By the end of November 1559, the episcopate in England and Wales had all but died out. The virtual extinction of the office in the realm was a serious problem for a monarch committed to an episcopal polity. When the first Elizabethan bishop came to be consecrated in December, no bishop in legal possession of an English or Welsh see (as required by the restored 1533 Appointment of Bishops Act) could be found to perform the consecration. Matthew Parker, Elizabeth's first Archbishop of Canterbury, was responsible for the continuation of episcopacy in the English Church through a series of appointments over the course of the next year. While the validity of his consecration has ever since been questioned, it should be noted in its favour that his consecrators had all at one time been accepted as bishops of the English Church by the prevailing administrations. Parker was consecrated using the rite in the 1552 Ordinal. Regardless of the validity of his consecrators' orders, if this rite is not considered to confer the episcopate validly, then the entire succession falls. The argument, therefore, that Coverdale and Scory were unable to consecrate validly having been themselves made bishop by the Edwardian Ordinal is irrelevant, as indeed is the argument that no record of Barlow's consecration survives. The fourth co-consecrator, John Hodgkin, Henrician Bishop of the suffragan see of Bedford, was certainly accepted by Bonner as in valid episcopal orders at the end of the reign of Henry VIII, Hodgkin performing almost all the ordinations held in London diocese between 1540 and 1547.