The Anglican Church, like the Catholic Church, was an episcopal polity, i.e., a vertical hierarchy led by bishops and archbishops who ultimately answer to the sovereign. Those suspicions seemed to be confirmed by Charles’s appointment of William Laud as Archbishop of Canterbury in 1633. All this made him the target of suspicion and outrage among Puritan dissenters who felt that the Anglican Church was insufficiently reformed and was now backsliding into Catholic ritualism. While as the head of the Church of England Charles was nominally Protestant, he was accused of being insufficiently supportive of the Protestant cause and even of having Catholic sympathies himself (his wife Henrietta Maria was a Roman Catholic). Meanwhile, continental Europe was awash in blood from the religious and political conflicts known collectively as the Thirty Years War (1618-1648) and tensions between Catholics and Protestants were felt keenly across the channel in England. King Charles I, who had ascended to the throne in 1625, believed in the divine right of kings to rule by personal fiat and had effectively dissolved Parliament in 1629. Milton’s life and career coincide with one of the most revolutionary periods of English history. Illustration from The Temptation & Fall of Eve, from William Blake’s Milton, a Poem, 1808.
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