The rightful heiress was now set upon the throne, and England had leisure to look on her and learn her moods. Mary was in her thirty-ninth year. Ever since her unfortunate mother's divorce she had been living in neglect and seclusion; her father had stigmatized her as a bastard, and her brother had kept her from court. For twenty years she had been nursing her own and her mother's wrongs in lonely country manors, denied all the state and deference that were her due, and closely supervised by the underlings of the Crown. It was small wonder that she had grown up discontented, suspicious, and morose. One help had sustained her through all her troubles--her intense faith in the old creed, which she believed to be true, and therefore bound to triumph in the end. _Veritas temporis filia_ was her favourite motto.[33] Mary's Catholicism was something more than earnest; it was a devouring flame, ready to consume all that stood in its way. She was set on avenging all the blood that had been shed by her father, all the insults to the old faith that had been inflicted by the ministers of her brother. She thought that she had come with a mission not merely to reconcile England to the papacy, but to scourge her for her past backsliding. The nation did not yet know of the habits of mind which its mistress harboured. The Protestants were ready to acquiesce in her rule; the majority, who were neither Protestants nor Papists, trusted that she was about to take up the middle course that her father had chosen; the Romanist minority hardly expected more than this from her at the first. But Mary's actions soon showed that she was set on a more violent reaction; not only did she release from bonds the imprisoned bishops, Bonner and Gardiner, the old Duke of Norfolk--a captive since 1547--and all others who had suffered under her father and brother, but she began to molest those who had taken a prominent part in the religious doings of the late reign. Proceedings were begun against ten Protestant bishops, including Cranmer, the Primate of England, before she had been two months on the throne. Some of them fled over seas; the others were caught and put into confinement. The restoration of the Latin Mass was everywhere commanded. All married clergy were threatened with removal from their benefices. Mary began to speak openly of placing her realm under the supremacy of the Pope, and even of restoring to the Church all the monastic estates that her father had appropriated, an idea which filled every landowner with dismay. [Sidenote: =Projected marriage with Philip of Spain.=]