The book's history is one of repeated rewriting under political pressure, and the 1662 edition still in use is the product of that struggle rather than a single act of composition. Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury under Henry VIII and Edward VI, produced the first English-language Book of Common Prayer in 1549, translating and consolidating the Latin service books into a single vernacular liturgy, and revised it more radically in a Protestant direction in 1552, only for it to be suppressed entirely when the Catholic Mary I restored the Latin mass.
Elizabeth I's 1559 settlement restored a version close to 1552 with a few deliberately ambiguous phrases inserted to allow both Protestant and more traditionally minded clergy to use it in conscience, a drafting compromise built into the wording rather than left to interpretation afterwards. The Puritan attempt to abolish the book entirely succeeded briefly during the Commonwealth, when its use was banned, and Charles I's execution among the events of the period made its restoration a political as well as a religious statement. The 1662 revision, produced after the monarchy's return, is substantially the 1559 text with adjustments demanded by the Savoy Conference between bishops and Presbyterian ministers, a negotiation that failed to reconcile the two sides and left the more Puritan clergy to leave the Church of England altogether under the Act of Uniformity the same year. That failed negotiation is why 1662 remains distinctly Anglican rather than a broader Protestant compromise, and why the book that emerged from it, rather than any later revision, still carries legal establishment status in England.