The advent of clerical marriage during the English Reformation, which ultimately transformed the social position of the clergy, was at first a highly controversial issue.Footnote ¹ After it had been embraced by many clergy in the second half of Edward VI's reign, its eradication became a high priority for Mary's Counter-Reformation. The Elizabethan settlement in turn enabled clergy deprived on account of their marriages under Mary to recover their former livings. As we shall see, the legal bases of both the Marian deprivations and the Elizabethan restorations were contested. The Marian proceedings are better documented than the Elizabethan restorations, and have also received more attention from historians. It has long been clear that under Mary many more men lost their livings because of marriage than did so on account of their religious nonconformity: the proportion was between a quarter and a third of all incumbents in those parts of the country where clerical marriage had been most widespread. The impact of this disruptive change was, however, offset by the fact that many of these men agreed to be separated from their wives and were placed in new livings.Footnote ²

Deprivations of clergy for religious nonconformity have bulked larger in accounts of the Elizabethan settlement than the restoration of married men removed from their livings under Mary. Until recently, most historians were inclined to base their approximate estimates of the number of deprivations for nonconformity on the work of Henry Gee, published in 1898. He concluded that not many more than two hundred were deprived for non-compliance during the years 1558–64. Between 1564 and 1570 (he believed) ‘nonconformity appeared to be due to Puritan rather than to Roman sympathies’.Footnote ³ Some Roman Catholic historians questioned Gee's estimates. H. N. Birt's history of the Elizabethan settlement, published in 1907, includes his finding that seven hundred parochial incumbents were deprived before 1565, but in the absence of detailed supporting evidence, this figure failed to gain widespread acceptance.Footnote ⁴ Many writers of subsequent general accounts have cautiously given rather higher figures than Gee's, but in somewhat vague terms, or for a different time span.Footnote ⁵ Peter Marshall and John Morgan have recently challenged Gee's estimates more thoroughly. They suggest that nearly 560 conservative clergy probably lost their parish livings as a result of the Elizabethan settlement in the province of Canterbury alone.Footnote ⁶

The extent to which the restoration of clergy deprived for marriage contributed to overall changes in clerical ranks after Elizabeth's accession has been largely ignored in general discussions of the effects of the settlement. This article seeks to remedy that neglect. It focuses on the Elizabethan restorations in the English dioceses where the adoption of clerical marriage had been most widespread under Edward VI. It explores the process of recovery through the prism of a neglected source: the act book of the royal visitation of the eastern dioceses in 1559. It examines the legal basis of the restorations and the operation of judicial procedures before presenting an approximate estimate of the number of clergy of these dioceses who took advantage of the opportunity presented in 1559. As will be seen, a relatively small proportion of those deprived for marriage sought restoration in and after 1559. Reasons for this outcome will be suggested. The overall numbers were nevertheless quite large. This article does not attempt to trace the subsequent careers of those displaced during the process of restoration. It will, however, emphasize the importance of distinguishing between them and those men deprived of their livings on religious grounds.

In 1559, Queen Elizabeth's first parliament restored the royal supremacy over the church in England together with Protestant worship, set out in a revised version of the Edwardian Prayer Book of 1552. The queen appointed commissioners to enforce the new religious settlement throughout England and Wales. Six sets of commissioners were each entrusted with the visitation of a group of dioceses and the execution of all aspects of ecclesiastical jurisdiction within them. Their responsibilities, specified in letters patent of 24 June, included enquiry into the state of churches and the behaviour of clergy and people; the punishment of criminous clergy and those who refused to subscribe the received religion; the exercise of probate jurisdiction; the issue of injunctions; institution and induction to vacant livings; and restoration in cases of unlawful deprivation.Footnote ⁷ The visitors travelled through each diocese in their circuits, stopping at cathedrals and several major parish churches. At each centre the churchwardens made their presentments, and the clergy were required to subscribe a declaration acknowledging the restoration of the royal supremacy and the doctrinal validity of the Book of Common Prayer and royal injunctions. The commissioners dealt with testamentary business and cases between parties as the visitation proceeded.

