re.

When it is said that the English changed their religion easily, this
record of heroic opposition must be remembered to the contrary. Mary's
reign became more and more hateful to her people until at last it is
possible that only the prospect of its speedy termination prevented a
rebellion. The popular epithet of {324} "bloody" rightly distinguishes
her place in the estimate of history. It is true that her persecution
sinks into insignificance compared with the holocausts of victims to
the inquisition in the Netherlands. But the English people naturally
judged by their own history, and in all of that such a reign of terror
was unexampled. The note of Mary's reign is sterility and its
achievement was to create, in reaction to the policy then pursued, a
ferocious and indelible hatred of Rome.

[1] The canon law forbade the burial of heretics in consecrated ground,
but it is said that Charles V refused to dig up Luther's body when he
took Wittenberg.

SECTION 4. THE ELIZABETHAN SETTLEMENT. 1558-88.

[Sidenote: Elizabeth, 1558-1603]

However numerous and thorny were the problems pressed for solution into
the hands of the maiden of twenty-five now called upon to rule England,
the greatest of all questions, that of religion, almost settled itself.
It is extremely hard to divest ourselves of the wisdom that comes after
the event and to put ourselves in the position of the men of that time
and estimate fairly the apparent feasibility of various alternatives.
But it is hard to believe that the considerations that seem so
overwhelming to us should not have forced themselves upon the attention
of the more thoughtful men of that generation.

In the first place, while the daughter of Anne Boleyn was predestined
by heredity and breeding to oppose Rome, yet she was brought up in the
Anglican Catholicism of Henry VIII. At the age of eleven she had
translated Margaret of Navarre's _Mirror of the Sinful Soul_, a work
expressing the spirit of devotion joined with liberalism in creed and
outward conformity in cult. The rapid vicissitudes of faith in England
taught her tolerance, and her own acute intellect and practical sense
inclined her to indifference. She did not scruple to give all parties,
Catholic, Lutheran and Calvinist, the impression, when it suited her,
that she was almost in agreement with each of them. The accusation
{325} that she was "an atheist and a maintainer of atheism" [Sidenote:
1601] meant no