sador's letters at this time have a certain tone of uneasiness throughout, and he seems to rest his hopes of continued tranquillity chiefly on the fact that the malcontents had no head, and were unable to trust one another.[1] Parliament was to meet in November, and every sort of pressure appears to have been used to influence the elections in the Lower House and to gain over the members of the Upper; and, judging by the results, with much success. When assembled, its subservience was as conspicuous, though not quite so complete, as it had ever been even under Henry VIII. Its first work was to reverse the attainder of Cardinal Pole, and thus pave the way for his return to England; and then it proceeded to pass some of the very measures which the preceding Parliament, some six months before, had rejected. The Act of 1 and 2 Philip and Mary, c. vi., revived the bloody legislation of Richard H., Henry IV., and Henry V., for the punishment of heretics; and 1 and 2 Philip and Mary, c. viii., repealed at once the anti-papal legislation of Henry VIII. from his twentieth year onwards; that of Edward VI. having, as we have seen, been already abolished in the second session of Mary's first Parliament—though, as a condition precedent to this, the Houses insisted on, and received, a distinct assurance, in the Pope's name, that the holders of Church lands were not to be molested. But not even so was the humiliation of the British Parliament, or of the British nation in its Parliament, complete; for in the interval between the passing of the repeal of Pole's attainder and the other legislation just mentioned, the two Houses had humbly petitioned the King and Queen to sue for their absolution to the legate, and had received it on their knees, and been re-admitted into the unity of
- ↑ Granvelle Papers, vol. iv. p. 317.
