The Restoration and Georgian Church of England

When the monarchy came back in 1660 so did the bishops and the Prayer Book, and the Act of Uniformity of 1662 required every minister to accept both. About two thousand refused and were ejected from their livings on a single day, creating English Dissent as a permanent fact. The church that remained was the established church of the long eighteenth century, and it has had a poor press — pluralism, absentee clergy, comfortable sermons. But it was also the church of the Prayer Book as ordinary people actually knew it, of parish registers and charity schools, and of the first Anglican missionary societies, the SPCK in 1698 and the SPG in 1701. It had its own principled casualties. The nonjurors, several hundred clergy including the Archbishop of Canterbury, who would not swear allegiance to William and Mary in 1689 while James II lived, and walked out rather than break an oath. And it was the church John and Charles Wesley were born in, ordained in, and never meant to leave.