Travers was then afternoon-lecturer at the Temple. The Master whose
death made the vacancy, Alvey, recommended on his deathbed Travers
for his successor, the society was favourable to him, and he had the
support of the Lord Treasurer Burghley. After Hooker's appointment
to the Mastership, Travers remained afternoon-lecturer, and combated
in the afternoons the doctrine which Hooker preached in the mornings.
Now, this Travers, originally a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge,
afterwards afternoon-lecturer at the Temple, recommended for the
Mastership by the foregoing Master, whose opinions, it is said,
agreed with his, favoured by the society of the Temple, and supported
by the Prime Minister,--this Travers was not an Episcopally ordained
clergyman at all; he was a Presbyterian, [xxxix] a partisan of the
Geneva church-discipline, as it was then called, and "had taken
orders," says Walton, "by the Presbyters in Antwerp." In another
place Walton speaks of his orders yet more fully:--"He had
disowned," he says, "the English Established Church and Episcopacy,
and went to Geneva, and afterwards to Antwerp, to be ordained
minister, as he was by Villers and Cartwright and others the heads of
a congregation there; and so came back again more confirmed for the
discipline." Villers and Cartwright are in like manner examples of
Presbyterianism within the Church of England, which was common enough
at that time; but perhaps nothing can better give us a lively sense
of its presence there than this history of Travers, which is as if
Mr. Binney were now afternoon-reader at Lincoln's Inn or the Temple,
were to be a candidate, favoured by the benchers and by the Prime
Minister, for the Mastership, and were only kept out of the post by
the accident of the Archbishop of Canterbury's influence with the
Queen carrying a rival candidate.

Presbyterianism, with its popular principle of the power of the