The Cavalier Parliament and the Religious Settlement
A New Parliament, an Older Mood
The Convention Parliament that brought Charles II home was relatively moderate. The Parliament that followed was not. Elections in spring 1661 returned the Cavalier Parliament — overwhelmingly young, royalist and Anglican. Many MPs had lost lands or relatives in the Civil War. They were determined to punish the religious groups they blamed for the regicide and to lock the Church of England’s privileges back into law. The result was a chain of statutes, passed between 1661 and 1665, that historians call the Clarendon Code.
The Four Laws of the Clarendon Code
The Clarendon Code was a misleading name from the start. Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, was Lord Chancellor while the laws were passed, but he personally favoured wider toleration and tried to soften the bills. The pressure for harsh measures came from the Cavalier Parliament itself, not from Clarendon.
The Corporation Act of 1661 required all officers of borough corporations to take Anglican communion and reject the Solemn League and Covenant — effectively purging Presbyterians from local government. The Act of Uniformity of 1662 forced every clergyman to use the Book of Common Prayer and to accept Anglican ordination. The Conventicle Act of 1664 made it illegal for more than five people outside one household to meet for non-Anglican worship. The Five Mile Act of 1665 banned ejected ministers from coming within five miles of any town or any place where they had previously preached.
The Great Ejection of 1662
The Act of Uniformity gave clergy until 24 August 1662 — St Bartholomew’s Day — to conform. Around 2,000 ministers refused and were ejected from their parishes. This Great Ejection created at a stroke a permanent body of Protestant Dissenters — men with congregations and no churches. Some emigrated to America. Most stayed and preached in private houses, barns and woods, despite the laws.
The Cavalier Parliament passed four laws between 1661 and 1665: Corporation Act 1661, Act of Uniformity 1662, Conventicle Act 1664 and Five Mile Act 1665. Together they restored Anglican monopoly and ejected around 2,000 ministers in the Great Ejection of 24 August 1662.
Who Were the Dissenters?
The Code targeted four main groups. Presbyterians wanted a national Calvinist Church without bishops. Independents (or Congregationalists) believed each congregation should govern itself. Baptists insisted on adult baptism. Quakers, founded by George Fox, refused oaths, would not remove their hats to magistrates and were jailed in their thousands. The most famous Dissenting prisoner was not a Quaker: the Bedford preacher John Bunyan, held in gaol from 1660 to 1672, where he began ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress’. The collective name for all these groups was Nonconformists or Dissenters; together they probably numbered around five per cent of the English population.
Charles II versus His Parliament
Charles personally preferred toleration — partly to ease the position of his fellow Catholics, partly out of practical sympathy for those who had supported the Restoration. In March 1672 he issued the Declaration of Indulgence, suspending the penal laws against Dissenters and Catholics by royal prerogative. The Cavalier Parliament refused to vote war taxes for the Third Dutch War unless he withdrew it. Charles backed down in March 1673; Parliament then passed the First Test Act, requiring all officeholders to take Anglican communion. The episode showed that Parliament, not the Crown, controlled the religious settlement.
The Convention had voted Charles a yearly income of around £1.2 million from customs, excise and the new hearth tax (a charge on every fireplace, introduced 1662). The figure proved far too small — perhaps two-thirds of what was actually needed. Every time Charles wanted extra money for war or court, he had to ask Parliament. That gave MPs constant leverage over royal policy, especially religious policy. The 1672–73 Indulgence collapse is the clearest example: Parliament traded supply for the withdrawal of toleration.
The 1672 Declaration of Indulgence suspended the penal laws against Dissenters and Catholics. The Cavalier Parliament forced Charles to withdraw it in March 1673 by withholding war taxes, then passed the First Test Act requiring all officeholders to take Anglican communion.
By the mid-1670s the religious settlement looked solid on paper. In practice, Dissenters worshipped quietly in private; magistrates enforced the laws unevenly; and Charles had learned that he could not buy religious peace without parliamentary consent. The pattern was already set: a hard line in statute, softer enforcement on the ground, and constant friction between Westminster and Whitehall whenever the king tried to widen toleration. The grievances created by the Code — especially the exclusion of Presbyterians from public life and the imprisonment of Quakers in their thousands — would resurface during the Exclusion Crisis of 1679–81 and again in the Toleration Act after the Glorious Revolution of 1688. The most lasting effect was institutional: a permanent body of English Protestant Dissenters who would later build their own academies, found their own congregations and shape political opposition for generations.