a powerful
influence on their election. To drive the Presbyterians therefore from
municipal posts was to weaken if not to destroy the Presbyterian party
in the House of Commons. It was with a view of bringing about this
object that the Cavalier Parliament passed a severe Corporation Act,
which required as a condition of entering on any municipal office a
reception of the communion according to the rites of the Anglican
Church, a renunciation of the League and Covenant, and a declaration
that it was unlawful on any grounds to take up arms against the king.
The attempt was only partially successful, and test and oath were taken
after a while by men who regarded both simply as insults to their
religious and political convictions. But if Clarendon was foiled in his
effort to secure political uniformity by excluding the Presbyterian
party from any connexion with the government of the State, he seemed for
the time more successful in his attempt to secure a religious uniformity
by their exclusion from the Church.

[Sidenote: Act of Uniformity.]

An effectual blow was dealt at the Puritans in 1662 by the renewal of
the Act of Uniformity. Not only was the use of the Prayer-Book, and the
Prayer-Book only, enforced in all public worship, but an unfeigned
consent and assent was demanded from every minister of the Church to all
which was contained in it; while for the first time since the
Reformation all orders save those conferred by the hands of bishops were
legally disallowed. To give a political stamp to the new measure the
declaration exacted from corporations, that it was unlawful in any case
to take up arms against the Crown, was exacted from the clergy, and a
pledge was required that they would seek to make no change in Church or
State. It was in vain that Ashley opposed the bill fiercely in the
Lords, that the peers pleaded for pensions to the ejected ministers and
for the exemption of schoolmasters from the necessity of subscription,
and that even Clarendon, who felt that the king's word was at stake,
pressed for the insertion of clauses enabling the Crown to grant
dispensations from its provisions. Every suggestion of compromise was
rejected by the Commons; and Charles whose aim was to procure a
toleration for the Catholics by allowing the Presbyterians to feel the
pressure of persecution at last assented to the bill.

[Sidenote: St. Bartholomew's Day.]

The bill passed in May, but its execution was deferred till Augu