marvellous, and in the main it was all her own work. Her one idea, when she arrived at the throne, was to restore religion; that is to say, the sway of the Pope and the Roman Church. With that view she had brought about the Spanish marriage, against the opposition of Gardiner himself, the leader of the Catholic clergy, and with no support beyond that of Paget and a small knot of latitudinarian statesmen; and, with the additional influence derived from that marriage, had succeeded in bringing about the complete legislative revolution which we have just seen. For the revolution was now, indeed, complete, and even the most important of the subsequent Acts of the reign (2 and 3 Philip and Mary, c. 4), by which the Crown renounced the first-fruits and tenths, were but matters of detail, however important they might be in their effects. But, wonderful as it was, Mary's success was not complete. Nor was it satisfactory to herself. She had failed in excluding Elizabeth[1] from the succession; she had failed in securing any powder to Philip beyond the term of her own life; and not only had she failed in effecting a restoration to the Church of the lands and goods torn from it by her father, but the spirit which had been displayed when she had raised the question, was such as may well have aroused a doubt in her own mind, as it clearly did in those of others, as to the sincerity and permanence of the change which she had effected. Some such thought as this, no doubt, urged on Mary in the course of severity which she now adopted. Of her sincerity there can be no doubt, and she may well have felt that her work was but
- ↑ In the despatches of the period there is a constant repetition of the statement that if Elizabeth succeed there will surely be a recurrence to heresy. See for example Renard's despatch of June 27, 1555, quoted by Froude, vol. vi. p. 355, where he says that the succession 'must fall to Elizabeth, and with Elizabeth there will be a religious revolution.'
