On St Bartholomew's Day, 24 August 1662, over 1,000 beneficed ministers, schoolteachers and university fellows chose to give up their positions rather than submit to the stringent conditions for continuing to exercise their vocations laid down by the Act of Uniformity passed by the Cavalier Parliament. This brought to some 2,000 the total ‘ejected’ since 1660 as the episcopal Church of England was re-established following the restoration of monarchy and the return of Charles ii. The act was one of a series of statutes which, in reaction against the (apparently) failed religious and political experiments of the Interregnum period, sought finally to crush any vestiges of Puritanism that might remain in the public life of the nation. In this, despite nearly thirty years of persecution, it failed. With the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688/89 and the Toleration Act of 1689, the freedom of the individual conscience and the right to dissent were (within limits) legally recognised. After centuries of enforced uniformity in religious affairs, this was the first step towards today's pluralist and multicultural society. Bartholomew's Day was hence a defining moment, perhaps the most significant single event in the post-Reformation religious history of the nation.

To mark the 350th anniversary of these events, in June 2012 the Friends of the Congregational Library organised a conference at Dr Williams's Library in London (which houses the Congregational Library). The volume under review publishes full versions of four papers presented to that conference. It is disappointing that it proves to be an uneven, misleading, and at times misconceived collection.

There is an excellent paper by Eryn M. White on Nonconformity in Wales from 1662 to 1689, presenting fresh archival evidence in the course of a wide-ranging, detailed and unfailingly lucid narrative which recovers the local experience of the first Nonconformists in the Principality. Her interpretation of often teasing and fragmentary evidence is invariably judicious and tactful, as is her use of modern scholarship. Only the ‘simply idiotic’ James ii (p. 115) upsets her scholarly equanimity. (An uncharacteristic error is the conferring on Aberystwyth of the title of Wales's first university which rightly belongs to Lampeter [p. 173]). David Appleby gives a businesslike, reliable and extremely useful account of events in England from 1662 to the Toleration Act in an essay which, confining itself to political and religious events, would have been enriched by greater attention to intellectual history and to the process by which the idea of toleration came to prevail over persecution and enforced uniformity.

The book, however, gets off to a very shaky start with an essay on ‘The growth of Puritanism, c. 1559–1662’ by John Gwynfor Jones. Its narrative, repetitive in structure and marred by numerous flaws in presentation, is superficial, failing to explain key events: unspecified ‘developments’ in the 1580s led to the ‘separatist movement’ (p. 17); the ‘more passive’ Puritanism of the early seventeenth century (p. 34) silently becomes the revolutionary movement of the 1640s; no explanation is offered for the name of the (wrongly styled) ‘new religious sect known as Arminians’ (p. 33). The point of view eschews impartiality for such tendentious assertions as that Puritans ‘wished to see the Reformation progress to its natural conclusion’ (p. 5). At times, the tone is patronising: in the 1640s and '50s, millenarianism ‘was part of an apocalyptic crisis of mind, which was quite common in those days’ (p. 51). Errors of fact and misunderstandings are frequent: to say that the Thirty-Nine Articles were ‘Laodicean’ and ‘secular’ (p. 9) is a remarkable misreading of their overt Calvinism; it was hardly Presbyterianism that Martin Marprelate opposed (p. 19); it was not his failure to please Parliament but the Army that led to Richard Cromwell's resignation (p. 59); Quakers were known as the Society of Friends long before ‘the late eighteenth century’ – ‘Friends’, indeed, was in use as early as 1652 (p. 54); and so on.

Part ii of the collection (extending to half the book) is given over to a theological essay by the editor on ‘The doctrinal and ecumenical significance of the Great Ejectment’. His ecumenical case, that pneumatology and ecclesiology are fundamentally linked in the Church of which Christ is Lord, is argued with great learning, an extraordinary range of reference, a persuasive passion and commitment, and engaging personal asides in an unfailingly lively and informative discourse. Unhappily, however, it is founded on a fundamental misrepresentation of the Bartholomeans as Congregationalists, if not separatists. This they emphatically were not. Far from acknowledging ‘their indebtedness to the Separatists of the preceding century’, as Alan Sell claims (p. 212), the Bartholomeans strenuously challenged the failure of the Act of Uniformity Act to distinguish them from ‘enthusiasts’ and ‘fanatics’ in its creation (for the first time) of an undifferentiated body of ‘nonconformists’. Sell repeatedly uses such locutions as ‘the Separatists’ heirs’ (p. 218), ‘the ejected ministers and their Separatist forebears’ (p. 221) ‘orthodox Dissent, epitomized by the Separatists’ (p. 228). Had this been so, those shortly to be ejected would not in 1660 have engaged in negotiations with the king and the bishops over the nature of the re-established national Church, nor would they, in 1661, have sent delegates to the Savoy conference to discuss revisions to the Book of Common Prayer to be used in the established Church. Their aspiration was not separation but the creation of a more comprehensive, less prescriptive, national Church with a parochial (not congregational) basis, its membership determined by residence, not covenant. When, in 1672, ejected ministers were able to apply for licences to preach, the overwhelming majority described themselves on their applications as Presbyterians, not Congregationalists. Congregationalism certainly had its champions (notably John Owen), but so far was Congregational (or separatist) ecclesiology from being definitive of the Nonconformity created in1662 that for Nonconformist leaders such as William Bates, Richard Baxter, John Howe and Thomas Manton it, no less than diocesan episcopacy, was a divisive misrepresentation of the true Church.