Despite the rather pejorative sounding title with its implication of idolatry, this book is a sympathetic account of the fate of those clergy, along with their dependents, who forfeited their livings in the mid-seventeenth century as a consequence of being on the losing side in the English Civil War. At the same time, however, the contemporary (1645) description “Baal's priests” (121) serves to convey something of the violent hatreds engendered by what the author, Fiona McCall, rightly regards as a period of revolutionary upheaval. Although McCall makes use of an impressively wide range of evidence, the documentary core of this study is provided by twelve volumes of documents in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. They were collected by the clergyman John Walker, whose surname they now bear, in connection with his book published in 1714 and entitled An Attempt Towards Recovering an Account of the Numbers and Sufferings of the Clergy of the Church of England . . . in the Late Times of the Grand Rebellion. But, as McCall recognizes, these Walker manuscripts are a problematic source, not least because they were gathered together as part of a propaganda exercise. Walker, a high churchman, was incensed by claims made on behalf of dissenters by Edmund Calamy in his 1702 publication An Account of . . . Those Worthy Ministers Who Were Ejected. Thus on the one hand were the “Anglican” clergy sequestered by the victorious parliamentarians in the 1640s and 1650s, and on the other the “Puritan” ministers ejected in the early 1660s when monarchy and episcopacy were restored. As well as rival claims to victimhood, “the bulk of the Walker archive consists of narratives of the past, written down years afterwards” (16). McCall devotes an opening chapter to this latter issue and, in general, makes a good case for the validity and indeed value as a source of the raw materials assembled by Walker. Albeit “created artefacts” (20), “the number of serious detectable errors in the Walker archive are . . . relatively few, given the hundreds of narratives involved” and “in fact it is often striking the extent to which Walker's stories match other contemporary evidence” (47). Also, wisely, she does not attempt to estimate who suffered the most, simply telling the reader that more “Anglican” clergy were involved (6–8).

Subsequent chapters investigate the accusations made against these same clergy, their war time experiences, the “reality” as opposed to the “rhetoric” of “loyalist” suffering, the various strategies devised for coping, and finally the new dispensation following the Restoration. McCall voices a convincing degree of skepticism about any simplistic assumption that “Laudianism” was a defining characteristic of those sequestered, or that “immorality” had much to do with the matter either. Much more central issues, so she argues, were continuing allegiances to the monarchy and the Book of Common Prayer. Hence Walker's sufferers remained both politically and religiously suspect, in the eyes of their persecutors. A further consequence is firmly to position “Puritanism” center stage in the “English Revolution”—an insight, however, which McCall does not develop, perhaps due to lack of space. Nevertheless her book includes some very suggestive anecdotes, including the reported response by the Presbyterian Peter Seddon, to an appeal for help from his sequestered brother William, a Cheshire clergyman, that “would he conform himself to the godly party, his own merits would protect . . . him” (217). The actual circumstances of sequestered clergy, their wives and children, varied greatly, and McCall is able to adduce many counter-examples to the kind of horror stories highlighted by Walker and his informants. She also includes some informative tables, illustrating levels of poverty and wealth among the sufferers. Here one would have liked more discussion of the “fifths” of clerical income that intruders were obliged by law, from 1643, to pay to those they had displaced. What proportion of the sequestered in the event received their legal due? It is possible, however, to deduce from what McCall does say that at least in parts of the country, for example in Devon and Kent (206–207), “fifths” were paid regularly. Furthermore she notes that the intruders often found it difficult to collect tithes from parishioners, who were sometimes encouraged to refuse by the previous incumbents. Again, we are reminded by way of contrast that those ejected in the early 1660s received no such financial cushioning. Yet, when all is said by way of extenuation, there remain some very striking cases of ruined lives and downward social mobility. In addition, McCall makes the very interesting claim, in her concluding chapter that these “loyalist” clergy, or at least some of them, came to be perceived as, in a sense, “class enemies” (267). She would appear particularly to have in mind certain instances cited earlier in the book of “inversion ritual” (179), clergy being stripped to their underwear, or swaddled in their surplices and hoods, and forced to ride bare-back, facing the horse's tail (176–182). Erstwhile authority figures, they were now humbled at the hands of social inferiors.

This is a richly rewarding book, and one likely effect will be to send historians hurrying off to the Bodleian Library in order to sample the Walker manuscripts for themselves. Yet, as with all good authors, McCall leaves the reader asking further questions. Apart from some of the more technical matters already mentioned, the most obvious relates to the over two thirds of the clergy not among those who suffered (266). How should these non-sufferers be characterized? Were they “Puritans,” “vicars of Bray,” just lucky, or what? Certainly they included some of the forebears of those low churchmen or Latitudinarians who remained distinctly cool about the whole Walker project and disinclined to assist with information gathering, among them those archdeacons of the “new mould” criticized in 1706 by the high churchman Samuel Hill (53). It does not follow, however, in the words of another low churchman John Lewis, not quoted by McCall, that Walker was therefore guilty of purveying “a farrago of false and senseless legends” (Calamy, An Account of . . . Those Worthy Ministers Who Were Ejected [1727], 12), but clearly “Anglicans” came in a variety of shapes. Granted that Walker's sufferers were a mixed bag, it was the intransigent admirers of the “martyred” Archbishop Laud who chose to recount this particular chapter of English Church history and in so doing provided their own distinctive spin.