In 1655, Obadiah Howe voiced a growing concern among Reformed divines that the continental Arminian controversy had now spread to England. As the conflict deepened, the puritan Arminian John Goodwin bemoaned those among the godly ‘who have appeared in arms against me in this Quinquarticular war’. Fellow puritans such as George Kendall and John Owen had published lengthy ripostes against the one they dubbed ‘the English Tilenus’. Daniel Tilenus was a French Protestant who became an Arminian sympathizer and open critic of the Synod of Dort. This accusation offended Goodwin and he complained against the underhand tactics being used in ‘Quinquarticular warfare’. This internecine conflict among the godly led Goodwin to pray that God would ‘speedily cause these civil wars, about matters of opinion, to cease to the end of the common¬wealth of Israel’. However, Goodwin was also concerned to downplay his apparent affinity with ‘Oxford Cavaliers’ such as Thomas Pierce. In defending the Calvinist credentials of the Church of England, Henry Hickman had named Goodwin and Pierce among ‘many’ who ‘lift up an English pen against the Orthodox, in this quinquarticular controversy’. By denouncing puritan and episcopal Arminians on the same page, Hickman demonstrated contemporary awareness of new battlelines. During the 1650s, a soteriological ‘civil war’ erupted in pulpits and in print, only this time some royalists and regicides, puritans and prelates, appeared to be fighting on the same side. Such was the nature of this ‘quinquarticular war’.

The emergence of Arminianism within the puritan fold has been described as ‘another of the great paradoxes of puritan history’. The polemical conjoining of ‘Puritan’ with ‘Calvinist’, and the counter-slur of ‘Arminianism’ against Laudians, made the whole notion of puritan Arminianism an oxymoron before the English Revolution. Indeed, pejorative associations proved to be so persistent that ‘we have been trained to think reflexively of puritans as Calvinists, and Calvinists as strict predestinarians’. However, more recent scholarship has begun to appreciate that the ‘puritan revolution’ led to a revolution within puritanism itself as some among the godly applied the Protestant topos of reformation to Calvinism.