9 - The Restoration of the Church of England, 1660–1662: Ordination, Re-ordination and Conformity

Summary

Modern accounts of the re-establishment of the Church of England in 1660-2 have usually focussed on the politics of court and parliament, on set pieces such as the Worcester House and Savoy conferences, and on the revival of cathedral communities and the machinery of diocesan government. Ordination, by contrast, has been largely neglected. Robert Bosher declared that it was ‘not a major issue’; other historians have noted that re-ordination, namely the requirement that presbyterians take episcopal orders to remain within the ministry, was highly contentious and that its inclusion in the Act of Uniformity of 1662 helped to swell the numbers ejected after St Bartholomew's day, but even this important point has not been systematically pursued. A thorough study of the number and pattern of ordinations in 1660-2, building on evidence in the Clergy of the Church of England Database, gives us a rather different view of the restoration of the Church in three important ways. First, this was an extraordinary and unsettled period. Very large numbers of candidates, among them many former presbyterians, obtained episcopal orders. These were dispensed by a minority of bishops, including several holding Scottish and Irish sees, with little regard for canonical regulations. The return of the customary administration of ordination only dates from the very end of 1662. Second, the fact that only a handful of bishops regularly conferred orders reveals starkly different practices of ordination among the episcopate and the paradox of high churchmen, such as Sheldon, leaving the restocking of the parish ministry to bishops who were more accommodating to tender puritan consciences.