Page:History of England (Froude) Vol 4.djvu/426

406 was to invade Scotland in the summer. The Italian question thickening, Paget was sent to the Emperor to attempt to persuade him to repeat the policy of 1544; the Protector and Charles were each to enter France at the head of thirty thousand men 'galyardly,' and dictate moderation at Paris. The new Prayer-book was to come into use at Whitsuntide, and the mass—the Jacob's ladder by which for thirty generations the souls of men were supposed to have climbed to heaven—was to be put down and prohibited by law. Simultaneously the two Universities were made an arena for a disputation on the real presence, where foreign Protestants were to confound superstition. Heresy becoming so troublesome, a commission was appointed to hunt out and try Anabaptists; to examine them, to report on their opinions, and if mild measures of conversion failed, to deliver over the obstinate in the old fashion to the secular arm. Since Parliament would not listen to the wrongs of the people, another commission was directed to enforce redress by the Acts of Henry, and to accomplish by immediate constraint the restoration of the appropriated lands.

'To alter the state of a realm,' Paget wrote to Sir William Petre, when he heard of all this; 'to alter the state of a realm would ask ten years' deliberation. War abroad and war among ourselves, what prince that understands things would not gladly see one of them at an end ere he enter with us?' 'Commissions out for in