With Mary comes an interlude of reaction. The sovereignty was not restored to the Pope. Grantees of abbey lands in Ireland, as in England, Catholics though they might be, held fast their prey. But the old ritual was for a time legally revived, and the hand of iconoclasm was stayed. Protestantism was rabbled; but Smithfield fires, the martyr's spirit being absent, there were none. A story is told of an envoy sent by Mary to Ireland with a warrant of persecution, whose commission a clever Protestant woman, in whose house he put up by the way, stole and replaced by a pack of cards, so that when the deputy opened the wallet at the council board nothing came forth but the pack of cards with the knave of clubs uppermost. IV Thus the day of the Elizabethan era which dawned so brightly upon England came on in heavy clouds for the unhappy dependency. The religious compromise which it brought to England was adapted by the English statesmen who framed it to the religious condition and temperament of their own people. To the condition and temperament of the Irish people there was no such adaptation. To the Catholic lords of the Pale the Elizabethan religion was alien; to the native Celts it was not only alien, but utterly abhorrent. It presented itself, not as the religion of Ireland, but as the religion of the conqueror. The ecclesiastical polity comprised in the Act of Uniformity and the Thirty-nine Articles was, however, formally extended to Ireland, and the Crown resumed the powers which it had assumed in the time of Henry VIII. or his son, including the appointment of bishops, in this case without the veil, retained in England, of the _conge d'elire_. In the dependency as in England, the State assumed supreme power of religious legislation, overriding and almost treating as null the authority of the ecclesiastical Convocation. Propagation of the Anglican liturgy beyond the Pale continued to be blocked by the language.