s own colleagues struck him down. Eager
to throw from their necks the yoke of a rival who had made himself a
master, the Council no sooner saw the popular reaction than they
proclaimed Mary Queen; and this step was at once followed by a
declaration of the fleet in her favour, and by the announcement of the
levies in every shire that they would only fight in her cause. As the
tidings reached him the Duke's courage suddenly gave way. His retreat to
Cambridge was the signal for a general defection. Northumberland himself
threw his cap into the air and shouted with his men for Queen Mary. But
his submission failed to avert his doom; and the death of the Duke drew
with it the imprisonment in the Tower of the hapless girl whom he had
made the tool of his ambition.

CHAPTER II

THE CATHOLIC REACTION

1553-1558

[Sidenote: Mary and the Monarchy.]

The triumph of Mary was a fatal blow at the system of despotism which
Henry the Eighth had established. It was a system that rested not so
much on the actual strength possessed by the Crown as on the absence of
any effective forces of resistance. At Henry's death the one force of
opposition which had developed itself was that of the Protestants, but
whether in numbers or political weight the Protestants were as yet of
small consequence, and their resistance did little to break the general
drift of both nation and king. For great as were the changes which Henry
had wrought in the severance of England from the Papacy and the
establishment of the ecclesiastical supremacy of the Crown, they were
wrought with fair assent from the people at large; and when once the
discontent roused by Cromwell's violence had been appeased by his fall
England as a whole acquiesced in the conservative system of the king.
This national union however was broken by the Protectorate. At the
moment when it had reached its height the royal authority was seized by
a knot of nobles and recklessly used to further the revolutionary
projects of a small minority of the people. From the hour of this
revolution a new impulse was given to resistance. The older nobility,
the bulk of the gentry, the wealthier merchants, the great mass of the
people, found themselves thrown by the very instinct of conservatism
into opposition to the Crown. It was only by foreign hirelings that
revolt was suppressed; it was only by a reckless abuse of the system of
packing the Houses that Parliament could be held in check. At las