g of visitors to her presence showed a general sense that
the Queen's end was near. Mary stood lonely and desolate in her realm.
"I will not be buried while I am living, as my sister was," Elizabeth
said in later years. "Do I not know how during her life every one
hastened to me at Hatfield?" The bloodshed indeed went on more busily
than ever. It had spread now from bishops and priests to the people
itself, and the sufferers were sent in batches to the flames. In a
single day thirteen victims, two of them women, were burned at
Stratford-le-Bow. Seventy-three Protestants of Colchester were dragged
through the streets of London tied to a single rope. A new commission
for the suppression of heresy was exempted by royal authority from all
restrictions of law which fettered its activity. But the work of terror
broke down before the silent revolt of the whole nation. The persecution
failed even to put an end to heretical worship. Not only do we find
ministers moving about in London and Kent to hold "secret meetings of
the Gospellers," but up to the middle of 1555 four parishes in Essex
still persisted in using the English-Prayer Book. Open marks of sympathy
at last began to be offered to the victims at the stake. "There were
seven men burned in Smithfield the twenty-eighth day of July," a
Londoner writes in 1558, "a fearful and a cruel proclamation being made
that under pain of present death no man should either approach nigh unto
them, touch them, neither speak to them nor comfort them. Yet were they
so comfortably taken by the hand and so goodly comforted,
notwithstanding that fearful proclamation and the present threatenings
of the sheriffs and serjeants, that the adversaries themselves were
astonished." The crowd round the fire shouted "Amen" to the martyrs'
prayers, and prayed with them that God would strengthen them. What
galled Mary yet more was the ill will of the Pope. Paul the Fourth still
adhered to his demand for full restoration of the Church lands, and held
England as only partly reconciled to the Holy See. He was hostile to
Philip; he was yet more hostile to Pole. At this moment he dealt a last
blow at the Queen by depriving Pole of his legatine power, and was
believed to be on the point of calling him to answer a charge of heresy.
Even when she was freed from part of her troubles in the autumn of 1558
by the opening of conferences for peace at Cambray a fresh danger
disclosed itself. The demands of the queen's e