The Church of England has become renowned for its ambivalent relationship with the Reformed churches of the continent. Puritans have therefore traditionally been distinguished (by Antipuritans, at least) by the supposed intimacy of their relationship with the theology and liturgy of the continental Reformed churches. It is true, as we shall see, that they displayed an especial readiness to urge the example of the foreign churches in debates over church government and liturgy, to cultivate personal links with the foreign churches, to support distressed foreign Protestants by charitable donations, and to encourage military support for their co-religionists abroad in their struggles with the forces of international Roman Catholicism. But the Puritans' relationship with the continental Reformed churches was a complex and changing one, and was characterised as much by tension and ambiguity as by instinctive fraternalism, especially as English Puritanism itself fractured during the seventeenth century.