Attendance
While the meeting was originally scheduled for November 1603, an outbreak of plague meant it was postponed until January. The conference was called in response to a series of requests for reform set down in the Millenary Petition by the Puritans, a document which supposedly contained the signatures of 1000 puritan ministers.
The conference was set out in two main parties by James, one party of Archbishop John Whitgift and eight Bishops who represented the episcopacy, supported by eight deans and one archdeacon, and another party of four or five moderate Puritans. Many historians and contemporary religious radicals have speculated that James, after a consultation with Whitgift, had deliberately arranged to have moderate Puritan reformers attend the conference. The de facto leader of the Puritans was John Rainolds (sometimes Reynolds), the president of Corpus Christi College, Oxford. There were three meetings over a period of three days.
Read more about this topic: Hampton Court Conference
Famous quotes containing the word attendance:
“We, too, had good attendance once,
Hearers and hearteners of the work;
Aye, horsemen for companions,
Before the merchant and the clerk
Breathed on the world with timid breath.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)