Protestant Dissent in England and Wales dates from the Restoration of Charles II in 1660. In many ways it was shaped by the law. The Act of Uniformity (1662) formed the basis of the Restoration religious settlement. Deliberately uncompromising, the act established an exclusive episcopal state church requiring conformity to a prescribed doctrine and liturgy. A substantial body of ministers who belonged to the Church of England and believed in a national church were forced out as a consequence, with the loss of their livelihoods. In all, just over two thousand ministers and teachers refused to submit between 1660 and 1662. Many of these ministers became active Dissenters, preaching and gathering congregations despite the laws and the threat of prosecution.Footnote ¹ They were joined by an important minority of their former parishioners who sought a godly ministry and therefore failed to conform or to conform fully. In addition, Baptists, Independents and Quakers would have nothing to do with the Church of England and had already formed their own separatist churches before 1660.

Even before the Act of Uniformity, the existing Elizabethan and Jacobean recusancy statutes could be enforced against all who failed to attend their parish church for worship or to receive communion. A great many Dissenters who refused to attend church and conform outwardly continued to be convicted after 1662 by these statutes, which had originally been passed against Catholics. In addition, those who failed to take the oaths of allegiance, most notably Quakers, suffered imprisonment. New laws were also passed to prevent ejected ministers from preaching to their former parishioners and Dissenters from assembling for worship. The first Conventicle Act (1664) prohibited meetings of five persons or more, aged 16 or over, for worship outside the Church of England. A second Act (1670) introduced greater fines against the preacher and those who provided the meeting place, and allowed for only one justice rather than two to convict. It also encouraged the use of informers by rewarding them with a third of the fines. The Five Mile Act (1665) prevented ministers who refused to take the oaths prescribed from coming within five miles of a borough which returned MPs or a parish where they had preached since the Act of Oblivion. Those convicted were subject to a £40 fine or six months’ imprisonment. There has been a long tradition among historians of Dissent, from Edmund Calamy's account of the ejected ministers in the early eighteenth century to the modern period, which has emphasized the sacrifice the ejected ministers made in giving up their livings and their subsequent sufferings because of their Nonconformity.Footnote ² Recent historians have tended to downplay the sufferings and sacrifice by Dissenters and their supporters and stress the easy accommodation reached with the authorities, particularly at the parish level.Footnote ³

This study examines the practical consequences of the enforcement of the laws against Dissenters after 1662. It returns to a question that Anthony Fletcher proposed at the Summer Conference of the Ecclesiastical History Society in 1983.Footnote ⁴ He argued that historians have been too ready to accept that ‘the decades between the Restoration and the Toleration Act can be represented as the period of the “Great Persecution”’. He asked: ‘how far were these acts actually enforced? How easy were they to enforce?’Footnote ⁵ Fletcher focused on the two Conventicle Acts, examining the Quarter Session order books and related records for eight counties taken from the north, the Midlands and the south of England. As a result of his analysis, he concluded that the impact of the penal laws has been exaggerated because the Conventicle Acts were not systematically applied. He found only a handful of justices in each county active in enforcing them.Footnote ⁶ His discussion remains almost the only detailed study of the enforcement of the penal laws against Protestant Dissenters using archival evidence.

