Elizabeth was in her twenty-sixth year when she came to the throne, and it was about the middle of the sixteenth century; the precise year being 1558. The England she was to dominate so splendidly was not a quiet England: the fierce religious controversies which had signalized the reign of Henry VIII.--who thwacked with his kingly bludgeon both ways and all ways--and which continued under Edward VI.--who was feebly Protestant; and which had caught new vigor under Mary--who was arrant and slavish Papist--had left gouts of blood and a dreadful exasperation. Those great Religious Houses, which only a quarter of a century before, were pleasantly embayed in so many charming valleys of Great Britain--with their writing-rooms, their busy transcribing clerks--their great gardens, were, most of them, despoiled--and to be seen no more. An old Venetian Ambassador,[85] writing to the Seigneury in those days, says--“London itself is disfigured by the ruins of a multitude of Churches and Monasteries which once belonged to Friars and Nuns.” Piers Plowman, long before, had attacked the sins growing up in the pleasant Abbey Courts; Chaucer had echoed the ridicule in his Abbot riding to Canterbury, with jingling trappings: Gower had repeated the assault in his _Vox Clamantis_, and Skelton had turned his ragged rhymes into the same current of satire. But all would have availed nothing except the arrogant Henry VIII. had set his foot upon them, and crushed them out. There was a wild justice in it--if not an orderly one. The spoils went to fill the Royal coffers; many of those beautiful properties were bestowed upon favorites; many princely estates are still held in England, by title tracing back to those days of spoliation--a fact which will be called to mind, I suspect--with unction, in case of any great social revolution in that country. Under Mary, some of these estates had been restored to Church dignitaries; but the restoration had not been general: and Elizabeth could not if she would, and would not if she could, sanction any further restitution. She was Protestant--but rather from policy than any heartiness of belief. It did not grieve her one whit, that her teacher, Roger Ascham, had been private secretary to bloody Mary: the lukewarmness of her great minister, Lord Burleigh, did not disturb her; she always kept wax tapers burning by a crucifix in her private chamber; a pretty rosary gave her no shock; but she _was_ shocked at the marriage of any member of the priesthood, always. In fact, if Spanish bigotry had not forced her into a resolute antagonism of Rome, I think history would have been in doubt whether to count her most a Lutheran, or most a Roman. Yet she made the Papists smoke for it--as grimly as ever her sister Mary did the Protestants--if they stood one whit in the way of England’s grasp on power. _Personality of the Queen._