The representation of episcopal power in an age of persecution, 1640-1680

The focus of this paper is the authority of English bishops as it was caught in separate processes of religious change. The first religious change is the English Reformation. The English episcopate survived this and even superintended the reforms and we think obviously of Cranmer, Latimer and Ridley. But bishops entered the seventeenth century battling a reputation held in some quarters that they were a popish dreg and that their authority over English Protestants was alarmingly popish