This verse from St Paul's letter to the Hebrews was only one of several scriptural texts that sustained the composition and publication of a growing number of funeral sermons and episcopal biographies in Stuart Britain and Ireland. The events of the 1640s and 1650s and the Restoration fused a long-standing tradition of writing about the English Reformation and its consequences with a debate about the legacies of the Civil Wars. During these decades the kingdom of Ireland experienced acute violence and vast transfers in landholding along ethnic and confessional lines. Its church as by law established endured attack and proscription, and then emerged as the defensive cornerstone of a hoped-for Protestant ascendancy.

Between 1656 and 1686 six printed and manuscript works commemorated the lives, deaths and publications of three Irish bishops, William Bedell, John Bramhall and James Ussher. Taken as a group they represent an evolving set of responses to tumultuous events worked out in the lives of individual church leaders. The series began with Nicholas Bernard's 1656 The life and death of the most reverend and learned father of our church, Dr James Ussher. This was a hugely extended version of a funeral sermon preached by Bernard at Westminster Abbey on 17 April 1656. William Bedell had died in early 1642, but his son and namesake's memoir, ‘Life and death of William Bedell’, was not composed until at least 1659.