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.

Outlines Henry VIII’s attempt to impose uniformity on the English liturgy after breaking with Rome, the early careers of the printers Richard Grafton and Edward Whitchurch, and the progress through Parliament of the 1549 Act of Uniformity. Closely examines the printing of their first two 1549 editions of Thomas Cranmer’s Book of the Common Prayer, in which various irregularities show that changes and additions were made to the text while those editions were being printed. Concludes that the accepted assignment of priority to the Whitchurch edition known as STC 16267 is mistaken, and that the only extant copies of the real first edition are a few copies supposedly ‘made up’ and incomplete. Explains the evolution of the official limits on the retail price, and how each printer subcontracted parts of his reprints to other printers.

Briefly recounts the parliamentary history of the 1552 Act of Uniformity, the revision of the communion service, and some common misconceptions about the so-called ‘Black Rubric’. Shows that this time it was Edward Whitchurch who began printing from the manuscript copy while Richard Grafton reprinted the text from Whitchurch’s sheets. Explains that each printer once again subcontracted parts of some of his subsequent editions to other printers, and how each reduced the size of his reprints to reduce his costs once the official limits had been imposed on the retail price.