Dr. Thomas Watson, bishop of Lincoln from 1557 until his deprivation in 1559, was, as A. F. Pollard describes him, ‘one of the chief catholic controversialists’ of Mary Tudor’s reign. ‘A man of acute parts’, according to Bishop Nicholas Ridley, Watson shaped the eucharistic thinking of English Catholics for a generation. Ten years after Watson’s deprivation, one Robert Crowley still felt the need to publish an answer to Watson’s two eucharistic sermons of 1554, since by them, Crowley believed, Catholics were yet ‘chiefly persuaded and stayed’ in their opinions.