This meticulous account of the ejections of the Royalist and orthodox clergy during the 1640s and 1650s is based on the retrospective surveys collected by the Church of England clergyman John Walker in the early eighteenth century. Walker’s Attempt towards recovering an account of the numbers and sufferings of the clergy of the Church of England (1714) was itself a response to Edmund Calamy’s Account (1702–13) about the dissenting clerics who were ejected at the Restoration. Despite the attempt by Walker to create a competing Anglican tradition of clerical suffering during the English Revolution, as McCall emphasizes, the nonconformist tradition became the louder voice. This was despite the fact that the Anglicans experienced the “largest ejection of clergy in the history of the Protestant Church in England” (268). The loyalist clergy were tarred by their parliamentarian opponents as malicious and scandalous, and as slavish followers of the religious changes of the 1630s inspired by Charles I and Archbishop William Laud. It was, therefore, extremely difficult for them to live down the varied accusations of drunkenness, swearing, immorality, violence, gambling, neglect of their duties, and quasi–Roman Catholic practice leveled against them by their parishioners and other informers.
While Walker’s book and the subsequent 1948 revision of his work in gazetteer format by A. G. Matthews are well known to historians, his source material has remained largely neglected, despite being deposited in Oxford University’s Bodleian Library. Walker gathered information by circulating questionnaires in the dioceses and he received replies from the ejected clergy, or more often their families; from those claiming to be eyewitnesses; and from later incumbents and their parishioners. Historians have previously been drawn to the statistical information provided by Walker’s and Matthew’s books about the number and distribution of the ejections, which showed that roughly twenty-eight of English benefices were sequestered and nearly 3,000 clerics were ejected. In contrast, McCall’s approach here is centered firmly on the material experiences of ejection and sequestration suffered by the loyalist clergy and their families, although she has also added to the tally of ejections and gives a careful analysis of their regional variations. The author’s overview of Walker’s sources is further contextualized through her careful assessment of parallel documents including letters, memoirs, diaries, official documents, wills, and church and secular court records.
One central issue raised by this material is that of reliability, both in respect of the charges leading to the ejections and of the later memories of the hardships endured by the loyalist clergy, their wives, and their children. The author highlights other long-term issues, particularly the payment of tithes, that were also factors leading to ejection and that were often ignored in the official documentation. Similarly, she discounts widespread accusations of drunkenness as likely to be exaggerated, while the small number of sexual offenses suggest that some clerics were likely to take advantage of their female parishioners, while others were falsely accused. In terms of memory, McCall argues that recollections of the indignities suffered by clergy families were likely to be muted. They were painful to recall, sometimes including physical assault not just of the minister, but of wives, children, and servants as well. They could also involve extreme hardship, as clerics were deprived of their living and their families were not always compensated by any support at all. Memories of injustice, displacement, hostility, and physical danger remained strong through oral traditions and down the generations.
This book will be of relevance to anyone interested in the events of the English Revolution and their long-term religious impact on the Church of England. It helps to correct the historiographical bias, which has seen a plethora of studies on the Puritan, Presbyterian, and independent clergy during the Civil Wars and on their fortunes after the Restoration. By putting the experiences of the orthodox, loyalist clergy center stage the author has made a significant contribution to modern scholarship on the seventeenth-century English clergy. She concludes that “the sequestered clergy were not innocent victims” (265) and that they were ejected because they were actively engaged with the issues being fought over. Nevertheless, their stories of suffering were genuine and had a profound long-term effect on the character of religion and society in England after the Restoration.