He was ordained as an Anglican clergyman, but rejected belief in episcopacy and became a Nonconformist. In 1645 he became chaplain to a Roundhead regiment. He published the first of some 150 pamphlets in 1649 and in 1650 The Saints’ Everlasting Rest, an important devotional work. During the Commonwealth period, his appeals for tolerance did not succeed. At the Restoration he became a royal chaplain but refused a bishopric. The 1662 Act of Uniformity forced his resignation, and in about 1673 he took out a licence as a Nonconformist minister. In 1685 he was imprisoned and fined by Judge Jeffreys for ‘libelling the Church’.