_Religious inclinations of the queen._--The first mortification these exiles endured on their return was to find a more dilatory advance towards public reformation of religion, and more of what they deemed lukewarmness, than their sanguine zeal had anticipated. Most part of this delay was owing to the greater prudence of the queen's counsellors, who felt the pulse of the nation before they ventured on such essential changes. But there was yet another obstacle, on which the reformers had not reckoned. Elizabeth, though resolute against submitting to the papal supremacy, was not so averse to all the tenets abjured by protestants, and loved also a more splendid worship than had prevailed in her brother's reign; while many of those returned from the continent were intent on copying a still simpler model. She reproved a divine who preached against the real presence, and is even said to have used prayers to the Virgin.[269] But her great struggle with the reformers was about images, and particularly the crucifix, which she retained, with lighted tapers before it, in her chapel; though in the injunctions to the ecclesiastical visitors of 1559, they are directed to have them taken away from churches.[270] This concession she must have made very reluctantly, for we find proofs the next year of her inclination to restore them; and the question of their lawfulness was debated, as Jewel writes word to Peter Martyr, by himself and Grindal on one side, against Parker and Cox, who had been persuaded to argue in their favour.[271] But the strenuous opposition of men so distinguished as Jewel, Sandys, and Grindal, of whom the first declared his intention of resigning his bishopric in case this return towards superstition should be made, compelled Elizabeth to relinquish her project.[272] The crucifix was even for a time removed from her own chapel, but replaced about 1570.[273] There was however one other subject of dispute between the old and new religions, upon which her majesty could not be brought to adopt the protestant side of the question. This was the marriage of the clergy, to which she expressed so great an aversion, that she would never consent to repeal the statute of her sister's reign against it.[274] Accordingly, the bishops and clergy, though they married by connivance, or rather by an ungracious permission,[275] saw, with very just dissatisfaction, their children treated by the law as the offspring of concubinage.[276] This continued, in legal strictness, till the first year of James, when the statute of Mary was explicitly repealed; though I cannot help suspecting that clerical marriages had been tacitly recognised, even in courts of justice, long before that time. Yet it appears less probable to derive Elizabeth's prejudice in this respect from any deference to the Roman discipline, than from that strange dislike to the most lawful union between the sexes, which formed one of the singularities of her character.