin’s ideas concerning church organization and discipline. In particular, he adopted Calvin’s rejection of the Episcopacy. He eventually returned to Scotland and there persuaded many to adopt his ideas. Among those ideas was that of church governance by groups of Elders, or Presbyters, rather than Bishops.
You see, Jesus never bothered to set up a form of governance for his Church! He sent 12 of his followers on missions (‘apostle” is Greek for “one who is sent”, or “missionary”), but he never gave them names or ranks. During the 1st Century, a three part order of clergy grew up. Peter and Paul, and Luke, among others, refer to one or more of these: “Overseers”, or Bishops; Greek “episcopos”, as in I Timothy 3:1, Titus 1:7, and I Peter 2:25; “Elders”, or “Presbyters”, as in Matthew 27, Mark 7, Luke 7, and Acts; and “Deacons”, Greek “Diaknos” , referred to by function in Acts though not named as such, and named by Paul in his letters to Timothy and Titus. The Emperor Constantine, when he legalized the Church in 525 AD, formalized these three and assigned them legal functions to go along with their religious ones. Knox (and Calvin) argued that, lacking Biblical authorization, Bishops were not required for governance, and that, in fact, councils of Elders could get the job done, just fine.
In 1560, the government of Scotland adopted Knox’s plan as the established Church of Scotland. There were many within the Church of England who would have liked to see the same happen in England. Thus, some of the first English explorers and American colonists were Presbyterians.