Puritanism has a natural tendency to fragment into ever smaller units. That is what their opponents said about the movement, and, just because Samuel Parker and Roger L'Estrange said so, does not make it wrong. The dissidence of dissent is indeed one of the great historical platitudes. Patrick Collinson has never been one to let sleeping platitudes lie, however, and in a notable recent paper he has pointed to the resilience of a contrary strain within Puritanism; of what we might call a centripetal, rather than a centrifugal, tendency. He argues that the voluminous antiseparatist literature did have its effect, individuals could be pulled back from the brink (like Robert Browne himself, the man who gave a name to a tendency), the seceders were in any case less set apart from the rest of the community than was once supposed, combination lectureships strengthened not weakened the established church, and so on. It adds up to a formidable case for taking seriously the possibility of writing a different script for Puritanism, in which it becomes the ally, not the enemy, of a comprehensive national settlement.

Collinson wants historians to maintain an open-endedness: to recognise that by the end of the early years of the seventeenth century (where his analysis stops), it was by no means a foregone conclusion that the evolution of Puritanism would be synonymous with the triumph of the sects.