children by which she disgraced herself.

On the whole, it must be admitted that the personal conduct of Elizabeth
in this momentous business exhibited neither enlargement of mind nor
elevation of soul. Considerably attached to ceremonial observances, and
superior to none of the superstitions which she might have imbibed in
her childhood, she was however more attached to her own power and
authority than to these. Little under the influence of any individual
amongst her clergy, and somewhat inclined to treat that order in general
with harshness, if not cruelty,--as in the article of their marriages,
in the unmitigated rigor with which she exacted from them her first
fruits, and in the rapacity which she permitted her courtiers to
exercise upon the temporalities of the bishoprics,--the only view which
she took of the subject was that of the sovereign and the politician.
Aware on one hand of the manner in which her title to the crown was
connected with the renunciation of papal authority, of the
irreconcileable enmity borne her by the catholic powers, and of the
general attachment of her subjects to the cause of the reformation, she
felt herself called upon to assume the protection of the protestant
interest of Europe, and to re-establish that worship in her own
dominions. On the other hand, she remarked with secret dread and
aversion the popular spirit and republican tendency of the institutions
of Calvin, and she resolved at all hazards to check the growth of his
opinions in England. Accordingly, it was the scope of every alteration
made by her in the service-book of Edward, to give it more of a Lutheran
aspect, and it was for some time apprehended that she would cause the
entire Confession of Augsburg to be received into it.

Of toleration, of the rights of conscience, she had as little feeling or
understanding as any prince or polemic of her age. Her establishment was
formed throughout in the spirit of compromise and political expediency;
she took no pains to ascertain, either by the assembling of a national
synod or by the submission of the articles to free discussion in
parliament, whether or not they were likely to prove agreeable to the
opinions of the majority; it sufficed that she had decreed their
reception, and she prepared, by means of penal statutes strictly
executed, to prevent the propagation of any doctrines, or the observance
of any rites, capable of interfering with the exact uniformity in
religion then