Puritan History Timeline

The accession of James I prompted the Millenary Petition, a Puritan manifesto calling for reform of the English church.

James I called the Hampton Court Conference in 1604 and heard four prominent Puritan leaders, including Laurence Chaderton, but largely sided with his bishops.

Church organs were commonly damaged or destroyed during the Civil War period, including the organ of Worcester Cathedral, which was attacked with an axe in 1642.

Image source: English Civil War

Puritans became a major political force in England and came to power as a result of the First English Civil War.

Image source: First English Civil War

The Westminster Assembly was called in 1643 and brought together clergy of the Church of England to consider religious reform.

Image source: Westminster Assembly

Parliament outlawed the celebration of Christmas, Easter, and Whitsuntide in 1647.

Image source: Christmas controversies

Under Oliver Cromwell, the parish system was retained and ministers were financed by tithes, while state-appointed Triers and Ejectors supervised ministers and excluded Catholics and radical sects.

The Rump Parliament passed an Act repealing the Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity and laws making recusancy a crime.

Image source: Rump Parliament

Responsibility for recording births, marriages, and deaths was transferred from the church to a civil registrar.

The Instrument of Government stated that people should not be compelled in matters of religion by penalties or otherwise, while supporting persuasion through doctrine and example.

Image source: Instrument of Government

James I's Book of Sports permitted Christians to play football on Sunday afternoons after worship, in an attempt to offset Puritan strictness.

Image source: Declaration of Sports

Puritan settlers in the New England colonies established colony-supported churches and governments that closely intertwined civil law with religious practice.

Image source: Puritan migration to New England (1620–1640)

Some Puritans left for New England during Charles I's Personal Rule, supporting the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and other northern settlements.

Massachusetts laws banned the practice of individuals toasting each other's health as an expression of Puritan social discipline.

The Puritans established Boston Latin School in 1635 to educate their sons. It became the first and oldest formal education institution in the English-speaking New World.

Image source: Boston Latin School

Roger Williams established Providence Plantations in 1636 with a formal separation of church and state, representing a separatist alternative to Puritan colonial governance.

Image source: Rhode Island

Harvard, founded in 1636, became one of the colleges to which boys interested in the ministry were sent.

Image source: Harvard University

Massachusetts made blasphemy, defined as cursing God by atheism or the like, punishable by death.

The New Haven code prescribed death for men convicted of lying with mankind as a man lies with a woman.

Large-scale Puritan migration to New England ceased by 1641, after approximately 21,000 people had crossed the Atlantic.

Massachusetts required heads of households to teach wives, children, and servants basic reading and writing so they could read the Bible and understand colonial laws.

Massachusetts passed a law prohibiting Jesuit Roman Catholic priests from entering territory under Puritan jurisdiction.

Massachusetts required towns of 50 or more households to hire a teacher and towns of 100 or more households to hire a grammar-school instructor.

William Pynchon wrote The Meritorious Price of Our Redemption, a critique of Puritanical Calvinism.

When Pynchon's book reached Boston after its London publication, it was burned on Boston Common and the colony pressured him to return to England.

Christmas was outlawed in Boston from 1659. The ban was revoked in 1681 by the English-appointed governor Edmund Andros.

The Salem witch trials of 1692 had a lasting impact on the historical reputation of New England Puritans. Before 1692, New England had recorded at most sixteen convictions for witchcraft.

Image source: Salem witch trials

By 1790, the rapid growth of New England's colonies had brought their population to around 700,000, attributed almost entirely to high birth rates and lower annual death rates.

Image source: New England

The first two of the four Boston martyrs were executed by Puritans on 27 October 1659. The date is commemorated as International Religious Freedom Day.

The Quaker Mary Dyer was hanged in Boston in 1660 for repeatedly defying a Puritan law banning Quakers from the colony.

Image source: Mary Dyer

After the Restoration, the Savoy Conference was called to determine a new religious settlement for England and Wales.

King Charles II explicitly forbade Massachusetts from executing anyone for professing Quakerism.

The Act of Uniformity restored the Church of England's pre-Civil War constitution. Around 2,400 Puritan clergy are traditionally estimated to have left the church in the Great Ejection.

Image source: Great Ejection

After the Great Ejection, most expelled Puritans became nonconformists and worshipped outside the established Church of England.

The supplied account states that 62 percent of Royal Society members in 1663 were similarly identified with Puritan religious culture.

Image source: Royal Society

The Toleration Act was passed in the wake of the Glorious Revolution and ultimately allowed the position of religious dissenters to prevail.

Image source: Toleration Act 1688

The generation of Cotton Mather ran from the overthrow of Edmund Andros and the new charter, mediated by Increase Mather, to Cotton Mather's death in 1728.

Image source: Cotton Mather

From the middle of the 18th century, the term Nonconformist generally replaced Dissenter as the broader designation for Protestants outside the established church.

Puritanism contributed to the American Revolution through the belief that America was part of God's plan and through the development of eighteenth-century British Radical Whig ideas.