fall back upon the reforming party. This was pretty clearly shown after his fall by the fact that his successor, Lord Warwick, did the same, though at his death he showed that such belief as he really had, attached itself to the old religion.
The later years of Henry's reign, after the fall of Cromwell, may well have appeared to his contemporaries,[1] to whichever party they belonged, to be years of steady reaction in the direction of the old faith; but there are many indications that the reaction was but skin deep. Apparently the system had been a hard-and-fast maintenance of Henry's ideal Church—Catholicism, with a substitution of himself for the Pope, and accompanied by a tightening-up of the bonds of orthodoxy by the substitution of the Six Articles for the more liberal Ten, and a sharpening of the persecution of Protestants. But all this time, as we have seen, Papists so called (that is, the genuine adherents of the old religion) had been persecuted too—not, it is true, as heretics, but as traitors; and other changes were made, such as the omission of the Pope's name in the service books,[2] the order for the revision of these books and the omission therefrom of all superstitious and legendary matter, and for the public reading of the Bible in churches, the publication of the King's book, &c.
Thus the reaction, though it existed, was of a kind calculated rather to exacerbate both parties than to satisfy either. Both parties were held in check, but, while neither was permitted to reap a substantial victory, neither was effectually discouraged.
The greater part of the year 1547 was occupied, first by the settlement of the Protector's government
