Act of Uniformity

May 19, 1662

The Cavalier Parliament required all English clergymen to use the Book of Common Prayer. Nearly two thousand Puritan ministers who refused were ejected from their livings on Saint Bartholomew's Day. Nonconformity became a hereditary English political tradition; dissent was formally born into England as a minority identity that would produce some of the nation's most original thinkers and reformers.