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A.G.Matthews, Walker Revised: Being a Revision of John Walker's 'Sufferings of the clergy during the Grand Rebellion 1642-60'. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1948, reissued 1988. £45.
The reissue of this vital reference work, forty years after its first publication, is warmly to be welcomed. It is a distillation and up-dating of John Walker's Sufferings of the Clergy produced in 1714, a long delayed response to Edmund Calamy's 1702 account of the ministers ejected from their livings for refusal to accept the 1662 Act of Uniformity. Walker was an Exeter clergyman, a Tory and an Anglican whose concern was to show that the loyal royalist clergy had suffered much more severely in the 1640s and 1650s than the Puritans had at the Restoration. The battles of the mid-seventeenth century, so formative in Bunyan's development, were refought in the early eighteenth century as part of a controversy over the extent of Protestant toleration.
The contemporary antiquary Thomas Hearne felt Walker was 'a worthy and an Honest Man' but nonetheless considered 'His book is not done with that Judgment which could be wished'. Matthews' judgment is kinder and he commends Walker's factual accuracy although his book was of course written in a tone appropriate to party polemic. Walker spent ten years on his compilation. He searched official records such as State Papers, Commons' Journals, a few local committee records from the civil war, and the admission books of the 'Triers', established by Cromwell to oversee the standards of the clergy. He also used pamphlet material but above all he based his account on a vast number of private papers, solicited especially from the descendants of ejected ministers, which now form the Walker collection in the Bodleian...