close of 1559 England seemed to settle quietly down in a religious peace. [Sidenote: England Protestant.] But cautious as had been Elizabeth's movements and skilfully as she had hidden the real drift of her measures from the bulk of the people, the religion of England was changed. The old service was gone. The old bishops were gone. The royal supremacy was again restored. All connexion with Rome was again broken. The repudiation of the Papacy and the restoration of the Prayer-Book in the teeth of the unanimous opposition of the priesthood had established the great principle of the Reformation, that the form of a nation's faith should be determined not by the clergy but by the nation itself. Different therefore as was the temper of the government, the religious attitude of England was once more what it had been under the Protectorate. At the most critical moment of the strife between the new religion and the old England had ranged itself on the side of Protestantism. It was only the later history of Elizabeth's reign which was to reveal of what mighty import this Protestantism of England was to prove. Had England remained Catholic the freedom of the Dutch Republic would have been impossible. No Henry the Fourth would have reigned in France to save French Protestantism by the Edict of Nantes. No struggle over far-off seas would have broken the power of Spain and baffled the hopes which the House of Austria cherished of winning a mastery over the western world. Nor could Calvinism have found a home across the northern border. The first result of the religious change in England was to give a new impulse to the religious revolution in Scotland. [Sidenote: Scotch Calvinism.]