In 1844 William Pickering printed a splendid copy of what the title-page calls The Book of Common Prayer commonly called the First Book of Queen Elizabeth printed by Grafton 1559. Over a century and a half later, in 2011, Oxford University Press issued The Book of Common Prayer: the texts of 1549, 1559, and 1662 for which its editor, Brian Cummings, chose the Grafton Prayer Book as his copy-text, even as he remarks that ‘The imprint of 1559 bearing the name of Grafton is an oddity, since he lost his licence to print in 1553 and later in 1559 gave up his press and type (some to his son-in-law Richard Tottel).’Footnote 1 Unfortunately, Pickering offered no rationale for his choice of the Grafton text, but both he and Cummings represent exceptions to the consensus among both historians and bibliographers that the 1559 Book of Common Prayer printed by Richard Jugge and John Cawood was the real thing that was authorised by the 1559 Act of Uniformity, passed by parliament on 28 April 1559, while Grafton's was an imposter. As similar as the earliest 1559 Prayer Books are, the question of authority would seem to be unimportant, except that, in this case, the genesis of the first Elizabethan Book of Common Prayer, as well as its relationship to its two Edwardian predecessors, is intimately bound not only to the history of Elizabethan Protestantism but also to the history of Anglicanism. Many historians of both England's Church and State are still heavily invested in a narrative of the Elizabethan settlement of religion as a compromise between Catholic and Protestant versions of the Church, a via media. In this narrative the Book of Common Prayer, finally agreed upon at the eleventh hour in late April 1559 (and printed by Jugge and Cawood), represents a compromise between the more ‘Catholic’ 1549 Book of Common Prayer favoured by the queen and a ‘draft-book’ that ‘was more favourable to Puritan opinions than was agreeable to the Queen or her Secretary [William Cecil]’.Footnote 2 Even though this narrative has met with credible and serious revision in the work of Norman Jones, Diarmaid MacCulloch and Stephen Alford,Footnote 3 two volumes produced by Oxford University Press, Cumming's 2011 tri-text edition of the Book of Common Prayer, and essays in The Oxford guide to the Book of Common Prayer (2006), attest to the persistent view of the settlement as a via media. Evidence from a copy of Grafton's 1559 Book of Common Prayer in Corpus Christi College, Oxford, lends weight instead to the revisionist argument that, from her accession, Elizabeth i and her ministers intended to restore the English Protestant Church as it existed at Edward vi's death. Bibliographical features of Grafton's Prayer Books (1552 and 1559), together with privy councillors' signatures in the Corpus Christi copy, argue that Grafton's 1559 Book of Common Prayer was part of the preparation of Elizabeth's government for altering religion. Understanding and appreciating this evidence and its implications will first require looking more closely at the conflicting narratives about the Book of Common Prayer and the Elizabethan religious settlement.
Supporters of an Anglican via media rely upon three pieces of historical evidence to support their narrative of compromise: the now well-known ‘Device for the alteration of religion’, dating from December 1558; an undated letter from Edmund Guest to William Cecil; and the 1549 Edwardian Book of Common Prayer. Although the argument culminates in the 1559 Act of Uniformity and the Prayer Book ‘attached’ to it, neither is usually considered in detail. Traditional interest in the ‘Device’, which incidentally both Alford and Jones take as a veritable blueprint for the manner by which Edwardian Protestantism would be restored at the beginning of Elizabeth's reign, singularly focused upon its institution of a kind of committee to revise the liturgy, as may be seen in a passage in W. H. Frere's A new history of the Book of Common Prayer:
About Christmas time a very important State paper of questions and advices was prepared, suggesting the mode in which the alteration of religion could be most safely brought about. The ‘manner of doing it’ is advised to be determined by a consultation of ‘such learned men as be meet to show their minds herein; and to bring a plat or book thereof, ready drawn, to her Highness: which being approved of her Majesty, may be so put into the Parliament House'.Footnote 4
For what happened when the committee met – indeed that it met – Frere turns to Guest's letter:
Clearly some body of divines had met and drawn up a draft Service-book, and Guest was among them in a conspicuous position: for he speaks as though the revision had been especially his work. It is clear from this letter that this book, in the shape in which it left the committee of divines, was more favourable to Puritan opinions than was agreeable to the queen or her secretary.Footnote 5
In his note to this, Frere remarks that it ‘has been supposed, and probably rightly, from the form of Guest's letter to Cecil, that the First Prayer Book was recommended to the divines as the basis of the new book’.Footnote 6 Implicit throughout Frere's account is his clear preference (and the queen's) for the 1549 Book of Common Prayer. Even though what left the committee of divines may have been regarded as more favourable to ‘Puritans', the first Elizabethan Prayer Book was still sufficiently ‘Catholic’ to satisfy the late Victorians; as John Henry Blunt explains, the ‘new [1559] book was, substantially, as it still remains, a condensed reproduction, in English, of those Service-books which had been used in Latin by the Church of England for many centuries before’.Footnote 7 Both Blunt and Frere share the conviction, as did many nineteenth- and early twentieth-century church historians, that in the Elizabethan Settlement, the Church of England maintained its continuity with the worship of the medieval English Church. Not only was there continuity with the Catholic past, but Blunt insists that the Elizabethan Book of Common Prayer found favour with Elizabethan Catholics: ‘the Prayer Book was so generally accepted by the Clergy, that out of 9400 only 189 refused to adopt it’, a number that included ‘those Bishops and others of the most extreme Romanist party’.Footnote 8 Blunt here relies on William Camden's 1615 Annales rerum Anglicarum et Hibernicarum regnate Elizabetha, a source only somewhat more reliable in this matter than the next to which he turns – Edward Coke's overtly political Speech and charge (1607), delivered at the Norwich assize in August 1606, which extolled the good will of Catholics during the early years of Elizabeth's reign in contrast to their later seditions and treasons (which Blunt ignores). ‘It is worth notice’, Blunt says, drawing on Coke, ‘that the Book of Common Prayer as thus revised in 1559 was quietly accepted by the great body of Romanist laity; and also that the Pope himself saw so little to object to in it that he offered to give the book his full sanction if his authority were recognized by the queen and kingdom’.Footnote 9
Seeing the Elizabethan Settlement as a compromise between Catholic and Protestant parties through reliance on such selective use of historical sources and tenacious insistence on the more Catholic liturgical preferences of Elizabeth and her chief ministers has shown remarkable endurance, despite persuasive arguments to the contrary. Perhaps the most influential of all histories of the Elizabethan Book of Common Prayer and the Act of Supremacy is J. E Neale's in Elizabeth I and her parliaments.Footnote 10 In Neale's account, the House of Lords were carrying out the wishes of the queen and her ministers to put forward only a bill for supremacy, but they struggled against the domination in the House of Commons of the Protestant ‘Wolves', newly returned from their continental exile, who pressed for religious reform based on a radical prayer book. The compromise was a single bill containing the supremacy and a prayer book, but this was rejected by the House of Lords. After considerable political jockeying –and a decision by the queen to extend the parliamentary session beyond its expected termination before Easter – the Religious Settlement was finally accomplished after a committee proposed a new, though still radical prayer book, and the queen and her ministers, who favoured a return to the 1549 Book of Common Prayer, conceded to ‘the minimum these divines would accept’ – the 1552 Book of Common Prayer, but with significant changes. In this Neale assigns a compromise prayer book to late in the parliamentary process and pointedly disputes the ‘Device's' idea that Elizabeth's government formed a committee of clerics to propose a prayer book before parliament met. Despite impressive arguments against Neale, his version (or parts of it) often persist among textbook authors and even some historians, as may be seen in the recent work of Roger Bowers, who contends (though based on problematic datingFootnote 11) that since musical settings for the Elizabethan Chapel Royal were based on the 1549 Book of Common Prayer, Elizabeth clearly intended the restoration of ‘reformed liturgy based on the Prayer Book of 1549’, an intention that gave way ‘in a week of confusion and successive reversals of policy on the part of the queen’ near the end of March.Footnote 12 Like Neale, Bowers assigns the drafting of an acceptable revision of the 1552 Book of Common Prayer to late March.