This article focuses on cases concerning the restoration of deprived clergy heard by the visitors of the eastern dioceses of London, Norwich and Ely. Most of the commissioners for the visitation were peers or knights, but nearly all the work fell on the shoulders of three men: Robert Horne, a Marian exile, who was to be nominated bishop of Winchester in 1560; Thomas Huyck, LL D, future chancellor of the diocese of London (1561–74) and John Salvyn, a common lawyer.Footnote ⁸ Their first recorded session took place in the London consistory court at St Paul's Cathedral on 9 August. They then sat at various churches in London before setting out on or about 27 August on their journey round the three dioceses. Between 12 October and early December they once again sat at St Paul's.Footnote ⁹

The six teams of visitors kept no uniform corpus of documents. A variety of partial records survives, including act books for the northern province and the eastern dioceses. The extant act book for the eastern dioceses (TNA, PROB 34/1) is a very different record from the neatly written and well-organized act book of the northern visitation.Footnote ¹⁰ Suits by clergy deprived of their livings under Mary are the largest and best recorded category of business in PROB 34/1. The heading on the first folio refers particularly to inter-party cases of restitution of ecclesiastical benefices.Footnote ¹¹ These cases are the subject of this article. No provision was made for the recovery of their places by the considerable number of stipendiary clergy dismissed from their cures because of their marriages.Footnote ¹² The book also contains scattered entries relating to several miscellaneous ex officio matters. Some of these were connected with the enforcement of the settlement, such as measures taken to deal with the concealment of images, orders to produce inventories of church goods, and action taken against a few clergy who were reluctant to conform. Others concerned breaches of matrimonial law or clerical misbehaviour.Footnote ¹³ The visitors also heard many matrimonial and testamentary suits. This volume is clearly not a complete record of the visitors’ proceedings. John Strype drew on a since lost record of the commissioners’ enforcement of the settlement at St Paul's Cathedral.Footnote ¹⁴ There is a separate will register (PROB 34/2/1), and the surviving subscriptions of the clergy of these and some other southern dioceses are kept at Lambeth Palace.Footnote ¹⁵

The first scholar to use PROB 34/1 to study the effects of the Elizabethan settlement appears to have been Edward Mullins, in his MA thesis of 1948 on the London clergy.Footnote ¹⁶ Mullins identified several London incumbents deprived under Mary who were restored in 1559. In over seventy years since 1948 the volume seems to have remained almost completely neglected. Very few historians have mentioned it or drawn on it, let alone analysed it thoroughly.Footnote ¹⁷ Meticulously repaired and handsomely bound since Mullins consulted it in a somewhat dilapidated state, the volume may comprise more than one original act book.Footnote ¹⁸ However, there seem to be no good grounds for thinking that there are gaps in its record of cases during the period that it covers: all the dates assigned to hear sentence in these cases refer to sessions actually recorded in the act book. Thereafter cases may have been dealt with by the more permanent body of commissaries in ecclesiastical causes in London established on 19 July 1559.Footnote ¹⁹

The three dioceses of London, Norwich and Ely whose visitation was partially recorded in PROB 34/1 included the region where clerical marriage had been most widespread after it had been made lawful by statutes of 1549 and 1552. The legal basis of the process of restoration and the judicial procedures employed present questions of considerable interest. The visitors of the northern province, and no doubt those responsible for the other five groups of dioceses, were empowered by commission issued on 24 June 1559 to restore all those deprived contrary to the statutes and ordinances of the kingdom of England and the order of ecclesiastical law.Footnote ²⁰ On 19 July, the letters patent naming the commissioners or commissaries for ecclesiastical causes based in London authorized them to hear and determine by the laws of the realm

It seems likely that all or nearly all those restored to their livings early in Elizabeth's reign had been deprived for marriage, whatever their religious sympathies may have been. The twenty-ninth of the royal injunctions that the clergy were required to subscribe during the visitation observed that the marriage of priests and ministers of the church had not been prohibited by the word of God or any example of the primitive church. It had been made lawful by act of parliament during Edward VI's reign, ‘whereupon a great number of the clergy of this realm were then married, and so yet continue’.Footnote ²²