This article argues that Fletcher's approach was too narrow. The number of prosecutions and successful convictions is not the only measure of the effectiveness of a law. The threat of prosecution undoubtedly encouraged many to conform outwardly. Even those willing to hazard the law took steps to evade its penalties: for example, by meeting secretly at night, or in small groups to avoid exceeding the limit on the numbers attending a meeting set by the Conventicle Acts. These acts, whilst they inflicted harsh penalties, were not the only means by which Dissenters were harassed and persecuted. Dissenters were more likely to be presented under the recusancy laws for not attending church or receiving the sacrament, and for other offences, such as refusing the oaths of allegiance.Footnote ⁷ It was an easier task for the churchwardens to present those who were absent from the parish church on Sundays than to surprise and then to identify who was present at a conventicle. The penalty for not attending church under the Act of Uniformity of 1558 (1 Eliz. c.2) was a fine of a shilling for each Sunday, collected for the benefit of the poor by the churchwardens. The churchwardens also had to make a presentment twice a year at the archdeacon's visitation of the names of those not attending church or receiving the sacrament. The threat of the church courts for Dissenters was real. Roger Lowe, an apprentice shopkeeper in Lancashire who was active in attending meetings and hearing Nonconformist ministers, was tricked by a friend at dinner into believing that he ‘was cited to Bishop's Court for Nonconfformitie to Common Prayer’. After this, he wrote, ‘I eate no more, but went to Town Heath and prayd to God to deliver me and consulted with my selfe how to doe [it].’ When he discovered the truth, he was clearly very relieved.Footnote ⁸ Those presented were required to appear in person before the correction court, and their case was often put off from one court to another. Failure to attend court, or non-payment of fees and fines, resulted in excommunication. This was not perhaps much of a penalty for a sectary, but serious for a moderate Dissenter who did not wish to separate from the world. The church courts also had a host of petty procedures to weary the Dissenter.

This study examines the experience of the Dissenters themselves to consider the reality of the laws against Nonconformity. Evidence will be used from diaries, autobiographical accounts, church books and other contemporary sources to suggest that the impact of the laws was greater than Fletcher argued. The Conventicle Acts were only one aspect of the statutes enforced against Dissenters, and not necessarily the most significant. Moreover, the harassment of Dissenters by the authorities did not inevitably lead to indictment and conviction. This study will examine the first decade of Dissent between the Act of Uniformity and Charles II's Declaration of Indulgence, the period both shortly before and after the passing of the two Conventicle Acts. For reasons of space, it will largely exclude Baptists and Quakers, who formed only a small minority of Dissenters in this period. The latter have been well studied, particularly with regard to their use of the law to frustrate indictments and to overturn convictions.Footnote ⁹

Although Dissenters had to endure three decades of persecution, it was never continuous. There were periods of more intense persecution, for example the early 1660s and 1680s, which were generally related to times of political uncertainty. In the early 1660s, there were still concerns about the threat to the recently restored monarchy from armed uprisings and plots. In the 1680s there was a severe reaction against Dissenters because of their support for the exclusion from the succession of the Catholic duke of York, later James II. There were also denominational differences. Because of the Civil War and the Interregnum, the radical sects (the Quakers and Baptists) and the separatists or Independents were the particular focus in the 1660s. In the 1680s many Presbyterians were presented for the first time, because of their political alliance with the Whigs. In addition persecution could depend upon the animus of a local justice or official.

Even before the Restoration settlement became law and the Church of England was restored, Dissenters were under pressure to conform. It is clear that those opposed to the Anglican settlement did not have to wait until the Act of Uniformity to be pressed or even harassed. Parish constables were already presenting individuals for not attending church or for holding unlawful religious meetings under the Elizabethan and Jacobean recusancy statutes. At the Easter 1661 Quarter Sessions for Surrey, over seventy individuals were presented for not attending their parish church.Footnote ¹⁰ The Book of Common Prayer was the focus of much of the effort by the bishops and church officials against ministers, but its use also had gentry and popular support. As early as September 1660, before the church was legally restored, Philip Henry, minister at Worthenbury, Flintshire, and his friends, Robert Fogg and Richard Steele, were presented at the Flint Assizes for not using the Prayer Book, less than four months after the return of the king and two years before it was required by law. Henry and Steele were presented at the spring assizes, and Steele again in October 1661.Footnote ¹¹ A group of eight puritan ministers in Surrey were likewise presented at the sessions in October 1661. The same eight were presented again at the next sessions in January 1662, and one minister a third time in April 1662. These presentments were all before the Act of Uniformity was passed on 19 May 1662, enforcing the use of the new Prayer Book.Footnote ¹²

