During the 1600s, increasing numbers of Christians were disaffected with the current state of the Church of England and sought its reform. This overlapped with parliament's struggle with the Stuart Kings, which culminated in the execution of Charles I in 1649, and the brief period of the Commonwealth, when Britain was ruled as a republic led by Oliver Cromwell, and briefly his son Richard. The monarchy was restored in 1660. Those who sought reform of the Church of England in the 1600s were known as Puritans. Some Puritans wanted the national church to be reorganised along Reformed/Presbyterian lines, and this is what more or less what happened during the Commonwealth period. Others, sometimes known as "Separatists", rejected the whole idea of a national church, and organised independent churches - what would later be known as the congregational churches. In the Lancashire town of Bury, in 1645, the incumbent parish vicar Travers, also a Puritan, was removed for suspecte...