at the same time, the execution of Cromwell and the marriage of his hardened master to Katherine Howard.
In the year which followed there was held neither Parliament nor Convocation.[1] Cromwell, indeed, was gone, but his policy was not altogether gone with him. The Duke of Norfolk was once more in power, who would willingly have reversed it, who, with longer life, and under the influence of the constant irritation of Cromwell's action, had now become thoroughly reactionary, and had been known to say, 'It was merry in England afore the new learning came up; yea, I would all things were as hath been in times past.' That speech represented a frame of mind almost as much out of harmony with the middle of the sixteenth century as it would be with the end of the nineteenth; and so unable was the Duke to resist the current of the times that we find in this year a proclamation issued—having, be it remembered, the force of law—requiring that a Bible should be placed in every church: certainly of all measures the least likely to bring all things back to the state in which 'times past' had left them, albeit the Duke himself declared, 'I never read the Scripture, nor never will.'[2]
In this year, too, some of the service books were printed[3] omitting the name of the Pope as impugning by its presence there ' the statute of our most Christian King.'
In January of 1542 both assemblies resumed their activity. Parliament, besides the dismal work of passing bills of attainder against the Queen and Lady Rocheford, was employed with a number of enactments on ecclesiastical matters such as the rearrangement of bishops' sees and the civil status of the unfrocked monks,