In making this assertion, the commissions and the injunction seemingly ignored the fact that the Edwardian statutes authorizing marriage had been repealed in Mary's first parliament and never re-enacted. Two bills, one for the restoration of clergy deprived for marriage or heresy, and another to authorize the queen to restore deprived clergy, failed in the parliament of 1559.Footnote ²³ The restoration of the married clergy thus rested on the royal prerogative, exercised by a queen who had notorious reservations concerning clerical marriages. Most of the injunction concerned the regulation of such marriages. It is by no means clear how the authors of the Elizabethan commissions of 1559 and those who implemented them might have justified the description of the deprivation of the married clergy as being contrary to the laws of England, given the repeal in 1553 of the relevant Edwardian statutes. Mary, using the authority she still possessed as supreme head of the church, had issued on 4 March 1554 an injunction ordering bishops and their officers to remove from their benefices all those who had married and used women as their wives ‘contrary to the state of their order and the laudable custom of the Church’.Footnote ²⁴

The eastern visitation act book records or refers to some 120 claims for restoration to benefices, over four times as many as the twenty-eight entered in its northern counterpart. A few appear only in the form of scribbled notes of the parties’ names and livings, but the great majority were the subject of formal entries. The benefices concerned included four prebends, two canonries, one cathedral deanery and an archdeaconry.Footnote ²⁵ The rest were parish livings.Footnote ²⁶

Procedure in these cases was summary, and most were speedily despatched. The record normally begins with the certification of the citation of the defendant, followed by the parties’ appearance in court, either personally or by means of their proctors. Defendants frequently failed to appear at the due time, but their absence was seldom allowed to delay proceedings for very long. Some claimants had evidently been unable to identify the present incumbent of their former benefices. Their cases were therefore undertaken contra omnes contradictores.Footnote ²⁷ (Some of the ‘usurpers’ were not the men instituted to the benefices in question on the plaintiffs’ deprivation, but their successors.) The plaintiff's case was presented, according to the eastern act book, by means of a ‘rescript in place of a summary petition’. Plaintiffs or their proctors then usually produced supporting evidence of their institution and induction, and the whole process and sentence of their ‘pretended’ deprivation. This normally sufficed to secure their restoration. Plaintiffs’ personal statements were not usually recorded. However, one claimant, John Walsyngham, alleged that he had been instituted to the vicarage of Fressingfield in Suffolk in 1541–2. After he had occupied it peacefully for no short period of time, he had been deprived and spoiled of it in the first year of Queen Mary, contrary to the order of law and the statutes of the realm, that is, the Edwardian legislation legalizing priests’ marriages, by a judge incompetent in this regard. The language of this complaint was entirely in line with official rhetoric.Footnote ²⁸

Plaintiffs were successful in eighty-four out of 120 suits.Footnote ²⁹ A further seventeen livings are known from other evidence to have been occupied by act book claimants during the period immediately following. Any court records that might have thrown further light on their recovery of these benefices have perished. The London Commission probably dealt with several unfinished suits. Another possibility is that some disputes were settled extra-judicially, as appears from one entry in the visitation book. When John Copsheaf sought to recover the rectory of St Lawrence (Essex), both he and the Marian incumbent Thomas Hinde appeared in court. Then, however, the parties entered into a peaceful agreement, as Copsheaf alleged. The case was dismissed. Copsheaf was later reported to have been instituted to the rectory in 1560, perhaps as a precaution.Footnote ³⁰

The procedure seemed loaded against the Marian ‘usurpers’. Defendants were described as ‘pretended’ incumbents. Some of them nevertheless questioned the validity of the proceedings.Footnote ³¹ Ralph Birche, rector of Wickford (Essex), not only alleged that Christopher Eton had been legitimately deprived, but pointed out that Eton had not appealed against the sentence, which had thus become res judicata, and three fatalia or legal deadlines had since elapsed. However, it seems that Birche soon realized the futility of these objections. He gave up the fight and renounced his title.Footnote ³² Some other defendants challenged the legal basis of the process of restitution. The proctor acting for Thomas Darbyshire, rector of Hackney and later a famous Jesuit, and Thomas Collyer, prebendary of Finsbury in St Paul's Cathedral, pointed out that the acts of Edward VI authorizing the marriage of the clergy had been repealed by Mary's statute. The delicts for which the claimant John Spendlove had been deprived had been committed after that statute. The commissioners nevertheless delivered their sentences for Spendlove.Footnote ³³ Humphrey Busbie faced a claim to the London living of St Stephen Walbrook by the redoubtable Protestant Thomas Becon. Busbie not only challenged the contents of Becon's summary petition but recused Robert Horne as a judge partial to Becon in this case. Given Horne's known sympathies, Busbie's objection may seem quite reasonable, but it nonetheless proved irrelevant to the conduct of the suit.Footnote ³⁴

