sition to her system which controversy could not fail to bring with
it. Parker's successor, Archbishop Grindal, who had been one of the
Marian exiles and returned with much of the Calvinistic fanaticism,
showed favour to a "liberty of prophesying" or preaching which would
have flooded the realm with Protestant disputants. Elizabeth at once
interposed. The "liberty of prophesying" was brought to an end; even the
number of licensed preachers was curtailed; and the Primate himself was
suspended from the exercise of his functions.

[Sidenote: The religious change.]

No stronger proof could have been given of the Queen's resolve to watch
jealously over the religious peace of her realm. In her earlier years
such a resolve went fairly with the general temper of the people at
large. The mass of Englishmen remained true in sentiment to the older
creed. But they conformed to the new worship. They shrank from any open
defiance of the government. They shrank from reawakening the fierce
strife of religions, of calling back the horsemen of Somerset or the
fires of Mary. They saw little doctrinal difference between the new
prayer and the old. Above all they trusted to patience. They had seen
too many religious revolutions to believe that any revolution would be
lasting. They believed that the changes would be undone again as they
had been undone before. They held that Elizabeth was only acting under
pressure, and that her real inclination was towards the old religion.
They trusted in Philip's influence, in an Austrian marriage, in the
Queen's dread of a breach with the Papacy, in the pressure of Mary
Stuart. And meanwhile the years went by, and as the memories of the past
became dimmer, and custom laid a heavier and heavier hand on the mass of
men, and a new generation grew up that had never known the spell of
Catholicism, the nation drifted from its older tradition and became
Protestant in its own despite.

[Sidenote: The Puritan pressure.]

It was no doubt a sense that the religious truce was doing their work,
as well as a dread of alienating the Queen and throwing her into the
hands of their opponents by a more violent pressure, which brought the
more zealous reformers to acquiesce through Elizabeth's earlier years in
this system of compromise. But it was no sooner denounced by the Papacy
than it was attacked by the Puritans. The rebellion of the Northern
Earls, the withdrawal from the public worship, the Bull of Deposition,
ro