Although their accounts of the events of late 1558 through the April passage of the 1559 Act of Uniformity vary, from Blount through Bowers, the queen and, usually, her ministers are at odds with the wishes of the ‘Reform’ party, and the Church established by the Elizabethan Settlement appears comfortably un-Protestant. Despite its persistence, this narrative has had its detractors. In 1901 Henry Gee made a credible argument that, based on its reference to kneeling as adiaphoric, Guest's letter defending Prayer Book revisions more likely belonged to the process of drafting the final version of the 1552 Book of Common Prayer,Footnote 13 which contained a directive that the Communion Bread should be received ‘kneeling’ (actually, ‘in their handes kneling’).Footnote 14 Gee observed that the ‘kneeling controversy was a very prominent matter in the year 1552’Footnote 15 but not in 1559. Gee also debunks the idea of Cecil and the queen's preferring the 1549 Book of Common Prayer. He does, however, subscribe to the view that the ‘Device's' principal purpose was to procure a draft prayer book through efforts by a committee composed of men whom he variously describes as ‘strongly’ Protestant, or ‘of the more extreme school of reformers'.Footnote 16 Since the clerk of the Commons recorded the presentation of a Prayer Book on 16 February 1559, Gee says that the committee must have completed their work by then, and, he notes, that ‘in default of evidence to the contrary’, he assumes that the book presented was ‘that of 1552, with the specified exceptions'.Footnote 17 According to Gee, the 15 February bill for the Order of Service and the Book of Common Prayer introduced on 16 February were set aside as parliament struggled with the far more important and controversial matter of the supremacy. At one point in March, according to Gee, ‘the Prayer-Book was annexed to the Supremacy Bill, in some way’ and both matters were debated together, although ‘the second Prayer-Book of Edward vi, having been passed by the Lower House, was definitely rejected by the Lords, who passed only that section of the compound bill which referred to the Supremacy’.Footnote 18 This bill was returned to the Commons, who objected to the changes made in the House of Lords, and in turn returned the bill to the Lords with a new proviso. The Lords passed the revised bill. Gee understands all of this as a ‘defeat’ of the Prayer Book, and following a recess for Easter, a new, and to Gee inexplicable, bill for the Supremacy was read, and before it was passed a uniformity bill was brought before the Commons, where it passed and was sent to the Lords. There, once again, it met with opposition, but this time passed; ‘by the narrow majority of three, the old Latin Service was abolished, and the Elizabethan Prayer-Book was to take its place’.Footnote 19 Although no actual book yet existed, according to Gee, the Act of Uniformity provided that the book would follow the 1552 Book of Common Prayer with the three exceptions described in the act: a changed litany, expanded lessons on Sundays, and the addition of language from the 1549 Prayer Book at the distribution of the communion. Gee finds it perplexing, however, that ‘the printed copies that survive from the year 1559 show considerable further divergence from the book of 1552 than those specified in the Act of Uniformity, and ‘likewise exhibit small points of mutual difference’.Footnote 20 The most notable difference that interests Gee is the ornaments rubric, which he assigns to changes made by the privy council after the Uniformity Act was passed. Gee's account envisions four stages of the Book of Common Prayer: the appointed committee's draft revision (probably of the 1552 Prayer Book) which appears in the House of Commons as a material book, is then set aside, is later ‘annexed’ by the Lords to the second supremacy bill and defeated; a non-material book envisioned by the Act of Uniformity; a sparsely printed material book that corresponded to the act's requirements, which appeared before the Whitsunday deadline for parish use; and the final version of the material 1559 Book of Common Prayer that included privy council changes regarding ornaments, which was printed in the summer or early autumn of 1559.
Despite its strengths, Gee's version was overridden by Neale's better understanding of parliamentary proceedings (even though his account is at times speculative). In Faith by statute Norman Jones meets Neale on his own terms, and persuasively addresses parliamentary matters, not the least of which is to dispell Neale's idea of an oppositional House of Commons dominated by Protestant radicals. With regard to the queen and her government's intentions, Jones insists that however conservative some of Elizabeth's religious predilections may have been – her insistence on retaining a crucifix in her chapel, for example – the queen was sincerely Protestant and thoroughly committed to a reformed Church in England. The efforts for reformation themselves were politically strategic. Indeed, based on the ‘Device for alteration of religion’, which Jones dates before Christmas 1558, and Richard Goodrich's ‘Divers points of religion contrary to the Church of Rome’, which considered the political climate in which church reform would be introduced, Jones maintains not only that it was probable that from her accession Elizabeth intended to revive the 1552 Book of Common Prayer, but also that the 1552 prayer book ‘would be the vehicle for the new uniformity’.Footnote 21 That uniformity, of course, would be implemented by statute passed by parliament. Based on the ‘Device’, according to Jones, from the beginning it was intended that the royal supremacy should be separate from religious uniformity, although the government's bills on each could expect support from the House of Commons with its strongly Protestant majority – a majority that was ‘patriotic, anti-Spanish, anti-Catholic and deeply impressed with the horror of the Marian persecution’ despite variety in their Protestant views.Footnote 22 What Elizabeth and her advisors had not planned for was the determination of the Marian Catholic bishops and their lay supporters, and when it became clear that they would vote as a bloc to oppose the bill, the queen and her ministers devised a new political strategy to weaken opposition: ‘Among the moves made along this line were the Westminster disputation [on tenets embraced by English reformers], the imprisonment of two bishops, and the preparation of separate bills for supremacy and uniformity’ (after an earlier parliamentary attempt to merge the matters into one bill) that were more moderate than initially planned.Footnote 23 Jones suggests that the changes to the 1552 Book of Common Prayer specified by the Act of Uniformity – the ornaments rubric and the addition of sentences from the 1549 Book of Common Prayer in the administration of communion – reflect alterations to the Bill of Uniformity done to ‘improve its chance of passage’ and gain support in the House of Lords.Footnote 24 He admits, however, that this would assume that the changes were made after Easter, but it was possible ‘that the combined formulae were in the bill for order of service introduced in February’.Footnote 25
