There can be no doubt whatever that just as in the reign of Richard II. the City was saturated with Lollardry, so in the last years of Henry VIII. it was filled with the new ideas. The connection with the Pope severed; the religious Orders clean swept away; the reading of the Bible rapidly spreading; the teaching and example of men like Cranmer, Latimer, Rogers, Ridley, Hooper, and others; the derision poured upon the old things such as pilgrimages, image worship, repeated services and monasticism; the popular attack on the Religious by such writers as Fish in the _Supplicacyon of Beggars_ and Barnabe Googe in his _Popish Kingdom_; the lectures and sermons carefully composed with the design of overthrowing and casting contempt upon the old Faith; the natural instinct of men to see in new ideas a certain remedy for old ills;—these things made it inevitable that the new thoughts should spread and take root. We hear no more, for instance, of the Mayor disarming men who had been monks and friars. The new ideas, again, appealed to the nobler and more generous part of humanity. To stand erect before the Creator without the intervention of a priest; no longer to be called upon to believe that which the Bible would not allow to be believed; the introduction of Reason into the domain of Doctrine; the abandonment of childish pilgrimages to the tombs of fallible and sinful mortals; the abolition of the doctrine that pardons, indulgences, Heaven itself, can be bought with money; no longer to believe that fasting and the observance of days may avail to salvation;—these things caught hold of men’s minds and ran rapidly from class to class. And then there was the reading of the Bible for themselves by the folk who could do no more than read. There are no means of deciding how far the old English Version had been read and passed from hand to hand. In the reign of Edward VI. we see the first-fruits of the new ideas. Already, however, there were signs of change other than those ordered and authorised by the most autocratic of sovereigns. The Mayor abolished the service of the Boy Bishop at St. Paul’s; sober citizens were haled before the courts charged with blaspheming the mass; men rose in their places and made a noise in church during celebration; one, a boy, threw his cap at the Host during the time of elevation: “at this tyme” (_Grey Friars Chron._) “was moche spekyng agayn the Sacrament of the Auter, that some called it Jack of the boxe, with divers other shameful names.” Thus the new reign began.