In the course of the last section we encountered ministers who received a new, or renewed, sense of the sinfulness of the controverted ceremonies as a result of the changed ecclesiastical climate. Some space was given to the strategies adopted to evade the ceremonies and the censure of the ecclesiastical courts, but the response of the godly ministers in this account, it must be said, seems rather passive and a little negative. As the authors of the Apologeticall Narration admitted, ‘Neither at the first did we see or look further than the dark part, the evill of those superstitions adjoyned to the worship of God’. Like Goodwin and his associates, we are ‘cast upon a further necessity of inquiring into and viewing the light part’. For those writers, the ‘light part’ was a new model of church government and worship, and a consideration of some strands of the debate on church government will indeed be one of the tasks of this section. Firstly, however, we may discuss some other responses and draw out themes relating to the continuing patterns of association and to the eventual diaspora of the ministers.

The first chapter of this section discusses an element of the schemes of John Dury, the son of a Scots exile who had been working with Lutheran statesmen and divines in pursuit of a pan-Protestant union. His work in England brought him into the circles of godly ministers as he endeavoured to compile a work of practical divinity for European consumption, and an examination of his efforts reveals the networks and continuing patterns of association among the godly.