Ministers were also under pressure to use the Prayer Book in their parishes. It was pressed upon Henry in April by Leonard Perkins, one of the churchwardens. The following Sunday, Edward David, the other churchwarden, offered the Prayer Book, and this was the pattern for much of the rest of the summer.Footnote ¹³ Henry's dislike of the Prayer Book gave his opponents in the parish a rod with which to beat him. Oliver Heywood, minister at Coley, a township in the vast parish of Halifax, by midsummer 1661 perceived ‘a black cloud [that] thickens up on us in this congregation, my old adversarys haue now got that advantage ag[ains]^t me they haue been long seeking’. He feared that the bishop and his officials would soon ‘urge us to a conformity’ and that ‘we must comply to humane ceremonys or haue our mouths stopt’.Footnote ¹⁴ In August 1661 he was offered the Prayer Book when he went into the pulpit by the churchwarden, at the instigation of his old adversary Stephen Ellis. Heywood demanded to know with what authority it was offered: ‘he gaue me no answ. but when I would not take it he laid it upon the cushion, I took it down and laid in the lower pulpit’.Footnote ¹⁵ Heywood did not escape for long. On 13 September, he was cited to appear at the consistory court in York. He was advised to appear, but on doing so the officials would not tell him the charge and he was told to return in three weeks. Until restored by parliament, the court had no authority and ‘therefore they cannot bite’, as Heywood noted,Footnote ¹⁶ although clearly the officials still sought to harass Nonconformist ministers and their supporters.

Although Nonconformist ministers, both before and after the Act of Uniformity became law, were the focus of much of the official effort, the Independents or Congregationalists as separatists were also the subject of considerable attention. For the Independents at Cockermouth, their difficulties appear to have begun almost immediately following the Restoration. ‘In this yeare began the afflictions of the churches to tumble in upon them, heapes upon heapes.’Footnote ¹⁷ As early as 1661 the church at Cockermouth appears to have experienced serious opposition. Several of the meetings for worship had to be held ‘in parts & parcells here and there, as they could, because of the great violence of evill men’. By the Act of Uniformity, ‘which stops the mouths of all that will not abjure, … all publike liberty is denyed’.Footnote ¹⁸ Care is necessary in interpreting these early references, since they were almost certainly written up retrospectively. The Cockermouth Church Book was compiled by the minister George Larkham, curate of Cockermouth until he was displaced by the return of the sequestrated incumbent in 1660. Larkham left Cockermouth with his family and sought shelter at Broughton Tower in Lancashire with Roger Sawrey, a former parliamentarian colonel. Sawrey, however, was arrested for his support of Nonconformist meetings, and Larkham was forced to take refuge at Gomersal in West Yorkshire.Footnote ¹⁹

In Larkham's absence, the years 1663 to 1667 are very sparsely recorded in the Church book. Nevertheless it is clear that its members suffered ‘[t]he Vexations pillings & finings of many or most of the Church by the power of the justices for non-conformity.’ Inevitably they also experienced ‘the sad Apostacy & backsliding’ of some of the weaker members. Even those who remained loyal often compromised with the authorities in upholding their testimonies. ‘Besides those (in the pastors absence departed & turned aside) many of the church staggered & miscarried, through weaknes it is hoped, some of which since have given satisfaction to their brethren.’Footnote ²⁰ Persecution and the threat of persecution led to the falling away of members. The Church of England clergy certainly believed stricter enforcement of the statutes would lead to greater conformity. The archdeacon of Northampton, John Palmer, told his bishop in 1669 that those who supported Dissent would ‘return apace to the Church’ if the justices held monthly sessions in the main towns and executed the statute of 1 Eliz. c.2 against recusants. They had come in fast in 1662 and 1664 ‘& we then baptized children of some years’. These were older children whose parents had not had them baptized earlier or as infants, in many cases because they were Quakers or Baptists.Footnote ²¹ The Cockermouth Church Book makes clear that persecution of the church and its members intensified. They were forced to meet secretly, often at night, and in small numbers. In July 1671 it was agreed they would meet for the sacrament in two parts. In the case of the part meeting at Hemshill, ‘all are to be in before sun-rising because of the difficulty of the day’.Footnote ²²

