The Book of Common Prayer proved, in its efforts to stabilize conflict into dialectical ambiguity, tragically unable fully to contain the conflicting energies it sought to synthesize. The individualizing logic of reform contributed to the continuing growth of an aggressively evangelical strain of Protestantism, which even in Elizabeth's reign came to see the Prayerbook as an empty popish form which impeded authentic religious expression, and which supported monarchical and prelatical tyranny. The rise of High Church Laudianism in the seventeenth century founded itself in the set form and ceremonial of the Prayerbook, and its implied corollaries of royal and ecclesiastical hierarchy. These two poles, defined substantially and not at all coincidentally around liturgical issues, developed into the parties whose growing conflict would eventually erupt into civil war and the beheading of a king. The BCP was originally an attempt to mediate textually the powerful oppositions of one revolution in the sixteenth century; this resolution proved insufficiently flexible to prevent another revolution in the seventeenth.

This latter revolution was a defining event for two of the most influential English voices of the seventeenth century. John Milton and Thomas Hobbes were, to a great extent, both heirs of the English Reformation and its textual establishment in the Prayerbook. Both took it as a matter of course that England should be free of Roman authority, and both decisively rejected not only the political but also the hermeneutic claims of Catholic theology.