The Revd John Easter: A Brief Ministry in Restoration Fareham

The Revd John Easter served as Vicar of Fareham from 1662 to 1664, during one of the most unsettled periods in the history of the Church of England.

He followed the Revd Thomas Heather, who had been appointed at the Restoration of Charles II in 1660. Fareham’s own historical list of vicars records Easter taking over in 1662 and serving for only about two years before being succeeded by Nathaniel Wilson.

Those dates are significant. In 1662 Parliament passed the Act of Uniformity, requiring clergy to use the newly restored Book of Common Prayer and to conform formally to the Church of England. Around two thousand ministers who could not accept the settlement were forced out of their livings in what became known as the Great Ejection.

John Easter therefore became Vicar of Fareham at exactly the moment when the parish church was settling into the restored Anglican order after the Civil War, Commonwealth and Restoration.

Unlike Thomas Heather, Easter has left very little easily accessible biographical material. The national Clergy of the Church of England Database appears to contain a “Johes Easter” active in 1663, which may be the same man, although the surviving online entry is too sparse to establish much more with confidence.

His short ministry may therefore seem almost invisible compared with some of Fareham’s later vicars, but the timing makes it historically important.

For two years, John Easter stood at the centre of parish life while the Church of England was being rebuilt and re-established after twenty years of religious and political upheaval. Every service he led at St Peter & St Paul belonged to a church that was still adjusting to the return of bishops, the Prayer Book and the restored monarchy.

His name in the succession of Fareham vicars gives us a small but direct link with one of the defining moments in Anglican history.