Charles II of England

Charles II returned in 1660 having promised at Breda a liberty to tender consciences, and the parliament elected the following year had other intentions. Four statutes, known collectively by the name of his chief minister although he did not draft them all, built the settlement. The Corporation Act required municipal officeholders to take communion in the Church of England. The Act of Uniformity of 1662 required every minister to declare his unfeigned assent to everything in the revised Book of Common Prayer by a fixed day, and about two thousand who would not do so lost their livings, an event remembered as the Great Ejection. The Conventicle Act made worship outside the parish church a criminal offence. The Five Mile Act barred an ejected minister from coming within five miles of a place where he had served.

The effect was not what its authors intended. Before 1662 the people who wanted the church further reformed had been a party inside it, arguing for change from within. After 1662 they were outside it and had to organise as separate congregations with their own ministers, buildings and finances, and English Nonconformity dates as a permanent body from that year. John Bunyan wrote in Bedford gaol under these laws.

In 1672 the king issued a Declaration of Indulgence suspending the penal laws against both Protestant dissenters and Catholics. Parliament forced its withdrawal the following year, and the objection was as much constitutional as religious: a crown that could suspend a statute at will was a crown that did not need a parliament. The price of the retreat was the Test Act of 1673, which required officeholders to take Anglican communion and to deny transubstantiation by declaration, and its immediate effect was to expose his brother James, who resigned as Lord High Admiral rather than take the test and was thereby revealed as a Catholic heir.

What followed ran on that fear for a decade: the invented conspiracy known as the Popish Plot, the executions it produced, and the attempt to exclude James from the succession, which the king defeated by dissolving parliaments. He was received into the Catholic church as he was dying in 1685, by a priest brought secretly to the bedchamber. The atlas notes the shape of the reign rather than a verdict on it. A ruler personally inclined to toleration and privately attached to Rome presided over the statutes that made English dissent permanent, because in this period what a monarch believed and what a parliament enacted were separate questions.