The Act of Uniformity (actually passed in 1559[1]) set the order of prayer to be used in the English Book of Common Prayer. Every man had to go to church once a week or be fined 12 pence (equivalent to just over £11 in 2007 [2]), a considerable sum for the poor. By this Act Elizabeth I made it a legal obligation to go to church every Sunday. The Act of Uniformity reinforced the Book of Common Prayer.
After passage, fourteen bishops were dismissed from their sees, leaving all but one see, Llandaff, vacant.[3] A new Archbishop of Canterbury, Matthew Parker, was appointed, and the question arose of how he could be consecrated while preserving the Apostolic Succession. The bishop of Llandaff, Anthony Kitchin, refused to officiate at Parker's consecration; thus instead bishops deposed and exiled by Mary assisted: William Barlow, former Bishop of Bath and Wells, John Scory, former Bishop of Chichester, Miles Coverdale, former Bishop of Exeter, and John Hodgkins, former Bishop of Bedford. The solution would give rise many years later to the Nag's Head Fable.
The Act was part of the Elizabethan Religious Settlement in England instituted by Elizabeth I, who wanted to unify the Anglican Church. Other Acts concerned with this settlement were the Act of Supremacy 1559 and the Thirty-Nine Articles (1563). Elizabeth was trying to achieve a settlement after thirty years of turmoil during the reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI and Mary I, during which England had swung from Catholicism to Protestantism and back to Catholicism. The outcome of the Elizabethan Settlement was a sometimes tense and often fragile union of High church and Low church elements within the Church of England and Anglicanism worldwide. The event was featured, albeit only briefly, in the movie Elizabeth.
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