Perhaps more than anyone else who has written on the Elizabethan Act of Uniformity, Jones emphasises the interdependence of the Act of Uniformity and the Book of Common Prayer. The ‘uniformity’ that the 1559 act reinstated was the uniform worship of the Church as specified by the 1552 Edwardian Act of Uniformity, which established the Church's worship according to the 1552 Book of Common Prayer. Like his predecessors, Jones addresses the entries relating to religious uniformity in the Commons Journal on two subsequent days, 16 and 17 February, the first of which notes a bill ‘for order of Servyce and mynysters in the churche’, and the second ‘The boke for common prayer and Mynystracion of the sacraments'.Footnote 26 (These are the bills whose origin Neale assigns to the radical Protestants in the House of Commons, while Gee allows that this may have been a single government bill and a draft of a prayer book, which he assumes either is set aside or is incorporated into a second supremacy bill.) Jones is unsure whether this is a single bill read a second time or two bills, but either way, he says that
Whether there were one or two bills, there is little doubt that its or their passage would have established a prayer book and an ordinal for the use of the Church of England – in all likelihood, the 1552 book with its purified ordinal attached. There is a possibility, however, that there was no ordinal included in the bill, in view of the fact that the Act of Uniformity's full title echoes the clerk's description of the two readings without including the one: The Act of Uniformity of Common Prayer and Divine Service in the Church and the Administration of the Sacraments.Footnote 27
A service book, though Jones does not identify its nature, also became part of a second, revised, supremacy act: ‘a squabble between Sir Ambrose Cave and Sir Thomas White over their opinions on the service book proves that the new bill for supremacy contained a service book’.Footnote 28 How a new supremacy bill might ‘contain’ a service book is perplexing, though it is only slightly less so than the Commons Journal's entries about a second February prayer book bill or the second reading of the first uniformity bill. Gee's view that one day an act was entered, and the second day an actual Prayer Book was entered does make some sense. Either way, Jones raises the possibility of a material book quite differently from other accounts.
These explanations of the journey through parliament of Elizabethan uniformity bills revolve around a somewhat protean notion of prayer books. Gee and Neale maintain that the April uniformity bill ‘but not the Prayer Book’ went before the Commons and the Lords and was passed. Why in the end there was no book presented to parliament is not altogether clear – perhaps simply because Neale relies on Gee's account in this respect. Alternatively, it may be because, elsewhere in his account, material books had mattered but then been discarded. One book (the radical Puritan version) accompanied the February bill for order of service and another, the 1552 Prayer Book, had been materially ‘annexed’ to the second supremacy bill, since the speeches against it referred specifically to the book. In Neale's narrative the short time available between parliament's adjournment and the uniformity bill's introduction had been spent on an unacceptable second radical revision – the material book that was presented to Cecil and to which Guest's letter referred – so he may simply have assumed that time would not have allowed for the production of a material book reflecting the compromise. Although Neale does not actually address the book, Elizabeth's late compromise implies deferred changes in the 1552 Prayer Book. Even Jones, who allowed a material book early in parliamentary deliberations, indicates that there may have been late April changes to appease the traditionalists, raising the possibility that a material book was no longer attached to the uniformity bill. Throughout, the spectre of a necessary but invisible ‘draft-book’ haunts these accounts; that is, some material object to which abbots, bishops and members of the Houses of Lords and Commons could address their words of condemnation or approbation seems to be implicit.
Why, it might be asked, should a material object be necessary? A most tantalising piece of evidence appears in an earlier but parallel case where the material book – a Book of Common Prayer – possessed singular authority. The second (1552) Edwardian Prayer Book was so poorly printed that the king called for it to be ‘diligently perused, and therein the printers' errors amended’.Footnote 29 We know this from Archbishop Thomas Cranmer's letter of 7 October 1552 to the privy council which had conveyed the king's request to him. Archbishop Cranmer replied
I shall travail therein to the uttermost of my power, albeit I had need first to have had the book written which was passed by Act of Parliament sealed with the great seal, which remaineth in the hands of Mr. Spilman, clerk of the parliament, who is not in London, nor I cannot learn where he is.Footnote 30
The ‘book written’ here refers to the manuscript of the Book of Common Prayer – the material book that was passed by parliament. The approved book was then sealed with the Great Seal and placed in the custody of the clerk of parliament. This particular book was important because it served as the apparently perfect ‘original’ against which the printers' errors could be measured. The next sentence of Cranmer's letter tells more about the process by which the authorised official version of the book made its way into print. While Cranmer had been unable to contact Mr. Spilman, who was away from London, he had ‘gotten the copy which Mr. Spilman delivered to the printers to print by, which, I think, shall serve well enough’. To facilitate printing the book, Mr. Spilman had the original of the approved book copied out and delivered to the printers, who would then cast off and set type from the copied manuscript. Cranmer's reflection that the printer's copy should ‘serve well enough’ implicitly acknowledges that although a copyist might introduce variants, the care which would have been taken in this case to be faithful to the original should be sufficient to determine which variants in the printed copy were actually errors. Given the care taken for the ‘book written which was passed by Parliament’, including being sealed with the Great Seal and placed in protective custody – to say nothing of its authoritative character in determining printers' errors – it is difficult to believe that Elizabeth and her ministers would have sent forward a bill for uniformity without the book which the bill would enact. The 1559 Act of Uniformity designated uniform worship in the Church by enacting the
book with the order of service, and of the administration of sacraments, rites, and ceremonies … so authorized by Parliament in the said fifth and sixth years of the reign of King Edward vi, with one alteration or addition of certain lessons to be used on every Sunday in the year, and the form of the Litany altered, and corrected, and two sentences only added in the delivery of the sacrament to the communicants, and none other or otherwise.Footnote 31
As contentious as Elizabeth's first parliament had been over the changes in the religious state inherent in the iterations of the supremacy bills, could the government have expected parliament to have approved the restoration of the 1552 Book of Common Prayer without knowing what changes would be made in the litany or what two sentences would be added to the communion service?