Only a small minority of defendants managed to hang on to their livings. The visitors gave an exceptional sentence in favour of William Maddock, rector of Wiveton (Norfolk), when the claimant Thomas Brigges admitted that he had held it for two years as a deacon, without dispensation. He renounced his title. Thomas Norley seems to have abandoned his claim to the rectory of Swanton Morley, also in Norfolk, after the proctor for the defendant, Charles Parker, alleged that Norley had obtained the benefice by simony and had held various benefices with cure of souls without dispensation. Parker still held the benefice in 1561, although he was then said to be living overseas.Footnote ³⁵ Thomas Parkynson, ‘usurper’ of the rectory of Willingham (Cambridgeshire) also seems to have kept that benefice. He produced witnesses and documents, including of letters of acquittance signed by the claimant Lancelot Rydley, and the case was submitted to arbitration.Footnote ³⁶ William Latymer, biographer of Anne Boleyn and her former chaplain, failed to recover the rectory of Witnesham (Suffolk). He had allegedly not only obtained one or two other benefices after Witnesham without any dispensation but also freely resigned Witnesham for an annual pension. He was presented to other parish livings in 1559 and was appointed dean of Peterborough in December. The case record ended with the note concordia facta.Footnote ³⁷ In some other cases, plaintiffs’ failure to pursue their claims probably allowed ‘usurpers’ to retain the benefices they occupied.

As the visitation proceeded, and the futility of opposing the great majority of claims to restitution became increasingly apparent, large numbers of defendants simply failed to appear to hear sentence or even to attend the commencement of suit. Proceedings went ahead in their absence and as a penalty of their contumacy. A few defendants or their proctors protested when sentence was delivered, but there is no clear evidence that any of these protests resulted in an actual appeal. There is nothing in the record to show that ousted incumbents actively resisted the visitors’ decisions. At Hardwick (Cambridgeshire), however, the sequestration of the benefice, presumably a common, albeit seldom mentioned, consequence of these suits for restitution, was allegedly obstructed by one George Castell. Not the incumbent, he may have been the farmer of the rectory. He had, so the claimant Nicholas Stannett reported, threatened to stick his dagger in anyone who came on his ground to sequester or take his goods.Footnote ³⁸

Several incumbents – although many fewer than those who ‘contumaciously’ absented themselves from all or some stages of the proceedings – renounced their title, right and interest in the benefice in dispute. The motive for such renunciations on the part of some incumbents was simply that they were able to return to the benefices of which they had been deprived under Mary. These were clergy who had made themselves capable of institution to another benefice by renouncing their wives. One Essex case amounted to a straightforward exchange: Anthony Redferne recovered Little Chesterford, freely given up by Adam Richardson, and Richardson recovered Panfield, given up by Redferne.Footnote ³⁹

Priests’ wives who had been separated from their husbands either compulsorily (in the case of the ex-religious clergy) or by mutual consent (in the case of secular clergy) were left in a precarious position. A few men had been punished for continuing to consort with their ‘women’. A systematic study of the wills made by deprived married clergy of the diocese of Norwich shows that several made provision for their wives and children, despite the uncertainty of their wives’ legal status. This uncertainty persisted even after Elizabeth's accession, though more men then referred to the women concerned as their wives. The wife of Peter Stancliff, deprived of West Rudham (Norfolk), allegedly married another man, from whom she was reclaimed by Stancliff after Elizabeth's accession.Footnote ⁴⁰ One wife of a deprived priest appears in the act book of the eastern visitation. Rose Hunt sued John Hunt, described as rector of Bulmer (Essex), for restitution of conjugal rights, alleging that he had divorced himself from her for no legitimate cause. John confessed that he had married Rose and lived with her for two years in marital affection. However, their marriage had been dissolved by Nicholas Harpsfield, presumably in his capacity as vicar general of the diocese of London, who had declared that the marriage had been solemnized to the dishonour of the clerical order. (John, a former canon of St Osyth, would have had no choice in the matter.) The visitors told Rose to hear sentence at a later session, but no sentence was recorded.Footnote ⁴¹

