ism as
especially vigorous and obstinate in his diocese, where more than two
hundred heretics were once brought before him in the course of a single
visitation. It was in Lincolnshire, Norfolk, Suffolk, and Essex, and
among the fens of Ely, Cambridge, and Huntingdon, that Puritanism was
strongest at the end of the sixteenth century. It was as member and
leading spirit of the Eastern Counties Association that Oliver Cromwell
began his military career; and in so far as there was anything sectional
in the struggle between Charles I. and the Long Parliament, it was a
struggle which ended in the victory of east over west. East Anglia was
from first to last the one region in which the supremacy of Parliament
was unquestionable and impregnable, even after the strength of its
population had been diminished by sending some thousands of picked men
and women to America. While every one of the forty counties of England
was represented in the great Puritan exodus, the East Anglian counties
contributed to it far more than all the rest. Perhaps it would not be
far out of the way to say that two-thirds of the American people who can
trace their ancestry to New England might follow it back to the East
Anglian shires of the mother-country; one-sixth might follow it to those
southwestern countries--Devonshire, Dorset, and Somerset--which so
long were foremost in maritime enterprise; one-sixth to other parts of
England. I would not insist upon the exactness of such figures, in a
matter where only a rough approximation is possible; but I do not think
they overstate the East Anglian preponderance. It was not by accident
that the earliest counties of Massachusetts were called Norfolk,
Suffolk, and Essex, or that Boston in Lincolnshire gave its name to the
chief city of New England. The native of Connecticut or Massachusetts
who wanders about rural England to-day finds no part of it so homelike
as the cosy villages and smiling fields and quaint market towns as he
fares leisurely and in not too straight a line from Ipswich toward Hull.
Countless little unobtrusive features remind him of home. The very names
on the sign-boards over the sleepy shops have an unwontedly familiar
look. In many instances the homestead which his forefathers left, when
they followed Winthrop or Hooker to America, is still to be found,
well-kept and comfortable; the ancient manor-house built of massive
unhewn stone, yet in other respects much like the New England farmhous