ances of Elizabeth.

The public and splendid celebration of the festivals of the church was
the least reprehensible of the measures employed by Mary for restoring
the ascendancy of her religion over the minds of her subjects. She had
been profuse in her donations of sacred vestments and ornaments to the
churches and the monasteries, of which she had restored several; and
these gaudy trappings of a ceremonial worship were exhibited, rather
indeed to the scandal than the edification of a dejected people, in
frequent processions conducted with the utmost solemnity and
magnificence. Court entertainments always accompanied these devotional
ceremonies, and Elizabeth seems by assisting at the latter to have
purchased admission to the former. The Christmas festivities in which
she shared have already been described in the words of a contemporary
chronicler; and from the same source we derive the following account of
the "antique pageantries" with which another season of rejoicing was
celebrated for her recreation, by the munificence of the indulgent
superintendent of her conduct and affairs. "In Shrove-tide 1556, sir
Thomas Pope made for the lady Elizabeth, all at his own costs, a great
and rich masking in the great hall at Hatfield, where the pageants were
marvellously furnished. There were there twelve minstrels anticly
disguised; with forty six or more gentlemen and ladies, many of them
knights or nobles, and ladies of honor, apparelled in crimson sattin,
embroidered upon with wreaths of gold, and garnished with borders of
hanging pearl. And the devise of a castle of cloth of gold, set with
pomegranates about the battlements, with shields of knights hanging
therefrom; and six knights in rich harness tourneyed. At night the
cupboard in the hall was of twelve stages mainly furnished with garnish
of gold and silver vessul, and a banquet of seventy dishes, and after a
voidee of spices and suttleties with thirty six spice-plates; all at the
charges of sir Thomas Pope. And the next day the play of Holophernes.
But the queen percase misliked these folleries as by her letters to sir
Thomas it did appear; and so their disguisings ceased[29]."

[Note 29: See Nichols's "Progresses," vol. i. p. 19.]

A circumstance soon afterwards occurred calculated to recall past
dangers to the mind of the princess, and perhaps to disturb her with
apprehensions of their recurrence.

Dudley Ashton, formerly a partisan of Wyat, had escaped into Franc