The English Parliament in 1645 enacted a law abolishing the Church of England as an active organization. The law enacted by Parliament drove every bishop from his diocese, and forbade the use of the Book of Common Prayer in any church or chapel in England. The rectors of over two thousand parishes were forced out and their places were filled by Presbyterian and Independent or Baptist ministers.
The General Assembly of Virginia, upon learning the action of Parliament, adopted an act in 1647 requiring the use of the Prayer Book in every church and chapel in Virginia each Sunday in the regular forms prescribed in the Prayer Book. The Act made further provision that in every parish in which the incumbent minister disobeyed the law and continued disuse of the Book of Common Prayer, his parishioners were thereby absolved from paying him any further salary.
In England marriage was held to be a religious service to be performed by no one other than a priest of the Church; and Parliament, after abolishing the Prayer Book and the canons of the Anglican Church, was compelled to enact another law making provision for the performance of the marriage ceremony as a civil contract. The new law directed that justices of the local courts perform marriages and record them, if desired, in the court records. The people of Virginia paid no attention to this law except, as far as is known, in one case in Northumberland County. In the year 1656 a man and woman in Lancaster County, instead of going to the minister, if there were one, or to the reader of the parish, went to a county official of Northumberland and were married according to the Act of Parliament. Their marriage was recorded in the court order book and there nine months later the new incumbent, Samuel Cole of Lancaster, found it. He thereupon declared openly that the law of Virginia was in effect in his parish and not the Acts of Parliament. The affair ended when the parson required the wedded couple to consider themselves unwed until he could announce the banns of matrimony for them on three separate Sundays and then perform a Christian marriage. He then took occasion to go to the Northumberland county court and record his certificate of marriage of the couple in the court order book. The two certificates still appear in the order book of the county court of Northumberland County in the following words:
Certificate of Marriage, 11 Sept. 1656. John Merryday [i.e., Meredith] and Mrs. Ann Nash, als. Mallet, were married by Coll. Jno. Trussell, according to Act of Parliament, 24 August, 1653. Witnesses Geo. Colclough, Leonard Spencer and Jno. Carter. Rec. 20 Sept. 1656.
To all such whom it may concern. These are to certifie that John Meredith & Ann Nash, being three times Published according to Law, were married at Currotomon on the 14th of this instant July, 1657 per mee, Samuel Cole, minister, ibidem 20th July 1657 this certificate was recorded.
The colony of Virginia in affairs of both church and state exercised more independence of action under the Commonwealth than it ever exercised before or afterward until the Declaration of Independence in 1776. The General Assembly, after it made a treaty of peace with Cromwell's commissioners, elected the several governors of the colony until the Restoration of Charles Second in 1660 took that authority from them. The Burgesses had agreed to discontinue the use of prayers for the King and the royal family in public services, and the General Assembly enacted a law directing each parish to decide for itself whether it would continue or discontinue the use of the Book of Common Prayer. All questions of parish administration were left to the several vestries. If a parish did not wish to use the old form of worship it might use such form as it desired.
A number of ministers of Presbyterian ordination, and some openly acknowledged Puritans thereupon came into the colony and these became incumbent ministers of parishes. The last known one was the Rev. Andrew Jackson, incumbent of Christ Church Parish in Lancaster County from some years after 1680 until his death in 1711. He was a godly and devout minister, beloved by his parishioners. Tradition says that he "stood up to read the Psalms, but remained seated when they said the Creed."
For twenty-five or thirty years prior to 1675, to the distress of the Church and the people as a whole, there was a desperate lack of ordained ministers, and inability, to get clergymen from England. Some few, driven out of parishes in England by the Parliamentary victors, did come to Virginia, but never in sufficient number to supply the need. Then, after the restoration of Charles, II, in 1660 and the return of the Anglican Church to active life, there were so many parishes in England from which non-conforming ministers were removed because of refusal to use the Book of Common Prayer, that for nearly a decade there were almost no clergymen to send overseas. Conditions did begin to improve, however, before the end of the decade.
The improvement increased more rapidly after a new bishop of London came into that diocese in 1675 and manifested active interest in the affairs of the parishes in America.