the parliament, the
summons should be to meet at Oxford,[275] where the conservatism of
the country would be released from the dread of the London citizens.
The spirit which, thirteen years before, had passed the Six Articles
Bill by acclamation, continued to smoulder in the slow minds of the
country gentlemen, and was blazing freely among the lately persecuted
priests. The Bishop of Winchester had arranged in his imagination a
splendid melodrama. The session was to begin on the 2nd of April; and
the ecclesiastical bill was to be the first to be passed. On the 8th
of March, Cranmer, Ridley, and Latimer were sent down to the
University to be tried before a committee of Convocation which had
already decided on its verdict; and the Fathers of the Reformation
were either to recant or to suffer the flaming penalties of heresy in
the presence of the legislature, as the first-fruits of a renovated
church discipline.

[Footnote 274: Par feug et sang.--Renard to Charles
V., March 14: _Rolls House MSS._; partially printed
by Tytler.]

[Footnote 275: Ibid.]

Vainly Renard protested. In the fiery obstinacy of his determination,
Gardiner was the incarnate expression of the fury of the
ecclesiastical faction, smarting, as they were, under their long
degradation, and under the irritating consciousness of those false
oaths of submission which they had sworn to a power which they
loathed. Once before, in the first reaction against Protestant
excesses, the Bishop of Winchester had seen the Six {p.119} Articles
Bill carried--but his prey had then been snatched from his grasp. Now,
embittered by fresh oppression, he saw his party once more in a
position to revenge their wrongs when there was no Henry any longer to
stand between them and their enemies. He would take the tide at the
flood, forge a weapon keener than the last, and establish the
Inquisition.[276] Paget swore it should not be.[277] Charles V.
himself, dreading a fresh interruption to the marriage, insisted that
this extravagant fervour should be checked;[278] and the Bishop of
Arras, the scourge of the Netherlands, interceded for moderation in
England. But Gardiner and the clergy were not to be turned from the
hope of their hearts by the private alarms of the Imperialists; and in
the heart of the queen religious orthodoxy was Philip's solitary
rival. Renard urged her to be prudent in religion and c