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 themselves. Nine-tenths of England preferred anything—almost the Pope—to Northumberland and his land-grabbing crew. At the least, they wanted a return to the state of things at the end of Henry’s reign. ‘No foreigners,’ was the cry, ‘England and English Church for the English.’

But Mary cared little for her countrymen, cared only for her Church; she was determined to restore the state of things which had existed at the beginning, not at the end, of her father's reign; to restore the Pope and all his works, and to do this by making the closest alliance with the Emperor Charles and his son Philip, whom she determined, against all good advice, to marry. In six months she had terrified her people; in two years she had completely lost their hearts; in six years she had wrecked for ever the Catholic faith in the minds of intelligent Englishmen.

She hurled all the leaders of the Reformed Church into prison at once, and set about re-establishing the Catholic services everywhere. The greedy nobles, one and all, now professed themselves to be good Catholics, and them she dared not touch. The one thing they feared was to lose their new grants of the abbey lands. They knew the Queen was bent upon restoring the monasteries, and the laws for burning heretics, which had been abolished in the reign of Edward VI; but she was not able to persuade her Parliaments to do the latter until the end of 1554, and the lands she was never able to touch at all. But Reginald Pole, long an exile and now a Cardinal, came over as ‘Legate’ of the Pope, and in the Popes name absolved England from the guilt of heresy. Mary had already been married to Prince Philip of Spain.