Victorious over her enemies, Queen Mary was now able to carry out her unwise plans without hindrance. In July, 1554, Philip of Spain came over from Flanders, and wedded her at Winchester. In the same autumn a Parliament, elected under strong royal pressure, voted in favour of reconciliation with Rome, and a complete acknowledgment of the papal supremacy. In the capacity of Legate to England, there appeared Reginald Pole, a long-exiled English cardinal of Yorkist blood, brother of that Lord Montagu whom Henry VIII. had slain in 1539. He solemnly absolved the two Houses of Parliament from the papal excommunication which so long had lain upon the land. Shortly afterwards the submission of the realm to the papacy was celebrated in the most typical way by the solemn re-enacting of the cruel statute of Henry IV., _De Heretico Comburendo_, which made the stake once more the doom of all who refused to obey the Pope. Mary herself, a fanatical party among her bishops, of whom Bonner of London was the worst, and the Legate must all take their share of the responsibility for this crime. The queen had her wrongs to revenge; the bishops had suffered long in prison under King Edward; Pole had been accused by his enemies of Lutheranism, and was anxious to vindicate his orthodoxy by showing a readiness to put Protestants to death. [Sidenote: =Persecution of the Protestants--Latimer and Ridley.=] From the moment of the enacting of the laws against heresy (January, 1555), the history of Mary's reign became a catalogue of horrors. Even the callous Philip of Spain, moved by policy if not by pity, besought his wife to hold her hand. But Mary was inflexible. The burnings began with those of Hooper, Bishop of Gloucester, and Rogers, Prebendary of St. Paul's, in February, 1555. They went steadily on at the rate of about ten persons a month, till the queen's death. The persecution raged worst in London, the see of the rough and harsh Bishop Bonner; in Canterbury, where Pole succeeded Cranmer; and in the Eastern Counties; there were comparatively few victims in the West and North. As cautious men fled over-sea, and weak men conformed to the queen's faith, it was precisely the most fervent and pious of the Protestants who suffered. The sight of so many men of godly life and blameless conversation going to the stake for their faith, achieved the end that neither the sternness of Henry VIII. nor the violence of Northumberland had been able to secure--it practically converted England to Protestantism. The bigoted queen was always remembered by the English as "Bloody Mary;" her victims as "the Martyrs." A few of them deserve special mention: Latimer, Bishop of Worcester, and Ridley, Bishop of London, were burnt together under the walls of Oxford, on September 7, 1555, after being kept in prison for two years. They had been well known as the best of the Protestant bishops, and Latimer's fearless sermons had often