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138
CHURCH AND STATE UNDER THE TUDORS

and the restoration of the latter, were also acquiesced in as a necessary consequence of the righteous reversal of the high-handed measures taken during the Protectorate. There can be no reasonable doubt that, as a rule, the Londoners preferred Ridley to Bonner; but they probably felt that Bonner had received hard measure from the party which had just fallen from power, and that, as there could not be two kings of Brentford, his restoration was the natural consequence of their fall, and Ridley's expulsion a necessary preliminary to it.

In September, Archbishop Cranmer, who had hitherto simply been ordered to confine himself to his own palace, was sent, together with Ridley and Latimer, to the Tower. How far the immediate cause of this was the manifesto against the Mass, which he seems to have written but not published, but which became known, and was acknowledged by him before the Council, is not easy to determine; nor is it of much importance, since it seems clear that, when he had once resolved to remain in England, his final doom was no longer doubtful, or was only rendered so by his own subsequent vacillation.

With the beginning of the third session of her first Parliament,[1] Mary's brief popularity may be said to have come to an end. She now decided, contrary to the advice of her wisest councillors, on the marriage with Philip of Spain, a match which was abhorred by all her subjects, except the small section who were, to adopt a modern phrase, 'Catholics first and Englishmen only afterwards.' To the nation in general no proposition could have been more hateful. It had, it is true, one and one only recommendation, viz. that it secured Spain as a permanent ally against France,

  1. Strictly speaking this was a new Parliament, though the Acts are reckoned as if it were the same.