The creation narratives of the first Elizabethan Prayer Book and its connection to the religious settlement are thus comprised of multiple prayer books in multiple forms – real and imagined. The non-existence of a prayer book actually passed by parliament is but one of the problems in this narrative. The other, of course, is the problem of the preferences of the queen and her ministers in relation to the ‘Reformed’ party (or émigré wolves as Neale would have it) – and the vexed issue of the two Edwardian prayer books, the earlier the more Catholic (or as some would have it, more Anglican), the other more Protestant (or more corrupted by Swiss influences). The problem, as Neale rightly observed, is that conclusions about how policy was shaped and how the parliament proceeded have been based ‘on the most meagre and baffling evidence’.Footnote 32 Considerable liberties have been taken with the meagre evidence at hand. And, on the whole, what persists is a sense that the final decision to adopt the 1552 Book of Common Prayer, indeed to define the Elizabethan settlement of religion by what parliament passed as the 1559 Act of Uniformity, involved some last-minute improvisation after the Easter recess. One part of the evidence which has received strikingly short shrift – besides acknowledging that there were editions by two different printing houses and that they appeared after (by some accounts considerably after) the Act of Uniformity was passed – is the evidence provided by the Prayer Book itself. Some of this evidence – the bibliographical accounts of the different editions of the Prayer Book – has contributed to the muddle. Scrutiny of the texts, however, can help to clarify the complicated interrelationships between Edward's 1552 Prayer Book and Elizabeth's 1559 alteration of religion.
The bibliographical irregularities in the 1559 editions of The Book of Common Prayer appear in the second edition of the Short-title catalogue's entries prepared by Katherine Pantzer. For RSTC 16291, printed by Richard Grafton, the entry reads:
As no other book with Grafton's imprint after 1543 is known, this ed. possibly represents an unsuccessful attempt by him to gain a share in the Queen's Printing Office. Mr. Hetherington suggests that this ed. was pr. by Grafton as agent for Jugge and Cawood and that he improperly put his name in the imprint, since his licence as Queen's printer was revoked by Queen Mary in 1553, and never restored.Footnote 33
Hetherington (an earlier Book of Common Prayer bibliographer) is referring here to the Queen's Printers, Richard Jugge and John Cawood, who printed the other editions of the 1559 Book of Common Prayer. The RSTC entry on Grafton's edition also notes that one of the five extant copies, that in Cambridge University Library, has a printed cancel positioned over Grafton's imprint, which reads ‘in officina R. Jugge & J. Cawode’. This copy probably influenced the conclusion that Grafton was printing as an agent for Jugge and Cawood. The 1559 edition which, then, is the legitimate one would be Jugge and Cawood's (RSTC 16292), but according to the RSTC, that likewise had a problem: it did not contain the expanded litany, and the RSTC entry notes that ‘Mr. Hetherington suggests that the official printers were temporarily denied access to this part of the new revision.’Footnote 34
Besides the entries for all the individual editions of the Prayer Books printed before 1640, the RSTC contains a chart of the various editions that categorises them by series, date, RSTC number, collation and location of the State Prayer. Typically for RSTC cataloguing purposes edition (a single print run of a book) and issue (members of a print run with some variant, like title-page or colophon, introduced) are sufficient categorical markers. The bibliographical features of early Prayer Books, vastly complicated by the presence (or absence) of multiple preliminary materials, called for a further means of categorisation. Hetherington and Pantzer grouped editions with similar bibliographical features in series with sequential but somewhat arbitrary numbers. This allows the comparison of books that possess similar bibliographical features although they may be separated in time. This chart places the 1559 Grafton Prayer Book in series 2/20 and classifies the 1559 Jugge and Cawood as 2/21, the separate series recognising their bibliographical differences notable in their collations. Grafton's edition is a folio in sixes (comprised of three sheets), with the exception of the concluding X gathering, which is in eight (comprised of four sheets). The Jugge and Cawood series 2/21 editions consist of folio gatherings in eight (A–K, M–N), and gatherings in ten (L, O–P). What is most important about the series information is that Jugge and Cawood's 1559 Prayer Book, series 2/21, is based on series 2/14, the last 1552 edition printed by Edward Whitchurch; and Grafton's 2/20 series 1559 Prayer Book is based on 1552 series 2/15, Grafton's supposedly earliest edition of the 1552 Prayer Book. This close parallel, together with the recognition that Elizabeth's Act of Uniformity reinstated the 1552 Book of Common Prayer with three specified changes and a proviso on ornaments, warrants looking more closely at the 1552 Prayer Book and its printers.
Richard Grafton and Edward Whitchurch, who were partners, began as publishers rather than printers.Footnote 35 Among their earliest ventures was the Matthew Bible, edited by John Rogers from the books and papers of William Tyndale and printed in Amsterdam by Matthew Crom. In 1538 Thomas Cromwell secured Henry viii's privilege for Grafton and Whitchurch for all Bibles and New Testaments in English. They arranged for the Bible to be printed in Paris by François Reynault. When the French government placed Reynault's press under an interdiction, the English agent overseeing the venture arranged for the transportation to London of the forms, presses and any printed sheets that had not been seized. These were placed in a vacant building at Greyfriars, which became Grafton's residence and printing house, where he and Whitchurch proceeded to print the English ‘Great Bible’.Footnote 36 According to A. R. Slavin, through diplomatic negotiations the English government was subsequently able to secure the confiscated sheets, which Grafton and Whitchurch mixed in with sheets they printed at Greyfriars.Footnote 37
Whitchurch continued to print with Grafton at Greyfriars through 1541. On 28 January 1543 Grafton and Whitchurch obtained the royal privilege to print all service books, and each printed editions of both the 1549 and 1552 Book of Common Prayer, though in different premises. In 1545, the same year that he and Grafton became associated with the household of Prince Edward, Whitchurch acquired a property at the sign of the Sun in Fleet Street. At Edward's accession, Grafton became the King's Printer, and in 1547 the service book patent was renewed.Footnote 38 Both Grafton and Whitchurch were aligned with English religious reformers, and at Mary's accession both fell into disfavour. Grafton printed the proclamation that declared Jane Grey queen of England, and on 29 December 1553 Mary's patent, granting to John Cawood the office of Queen's Printer, expressed her disapproval of Grafton. ‘The said office’, the patent declares, ‘is now void because Richard Grafton who held it forfeited it by printing a proclamation in which was contained that a certain Jane, wife of Guildford Dudley, was Queen of England.’Footnote 39 According to Peter Blayney, when Mary ascended the throne, Grafton and Whitechurch were forbidden to run their printing houses and were forced to accept managers sympathetic to the regime. Whitchurch gave up his lease on the Sun, dismantled his presses, put everything in storage, and married Archbishop Thomas Cranmer's widow, though Blayney finds no evidence that he fled to the continent as has been widely believed. Although Grafton had to accept Robert Caly, as a manager, he retained the lease on his property, and Caly employed his presses and letters for a time, although Ferguson says he gave his letters and woodcuts to his son-in-law, Richard Tottel.Footnote 40 During Mary's reign Grafton, who served as Warden of the Grocers' Company, became involved in City politics, sitting as a London MP in 1557. On 8 November 1558 the name Richard Grafton ‘“printer” alias of London “grocer”’ appears in the pardon rolls.Footnote 41 Ferguson says that Grafton participated in planning the pageants celebrating Elizabeth's coronation on 14 January 1559, undoubtedly thanks to his position in the City. The central pageant was centred around the City's gift to the new queen, a Bible, ‘the Book from which she was to draw her strength and right’.Footnote 42 Since Grafton's edition of the Great Bible in 1553 was the last printed before Mary suppressed them, it well may have been a Grafton Bible which Elizabeth received. Late in 1558 Edward Whitchurch was again in London, where he briefly engaged once again in printing; he printed one of the earliest Elizabethan proclamations for Richard Jugge.Footnote 43