Heywood's ministry as a Nonconformist quickly brought him to the attention of the authorities. Following his refusal to conform in August 1662, he took his leave of ‘my dear congregation at Coley’. He was soon ‘further cast out of [the] church assembly’ when he was excommunicated on 2 November. He was excommunicated again in January 1663 for preaching a funeral sermon at Bolton, although in fact another had preached in his place, and again on 6 December that year.Footnote ²³ Being excommunicated was a serious matter for Heywood, who like most ejected ministers believed in a national church, although he could not accept the terms of the Act of Uniformity. When he went to hear the minister at Coley Chapel on 21 December, the churchwarden ‘came in fury to me before the minister took his text and would have taken me out’, but Heywood refused to leave. The churchwarden then ‘charged the minister to forbear preaching to an excommunicate person’. Heywood replied that ‘if he would not preach I would’. After a little time the minister took his text and gave his sermon.Footnote ²⁴ Those who attended Heywood's meetings were also threatened. The churchwarden, Heywood's enemy Stephen Ellis, ‘belched out grievous threatenings how he would punish the fanaticks in the place, … went to several houses to charge them to come to the common-prayers, or he would fetch away some cows’.Footnote ²⁵ Ellis then demanded four shillings from Heywood's servant for Heywood's absence from church for four Sundays. As Heywood recounted in his diary, his servant said to Ellis that ‘if I came he would put me out of church, yes, s[ai]^th he, and so I will too, for the law must be executed, both to keep me away and punish my absence’.Footnote ²⁶ Heywood favoured the appointment of John Hoole, ‘a very late conformist’, but he noted that he could not ‘peaceably goe to my owne chappel to hear him’.Footnote ²⁷ Because he had ‘a great desire to wait upon god in publick ordinances’, he asked a friend to consult the dean of York. The answer was somewhat ambivalent. An excommunicate was not permitted to be present at prayers or sermon, but privately the dean wondered if a churchman would be so malicious to hinder any from hearing the word.Footnote ²⁸

Heywood was also subjected to unofficial harassment. He found his house was regularly watched, and he and his hearers threatened. ‘Many wondered at my safety and liberty’, especially considering ‘the rage of mine enemys’.Footnote ²⁹ Threatened with arrest, Heywood left home and was absent for about a month. Heywood and his supporters also suffered from informers. The first Conventicle Act came into force on 1 July 1664 and greatly increased the risks in attending Nonconformist meetings. On Sunday, 2 October, ‘Nathan Whitley's man, and one Widow Bancroft watcht under the gates in the fore-noone while I both prayed and preacht, and gave out many bitter threatening words’, both to Heywood's servants and to those attending the meeting. Nonetheless, they were left undisturbed.Footnote ³⁰ Subsequently Heywood heard that ‘there are several persons suborned to watch my house’, to see who attended his meetings for the purpose of informing Sir John Armitage, a justice.Footnote ³¹

Furthermore, under the Conventicle Act a constable could enter a suspect's house without a warrant, providing all sorts of opportunities to harass Dissenters. In September 1665, Heywood was at prayer when the constable and two other men ‘came furiously in, searcht the house’, but fortunately found only four other persons besides the family, within the limit set by the law. It was, Heywood admitted, ‘much different from other times’.Footnote ³² He faced further difficulties when his landlord insisted that he gave up his house.Footnote ³³ Those who wanted to worship outside the Church of England found their attempts compromised by the need for secrecy. The joy that Heywood expressed when he found somewhere more remote is evident: ‘we have a more private place then ever before, where I can sing and speake as loud as I please without feares of being overheard’.Footnote ³⁴

