As Darrell moved towards open confrontation with the ecclesiastical authorities, he was doing what they expected him to do, as a young and turbulent lecturer. But it has been argued that he was also taking up a position which the authorities wanted him to choose. With characteristic insightfulness, Peter Lake has suggested that the end of the threat from presbyterianism in the mid-1590s was actually a bigger problem for Whitgift, Bancroft and Harsnett than it was for the godly. ‘The whole logic behind the careers of such men was threatened’ and

When John Darrell emerged from obscurity in the Midlands in 1596–7, Lake suggests, the trio of godly-bashers fell upon him joyfully as ‘an alternative focus for anti-puritan polemic’. Lake's analysis suggests that the impulse behind the controversy over John Darrell's activities was something rather like contention for its own sake.