m within. The country was
humiliated by defeat and brought to the verge of rebellion by the
bloodshed and misgovernment of Mary's reign. The social discontent which
had been trampled down for a while by the horsemen of Somerset remained
a menace to further order. Above all, the religious strife had passed
beyond hope of reconciliation now that the reformers were parted from
their opponents by the fires of Smithfield and the party of the New
Learning all but dissolved. The more earnest Catholics were bound
helplessly to Rome. The temper of the Protestants, burned at home or
driven into exile abroad, had become a fiercer thing, and the
Calvinistic refugees were pouring back from Geneva with dreams of
revolutionary changes in Church and State.

[Sidenote: Her religious policy.]

It was with the religious difficulty that Elizabeth was called first to
deal; and the way in which she dealt with it showed at once the peculiar
bent of her mind. The young Queen was not without a sense of religion;
at moments of peril or deliverance throughout her reign her
acknowledgements of a divine protection took a strange depth and
earnestness. But she was almost wholly destitute of spiritual emotion,
or of any consciousness of the vast questions with which theology strove
to deal. While the world around her was being swayed more and more by
theological beliefs and controversies, Elizabeth was absolutely
untouched by them. She was a child of the Italian Renascence rather than
of the New Learning of Colet or Erasmus, and her attitude towards the
enthusiasm of her time was that of Lorenzo de' Medici towards
Savonarola. Her mind was untroubled by the spiritual problems which were
vexing the minds around her; to Elizabeth indeed they were not only
unintelligible, they were a little ridiculous. She had been brought up
under Henry amidst the ritual of the older Church; under Edward she had
submitted to the English Prayer-Book, and drunk in much of the
Protestant theology; under Mary she was ready after a slight resistance
to conform again to the mass. Her temper remained unchanged through the
whole course of her reign. She showed the same intellectual contempt for
the superstition of the Romanist as for the bigotry of the Protestant.
While she ordered Catholic images to be flung into the fire, she quizzed
the Puritans as "brethren in Christ." But she had no sort of religious
aversion from either Puritan or Papist. The Protestants grumbled at the