reign with a
character so frightful. The parliament which re-enacted the Lollard
statutes, had refused to restore the Six Articles as being too severe;
yet under the Six Articles twenty-one persons only suffered in six
years; while, perhaps, not twice as many more had been executed under
the earlier acts in the century and a half in which they had stood on
the Statute roll. The harshness of the law confined the action of it
to men who were definitely dangerous; and when the bishops' powers
were given back to them, there was little anticipation of the manner
in which those powers would be misused.

And that except from some special influences they would not have been
thus misused, the local character of the persecution may be taken to
prove. The storm was violent only in London, in Essex, which was in
the diocese of London, and in Canterbury. It raged long after the
death of Gardiner; and Gardiner, though he made the beginning, ceased
after the first few months to take further part in it. The Bishop of
Winchester would have had a persecution, and a keen one; but the
fervour of others left his lagging zeal far behind. For the first and
last time the true Ultramontane spirit was dominant in England; the
genuine conviction that, as the orthodox prophets and sovereigns of
Israel slew the worshippers of Baal, so were Catholics rulers called
upon, as their first duty, to extirpate heretics as the enemies of God
and man.

The language of the legate to the city of London shows the devout
sincerity with which he held that opinion himself. Through him, and
sustained by his authority, the queen held it; and by these two the
ecclesiastical government of England was conducted.

{p.319} Archbishop Parker, who succeeded Pole at Canterbury, and had
therefore the best opportunity of knowing what his conduct had really
been, called him _Carnifex et flagellum Ecclesae Anglicanae_, the
hangman and the scourge of the Church of England. His character was
irreproachable; in all the virtues of the Catholic Church he walked
without spot or stain; and the system to which he had surrendered
himself had left to him of the common selfishnesses of mankind his
enormous vanity alone. But that system had extinguished also in him
the human instincts, the genial emotions by which theological theories
stand especially in need to be corrected. He belonged to a class of
persons at all times numerous, in whom enthusiasm takes the place of
understanding; w