things could not long be borne.  Those who had pulled down the crucifix could not long continue to persecute for the surplice.  It required no great sagacity to perceive the inconsistency and dishonesty of men who, dissenting from almost all Christendom, would suffer none to dissent from themselves, who demanded freedom of conscience, yet refused to grant it, who execrated persecution, yet persecuted, who urged reason against the authority of one opponent, and authority against the reasons of another.  Bonner acted at least in accordance with his own principles.  Cranmer could vindicate himself from the charge of being a heretic only by arguments which made him out to be a murderer.

Thus the system on which the English Princes acted with respect to ecclesiastical affairs for some time after the Reformation was a system too obviously unreasonable to be lasting.  The public mind moved while the government moved, but would not stop where the government stopped.  The same impulse which had carried millions away from the Church of Rome continued to carry them forward in the same direction.  As Catholics had become Protestants, Protestants became Puritans; and the Tudors and Stuarts were as unable to avert the latter change as the Popes had been to avert the former.  The dissenting party increased and became strong under every kind of discouragement and oppression.  They were a sect.  The government persecuted them; and they became an opposition.  The old constitution of England furnished to them the means of resisting the sovereign without breaking the law.  They were the majority of the House of Commons.  They had the power of giving or withholding supplies; and, by a judicious exercise of this power, they might hope to take from the Church its usurped authority over the consciences of men, and from the Crown some part of the vast prerogative which it had recently acquired at the expense of the nobles and of the Pope.

The faint beginnings of this memorable contest may be discerned early in the reign of Elizabeth.  The conduct of her last Parliament made it clear that one of those great revolutions which policy may guide but cannot stop was in progress.  It was on the question of monopolies that the House of Commons gained its first great victory over the throne.  The conduct of the extraordinary woman who then governed England is an admirable study for politicians who live in unquiet times.  It shows how thoroughly she understood the people whom she ruled, and the crisis in which she was called to act.  What she held she held firmly.  What she gave she gave graciously.  She saw that it was necessary to make a concession to the nation; and she made it not grudgingly, not tardily, not as a matter of bargain and sale, not, in a word, as Charles the First would have made it, but promptly and cordially.  Before a bill could be framed or an address presented, she applied a remedy to the evil of which the nation complained.  She expressed in the warmest terms her gratitude to her faithful Commons for detecting abuses which interested persons had concealed from her.  If her successors had inherited her wisdom with her crown, Charles the First might have died of old age, and James the Second would never have seen St. Germains.