The act book of the visitation of the eastern dioceses in 1559 provides an incomplete picture of the process of restoration of clergy deprived for marriage under Mary. Other sources show that seventeen act book claimants recovered their benefices, even though the outcomes of their cases are not clear from the acta themselves. Some deprived incumbents recovered their old benefices either before or after the period covered by the act book. Fortunately there are two local studies, already mentioned, that between them deal with much of the diocese of London: Mullins's thesis on the clergy of London and Grieve's pioneering investigation of the deprived married clergy of Essex, based on a meticulous analysis of a wide range of sources.Footnote ⁴² For the diocese of Norwich, a uniquely comprehensive list of deprived clergy survives, extensively annotated by Geoffrey Baskerville.Footnote ⁴³

Much additional evidence concerning the mid-sixteenth-century deprivations and restorations of the clergy has been published since 1970. The Clergy of the Church of England Database, launched in 1999, is still far from complete in its coverage of the dioceses of London and Norwich.Footnote ⁴⁴ Peter Marshall and John Morgan recently drew attention to a substantial but ‘hitherto almost completely neglected resource’: C. W. Field's The Province of Canterbury and the Elizabethan Settlement of Religion, privately produced in a small number of typescript copies in 1973. Field supplied a detailed list of all the deprivations, ejections and resignations of clergy that he could find between 1558 and the early 1570s. He also included a good many such events from before that period.Footnote ⁴⁵ The great majority of the men deprived under Queen Mary and restored in or after 1559 were not reinstituted, so that the main evidence of their restoration in episcopal registers (Field's principal source) lies in references to their deaths or resignations in the entries of their successors’ institutions. Field distinguished between ‘ejections’ of incumbents replaced by their restored predecessors and ‘deprivations’, mostly on account of nonconformity. He supplied such details of the predecessors of the ‘ejected’ men as he had been able to find. The great majority of the men restored had been deprived on account of their marriages. Field does not seem to have consulted the eastern visitation act book, although he correctly identified as ‘recoverers’ many of the successful plaintiffs who appear in it. Field nevertheless made mistakes, especially in identifying as ‘ejected’ several of the first men instituted to the living in question in or after 1554 rather than the ‘pretended incumbent’ actually sued in 1559.Footnote ⁴⁶

A source that is very helpful in establishing whether a man already known to have been deprived actually recovered his living after Elizabeth's accession is the set of diocesan lists of clergy returned in answer to enquiries by Archbishop Matthew Parker in 1560 and 1561, which have survived among the Parker manuscripts in the library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. Hilda Grieve and Edward Mullins made systematic use of these returns, and their recent transcription by Fiona McCall has made them much more easily searchable.Footnote ⁴⁷

Mullins's thesis covers 113 London parishes, most of which lay within the city walls, and some just outside. He found that sixteen London parish clergy and two prebendaries recovered benefices after Elizabeth's accession. Thirteen of those parish clergy and the two prebendaries appear in the act book of the eastern visitation, along with two minor canons and one incumbent whom Mullins did not include.Footnote ⁴⁸ Grieve concluded that at least twenty-eight out of eighty-eight clergy deprived for marriage in Essex had recovered benefices in the county by the time lists of the clergy of the diocese of London were returned to Archbishop Parker during the winter of 1560–1. She identified twenty-three of the twenty-eight by name.Footnote ⁴⁹ Twenty-five men appear as successful claimants in the act book of the eastern visitation, including four not named by Grieve.Footnote ⁵⁰ Field correctly listed two further restorations.Footnote ⁵¹

