Page:History of England (Froude) Vol 5.djvu/389

1554.] brought forward; the first for the confirmation of the treaty of marriage, the second to reassert the validity of the titles under which the Church estates were held by their present owners. If the Queen consented to the last, her title of Head of the Church might be dropped informally, and allowed to fall into abeyance.

Gardiner, however, saw in the failure of the insurrection an opportunity of emancipating the Church, and of extinguishing heresy with fire and sword. He was preparing a bill to restore the ancient rigorous tyranny of the ecclesiastical courts; and by his own authority he directed that, in the writs for the Parliament, the summons should be to meet at Oxford, where the conservatism of the country would be released from the dread of the London citizens. The spirit which, thirteen years before, had passed the Six Articles Bill by acclamation, continued to smoulder in the slow minds of the country gentlemen, and was blazing freely among the lately persecuted priests. The Bishop of Winchester had arranged in his imagination a splendid melodrama. The session was to begin on the 2nd of April; and the ecclesiastical bill was to be the first to be passed. On the 8th of March, Cranmer, Ridley, and Latimer were sent down to the University to be tried before a Committee of Convocation which had already decided on its verdict; and the Fathers of the Reformation were either to recant or to suffer the