Even though Grafton and Whitchurch eventually operated different printing houses, their Prayer Books betray some surprising similarities in printing practices. The collations as described by Pantzer, however, are somewhat problematic, as they operate on the premise of ‘ideal’ copies, that is of copies in which quires are printed and gathered sequentially, and variations reflect either resetting or sophistication. From this perspective, the variations in the number of sheets in a gathering (between eight and ten in Whitchurch, and between six and eight in Grafton) is somewhat irregular. Furthermore, Pantzer does not describe the preliminaries consistently for all of the different series. In all the 1552 Prayer Books, the preliminaries in an ideal collation would be a10 b6, but the actual collation in most editions is as follows:
* indicates that signature is not actually printed
This would properly be an ‘a’ gathering in 8 (4 sheets); a ‘b’ gathering in 6 (3 sheets); a second ‘a’ gathering in 2 (1 sheet). The problem arises in the duplication of ai and aii, which are usually separated by the ‘b’ gathering. In series 2/15 (Grafton), the table of contents indicates that the Act of Uniformity should appear first. Since the printed Act of Uniformity actually carries the ai and aii signature, it would appear that the title-page/table of contents sheet should not be signed a, and that ai should begin with the Act of Uniformity. If the Act were placed thus, then the preface would have to be aiii, but it is signed aii and aiii. In series 2/14 (Whitchurch) there is no Act of Uniformity in the contents, but the act appears at the end of the preliminaries, in the same position as it does in Grafton's edition. In one copy in this series, the kalendar appears before the preface. In one Grafton 2/15 copy the preface is signed ai, and the next signature is aiii, with the aii signature imprint omitted (clearly a printing rather than a collation error). In some cases, the second ‘a’ gathering containing the Act of Uniformity actually uses ‘A’. The representation, then, of the preliminaries as A10 works only in an ideal collation. What seems to have happened is that in the printing house, casting off copy was done to assure that discrete units, like the Kalendar, or the Act of Uniformity, could be printed separately, even at different times. Probably the most unusual aspect of the preliminaries is that the ‘ideal’ collation can apply both to Whitchurch's and to Grafton's 1552 Prayer Books. Not only that, but books from both houses appear to be set from a common source since, for the most part, line ends reflecting spacing within the line are the same. When variations appear, they derive from accommodating to different sizes in ornamental capital letters. These similarities indicate close cooperation between Whitchurch and Grafton.
These peculiarities in the preliminaries are instructive about printing strategies in the body of the Prayer Book. While the service book proper in Whitchurch and Grafton Prayer Books has different collations, both printers had the text cast off in such a way that content units of the Prayer Book could be printed separately, which accounts for the varied lengths of the gatherings. In one Whitchurch Prayer Book, for example, the A gathering in 8 contains Morning Prayer; Evening Prayer and the Litany are another unit; the Collects, Epistles and Gospels, a third. Communion begins on Mir in one edition, on Oir in another. The RSTC identifies one edition of a Grafton Prayer Book, a copy of which is in Lambeth Palace Library, as having a similar collation to Whitchurch's editions, and thus places it in a separate series (2/12). This, however, is an error. RSTC 16284.5 indeed has a Grafton title-page, and perhaps Grafton preliminaries, but the actual service book, including the Collects, Epistles and Gospels, is identical with Whitchurch's RSTC 16279.
Like Whitchurch's, all of Grafton's Prayer Books have the same collation (though different from Whitchurch's) in the body of the service book, and these also are cast off and the type set to allow separate printing of discrete units. Morning Prayer, Evening Prayer and the Litany comprise one unit beginning at Air and ending at Cir, with the verso of Ci left blank. The Collects, Epistles and Gospels begin at Ciir and end at Qir, with the verso of Qi left blank. While beginning at Cii seems to contradict the idea that sections of the prayer book were discrete printings, the number of sheets still make the gatherings consistent. What Grafton appears to be doing here is using signatures somewhat arbitrarily. It might be argued that this would create chaos in gathering and binding; it is important to note, however, that Grafton solves this problem by using continuous foliation throughout the services (except for in the Ordinal, which has its own sequential foliation). The Communion service begins at Qiir and ends Rviv. The Rvi leaf contains the communion rubrics, including the ‘Black Rubric’ on kneeling.Footnote 44 Baptism is contained in Si-vi; Confirmation, the Catechism, Matrimony and Communion of the Sick are complete in Ti–vi and Ui–vi. Xi–viii contains the Burial and Commination services. The ordinal is an entirely separate printing but begins at Aai.
Grafton's use of foliation rather than signatures as a guide for gathering and binding leads to some very complicated variations both among and between editions and issues. Any single copy of a Grafton Prayer Book may contain not only gatherings but also single sheets from different print runs. I compared multiple copies of Grafton Prayer Books, but three of them, two identifiable as RSTC 16286 and the third as RSTC 16286.2, illustrate patterns of variation. Among these three, the preliminaries and the A–Cir and Qii–Xviii are identical, but strange things happen in the long section containing the Collects, Epistles and Gospels, Ciir–Qir. Some of the gatherings are identical for all three (Cii–vi, D, G, I, L, M, N, O, P, Qi). For the other gatherings the first two 16286 copies are usually identical, but RSTC 16286.2 provides a resetting that corresponds in lineation to other copies and often even uses the same ornamental letters, with small variations in spelling. The F gathering is unusual. Fii and Fv have two almost identical though clearly different settings, while Fi and Fvi are identical for all three. The continuities between different issues and editions suggest that Grafton was printing the sections separately and storing the different sections together in the warehouse. The unusual configurations in the Collects, Epistles and Gospels suggest simultaneous printing from different forms that allowed sheets from different presses to be intermixed when a quire was gathered. Alternatively, Grafton may have kept type standing in his printing house. Furthermore, the very close similarities in different settings in parallel gatherings indicate that forms were set from previously printed copy. Pantzer has suggested that variations among copies of the 1552 Book of Common Prayer can be attributed to sophistication. While this may be so (and certainly is the case with the Lambeth Palace ‘Grafton’ Prayer Book), printing, warehousing and binding practices seem a much more logical explanation for the enormous variation that occurs within editions as well as the widespread commonality among editions and issues. The idea that the printing houses of Grafton and Whitchurch may even have been sharing materials for the preliminaries introduces another complexity. Even so, it appears that Grafton and Whitchurch learned from their experience with the 1538 Great Bible – that mixing sheets from different press runs could lead to greater efficiency.
