acceptance of the personal supremacy of
the sovereign, Gardiner was ready to bow to every change which Henry had
ordered, or which his son, when of age to be fully king, might order in
the days to come. But he denounced all ecclesiastical changes made
during the king's minority as illegal and invalid. Untenable as it was,
this protest probably represented the general mind of Englishmen; but
the bishop was committed by the Council to prison in the Fleet, and
though soon released was sent by the Protector to the Tower. The power
of preaching was restricted by the issue of licences only to the friends
of the Primate. While all counter-arguments were rigidly suppressed, a
crowd of Protestant pamphleteers flooded the country with vehement
invectives against the Mass and its superstitious accompaniments. The
suppression of chauntries and religious gilds which was now being
carried out enabled Somerset to buy the assent of noble and landowner to
his measures by glutting their greed with the last spoils of the Church.

[Sidenote: The Revolts.]

But it was impossible to buy off the general aversion of the people to
the Protector's measures; and German and Italian mercenaries had to be
introduced to stamp out the popular discontent which broke out in the
east, in the west, and in the midland counties. Everywhere men protested
against the new changes and called for the maintenance of the system of
Henry the Eighth. The Cornishmen refused to receive the new service
"because it is like a Christmas game." In 1549 Devonshire demanded by
open revolt the restoration of the Mass and the Six Articles as well as
a partial re-establishment of the suppressed abbeys. The agrarian
discontent woke again in the general disorder. Enclosures and evictions
were going steadily on, and the bitterness of the change was being
heightened by the results of the dissolution of the abbeys. Church lands
had always been underlet, the monks were easy landlords, and on no
estates had the peasantry been as yet so much exempt from the general
revolution in culture. But the new lay masters to whom the abbey lands
fell were quick to reap their full value by a rise of rents and by the
same processes of eviction and enclosure as went on elsewhere. The
distress was deepened by the change in the value of money which was now
beginning to be felt from the mass of gold and silver which the New
World was yielding to the Old, and still more by a general rise of
prices that