Please forgive me for being horribly pedantic, particularly in the light of such a helpful and carefully sourced response to the OP, but the phrase "the seven desertion rule to apply, allowing the deserted wife to remarry" might inadvertently mislead.

Desertion was not sufficient to allow a second marriage. For such a marriage to be legal (i.e. not a case of the felony of bigamy), the wife (and the person conducting a remarriage, if he wanted to keep his living and liberty) needed to have genuine cause to believe the absent husband to have been dead for seven years. The phrase in the 1828 Offences Against the Person Act (which superseded the 1603 Bigamy Act) is:

"shall have been continually absent from such Person for the Space of Seven Years then last past, and shall not have been known by such Person to be living within that Time" .

Caroline