He became one of the leading members of
Westminster Assembly from 1643, and was vicar of
St Martin-in-the-Fields in London from 1644 to 1648.[6] He was one of the presbyterian ministers who signed the address to
General Fairfax remonstrating against all personal violence against the king
Charles I. At the
Restoration he was recommended to
Lord Clarendon for a bishopric. Instead he refused to submit to the
Act of Uniformity 1662, and was ejected. He retired to
Wellingborough, where he died in October 1664 in his seventy-sixth year.[5]
Works
He was a voluminous writer of controversial works, both against the Anglicans on the one side and the Independents on the other; and he took on both
Henry Hammond and
John Owen. He considered
religious toleration "the last and most desperate design of Antichrist."[5][7]
^Sathan Discovered (1657); see
John Marshall, John Locke, toleration and early Enlightenment culture: religious intolerance and arguments for religious toleration in early modern and 'early Enlightenment' Europe (2006), p. 333.