Overview

The restoration of Charles II in 1660 brought back the old regime, or as much of it as could be rescued from the troubles of the previous twenty years. The church was restored in principle, but in practice it was subtly different from what it had been before. The king wanted an accommodation with dissenters, which would include as many people as possible in a broadly-based national church, but his strongest supporters were out for revenge and had little sympathy with those who had supported the commonwealth.

In this atmosphere, the convocations of Canterbury and York established a joint committee to work out the details of the new prayer book, which came into use on 24 August 1662. It was so traditional that more than 1,760 ministers resigned their livings, rather than accept it. This produced a dissenting minority which was too large to be suppressed or ignored, despite repeated attempts to bring it to heel.

During this period the church authorities did their utmost to restore what they imagined the church's rights and privileges should be, but their intransigence towards even the most moderate forms of dissent worked against them. By about 1680 there were two new parties in the country, a liberal group (the so-called Whigs) which wanted toleration for different opinions and a conservative one (the so-called Tories) which tried to preserve the established church in all its privileges and regarded any concessions to dissenters or Roman Catholics as a mortal danger to it.

On a different front, Archbishop Sheldon made a private arrangement with the treasury in 1663, by which the clerical subsidy would be merged with the general taxation, in return for which the clergy would be granted the right to vote. This move went almost unremarked at the time, though later it came to be regarded in high-church circles as a sell-out of the church's interests, which was said to be illegal because it had not been approved by convocation. Once the new liturgy was approved, convocation had little to do. The years after 1662 were among the bleakest in its history as an institution, and we know almost nothing about it for the rest of the reign, beyond the fact that it continued to meet in formal sessions linked to parliament.