The extensive diocese of Norwich contained well over half the parishes covered by the eastern circuit of 1559. The surviving list of both beneficed and unbeneficed clergy recently removed from their livings or cures in the diocese was probably compiled in the spring of 1555. The eighteenth-century antiquary and churchman Thomas Tanner added a few names to it. In 1933 Baskerville published this ‘Deprivation Book’, which records the names of 236 beneficed clergy, with separate references of his own to some fourteen additional men, bringing the total number of deprived incumbents to 250.Footnote ⁵²

Baskerville stated that no more than twenty-five of those so deprived in the diocese of Norwich could certainly be identified as having ‘got back to their former parishes’. This seems to be the result of a simple slip, because his own annotations of the ‘Deprivation Book’ entries refer to the restorations of at least thirty-four men.Footnote ⁵³ Thirty-nine men who appeared before the visitors in 1559 succeeded in recovering their livings. Both the visitation act book and Baskerville's annotations name some men not included in the other source. If we add to the thirty-nine claimants named in the eastern visitation book fourteen men whose names are not recorded there but annotated by Baskerville, the resulting total is fifty-three. Three men in the ‘Deprivation Book’ but not recorded by Baskerville as restored appear in the diocesan return for the winter of 1561–2.Footnote ⁵⁴ One more incumbent, though not mentioned in the ‘Deprivation Book’, left or lost his living c.1554 and had returned to it by the winter of 1561–2.Footnote ⁵⁵ If these four men are added, the provisional number of incumbents restored in the diocese of Norwich comes to fifty-seven, or nearly a quarter of those deprived under Mary.

Baskerville noted that the episcopal registers contain references to five men restored to their livings between 1559 and 1561. Two of the five were reinstituted in the spring of 1559: John Browne, rector of Wreningham, on 18 April, and John Chadwick, rector of Litcham, on 25 May. Both livings had been vacant, so no Marian incumbent was ejected to make way for them,Footnote ⁵⁶ but the restoration of the married clergy had not yet been officially authorized. This helps to explain why Browne subsequently took the precaution of asserting his claim to the benefice before the visitors against omnes contradictores. The other three men, who appeared in the register only in 1561, were described as restored to the livings of which they had previously been deprived.Footnote ⁵⁷

In the small diocese of Ely, at least thirty-four clergy were deprived of livings under Mary I.Footnote ⁵⁸ Nine Ely clergy who lodged claims before the visitors recovered livings, and at least one more deprived incumbent appears from other evidence to have succeeded in doing so.Footnote ⁵⁹ In Middlesex and the part of Hertfordshire within the London diocese, seven act book claimants succeeded in their suits, and other sources enable us to identify a further two clergy restored to their former benefices.Footnote ⁶⁰

Overall, some ninety-three clergy who had been deprived of livings in Mary's reign recovered benefices after commencing suits before the visitors of the south-eastern dioceses. Some of these men recovered more than one benefice. Other sources of information indicate that a further twenty-nine former incumbents regained benefices. This is probably a minimum figure, though it seems unlikely that many more restorations of deprived clergy have yet to be discovered. Broadly speaking, it appears that over a quarter of the clergy deprived for marriage under Mary in the eastern dioceses recovered livings after Elizabeth's accession. No doubt many of the deprived had died in the interval, especially during the period of heavy mortality in the later 1550s. But many of the survivors did not pursue claims. Some were presumably content to remain in the benefices to which they had been inducted after putting away their wives under Mary. No doubt the possibility of another reversal of religious policy influenced many clergy. If they took their old livings from ‘usurpers’, they faced the possibility of being summarily turned out of them once again if Catholicism were to be restored once more. As we have seen, a proctor acting for two prominent Marian incumbents had pointed out before Elizabeth's visitors that the married clergy had been deprived of their livings under Mary only after the repeal of the Edwardian legislation that sanctioned their marriages. Elizabeth's first parliament had passed no new laws on the subject, so that the restoration of the married clergy depended on the exercise of royal prerogative. It would hardly be surprising, then, if many men ousted under Mary chose not to seek restoration to their former livings, or if some decided to move as soon as possible to another benefice that offered them a more secure tenure. In one case, a claimant had only just had sentence passed in his favour when he renounced his title. This was Thomas Whitby, who had sued for the recovery of his former benefice of Aylsham (Norfolk) against all gainsayers. In 1561 he reportedly held two livings not far from Aylsham, Elsing and Sharrington.Footnote ⁶¹ Baldwin Derham spontaneously resigned his right to the rectory of Downham Market (Norfolk), which he had claimed against omnes contradictores, even before sentence had been given. He, like Whitby, held two other benefices in Norwich diocese in 1561.Footnote ⁶² There was no shortage of vacant benefices during the early years of Elizabeth's reign.

