a time. In Edward's reign, the King's youth, and the mere fact of a regency, and the consequent certainty that the existing system would be but temporary, with the discontent of the people and the misgovernment of the Council, all pointing to a coming change, may well have inclined them to the belief that their strength was to sit still. The accession of Mary seemed to bring the reward of their patience, and they at once rebounded to their old position of Popish priests and prelates inflamed with all the additional zeal born of years of repression and adversity. Then they became agents, or at least accessories, in the persecution which was at once the disgrace of Mary's reign, and the chief cause of the final establishment of Protestantism in England. When, in the midst of this, and of the rising tide of popular indignation against it, Mary died and Elizabeth succeeded, they could no longer buoy themselves up with any reasonable hope that the new changes were temporary: Elizabeth, they knew, could never acknowledge the Pope, since to do so was to proclaim herself a bastard, and her mother a harlot; they themselves were no longer young, and their faith, conscience, consistency, self-respect—every consideration which affects the minds of religious or honourable men—concurred to keep them loyal to the cause for which they had struggled, intrigued, and persecuted through some thirty stormy years.
The bishops being thus all deprived, or in process of deprivation, it became necessary to fill their sees with others.[1] Matthew Parker was chosen to be Archbishop of Canterbury—a man of learning and moderation, and who, besides his peculiar fitness as a consistent, but not a fanatical, reformer, for the difficult position which he
- ↑ Burnet, vol. ii. p. 637.