This consideration of the materiality of the 1552 edition might appear to be somewhat beside the point of understanding the first Elizabethan Books of Common Prayer except for the important point that the first two editions of the 1559 Prayer Book, according to Pantzer, paralleled Edwardian editions. It is an interesting point that Edward Whitchurch printed an early Elizabethan proclamation for Richard Jugge. It is tempting to imagine Whitchurch providing Jugge with a copy upon which Jugge based his first printing of the 1559 Book of Common Prayer. At any rate, Jugge and Cawood certainly acquired one, along with the type and printing ornaments that Whitchurch had used to print the 1552 Book of Common Prayer. Jugge and Cawood's first Book of Common Prayer (RSTC 16292, Huntington Library, shelf mark 97019) very closely parallels Whitchurch's 1552 (RSTC 16282, Huntington 62282). The title-page ornament and the ornamental capital letters are identical. That the 1559 Prayer Book was probably set from Whitchurch's 1552 may be seen in the spacing, not only within lines of type but from line to line. Many pages are even set using the same ornamental capitals. For those pages where ornamental capitals differ, the typesetter selected ornaments of similar sizes to allow him to retain the spacing from the earlier Prayer Book. There are some sections that are entirely reset – most of the preliminaries and parts of the Morning Prayer service, for example. Even here, however, it is clear that the 1552 Prayer Book provides a guide. The ornament rubric change at the beginning of the Morning Prayer service forces a resetting. Morning Prayer begins on a recto, but by the last line on the verso, the typesetter has adjusted the spacing so that he can go back to copying the 1552. The increase in lessons dictated by the Act of Uniformity led to a longer 1559 Proper, which ends on a verso. In the 1552 the Proper ended on a recto and the other side contained the Almanack. That the Kalendar always began on a recto, meant that in 1559 the Almanack would have to be left out or a blank page or something else added. Jugge and Cawood chose to add a ‘Declaration of when term times begin and end’. The Communion Service was entirely reset. Why Jugge and Cawood would not have included the state prayer or the longer prayers after the litany is not at all clear, unless they were printing in anticipation of the Act of Uniformity being passed. It is significant that the patent that appointed Jugge and Cawood to the office of Queen's Printers with the exclusive right to print ‘all statute books, libels of acts of parliament, proclamations, injunctions and service books' was dated 24 March 1559, the same day that parliament was adjourned until after Easter – and until after the disputation that landed a few of the recalcitrant bishops in the Tower and shifted the balance of power in the House of Lords. Once assured that they would have the sole right to print service books, Jugge and Cawood may have set type from Whitchurch's copy so they would be ready to print the Book of Common Prayer once the Act of Uniformity was passed. Rather than being deprived by the government of the extended prayers, at the point when they were setting type, they may not have been aware of the final form that the Prayer Book would take.
Of even more interest than the similarities between the Jugge-Cawood and the Whitchurch editions are those between Grafton's 1552 Book of Common Prayer and his bibliographically discredited 1559 edition. In his recent edition of the 1549, 1559 and 1662 Books of Common Prayer, Brian Cummings explains that he has used the Grafton Prayer Book for his copy text because it is preferred to the earliest Jugge and Cawood edition, ‘since, although their status as royal printers might otherwise give them precedence, the Litany is imperfect in their edition and an incorrect “State prayer” is included’.Footnote 45 Of Grafton's 1559 text, Cummings notes that ‘some of the idiosyncrasies of the text are in line with his 1552 editions'.Footnote 46 In comparing Grafton's 1559 with his 1552 edition, whose colophon reads ‘Thus booke is truly and diligently imprinted’ (RSTC 16286.2), it becomes clear that Grafton was not only basing his 1559 Prayer Book on his 1552, but in some cases was actually incorporating text printed in 1552 into the 1559 Book of Common Prayer. Based on a comparison of Grafton's 1552 Book of Common Prayer with the copy of the 1559 Grafton Prayer Book in the collection of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, a copy which includes the Ordinal followed by a colophon with Grafton's device and the imprint, 1559, it is clear that the following sections of the two Prayer Books are bibliographically identical: bir–bviv (the Kalendar); and Tir–Uviv (‘Confirmation wherein is conteined a Catechisme’, ‘The forme of solemnizacion of Matrimonye’, and ‘The Order for the visitacion of the Sicke’)Footnote 47 (see fig. 1). Additionally, many sections are a resetting of the 1552 Prayer Book which maintain spacing within and between lines and use many of the same ornaments. This is a feature that is characteristic of different editions and even copies within editions of 1552 Grafton prayer books, so it is entirely possible that the X gathering (Burial, Thanksgiving of Women after Childbirth, and Comminacion) is 1552 copy.
Figure 1. Colophon. Book of Common Prayer and Ordinal, [Richard Grafton: 1559]. Corpus Christi College Library, Oxford. Shelfmark phi.F.3.7. Reproduced by kind permission of the President and Fellows of the college.
Some of the idiosyncrasies of the long section of Collects, Epistles and Gospels (Ciir–Qir) suggest that the variants between the 1559 Corpus Christi copy and the 1552 British Library copy could as likely have resulted from the printing and warehousing practices that account for differences among 1552 copies as from setting 1559 type from a 1552 copy. For, example, in the E gathering, Eiii and Eiiii are identical (the middle sheet in the gathering), but the rest of the gathering has almost identical spacing but some spelling and ornament variants. In the F gathering the outer sheets (Fi and Fvi) are identical. The H gathering has almost identical spacing and spelling and some, but not all, of the same ornamental capitals. The I gatherings are identical. The inner sheet of the L gathering (Liii and Liiii) is a different setting while the rest of the gathering is identical. The outer leaves of the N gathering (Li and Lvi) are identical; the rest is reset. The O gathering is identical.
Perhaps the most bibliographically interesting sections are those that contain the changes dictated by the 1559 Act of Uniformity. The A gathering, which contains the order for Morning Prayer and part of Evening Prayer, has, as would be expected, a new rubric at the beginning specifying that the service ‘shalbe used in the accustomed place of the churche, chapel, or chancel’ and requiring that, in their ministrations, the ‘Minister … shall use suche ornamentes in the church as wer in use by aucthoritie of parliament in the second yere of the reygne of king Edward the .vi. according to the acte of parliament set in the beginning of thys booke’ (Air). As would be expected Ai and Avi are reset in the 1559 copy, but Aii–Av are bibliographically identical, including the text ‘O Lorde save the King’ on Avv. The B gathering completes Evening Prayer followed by the Great Litany. The 1559 B gathering is entirely reset to accommodate the changes in the Litany and the State Prayer. The 1559 ‘Ordre for the administracion of the Lordes Supper’ (Qi–Qvi; Ri–Rvir) changed references to the monarch from ‘Edward our King’ to ‘Elizabeth our Queene’, added the 1549 formula of administration at the distribution of the Communion, and eliminated the Black Rubric. These changes required a new printing, although the type was apparently set from the 1552 copy, and follows it closely once adjustments are made for the changes. The British Library copy of the 1552 Prayer Book that I used for comparison with the Corpus Christi 1559 Grafton contains the Black Rubric among the other Communion rubrics printed on Rvir. Doing so, however, extends the rubrics onto Rviv. The 1559 Book of Common Prayer's Rviv is blank (and omits the Black Rubric), a feature that would usually be bibliographically unremarkable. In the case of the Corpus Christi College copy, however, it is significant. In sixteenth-century hand the page reads:
Thys booke of prayers is
to be sold as followeth and not
above
In quares unbound atiis iiid
In pchment bound atiiis
In prestor board bound atiiis viiid
Following this are the signatures of nine privy councillors: N[icholas] Bacon, C[ustos] S[igli]; F[rancis Russell, earl of] Bedford; [William Herbert, earl of] Pembroke; E[dward Fiennes de] Clinton, [Lord High Admiral]; W[illiam] Howard, [Lord Howard of Effingham] Lord Chamberlain]; [Sir] T[homas] Parry [Comptroller]; [Sir] F[rancis] Knollys; [Secretary] W[illiam] Cecill; and Ambrose Caue [Cave] (see fig. 2). With the exception of Knollys, who may not have signed as a privy councillor, all of these men were appointed to Elizabeth's privy council in the first month of her reign.
