Introduction:
The nonjurors were clergy who, after the Glorious Revolution, refused to take the oath of Allegiance to William and Mary. Several Bishops, among them William Sancroft, Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Ken, Bishop of Bath and Wells, and William Lloyd, Bishop of Norwich, believed that their previous oaths of allegiance to King James prevented them from taking a subsequent oath to William and Mary. As a result, these Bishops were removed from their sees by act of parliament. A segment of the Anglican clergy and laity, believing the deprivations to be unjust, supported the deprived Bishops, and refused to worship in the Church of England. There was a substantial overlap between the Nonjurors and the Jacobites, but not a perfect one; many Jacobites were Catholics, Presbyterians or even communicants of the Church of England, while historical accounts of the Nonjurors indicate that most of their leadership was ambivalent to the Jacobite cause. Still, the nonjurors were assumed to be Jacobites by the government, and this was not always as false as the nonjurors claimed. Indeed, several of the more prominent English Jacobite regiments in the 45 were composed of nonjurors.
In terms of theology, the nonjurors continued in the high church tradition of the Caroline divines, represented by men such as Lancelot Andrews, William Laud, John Cosin, and Jeremy Taylor. They were staunch in their opposition to Roman Catholicism and dissenting Protestantism. Generally, they also opposed what was called latitudinarianism; what would be known today as a broad church or liberal approach. The nonjurors took this further. Many of them were liturgical scholars and antiquarians, and so they developed a number of liturgical resources that laid the groundwork for the Oxford movement and the nineteenth-century rise of Anglo-Catholicism. Unlike some of the more prominent tractarians, such as Newman, they remained quite firmly opposed to Roman Catholicism on doctrinal grounds.
Inevitably, the nonjurors were pulled into the orbit of Jacobitism, and so when that cause failed, so too did theirs. The initial inspiration for this TL was a question about what might have happened if the nonjurors were more firmly distanced from the Jacobites, and a related speculation: what if nonjurors colonized, and planted churches in the Americas? Thus, the timeline begins with a heavy focus on the nonjurors themselves. Eventually, the butterflies will begin to change things more substantially. However, I will not take a maximalist approach to the butterfly effect. For at least the first century, for example, you should assume that any historical figures are born as per OTL, unless a specific historical circumstance would change that fact. The historical assumption made is, explicitly, that of path-dependence: history will proceed as in OTL unless specific external shocks create critical junctures at which history would be changed. Absent direct causation, in other words, history will proceed as per OTL. Logically, then, the further from the POD we are in time, and the closer to it in space, the more dramatic will be the departures.