the Catholic Church. But, great as were the successes of the Catholic party under the exceptionally favourable circumstances of the early part of Mary's reign, they were far from coming up to the level of the wishes and hopes of Pole or Gardiner and the Catholic clergy. Parliament had stoutly refused to exclude Elizabeth from the succession, or to permit Philip to ignore the conditions imposed upon him on his marriage, or to remove or define the Præmunire, or to meddle with the Mortmain Act beyond a temporary suspension, or to restore the Church lands, or even to take away the impropriated tithes from their lay owners.[1] Thus, though much was given, much also was withheld; and Pole and the Court party were but imperfectly satisfied.
An unsuccessful attempt to give additional power to Philip by a Regency Bill brought about a dissolution of Parliament in the middle of January 1555. Thus, in eighteen months after Edward's death, the whole, not only of his religious system, but of his father's also, was swept away, and the power of the Pope, and of the Catholic clergy, was re-established in England as it had been in the early days of Henry's reign—so far, at least, as it was in the power of law to re-establish it. But the England of 1555 was not the England of 1525: the thirty years which had elapsed since Henry first openly agitated the question of divorcing Mary's mother, had been years which had brought more change in the social, moral, and intellectual condition of the country than the whole previous century; and though Mary had succeeded in sweeping away, for the time, almost the whole legislation of the period, the other factors in the condition of the nation were beyond the powers even of a Tudor monarch. Mary's success had, indeed, been
- ↑ Froude, vol. vi. pp. 292-306.
