An Attempt Towards Recovering an Account of the Numbers and Sufferings of the Clergy of the Church of England,…

In Very Good Condition bound in contemporary Cambridge style panelled calf, with the spine divided into seven compartments by six raised bands, with the leaf edges red speckled. Externally the boards and spine are lightly scuffed in general, with chipping to the head and tail of the spine, splitting to the hinges, and the board corners bumped a bit. Internally the leaves are generally clean and broadly margined, with browning to gathering U & Y, the second instance, and with little in the way of stains or tears otherwise. Complete in All Respects.

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About Walker’s ‘An Attempt Towards…’

The publication of Edmund Calamy’s Account, on the nonconformist ministers silenced and ejected after the 1660 English Restoration, suggested to Charles Goodall and to Walker a similar work on the deprived and sequestered clergy. Goodall advertised for information in the London Gazette; finding that Walker was engaged on a similar task, he passed on the materials he had collected. Walker gathered particulars by help of query sheets, circulated in various dioceses; those for Exeter and Canterbury were printed by Calamy. Among his helpers was Mary Astell. His manuscript collections were presented to the Bodleian Library in 1754 by Walker’s son William, a druggist in Exeter; the lost Minutes of the Bury Presbyterian Classis were edited from the transcript in the Walker manuscripts.

Walker’s book Sufferings of the Clergy appeared in 1714, The subscription list contained over thirteen hundred names. The work consists of two parts: a history of ecclesiastical affairs from 1640 to 1660, the object being to show that the ejection of the Puritans at the Restoration was a just reprisal for their actions when in power; a catalogue of the deprived clergy with particulars of their sufferings. It does not profess to give biographies; the list of names adds up to 3,334 (Calamy’s ejected add up to 2,465), but if all the names of the suffering clergy could be recovered, Walker thinks they might reach ten thousand (i. 200). A third part, announced in the title-page as an examination of Calamy’s work, was deferred (pref. p. li), and never appeared; Calamy is plentifully attacked in the preface. Walker tried to distinguish doubtful from authenticated matter, and mentions the charges brought against some of his sufferers; but his tone was counter-productive to his argument.

The work was hailed by Thomas Bisse in a sermon before the Corporation of the Sons of the Clergy (6 December 1716) as a book of martyrology and a record which ought to be kept in every sanctuary. John Lewis disparaged it as a farrago of false and senseless legends. It was criticised, from the nonconformist side, by John Withers of Exeter, in an appendix to his Reply, 1714, to two pamphlets by John Agate, an Exeter clergyman; and by Calamy in The Church and the Dissenters Compar’d as to Persecution, 1719. An Epitome of the Attempt was published at Oxford, 1862. A small abridgment of the Attempt, with biographical additions and an introduction by Robert Whittaker, was published under the title The Sufferings of the Clergy, 1863.