was a kind of survival of the old ecclesiastical politician; but the politician in him always preponderated slightly over the ecclesiastic. He had seen much of the evils of the Roman supremacy, and had gone with Henry VIII. in his subversion of it; and though later on he became one of the Roman party, it is not credible that he was really sincere in his wish for its restoration. His efforts, up to this time, had always been directed towards the revival of the system which had prevailed in the later years of Henry, viz.: the maintenance of the old faith and the old ritual almost unaltered, together with a rigid intolerance of difference of opinion, and with little or no diminution of the authority of the clergy, but with the substitution of the Royal for the Papal headship. He wished Mary to marry a subject, and to send Elizabeth to the Tower, and he hated the Spanish match as certain to lead to the re-establishment of the Papal power in England, and probably by violent means. Mary herself possessed all the self-will of the Tudors, reinforced by the obstinacy of her Spanish forefathers; and partly by playing off the different parties against one another, and partly by insisting obstinately on her own personal right to marry as she pleased, she gained her point at last. The only real ally whom she had throughout was Reginald Pole, a man as fanatical, as narrow, and, though from different causes, as politically ignorant, as herself, but without a tithe of her courage or her patience, who had been in exile for years, and was not even yet permitted to return to England, and whose knowledge of England was therefore obtained at second-hand and coloured by all the fancies of an enthusiast and a dreamer.
Mary's determination to marry Philip was—at least in the first instance—simply a means to an end, and the
