Page:History of England (Froude) Vol 4.djvu/429

1549.] whose own parks had been invaded, attacked the rioters in person, and cut some of them in pieces.

At this crisis news came from the western counties which exposed the weakness of the hopes with which Somerset was cheating himself. A religious insurrection he had believed to be impossible. He had been persuaded that the masses of the people sympathized with the changes which he was introducing. He had confounded a contented acquiescence in the separation from the Pope with an approval of innovations upon the creed.

It has been mentioned that a Government commissioner was murdered in the summer of 1548 in Cornwall. The Cornishmen had been neither conciliated nor terrified by the executions with which the crime was avenged; an organized spirit of disaffection silently spread, and Sir Humfrey Arundel, of St Michael's Mount, and Boyer, the mayor of Bodmin, were the intended leaders of a meditated rebellion. A second Pilgrimage of Grace was about to be enacted in England; the reader will observe, in the altered features assumed by the insurrection, the changes which had passed over the country.

The flame first kindled in the adjoining county.

The English liturgy was read in all churches for the first time on Whit-Sunday, the 9th of June, 1549. On Whit-Monday the priest of Sampford Courtenay, a village on the slopes of Dartmoor, in Devonshire, was going into church for morning prayers, when a group of his parishioners gathered about him,