f oundation and episcopacy as its government The Book served as the textbook, compelling local people to weekly church attendance and other services in liturgical uniformity and in the English vernacular, which managed to mask the differences between Catholic and Calvinistic followers within the church Although the queen’s sincere and meticulous compromise won the people’s broad acceptance, she could not pacify ardent opposition to her settlement Neither was she able to persuade all her subjects to conform to the national and reformed church required by the Act of Uniformity of 1559 The Marian bishops and their followers adamantly rejected her breach with Rome and her governorship of the church After Pope Pius VI issued a bull in 1570 deposing her and absolving her Catholic subjects from allegiance, a series of plots were carried out against her life, including one led by her cousin Mary, Queen of Scots, in 1586 At the same time, radical Calvinists refused to conform to the Church of England because of their resentment of its episcopal structure To a great extent, the Catholic conspiracies confirmed the Calvinist conviction that the Church of England had to be purified of the accreted institutions, doctrines, and liturgies inherited from medieval Catholicism King james bible In the 17th century, both the popish plots, real or imagined, and radical movements of the Puritans would test the vitality of the Elizabethan Church of England At the Hampton Court conference of 1604, the first Stuart king, James I (r 1603–25), met his Puritan subjects to receive their petition for purifying the Catholic remnants from the Church of England The king commissioned a panel of 54 to produce an authorized English Bible The so-called James I Version was finished in 1611, and the Church of England began to have its own standardized book for centuries to come However, at the same conference, the king was displeased by the demands of the Puritan nonconformists to reform the episcopacy, and later responded to it with his succinct statement “No bishop, no king.” Afterward, the Gunpowder Plot by Catholic extremists, aiming at blowing up all of royalty at the opening session of Parliament of 1605, further inflamed anti-Catholic sentiment in England, and helped the Puritan cause to gain growing support from its popular base The leading Puritan parliamentarians under King Charles I (r 1625–49) became infuriated when the king refused to transform the Church of England toward congregational structure, and they linked the episcopal structure of the church to the king’s personal tyranny Church of England 79 civil war Although the Puritans’ frustration alone might not have caused the breakout of the Civil War in 1642, the uncompromising antipapal and antiepiscopal attitude of the Puritan politicians and military men undoubtedly shaped the fate of England and its church in the next 20 years After the regicide of 1649, General Oliver Cromwell, a Puritan providentialist and a pragmatic politician, was forced to suppress his fellow Puritan extremists, the levellers and the followers of the fifth monarchism, in order to preserve the episcopal organization in his Puritan-styled Church of England During the Restoration (1660–88), endeavors were made among different religious leaders to find a new settlement, but King Charles II (r 1660–85) and the Anglicans now in power refused to recognize the nonconformists who had been previously ordained to serve in their congregations The king expelled about 2,000 of them from the church after they refused to pass the test, defined by the Act of Test of 1673 as taking oaths of allegiance and receiving Holy Communion in the Church of England The national church became schismatic, and the specter of the Civil War loomed When the nation faced a very real possibility of the restoration of Roman Catholicism under James II (r 1685–88), Parliament met in 1688 to contemplate how to contend with the crisis In Parliament, the majority of the Tories supported royal authority, but cared about the future of the Church of England more than King James II; the Whigs favored parliamentary supremacy, but were willing to work with the Tories in order to prevent Catholic resurgence After suffering military defeats at the hand of the king’s opponents, James II abandoned the throne and fled to France at the end of 1688 In 1689, Parliament offered the Crown jointly to Mary (r 1689–94), the Anglican daughter of James I, and her husband, William III (r 1689–1702), the Calvinist duke of Orange In the same year, Parliament required William and Mary to accept the Bill of Rights, which was designed to guarantee the members of Parliament freedom of speech and immunity from prosecution for their opinions presented in parliamentary debates In 1689, the Parliament also adopted the Toleration Act, which offered some freedom of worship to the nonconformist Protestants; their right to hold public offices, however, was still technically restricted by the Act of Test of 1673, which would be finally repealed in 1828 But the Catholics did not gain religious freedom until 1829 Political and religious struggles continued to disrupt the English life from the Glorious Revolution in England to the succession of the first Hanoverian king, George I (r 1714–27), when the restoration of