Page:History of England (Froude) Vol 9.djvu/443

I571-] THE RIDOLFI CONSPIRACY. 429 silence. A reform in the discipline of the Church was admitted to be necessary, but a wish was pointedly ex- pressed that it should be left to the bishops. Had the Parliament confined themselves to the pro- gramme thus marked out for them, the session would have passed over quietly. So long as no attempt was made to cut the Queen of Scots off from the succession, the Peers would have been content to wait to assert her claims after the arrival of Alva ; and the Commons were intended to restrict themselves to voting the supplies. The Commons however were in no humour to be thus easily managed. The ultra- Protest ants proved to be in an enormous majority. The rebellion of the North, and the general necessity of things, had de- veloped largely and freely the Puritan spirit of the towns ; and the Catholic reaction in the country dis- tricts, the loose administration of the laws, and the notoriously Romanizing tendencies of the Peers and country families, acted as a challenge to the fiercer of the Reformers to try their strength with them. For ten years past there had been an earnest desire in the Reforming leaders to inflict the Thirty-nine Articles both on clergy and laity as a test of doctrine, to reform the Prayer-book, and impose on England generally the Genevan discipline. As a step in this direction, on the first day on which the Houses met for business, a Bill was introduced to compel all persons, of whatever degree, not only to attend service on Sundays at church, but to be present twice a-year at the Communion. The tongues of men, finding themselves unloosed at