Occasionally we can still see notices outside English parish churches declaring ‘1662 services here’. Until recent times the Church of England's service book was the text revised at the Restoration. If ‘1662’ endures for its aesthetic appeal among traditionally-minded Anglicans, the date was cruelly cut into the collective memory of English Nonconformity, for it marked permanently their expulsion, for a generation their repression, and indefinitely their marginalisation. Puritanism ceased to be a reforming tendency within the Church and became a set of independent denominations outside it. ‘Black Bartholomew's Day’, 24 August 1662, was the date on which more than a thousand ministers chose their consciences over their benefices, refusing to comply with a liturgy too papistical, an episcopal reordination that invalidated their previous ministries, and a renunciation of a Covenant that they had solemnly sworn.

The present volume marks the 350th anniversary and derives from a conference held at Dr Williams's Library in London, the leading research institution for the history of English Dissent. In keeping with broader historiographical currents, there are two distinctive accents here: the restoration of the Church beyond as well as within England, and the ‘politics of memory’ in the generation after 1662. Robert Armstrong, Alasdair Raffe and Owen Stanwood cover Ireland, Scotland and New England respectively, while Neil Keeble and Mark Burden investigate the construction of martyrologies and counter-martyrologies at the turn of the eighteenth century. If the narrative of the English Restoration is dominated politically by the earl of Clarendon, and ecclesiastically by Gilbert Sheldon (future archbishop of Canterbury), with the great Puritan Richard Baxter acting as aggrieved rapporteur, so the Irish is by the marquis of Ormond, Jeremy Taylor (newly bishop of Down and Connor) and Patrick Adair, the ‘Ulster-Scots Baxter’ (p. 116), while the Scottish is by the earl of Middleton, John Sharpe (soon archbishop of St Andrews) and Robert Wodrow, author of the History of the sufferings of the Church of Scotland. In all three kingdoms, initial high hopes of a settlement generous to the Presbyterians were dashed by a renversement, for which culpability is a delicate matter to determine. The losers certainly felt that Taylor, author of the eirenic Liberty of prophesying (1646), and Sharpe, a former Presbyterian, had something to answer for. The promise of the king's Declaration of Breda (1660) seemed empty in the face, within two years, of vigorous and coercive episcopal regimes. If the fundamental dynamic of restoration was the same in each case, there were marked differences. English Episcopalians could but envy their brethren in Ireland, where no legislation was needed to effect restoration. New England was a unique case: godly Puritan oligarchy continued in Massachusetts, which became a haven for fleeing Puritans; and yet subtle transformations, by 1691, ensured that the colony abandoned the rule of the saints.

Turning to the English politics of memory, we may say that once the Act of Toleration of 1689 ended the possibility of real martyrdom for the ‘ejected’, so the battle for the moral high ground continued in literature and print. Starting in 1702, Edmund Calamy published expansive additions to the biographical dictionary of the ejected ministers, the ‘Bartholomeans’, which Baxter had included in his landmark memoir, Reliquiae Baxterianae (1696). Anglicans responded with John Walker's Sufferings of the clergy (1714), which recorded the tribulations of Episcopalians sequestered, and exiled, in the 1640s and 1650s. Keeble's account of the Reliquiae is a propaedeutic towards a new edition to be published by Oxford University Press. Burden's fine analysis of Walker's project, based on a trove of Bodleian Library papers, shows that this was a collective research effort by the Church at large, using such new investigative apparatus as printed pro forma questionnaires. The varying degrees of willingness of clergy to co-operate were calibrations of competing impetuses towards retribution, or towards healing.

Rather little space is devoted to the high politics of re-establishment, the manoeuvres of divines and parliamentarians which culminated in the Act of Uniformity, although a fine synoptic narrative is provided by the editor as the introductory chapter. Closest to the terrain of the two leading twentieth-century analyses of church restoration (Robert Bosher, The Making of the Restoration Settlement, London 1951; Ian Green, Re-establishment of the Church of England, Oxford, 1978), is Paul Seaward's finessed analysis of Clarendon's subtle position. The ‘Clarendon Code’, the name for the repressive legislation that began with the act, is a later misnomer. Clarendon was both an adiaphorist, in the sense that episcopacy, for all its antiquity and utility, was for him of human rather than divine ordinance, and a politique, in his concern to meliorate the blows against the Puritans that became inevitable as the tide of revanchist parliamentary opinion flowed. An astute and graceful chapter by Jacqueline Rose examines the ecclesiological debate that ensued during the hiatus between the return of the king and the passage of Uniformity. What was permissible for the civil magistrate to impose in matters of religion? Plainly the magistrate could not impose what God forbids; and few denied that the godly magistrate ought to assist the true Church by imposing what God requires. But what of the middle ground: things neither ‘necessary for salvation’ nor forbidden by Scripture – adiaphora, or ‘things indifferent’? The debate was vexed, not least because some adopted insufferably paradoxical positions, such as the Puritan Edward Bagshaw, who claimed that by imposing adiaphora, the thing imposed became necessary to reject. Paradoxical too was the position of those who would later be called latitudinarians. Eirenic in the breadth of matters that they held to be adiaphora, they could be dogmatic about magisterial coercion, on the ground that, precisely because a matter was indifferent, there could be no case in conscience for objecting to its imposition. This was Clarendon's view: ‘distance from theological prescriptivism did not mean a reluctance to enforce religious rules’ (p. 64).

Finally, there are two chapters which attend to aspects of ‘the experience of defeat’, once the bread-and-butter of Dissenting historiography. Corry Cotter traces the exilic migration of Bartholomeans to the Netherlands. Michael Davies shows that John Bunyan's Bedfordshire circle, far from being permanently on the sectarian margins, belonged to the Cromwellian establishment and magistracy. The Baptists are generally not included among the Bartholomeans, because few were ejected from benefices (Calamy's dramatis personae are mainly Presbyterian), but for Bunyan, 1662 was no mere eddy in the current of outsiderdom but the catastrophe of disestablishment.

This book is exceptionally high in scholarly quality and execution. The index, however, demands an uncommon grasp of the seventeenth-century nobility: you won't find Clarendon, Lauderdale or Ormond, but Hyde, Maitland and Butler.