The crisis of Henry VIII's reign had caused great shock in the county of Southampton. Bishop Gardiner of Winchester, in whose great diocese the region lay, was a loyal Catholic who had only with difficulty been persuaded to acknowledge Henry's supremacy over the Church. He had nearly gone to execution like Fisher and More. When Henry had dissolved the monasteries huge tracts of the county had changed hands. In the New Forest, in particular, the great monastery of Beaulieu, the lands of Christchurch priory to the south-west, the smaller house of Breamore in the Avon valley and the great abbey of Romsey just above the Forest - these were all stolen, their buildings stripped and left to fall into ruin. For a family like the Pitts this was terrible indeed.

But the Protestant years of the boy-king that followed were almost beyond enduring. Bishop Gardiner was taken to the Fleet prison - a London common gaol - and then to the Tower, before being left under house arrest. In his place as bishop the king's Protestant council sent a man who had been married three times, who held two bishoprics at the same time and who cheerfully sold part of Winchester's endowment to pay off the family of the Duke of Somerset who had appointed him. 'See', a Pitt remarked drily, 'how these Protestants purify the Church.' And certainly, in the years of the boy-king that followed, the diocese of Winchester was well and truly purified. The churches of Hampshire and the Isle of Wight had been particularly well furnished. With what boundless joy, therefore, the Protestant reformers now fell upon them. Silver plate and candlesticks, vestments, hangings, even the bells were taken down. Some of this huge haul simply disappeared, stolen. Some was sold, although for whose account it was not always easy to say. Thus the English Church was liberated from popery.

Clement had no memory of his mother during these years. He had been born early in the boy-king's reign, but he was not yet three when his mother had left. He could only guess at what strains these events had put upon his parents' marriage, but it was apparently his father's purchase of some property that had belonged to Beaulieu Abbey that made his pious mother realize she could no longer dwell in her husband's house. She had returned to her family, the other side of Winchester. His father had always told him that he had refused to let her take her little child with her, so Clement supposed it must be so.