ABSTRACT
Hopes for a widely comprehensive Church began to fade after 1660. In place of liberty for tender consciences, the old Elizabethan Act for Retaining the Queen’s subjects in their Due Obedience was invoked, and was joined by the statutes of the Clarendon Code. Together these effectively excluded Nonconformists and Dissenters from holding public office and their ministers from living or ministering in towns, and made them liable to imprisonment, fines and confiscation of goods and property. The Corporation Act 1661 excluded from public office those who did not receive the sacrament according to the rites of the Church of England. The Act of Uniformity imposed the use of the Book of Common Prayer on all public places of worship. The Conventicle Act of 1664 made it illegal for more than five persons in addition to a household to gather for public worship, unless it was Church of England worship. The Five Mile Act of 1665 made residence for Nonconformist and Dissenting ministers and schoolmasters difficult. In 1670 the Second Conventicle Act rewarded informers by giving them a portion of the fines levied on illegal worshippers. A brief respite came with the Declaration of Indulgence in 1672, and many ministers took advantage of obtaining licences for themselves and their places of worship, but this was all rescinded in 1673. John Milton’s words in Paradise Lost spoke for many of them: ‘In darkness, and with dangers compassed round, and solitude’.1 John Bunyan, who spent a good while in Bedford Gaol, warned Christian and Faithful in his Pilgrim’s Progress, that ‘in every City, bonds and afflictions abide in you; and therefore you cannot expect that you should go long on your Pilgrimage without them, in some sort or other’.2 Some of the many hardships of this period are illustrated in the journal notes of Thomas Jolly.