Figure 2. Opening Rviv–Qir, Book of Common Prayer, [Richard Grafton: 1559]. Corpus Christi College, Oxford, Shelfmark phi.F.3.7. Reproduced by kind permission of the President and Fellows of the college.
The presence of these signatures, on the verso leaf of the Book of Common Prayer that in 1552 had contained the Black Rubric – and after which in the 1559 Prayer Book there were no further changes designated by the Act of Uniformity – affords credible evidence that Grafton's 1559 Book of Common Prayer was something other than ‘an unsuccessful attempt by him to gain a share in the Queen's Printing Office’. Given that this copy of the Book of Common Prayer contained all of the changes specified in the Act of Uniformity, including in the preliminaries a new Proper of Psalms and Lessons that was expanded to meet the act's demand for an ‘addition of certain lessons to be used on every Sunday in the year’, the changes in the Litany, the addition of ‘two changes only added in the delivery of the sacrament to the communicants', and the new ornament rubric advancing the act's demand ‘that such ornaments of the church, and of the ministers thereof, shall be retained and be in use, as was in the Church of England, by authority of Parliament, in the second year of the reign of King Edward vi’, it can be regarded as legitimate, indeed even as an authorised, copy. The Corpus Christi copy of Grafton's 1559 Book of Common Prayer represents the material book that was, or was intended to be, put before the 1559 Parliament in conjunction with what became the Act of Uniformity. What happened to the copy after 1559 is unclear, but in 1597, along with ninety-three other titles of English and continental theological works, it was bequeathed to Corpus Christi by Richard Cobb, a Fellow and Vice-President of the college. This volume, in a late sixteenth-century calf binding, contains the Book of Common Prayer and the Ordinal, both printed by Grafton with the imprint 1559.Footnote 48
Before considering the implications of the 1559 Prayer Book being a revised (and partly reassembled) 1552 Book of Common Prayer, signed by Elizabeth's privy councillors, discerning a date when the book could have been signed is important. There is no mention in the Acts of the Privy Council of a Prayer Book being signed or of prices being dictated – but then there is little in the first few months of these records that indicate the privy council's involvement with religion at all. There is a letter to the Lord Mayor of London asking him to publish proclamations ‘for thinhibyting of preachers', but nothing is written about the circumstances that led to the proclamation or the proclamation's contents.Footnote 49 During the reign of Edward vi the privy council took active measures to enforce the Reformation, including recalling the 1552 Book of Common Prayer because of its errors. (This is known from Cranmer's letter responding to the privy council's request.) It is interesting, though, that the Acts of the Privy Council does not mention the council's letter to Cranmer. Even when Edward's privy council acted on behalf of a king on whom parliament had conferred the supreme authority over the Church, evidently not all of their actions in this respect were recorded. According to D. E. Hoak, the principal secretary, relying upon his own notes, directed the clerks of the privy council on which matters should be entered in the council's book, and the clerks entered only those proceedings which the council commanded to be part of the permanent record. Typically this included notices of warrant, the texts of selected letters, notations of letters sent, citations of significant foreign developments, records of appointments, and notices of proclamations.Footnote 50 Such protocols would have continued with Elizabeth's privy council. Given the rush of events that did get entered (and that did not) in the first months of privy council records for Elizabeth's reign, many things of great importance were undoubtedly omitted, and the signing of Grafton's Prayer Book was probably one of them.
Even without a recorded date, it is possible to discover a window during which Grafton's Prayer Book may have been signed. Nicholas Bacon was not appointed as keeper of the Great Seal until 22 December 1558. Sir Francis Knollys was not sworn to the privy council until 14 January 1559.Footnote 51 William Howard, Lord Chamberlain, was away from the council on a commission to France from the queen between 21 January 1559 and 15 April 1559 – indeed this may have had something to do with Knollys’s appointment as vice-chamberlain. Both Howard and Knollys attended the next two meetings after Knollys's appointment, but on 16 January Pembroke was absent and on 19 January, Knollys was absent, though it is conceivable that the signing could have taken place prior or subsequent to the official privy council session where the clerk recorded attendance. One appealing feature of the 19 January date is that only one person, Mr Mason, was present besides the signatories. Sir John Mason was the only member of Mary's household who was called to serve on Elizabeth's privy council. As an accomplished diplomat with extensive service in France from the time of Henry viii, even though he was a Catholic, Mason would have been instrumental in securing the French peace that was seen as essential for the new regime.Footnote 52 As a matter of conscience, Mason may have elected to withhold his signature on 19 January. This date is further supported by a feature of the signed leaf which suggests that Knollys was signing in his capacity as vice-chamberlain. His signature falls between Parry's (the Comptroller) and Secretary Cecil's in the customary order of precedence assigned to members of the privy council in the minutes. I am reluctant, however, to insist on 19 January as the date of signing, since it is conceivable, though unlikely, that Knollys did not sign in his capacity as vice-chamberlain. If that were the case, then the Corpus Christi Book of Common Prayer may have been signed on one other occasion in January (7 January), or any of six days between 24 December and 29 December 1558, when all the signatories except Knollys were present for privy council meetings. While the exact date on which the book was signed cannot be known, the signatures place Grafton's 1559 Book of Common Prayer between 22 December 1558 and 20 January 1559.
