It has recently been suggested that the Grafton edition of 1559 was not only the first of that year, but that it was printed even before Parliament sat. But the book not only quotes the Act of Supremacy accurately but its preliminaries also include the whole Act of Uniformity verbatim—and there are several other improbabilities and mistakes in that argument. This chapter also reveals that although every sheet of the 1552 book was duly reprinted in 1559 with the required revisions (each of which is discussed), Grafton had kept a large number of unused sheets from his last edition of 1552. Each of the surviving copies of his Elizabethan edition contains between one and twenty-three sheets recycled from his last Edwardian edition.

The second Edwardian Act of Uniformity required an ordinal (a booklet containing the services for ordaining priests and bishops) to be bound with each folio edition of the 1552 Book of Common Prayer. No ordinal was mentioned in the 1559 Act, but the authorities evidently provided the printers with revisions for it, and each team of printers produced one. Only one copy of Grafton’s survives, and none of the extant copies of the ‘Jugge and Cawood’ ordinal is bound with their first edition of the prayer book. Moreover, unlike the 1552 contents lists, those of 1559 make no mention of an ordinal. The evidence suggests that it was withdrawn at the last minute, to be sold only as a separate item. Curiously, fewer than half the copies include the original sheet BB5:6. One simply lacks it; three have cancels printed in the 1580s by two different printers.

After the four folio editions (intended mainly for the use of the clergy), the printers produced some smaller editions for more general sale. They have survived less well than the larger volumes, and while one octavo is known from a complete copy, neither of the quartos is complete and the other octavo is known only from a small fragment. As in Edward’s reign, the small-format editions were accompanied by a psalter, and the quarto psalters reveal a conflict of ‘copyrights’. The stationer William Seres, a former household servant of Sir William Cecil (Elizabeth’s Principal Secretary) had managed in July to acquire a patent that ostensibly gave him a monopoly of psalters, and the two surviving quarto copies were printed for him rather than the Queen’s Printers. That unintended conflict, however, was soon rectified, and by the time the extant octavo was printed the conflict had been resolved.

The story I have tried to tell in this book is complex in many ways: in the politics of the authorizing Acts of Parliament, in the evolution of the text itself, and in the rivalries and collaborations between the printers of the successive versions of the prayer book. It has therefore often been been necessary to depart from a strict chronological order. In this final chapter I have therefore tried to recapitulate the overall story, and the numerous separate conclusions, as a more continuous narrative.

The Edwardian Reformation was quickly overturned when Mary Tudor succeeded her half-brother and began returning the English Church to Rome. The printers of the Edwardian prayer books had their businesses placed under Catholic managers, and all Edwardian prayer books were called in to be burnt. When Mary died and was succeeded by Elizabeth, the influence of Catholic bishops and abbots in the House of Lords was a major obstacle to any revival of the Reformation. Eventually, however, the passage of an Act of Supremacy made Elizabeth Supreme Governor of the Church of England, and a new Act of Uniformity prescribed a Book of Common Prayer that largely revived the 1552 book but with a few significant revisions. Two editions were put in hand, one supervised by the two new Queen’s Printers (Richard Jugge and John Cawood) and the other by Richard Grafton (who had taken back control of his printing house).

The Queen’s Printers, Richard Jugge and John Cawood, printed less than one-sixth of the first of the 1559 editions bearing their names. The first London book known to contain the work of more than three different printing houses, it also includes sheets printed by Reyner Wolfe, Edward Whitchurch, Owen Rogers, Thomas Marshe, Richard Payne, and John Kingston. Moreover, at least two of the leaves of the main text are cancels that replace leaves rejected for unknown reasons, each almost certainly introducing revisions neither specified nor permitted by the Act of Uniformity. Three of the printers involved were (like Grafton) not freemen of the Stationers’ Company, and therefore not legally entitled to print at all. One of them (and one of the Stationers) had recently been punished by Star Chamber for printing a piracy of a privileged book.

The year 1559 saw two more ‘Jugge and Cawood’ editions in folio, each printed by five of the original team (Jugge, Cawood, Kingston, Rogers, and Payne). The first of these is known only from a single copy that lacks the preliminaries (discovered during the research for this book); six copies are known of the later of the two. For the most part the relationship between the reprints is clear and straightforward, although a few odd sheets ‘belonging’ to one edition are found in one or more copies of the other. Amid the predictable crop of errors in each reprint, a few readings show that attempts were made to correct errors that were evidently noticed. But the overall trend in accuracy is (predictably) downhill.

In 1561 Elizabeth commanded that the liturgical calendar should be revised, because the Old Testament chapters assigned to each day included many that could profitably be replaced by more edifying ones. Because thousands of 1559 folio editions were already in use, Richard Jugge was commissioned to print cancel calendars that could be inserted to replace the obsolete ones. The revisions did not, however, really implement the queen’s wishes, because although thirty-five chapters were removed from the sequence, the only new insertion was Leviticus 26. More immediately noticeable, however, was a considerable increase in the number of saints’ days and fasts listed in the ‘miscellaneous’ column. Those additions have sometimes been interpreted as a resurgence of Catholic traditions, but it has seldom been noticed that most of them had already been added in the small-format ‘popular’ editions of 1552–53 by those unimpeachable Protestants, Grafton and Whitchurch.