March
till the following November.

[Footnote 640: Ibid. statute 3.]

The chief immediate difficulty was to find money for present
necessities. The loan was gone. The subsidy would not come in for six
months. Englefield, Waldegrave, Petre, Baker, and Sir Walter Mildmay,
were formed into a permanent committee of ways and means, with
instructions to sit daily "till some device had been arrived at."[641]
Sir Thomas Gresham was sent again to Antwerp to borrow L200,000, if
possible, at fourteen per cent.[642] The queen applied in person for a
loan to the citizens of London. For security, she offered to bind the
crown lands, "so assuredly as they themselves could cause to be
devised;"[643] and she promised, further, that, if she could legally
do it, she would dispense in their favour with the statute for the
limitation of usury.

[Footnote 641: _MS. Mary, Domestic_, vol. xii.]

[Footnote 642: _Flanders MSS. Mary._ The aggregate
of the debts to the Flanders Jews, which Elizabeth
inherited, cannot be prudently guessed at; and I
have not yet found any complete account on which I
can rely. It cost her, however, fifteen years of
economy to pay them off.]

[Footnote 643: Queen Mary to the Aldermen of the
City of London: _MS._ Ibid.]

To this last appeal the corporation responded with a loan of L20,000,
at twelve per cent.; the Merchant Adventurers contributed L18,000
more; and Gresham sent from Flanders from time to time whatever he
could obtain. In this way dockyards and armouries were set in
activity, and the castles on the coast were repaired.

{p.309} Yet with the masses the work of arming went forward
languidly. The nation was heavy at heart, and it was in vain that the
noblemen and gentlemen endeavoured to raise men's spirits; the black
incubus of the priesthood sat upon them like a nightmare. The burnings
had been suspended while parliament was in session. On the 28th of
March the work began again, and Cuthbert Simson, the minister of a
protestant congregation, was put to death in Smithfield, having been
first racked to extort from him the names of his supporters;[644] on
the same day Reginald Pole, to clear himself of the charge of heresy,
sent a fresh commission to Harpsfeld, to purge the diocese of
Canterbury;[645] and the peo