The first Book of Common Prayer was printed during the spring of 1549 and was authorized for use “throughout this realm of England” on Whitsunday of the same year. It was not popular. Riots erupted across the country; one priest in Wales was hanged outside his church for insisting on its use.
For all the excitement, it was a conservative Liturgy. It preserved the structure of the medieval Mass (which, for the most part, it still does), along with almost all its ceremonies, vestments and practices. But it was in English, and that scared people. He was All-Knowing, but would God tolerate prayers not said in Latin?
The 1549 book and the tradition of worship it continued, angered those anti-Roman reformers (who would eventually come to be called “Puritans”); they saw the Prayer Book as a “Romish rag.” The Puritans found a spokesman on the Privy Council of the young King, Edward VI. The Duke of Somerset, Edward Seymour, pushed for a new book, one which would enshrine the protests of the Puritans. Somerset forced their demands through Parliament and in 1552, a hastily-revised new Prayer Book was approved. Nobody liked it: conservatives attacked it as a Calvinist production; the Puritans complained it still “reeks with the stench of popery.” At any rate, the book barely saw public use. Shortly after it was issued, the Boy King died and “Bloody Mary” Tudor, Henry VIII’s daughter by Katherine of Aragon, ascended the throne. England returned to the Roman fold and the Book of Common Prayer was consigned to the dustbin.
But five years later, when Queen Mary died childless, Elizabeth I, the daughter of Henry and Anne Boleyn, became Queen. Elizabeth called herself a “reformed Catholic” (not in the sense of a “reformed alcoholic,” but meaning a “Catholic but not Roman”). Her inclination was to restore the Book of 1549, but the hardening of attitudes in England as the result of Queen Mary’s persecution of all manner of protestants made Elizabeth’s hopes of taking a conciliatory approach impossible (Pope Pius IV offered to approve the English Liturgy of the Prayer Book if Elizabeth would recognize his universal authority over the Church). In 1559 the third Book of Common Prayer was approved, made by blending elements of the two previous Books, removing some things to which the Puritans objected in the first Book and some things conservatives disapproved in the second. This Book of Common Prayer was used through the forty years and more remaining of Elizabeth’s reign.
James VI of Scotland became James I at the death of Elizabeth. You know him from the King James Bible, which he authorized and paid for. James, reared in Calvinist Scotland, disliked Puritans and Calvinists with an intensity probably only a former Calvinist could appreciate. He became an enthusiastic Anglican—like Elizabeth, he spoke about Anglicanism as “Catholicism, purified and refined.” Under the early Stuart kings, James I and his son, Charles I, the Prayer Book was used to solidify Anglicanism as the “established Church, Catholic and Reformed,” throughout the Kingdom. Archbishop William Laud (1573-1645) roused the ire of Puritans across England when he promulgated a Book of Common Prayer for the Episcopal Church of Scotland which virtually restored the 1549 Book.
England erupted in Civil War. In part at least, the Civil War was a war of religion. Anglican “cavaliers,” supporting the king, and Puritan “roundheads,” supporting the Parliament, fought a nine-year war for control of the English Crown and the English Church. In the end, the King lost the war. After the war, the king lost his head. On January 30, 1649 in front of a London crowd at Whitehall Palace, the king was "decollated." Ever since, January 30 has been marked on the Prayer Book calendars of the Church of England as the day of “King Charles I, the Royal Martyr.”
Oliver Cromwell, the head of the Parliamentary army, became Protector of England and dictator for life. The Book of Common Prayer and the open practice of the religion of the Prayer Book was outlawed everywhere in England. Bishops and priests were imprisoned; Common Prayer Books were burned. No Christmas, no Easter, no altars, no kneeling for communion—in fact, Holy Communion itself became a rarity.
Anglicanism and its Prayer Book were about to become extinct.
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