This year sees the 350th anniversary of the Great Ejection.
In 1662 about 2,000 ministers and others in the pay of the National Church in England and Wales were silenced or ejected from their livings for failing to conform to what the Church of England required.
Most of the names of the men who were ejected and their wives, who suffered with them, are unfamiliar to us, though names such as Richard Baxter, Thomas Manton and Thomas Watson are well known. Though a few good men did remain in the national church, Gerald Bray is right to say that almost all of the ejected ‘were Puritans, and so the Act [of Uniformity, 1662] may be said to represent the expulsion of Puritanism from the national church’.
