Jewell stating that it is to the Queen's own determined dislike of change that the maintenance of the vestments and ceremonies objected to by the Puritans, and disliked only a little less by the bishops themselves, is due. Later on we have seen her personal objection to the 'prophesyings' leading to their prohibition by the bishops, and to the suspension of the archbishop himself, because he declined to acquiesce; and towards the end we have seen her rebuking Archbishop Whitgift for permitting the predestinarian controversy to emerge, and giving him an intimation which led at once to the virtual withdrawal of his Lambeth Articles, after he had already sent them down to the heads at Cambridge, as a sort of quasi-authoritative document: and throughout the reign we find any attempt on the part of Parliament to deal with ecclesiastical matters of any kind checked and rebuked in no measured terms, even in cases in which the Queen took the same view as the Commons themselves.
Since Elizabeth, then, was to so great an extent both in theory and practice Pope of England, it is of importance that we should consider, with the best light we can find, what kind of a Pope she was, what were the real acts which she did, and whether she deserves altogether the discredit of that deliberate and organised system of hypocrisy which Mr. Froude attributes to her. Elizabeth, then, we have to remember, besides being a woman of great natural abilities and quite exceptional force of character, and very wide culture, also had an experience of life almost unexampled. True, she was born in the purple, but it was purple in which were some very coarse threads; for at her birth Katherine of Arragon was still living, and, when she was but three years old, her own mother was attainted,
