the basis of the memorandum he had received
at Wittenberg, in close substantial and frequently in verbal agreement
with it. By this confession the Bible, the three creeds, and the acts
of the first four councils were designated as authoritative; the three
Lutheran sacraments of baptism, penance, and the altar were retained;
justification by faith and good works jointly was proclaimed; the use
of images was allowed and purgatory disallowed; the real presence in
the sacrament was strongly affirmed. The significance of the articles,
however, is not so much their Lutheran provenance, as in their
promulgation {302} by the crown. It was the last step in the
enslavement of religion. "This king," as Luther remarked, "wants to be
God. He founds articles of faith, which even the pope never did."

[Sidenote: The Pilgrimage of Grace]

It only remained to see what the people would say to the new order.
Within a few months after the dissolution of the Reformation Parliament
and the publication of the Ten Articles, the people in the north spread
upon the page of history an extremely emphatic protest. For this is
really what the Pilgrimage of Grace was--not a rebellion against king,
property, or any established institution, but a great demonstration
against the policy for which Cromwell became the scapegoat. In those
days of slow communication opinions travelled on the beaten roads of
commerce. As late as Mary's reign there is proof that Protestantism
was confined to the south, east, and midlands,--roughly speaking to a
circle with London as its center and a radius of one hundred miles. In
these earlier years, Protestant opinion was probably even more
confined; London was both royalist and anti-Roman Catholic; the ports
on the south-eastern coast, including Calais, at that time an English
station in France, and the university towns had strong Lutheran and
still stronger anti-clerical parties.

But in the wilds of the north and west it was different. There, hardly
any bourgeois class of traders existed to adopt "the religion of
merchants" as Protestantism has been called. Perhaps more important
was the mere slowness of the diffusion of ideas. The good old ways
were good enough for men who never knew anything else. The people were
discontented with the high taxes, and the nobles, who in the north
retained feudal affections if not feudal power, were outraged by the
ascendency in the royal councils of low-born upstarts. Mo