They had nourished the
hope that the King might be prevailed on to reduce the English
episcopate to the level of the Scottish, in the shape in which he had
just restored it.[320]

But the tendencies which the King brought with him out of Scotland ran
in an altogether different direction. He had often been personally
affronted by the Presbyterians: he hated their system; for in his
opinion equality in the Church necessarily led to equality in the
State. His intention was rather by degrees to develop further on the
English model those beginnings of episcopacy which he had introduced
into Scotland. In December 1603 he convened, as the Puritans wished,
an assembly of the Church at Hampton Court, to which he also invited
the leading men among the opponents of uniformity. But he opened the
conference at once with a thanksgiving to Almighty God 'for bringing
him into the promised land where religion was purely professed, where
he sat among grave, learned, and reverend men, not, as before,
elsewhere, a king without state, without honour, without order, where
beardless boys would brave him to his face.' He declared that the
government of the English Church had been approved by manifold
blessings from God himself; and he said that he had not called this
assembly in order to make innovations in the same, but in order to
strengthen it by the removal of some abuses. In the conference which
he opened he held the office of moderator himself. Certainly the
suggestions of the Puritans were not altogether without result. When
they expressed the wish to see the Sunday more strictly observed, to
have a trustworthy and faithful translation of the Bible provided, and
to have the Apocrypha excluded from the canonical scriptures, they met
with a favourable reception; but the King would neither allow the
confessions of faith to be tampered with, nor the ceremonies which had
been brought under discussion to undergo the least diminution. He
thought that they were older than the Papacy, that the decision of
deeper questions of doctrine ought to be left to the discussion of the
Universities, and that the articles of the faith would only be
encumbered by them. And every limitation of episcopal authority he
entirely refused to discuss. The bishops themselves were amazed at the
zeal with which the King espoused the cause of ecclesiastical
jurisdiction, and allowed their justification of it even on a point of
great importance for the constitution, the