tefois la chose a prins
telle issue que pour ce coup il fault qu'il se
contente a beaucoup moings qu'il ne s'attendoit.

"Ce qui a tellement despleu a cedict roy et royne,
que le 16 de ce mois ilz allerent par eau tous
deulx clorre et terminer ledict parlement, sur les
quatre heures du soir, assez petitement
accompaignez et sans aulcune ceremonie, monstrans
et faisans congnoistre a ung chascun avoir quelque
grand mescontentement contre l'assemble
d'icelluy."--Noailles to the Constable:
_Ambassades_, vol. iv. p. 153.]

I have been particular in relating the proceedings of this parliament,
because it marks the point where the flood tide of reaction ceased to
ascend, and the ebb recommenced. From the beginning of the Reformation
in 1529, two distinct movements had gone on side by side--the
alteration of doctrines, and the emancipation of the laity from papal
and ecclesiastical domination. With the first, the contemporaries of
Henry VIII., the country gentlemen and the peers, who were the heads
of families at the period of Mary's accession, had never sympathised;
and the tyranny of the Protestants while they were in power had
converted a disapproval which time would have overcome, into active
and determined indignation. The papacy was a mixed question; the
Pilgrims of Grace in 1536, and the Cornish rebels in 1549, had
demanded the restoration of the spiritual primacy to the See of St.
Peter, and Henry himself, until Pole and Paul III. called on Europe to
unite in a crusade against him, had not determined wholly against some
degree of concession. In the pope, as a sovereign who claimed
reverence and tribute, who interfered with the laws of the land, and
maintained at Rome a supreme court of appeal--who pretended a right to
depose kings and absolve subjects from their allegiance--who held a
weapon in excommunication as terrible to the laity as Premunire was
terrible to ecclesiastics--in the pope under this aspect, only a few
insignificant fanatics entertained any kind of interest.

But experience had proved that to a nation cut off from the centre of
Catholic union, the maintenance of orthodoxy was impossible: the
supremacy of the pope, therefore, came back as a tolerated feature in
the return to the Catholic faith, a