For many ministers the Five Mile Act of 1665 added to their troubles. This act prohibited ministers who refused to take the oaths prescribed from coming within five miles of a borough which returned MPs or a parish where they had preached since the Act of Oblivion. Richard Baxter in his autobiographical account wrote of the particular difficulties the act caused: ‘In many Countries, it was hard to find many places which were not within five Miles of some Corporation, or of some place where we had Preached before (for some Ministers preached in a great number of Parishes at several times).’Footnote ³⁵ Having been driven first from their parishes by the Act of Uniformity, the Five Mile Act then forced them further away from their friends who supported them.Footnote ³⁶ To Heywood the day the Act came into force was ‘a day of great scattering, hundreds of ministers being by act of Parl. banished fiue miles from the places where they haue formerly preacht, if they take not an oath, which they generally refuse’. He retired to Denton ‘to live in exile’.Footnote ³⁷ John Earl, when he was ejected, moved to Lewes, Sussex, and preached as far afield as Chichester in the extreme west of the county, Maidstone in Kent, and London, often travelling on foot. He was frequently arrested and fined. According to Edmund Calamy in his account of Earl, ‘[n]o part of his Sufferings went nearer his Heart, than those occasion'd by the Five Mile Act, which made Ministers hide like the worst of Criminals.’Footnote ³⁸ Nevertheless, one consequence of the act was to force ministers to travel more widely, thereby reaching audiences who had not previously heard regular preaching. Earl said later that ‘he knew some Ministers, who had it not been for the Act, had wanted Bread for their Families. Being scatter'd about, they fed many, who fed them and theirs.’Footnote ³⁹ At least 215 ejected ministers were imprisoned for preaching or for contravening the Five Mile Act.Footnote ⁴⁰

By the fact of their refusal to conform, Nonconformist ministers and their supporters were vulnerable to accusations of disloyalty and plotting. In addition, the futile insurrection in London by the Fifth Monarchist Thomas Venner in January 1661, whilst easily suppressed, caused the authorities to make the link between religious resistance and political subversion. In the early years after the Act of Uniformity, Nonconformist ministers were often caught up in rumours of plots. Philip Henry heard in February 1663, at the time of the Farley Wood Plot, of the imprisonment of Robert Yates, who had been ejected from Warrington. Yates had been imprisoned ‘upon the malicious information of a person of small credit, who swore, hee mov'd him to take up Arms ag^t y^e King for y^e Presbyterians & promis'd him 40s p. week pay’.Footnote ⁴¹ Henry was aware that he and other Nonconformist ministers faced similar risks: ‘Tis only from Gods Providence holding y^e Chayn that tis not every ones case … considering our own impotency to gainsay & the enemyes malice to accuse.’Footnote ⁴² In fact, Henry and his friends did not escape. Nine months later, in October, Henry was arrested and examined by two justices out of sessions. He was told he had been arrested on reports of a plot, but Henry was also charged with frequenting conventicles, particularly during the previous month. This Henry strongly denied. The authorities clearly saw a link between Nonconformist meetings and plotting. Henry and his friends were released on providing recognizances. They were comparatively fortunate. John Taylor, the former curate of Holt, Flintshire, was caught at a private meeting or conventicle near Wrexham with many others. They were bound over to appear at the next Quarter Sessions at Llanrwst. At the Quarter Sessions, the justices swore and used much foul language towards them and bound them over to the assizes. Most were then released on taking the oath of allegiance, but some of those present were not so lucky. Because of the remoteness of Llanrwst, they were not known and could not obtain sureties, and so remained in prison.Footnote ⁴³

Even when Dissenters were spared harassment or overt pressure to conform, their religious activities were still affected by the statutes in force. Roger Lowe of Ashton-in-Makerfield in Lancashire kept a diary for nearly four years from January 1663 to October 1667, in which he recorded his religious activities. In April 1663, his minister, James Woods, who had been the curate of Ashton until silenced by the Act of Uniformity in 1662, left the parish to live in Thelwall, near Warrington in Cheshire.Footnote ⁴⁴ The reasons were not given by Lowe in his diary, although presumably Woods was under pressure for his Nonconformity. Woods was to visit his former parish on a number of occasions, but his appearances were infrequent, and on average he only returned to Ashton once every two months.Footnote ⁴⁵ Without a regular minister, the godly had to maintain their own religious meetings. The Sunday after Woods's departure, Lowe, his friend Thomas Smith, ‘and severall young women … assembled togather in [the] feilds’ where Lowe repeated a sermon.Footnote ⁴⁶ More commonly, the meetings were held at the houses of two supporters, either that of Robert Rosbothom or John Robinson. Until his death in February 1667, Woods was the only Nonconformist minister to visit Ashton, and it is clear from Lowe's diary there was very little godly preaching in the parish as a consequence. Woods's death reduced those occasions still further. Opportunities to receive the Lord's Supper were even more infrequent. Lowe, who travelled widely, only recorded three occasions in nearly four years.Footnote ⁴⁷