One further feature of Grafton's 1559 Prayer Book supports its early publication date: its title-page, which reads ‘Cum privilegio Regie Maiestatis’ (With Royal Majesty's Privilege). This imprint has been misunderstood as a claim by Grafton to be the Queen's Printer. Historically the King or Queen's Printer printed books within their patent, which usually meant statutes and statute books, acts of parliament, proclamations and, after the Reformation, service books. All of these bore some form of the imprint ‘cum privilegio’. One of the perquisites of being the King or Queen's Printer was that even when the printed books were not named in his patent, he could use the imprint cum privilegio. This has contributed to a misunderstanding about privileges: it has often been assumed that if a book were printed ‘cum privilegio’, it was printed by the royal printer. The problem arises, however, that privileges to print were also given to other publishers and printers. Indeed, until after the formation of the Stationers’ Company in 1557, it was necessary to obtain a royal privilege to protect a printer's or publisher's exclusive right in a title. Books so privileged also carried the ‘cum privilegio’ imprint. In short, all books printed by the royal printer were printed with the royal privilege, but not all books with notice of the royal privilege were printed by the monarch's printers. Knowing his specialised printing experience, the government most likely procured Grafton's services to print this service book, which he printed with royal privilege (and not as the Queen's Printer), and necessarily before the end of March. After 24 March 1559 for Grafton to have printed a Book of Common Prayer, even with royal privilege, would have infringed upon the royal patent which gave Jugge and Cawood the right to print service books. It might be tempting to assume that since the queen would ultimately give the right to print service books to Jugge and Cawood, it would have been unlikely for her to call upon Grafton, but what we know about Grafton suggests otherwise. Grafton had not only previously printed the Book of Common Prayer, indeed printed it ‘truely and diligently’ without errors, but he most likely possessed remainders and thus could produce in a timely fashion a book that was only partially reprinted. Admittedly, during Mary's reign he had traded his career in printing for an active role in London politics, indeed in parliament, but even if he did not reclaim his printing materials from Caly, as Blayney surmises, he certainly had access to the printing house of his son-in-law on whom he had bestowed his presses and type. Furthermore, Grafton was a significant figure in the Grocers’ Company which was well known for its Protestant zeal. He would also have had some connections with members of Elizabeth's household since on 13 December 1558 he was one of four of the Corporation of London charged with devising the coronation pageants.Footnote 53
The Corpus Christi College copy of the 1559 Book of Common Prayer, printed by Richard Grafton with the queen's privilege, accurately represented the changes that would be specified by the Act of Uniformity and was signed by men whom Elizabeth trusted so well that she called them to her privy council immediately after her accession. It represents an extraordinary artefact with serious implications for understanding the Elizabethan religious settlement, the Prayer Book's subsequent history, and the history of Anglicanism. First, the presence of the signatures indicates that the Elizabethan restoration of Edwardian Protestantism was more a matter of consensus than of confrontation or compromise, especially within the inner circles of Elizabeth's government. Among the men who signed the document were committed Reformers (Knollys, Cave and, based on Stephen Alford's Burghley, certainly Cecil and BaconFootnote 54), moderate erastian pragmatists (Herbert, Clinton and Parry), and the conservative Howard whose loyalty to the queen overrode his Catholic leanings. It is unthinkable that the men whom Elizabeth trusted most would have signed the book against the queen's wishes. This artefact, then, should put to rest all assertions that Elizabeth (and sometimes Cecil) sought to have the Elizabethan Reformation rest on Edward's 1549 Book of Common Prayer.
The Corpus Christi 1559 Prayer Book not only clarifies the intentions of Elizabeth and her ministers, but it helps to explain the rocky progress of reform. Since the book contains the printed text of all the revisions of the 1552 Book of Common Prayer and all the additions, any historical interpretation that regards the Elizabethan Reformation of religion as inept, ad hoc or a compromise – between the queen and her advisors, between the queen and a radical House of Commons, or even between the queen and her ministers and the Catholics – needs reconsideration. Norman Jones has effectively challenged Neale's speculations about multiple service books and Puritan reformers. The Corpus Christi Prayer Book lends considerable weight to Jones's argument that Elizabeth and her ministers always intended to restore Edwardian Protestantism and that the Prayer Book that they set forth was probably the 1552 Edwardian Prayer Book. Likewise, it affirms what Jones regards as the centrality of the ‘Device for the alteration of religion’ to understanding the course of the Elizabethan Reformation. Historians have wondered whether the consultation with learned men about the Book of Common Prayer called for by the ‘Device’ ever took place, and, if it did occur, whether the ‘booke hereof ready drawn’ was brought to the queen, ‘which being approved of Her Majesty, may so be put in the Parliament House’.Footnote 55 The Corpus Christi 1559 Book of Common Prayer, with its signatures, supports the idea that a plan (plat) for reform with a proposal for revising the 1552 Book of Common Prayer was made and the proposed book presented to the Crown. It seems likely, then, not only that the learned men met, but that there was remarkable consensus among both the learned divines named in the ‘Device’ and the noblemen whom the ‘Device’ named as privy to the proceedings. Jones's position requires reconsideration in one respect, though; he allows the possibility that the changes introduced to the Edwardian Prayer Book emerged as a means to effect a compromise during the course of parliamentary debates about uniformity and supremacy. It would appear, instead, that those who prepared the Book of Common Prayer, as it was presented in the early days of the 1559 Parliament and as it was ultimately passed, had already taken into account the limits of concessions that would be made both to religious conservatives and to the most radical Protestant reformers.
Since the Prayer Book remained the same from the beginning until the end of the 1559 Parliament, the question of the Prayer Book's being ‘attached’ to the supremacy bill also needs some rethinking. Neale argues that because the Act of Supremacy retains references to liturgy, the Prayer Book had been attached in the March bill. Jones takes the fact that a quarrel about the Prayer Book arose among two members of Commons, after the revised supremacy bill was read, as evidence that the book was attached to the bill. Gee, instead, suggested that a uniformity bill and a Book of Common Prayer book were presented in February but no further action could be taken until the Act of Supremacy passed. Would it not have been possible that members of parliament could have been able to see copies of Grafton's 1559 Book of Common Prayer during the time that they were debating the supremacy bill, even if it were not properly ‘attached’ at some point to a revised bill? It seems likely that a bill and a material book were indeed presented to the House of Commons on 15 and 16 February 1599, as Gee suggested, whether or not they were ‘attached’. The existence of this book probably led to the enormous problem with the supremacy for the conservatives, who surely knew that to pass the supremacy bill – to make Elizabeth head or governor of the Church – would assure the restoration of the Edwardian Reformation. Mention of the Protestant service and prayer book in ambassadors’ reports probably arose from their knowledge about the impending service changes that would occur were the supremacy bill passed rather than from provisions for a Protestant service in the bill. Full arguments on these points are beyond the scope of this article, but the material presence of Grafton's first Elizabethan Book of Common Prayer adds a dimension that needs to be considered for narratives about the Elizabethan Reformation and, indeed, about Anglicanism. Such considerations may lead to dramatic revisions in these narratives – or they may not – but at the very least a few things are now certain. Grafton's book was indeed the first Elizabethan Book of Common Prayer, and he produced it legitimately. Furthermore, this was the Prayer Book enacted by the 1559 Act of Uniformity. And, finally, Grafton's book, the first 1559 Book of Common Prayer, was the product of a collaborative effort of Church and State, of learned divines and fit noblemen, of privy council and queen – and ultimately parliament – to restore the Church of England to Edwardian Protestantism, indeed (with the exception of the provision reviving liturgical vestments), to the state of the Church as it had existed at the end of Edward's reign.
