This book aims to guide A-level students and undergraduates through the area of religious separatism in the century before the English Civil War. Whilst attempting to review some of the results of recent scholarship in this field, it also attempts to show that the religious tensions which came to the fore during the Civil War and Interregnum had their roots mainly in the frustrations of the radical wing of the Puritan movement in Elizabethan and Jacobean England.

This study of religious tensions in Early Modern England explores the different religious separatist movements between 1550-1660. It describes the development of radical sectarianism during the reign of Charles I and explores why the unity of radical cause was shattered following the restoration of the monarchy in 1660.