First paragraph: The Dissenters of England and Wales, that is the Protestants who stood outside the Church of England, originally included five main strands. The largest body in the seventeenth century consisted of the Presbyterians, who, like their coreligionists in Scotland, upheld the stoutly Calvinist doctrines expounded in the Westminster Confession of 1646. They originally aspired to copy their Scottish contemporaries by creating a system of church courts that would govern a national church, supplanting the episcopal structure of the Church of England. Alongside them was the second and smaller strand, the Independents, who, while sharing the Calvinist theology of the Presbyterians, differed from them in church organisation. Rejecting ...