In none of these letters is any reference made to the debates in the
House on the unhappy Bill of Uniformity, nor does any record of those
discussions anywhere exist. The Savoy Conference proved a failure, and
no lay reader of Baxter's account of it can profess wonder. Not a single
point in difference was settled. In the meantime the restored Houses of
Convocation, from which the Presbyterian members were excluded, had
completed their revision of the Book of Common Prayer and presented it
to Parliament.

In considering the Bill for Uniformity, the House of Lords, where
Presbyterianism was powerfully represented, showed more regard for those
"tender consciences" to which the king (by the new Prayer Book called
for the first time "our most religious King") had referred in his Breda
Declaration than did the House of Commons. "The Book, the whole Book,
and nothing but the Book" was, in effect, the cry of the lower House,
and on the 19th of May, ten days after Marvell had left for the
Continent, the Act of Uniformity became law, and by the 24th of August
1662 all beneficed ministers and schoolmasters had to make the
celebrated subscription and profession, or go out into the wilderness.

There has always been a dispute as to the physical possibility of
perusing the compilation in question before the day fixed by the
Statute. The Book was advertised for sale in London on the 6th of
August, but how many copies were actually available on that day is not
known.

The Dean and Chapter of Peterborough did not get their copies until the
17th of August. When the new folios reached the lonely parsonages of
Cumberland and Durham--who would care to say? The Act required a verbal