necessary check both the parties it affected; to persecute with an equal hand the Romanist and the Lutheran; to send the Protestant to the stake for resisting Popery, and the Roman Catholic to the scaffold for not admitting himself to be Pope; while he meantime plundered the monasteries, hunted down and rooted out the priests, alienated the abbey lands, and glutted himself and his creatures with that enormous spoil. It was Edward's to become the ready and undoubting instrument of Cranmer's design, and, with all the inexperience and more than the obstinacy of youth, so to force upon the people his compromise of doctrine and observance, as to render possible, even perhaps unavoidable, his elder sister's reign. It was Mary's to undo the effect of that precipitate eagerness of the Reformers, by lighting the fires of Smithfield; and opportunely to arrest the waverers from Protestantism, by exhibiting in their excess the very worst vices, the cruel bigotry, the hateful intolerance, the spiritual slavery, of Rome. It was Elizabeth's finally and forever to uproot that slavery from amongst us, to champion all over the world a new and nobler faith, and immovably to establish in England the Protestant religion." _J. Forster, Historical and Biographical Essays, pages 221-222._ ALSO IN: _S. R. Gardiner and J. B. Mullinger, Introduction to the Study of English History, chapter 6._ _C. E. Moberly, The Early Tudors._ {824} ENGLAND: A. D. 1487-1497. The Rebellions of Lambert Simnel and Perkin Warbeck.