Marriage by itself provided no strong evidence of Protestant convictions. Nor (as Grieve long ago emphasized) did a man's status as a ‘usurper’ ejected from a benefice on the restoration of a previous incumbent in 1559 give a reliable indication of his disaffection towards the Elizabethan settlement. Some of these ‘usurpers’ had themselves been married men whose formal repudiation of their wives had enabled them to take a new living under Mary. Many of those ejected in 1559 soon found other livings. Nearly two-thirds of the Essex ‘usurpers’ did so ‘almost immediately’, according to Grieve. This evidence undermined Birt's assumption, which Grieve noticed in passing, that such ‘usurpers’ were sound Catholics whose claim to be ranked among the deprived Marian priests had been unfairly ignored by Protestant writers.Footnote ⁶³ Marshall and Morgan cited Grieve's findings, and recognized that incumbents who had to make way for men restored in or after 1559 ‘were not necessarily sympathisers with the old order’. Their figure of 101 parishes in the diocese of London ‘deprived of their priests’ nevertheless includes about forty parishes whose incumbents were ‘ejected’ to make way for men deprived under Mary. Field correctly identified some of those men as conservative nonconformists. There is however nothing to show that the majority belong in this category. Over half of the parishes affected lay in the county of Essex, which Grieve studied so thoroughly. Several of the ‘ejected’ priests listed by Field had been deprived for marriage themselves; some recovered their livings in 1559.Footnote ⁶⁴ Marshall and Morgan also cited Field's findings for the diocese of Ely, including nearly all his ‘ejections’, in the total number of deprivations. Those findings illustrate very clearly the need for care in using Field's work. He listed ten ejections in this diocese. He correctly identified three incumbents ejected in 1559. In three cases, however, he seems to have been mistaken in believing that an Elizabethan ejection took place, while in four others his identification of the individual ejected in 1559 was incorrect.Footnote ⁶⁵ In the diocese of Norwich, at least half the named ‘usurpers’ removed by the visitors in 1559 to make way for men deprived under Mary had obtained other benefices within the diocese before the winter of 1561–2.Footnote ⁶⁶ The total numbers of deprivations ‘for conservative sympathies’ provisionally given by Marshall and Morgan, on the basis of Field's research,Footnote ⁶⁷ will certainly need to be adjusted downwards, although by what margin only further investigation can determine.

The act book of the eastern visitation of 1559 has been a neglected asset. This investigation points to four main conclusions. First, the act book is an invaluable source for understanding the process of restoration of the clergy deprived under Mary, a process that was by no means always smooth, tidy or uncontested. Second, although the act book is certainly not a complete record of the restorations in the eastern dioceses, we can be reasonably confident that a substantial majority of the restored clergy appear in it. Third, only a minority of the clergy deprived of their livings under Mary sought to recover them in or after 1559. This finding broadly confirms the results of local studies by previous investigators. Three main explanations for this state of affairs may be suggested. Many of the men concerned had no doubt fallen victim to the terrible mortality of the intervening years. Some were content to remain in the parishes to which they had moved after separation from their wives. This article has particularly emphasized a third explanation: the potentially precarious nature of restorations based solely on the exercise of the supreme governor's prerogative, in the event of the reversal of the settlement by a Catholic successor. Finally, we have seen the diversity of the reactions to the Elizabethan settlement of ‘usurpers’ ousted to make way for victims of the Marian purge of the married clergy. Some became Catholic nonconformists, either in 1559 or later, but they were probably outnumbered by those who accepted benefices in the Elizabethan church and ended their careers as conformists or firm supporters of the settlement.