of his becoming reactionary, and more and more reactionary as time went on, which made him change gradually from Mary's bitterest enemy to almost her closest and most trusted friend; and his so doing shows how completely Mary could overcome her most natural and most sacred private feelings at the bidding of her religious fanaticism, and in the interests of her cherished Church. And just as Gardiner had moved in a retrograde, so had Cranmer moved in an advancing, direction from the time when he sentenced Frith for denying the Corporal Presence in the Eucharist, to that at which he adopted Frith's words on the very same subject, and incorporated them in a note into his own Communion Office.
Is it not possible, too, that in Cromwell's later legislation we may find the key to Gardiner's later and reactionary course? His early career showed that he had little real regard for the Papal claims or the unity of the Church; but nothing in his whole life ever gave rise to a suspicion that he undervalued the privileges of the clergy or the power and dignity of a bishop.
He cared little whether Pope or King was called Head of the Church, but he cared a great deal for the bishop's revenues and the bishop's courts and rights and jurisdictions; and when he found out that the royal supremacy was to be a reality, and not a mere title, and that it meant a lay vicar-general presiding in Convocation, and a Church made realty subject to one master, instead of maintaining a position in which it might alternately despise each of two, then the scales fell from his eyes, and he began to perceive that the clergy were in danger of exchanging 'King Log for King Stork,' and that the Pope in Italy, with all his exactions and extortions, was a better bargain than the
