No stronger proof could have been given of the Queen's resolve to watch jealously over the religious peace of her realm. In her earlier years such a resolve went fairly with the general temper of the people at large. The mass of Englishmen remained true in sentiment to the older creed. But they conformed to the new worship. They shrank from any open defiance of the government. They shrank from reawakening the fierce strife of religions, of calling back the horsemen of Somerset or the fires of Mary. They saw little doctrinal difference between the new prayer and the old. Above all they trusted to patience. They had seen too many religious revolutions to believe that any revolution would be lasting. They believed that the changes would be undone again as they had been undone before. They held that Elizabeth was only acting under pressure, and that her real inclination was towards the old religion. They trusted in Philip's influence, in an Austrian marriage, in the Queen's dread of a breach with the Papacy, in the pressure of Mary Stuart. And meanwhile the years went by, and as the memories of the past became dimmer, and custom laid a heavier and heavier hand on the mass of men, and a new generation grew up that had never known the spell of Catholicism, the nation drifted from its older tradition and became Protestant in its own despite. [Sidenote: The Puritan pressure.] It was no doubt a sense that the religious truce was doing their work, as well as a dread of alienating the Queen and throwing her into the hands of their opponents by a more violent pressure, which brought the more zealous reformers to acquiesce through Elizabeth's earlier years in this system of compromise. But it was no sooner denounced by the Papacy than it was attacked by the Puritans. The rebellion of the Northern Earls, the withdrawal from the public worship, the Bull of Deposition, roused a fanatical zeal among the Calvinistic party which predominated in the Parliament of 1571. The movement in favour of a more pronounced Protestantism, of a more utter break with the Catholic past, which had slowly spread from the knot of exiles who returned to Geneva, now gathered a new strength; and a bill was brought in for the reform of the book of Common Prayer by the omission of the practices which displeased the Genevan party among the clergy. A yet closer approach to the theocratic system of Calvin was seen when the Lower House refused its assent to a statute that would have bound the clergy to subscribe to those articles which recognised the royal supremacy, the power of the Church to ordain rites and ceremonies, and the actual form of Church government. At such a crisis even the weightiest statesmen at Elizabeth's council-board believed that in the contest with Rome the Crown would have to rely on Protestant zeal, and the influence of Cecil and Walsingham backed the pressure of the Parliament. But the Queen was only stirred to a burst of anger; she ordered Strickland, who had