Like many Dissenters in other parishes, Lowe had to seek his religion outside Ashton. He visited a wide area on business, and he took the opportunity to travel, often with friends, to hear sermons. His master lived in Leigh, where Woods's son, James junior, who also refused to conform, lived and to whom Lowe made frequent reference. On two occasions Lowe visited Woods senior in Thelwall.Footnote ⁴⁸ In his extant diary, Lowe named at least seven other Nonconformist ministers whom he heard preach, although rarely more than once. On one occasion he travelled nearly forty miles to hear Thomas Gregg preach at Broad Oak.Footnote ⁴⁹ Lowe was also aware of a small number of conformist ministers who failed to conform fully, such as John Tilsley and John Angier at Dean Church, and Richard Grimshay at Lymm, some of whom he went to hear. Other ministers, such as Thomas Gregg and James Woods junior, although they refused to conform, were able to preach openly in the early years because their chapel was not consecrated.Footnote ⁵⁰ Yet despite all these efforts Lowe did not hear sermons on a regular basis.

Anthony Fletcher found few prosecutions under the Conventicle Acts, and he concluded that the persecution of Dissenters had been exaggerated. But the situation was rather more complicated than the study of the enforcement of the Conventicle Act alone would suggest. The effectiveness of a law is not judged by the number of convictions but by its success in discouraging individuals from committing an offence. It is impossible to say how many were dissuaded from attending Nonconformist meetings by the Conventicle Acts. Nonetheless the threat of prosecution clearly encouraged even those individuals determined to ignore the injunction against illegal meetings to take steps either to avoid discovery or to remain within the law, for example by meeting secretly at night or in small groups. Fletcher did not take account of the widespread use of the earlier recusancy statutes against Dissenters, nor did he examine the Dissenters themselves to identify the threats and harassment they experienced. The use of informers and the actions of their enemies locally greatly increased the difficulties Dissenters faced. The experience of Roger Lowe demonstrates that even in parishes where Dissenters were not subject to regular harassment their religious activities were still limited by the laws against Nonconformity. After his minister Woods had left Ashton there was very little godly preaching in the parish, and almost no access to the sacraments. Lowe, because of his business as an apprentice shopkeeper, had greater opportunities than most Dissenters to hear Nonconformist ministers on his travels, but even he and his friends were unable to hear sermons regularly. Once the evidence for the large-scale presentment of Dissenters under the recusancy laws, together with the threats and harassment they experienced, is taken into account, it is no longer possible to accept Fletcher's conclusions that Dissenters suffered little persecution or that the impact of the penal laws has been exaggerated.

Dissenters not only suffered from the enforcement of the law, but clearly it created and shaped Dissent as well. The Restoration religious settlement forced those ministers who refused to conform out of the church, imposing the Book of Common Prayer and making all other forms of religious worship illegal. Dissenters were forced to modify the way they met and worshipped by how the law was enforced. Moreover, a direct consequence of the threats and persecution was the falling away of the weaker members, leaving a remnant whose faith was often intensified by persecution, which in some cases seems to have encouraged a more sectarian strain among previously moderate Dissenters.Footnote ⁵¹ The destructive nature of religious intolerance on its victims is now better understood. Historians perhaps need to recognize the consequences for Dissenters in the period after 1662 of the abuse, bigotry and intolerance they experienced.