Section 9 of the Act of Supremacy, 1559, provided that ‘all and every Archebishoppe Bishoppe and all and every other Ecclesiasticall Person, and other Ecclesiastical Officer and Minister… and all and every Temporall Judge Justicer Mayor and other Laye or Temporall Officer and Minister’, and certain other persons should take an oath the form of which was set out in the section. The oath acknowledged the queen's ecclesiastical authority and renounced all foreign jurisdiction including that of the pope. Section 10 of the Act provided that if any person who was required to take the oath refused to do so, he should be deprived of ‘all and every Ecclesiasticall and Spiritual Promotion Benefice and Office, and every Temporall and Laye Promotion and Office’ which he had at the time of refusal, and should thereafter be disqualified for life from holding or exercising any such office or promotion.

The Act of Supremacy received the royal assent on 8 May 1559, soon after Easter, and immediately the surviving bishops of Mary's reign were faced with the prospect of taking the oath prescribed by the act. On 23 May 1559, a commission was issued to eighteen laymen authorizing and requiring them to administer the oath of supremacy to the bishops and others required by the act to take it.

Henry Hawkins deserves to be remembered if only because he lived to be an old man. After more than twenty-five years of active but unostentatious service as a Jesuit priest in the London area, he died on 14 August 1646 at the House of the English Tertian Fathers in Ghent, aged about seventy years. But apart from the achievement of keeping his body intact and relatively free for a quarter of a century on the English Mission, Hawkins should be known, too, for his literary works—two original and six substantial translations from Latin, French and Italian. From the earliest days of the English Catholic struggle for survival, the particular need of the isolated English ‘Papists’ for spiritual reading in order to sustain faith, had been recognized and many attempts were made to meet it. For Catholics at home, largely deprived of sacraments, worship and instruction through homily, it was one of the only ways of keeping in touch with the Church's devotional life and one of the few channels of encouragement. Hawkins's work is not apologetical; he does not try to supply the need for doctrinal instruction nor does he in any way enter the dogmatic or political conflict.

A coarse logic rules throughout all English souls; if you have merit, can you not show it by your good clothes, and coach and horses? How can a man be a gentleman without a pipe of wine? … They are under the Jewish law, and read with sonorous emphasis that their days shall be long in the land, they shall have sons and daughters, flocks and herds, wine and oil. In exact proportion, is the reproach of poverty . … The last term of insult is, ‘a beggar’. Nelson said, ‘The want of fortune is a crime I can never get over!’ Sydney Smith said, ‘Poverty is infamous in England’. And one of their recent writers speaks, in reference to a private and scholastic life, of ‘the grave moral deterioration which follows an empty exchequer.’ … The two disgraces are … first, disloyalty to Church and State, and second, to be born poor.