They would gladly have made arrangements for an earlier date, had it been possible. But John Laurence was not much richer than Agnes herself, and they had to wait till he thought that he could reasonably afford to marry. Beside this, it was a most perilous time for a priest to think of wedlock. Things might change. Hope told that "flattering tale" which she is so fond of recapitulating to young people--often most unjustifiably. Who could tell what might happen, if they waited? Meanwhile, what was happening was not particularly cheering, at least to the apprehension of the Gospellers. Wyatt's insurrection had been put down, and its leader beheaded; and its fruitlessness was shown by the setting out of the Queen's envoys to escort Philip to England, while Wyatt yet lay in prison waiting for his trial. The Princess Elizabeth, sent to the Tower in March, on charge of complicity in Wyatt's evil deeds--who will ever know whether it was true?--had been released (at Philip's request, it was said) a few days before Corpus Christi. Cranmer, Ridley, and Latimer lay imprisoned at Oxford, and under sentence of death. Nearly every day somebody was exhibited in the pillory--women as well as men--the most frequent charge being, as it appears in the diary of that comical speller, Mr Henry Machyn--"spekyng yll of good Qwen Mare." The difficulty which presents itself to the present generation is, how else her subjects could well speak of her proceedings. However, they could have held their peace. Probably the discreet portion of the community did so. It may seem a little strange, on the surface, when one considers how it was that the reign of Mary was felt so galling, that the accession of Elizabeth was welcomed with such a fever of delight and triumph, such a sense of relief and freedom, as was undoubtedly the case--and yet that men bore the former and made no sign, waited for the latter with indescribable longing, but without any attempt to bring it about. Perhaps we must attribute this partly to that law-abiding instinct inherent in the ordinary Englishman: yet I think still more to the fact that as a rule, at all times, in all respects, the majority of the nation are indifferent. There were men who died at the stake in defence of the free Gospel. There were men who kindled those fires, and stamped out the truth, so far as in them lay. But these, even when put together, were still a minority. The majority were the watchers who stood round the stake, and who cared nothing for the cause on either side--who went to see a martyrdom as a Spaniard goes to see a bull-fight, with neither sympathy nor enmity towards the martyr. Of course, these would be, as to religious profession, what they found it to their own interest that they should be. The most popular and crowded of all the Seven Churches is the Church of Laodicea. "_Because_ thou art lukewarm... I will spue thee out of My mouth."