There were _frondeurs_, of course, as there always are in the projection of any scheme involving novelty; and the _Times_ lent its sonorous voice to swell the clamour raised against the desecration of Hyde Park by the introduction of a commercial speculation. It may appear to some that the British retain to this day some traces of insular prejudice against foreigners, but such a feeling was far more prevalent in 1850 than one is apt to realise now. It found fitting expression in the House of Commons from the lips of Colonel Sibthorp, who declared that "when Free Trade had left nothing else wanting to complete the ruin of the Empire, the devil had suggested the idea of the Great Exhibition, so that the foreigners who had first robbed us of our trade might now be enabled to rob us of our honour."[D] The circumstances of the moment secured the gallant Colonel more sympathy than his grotesque speech and exaggerated fears would otherwise have won for him. The Protestant spirit of England had taken alarm at a Papal bull re-establishing in Great Britain a hierarchy of bishops deriving titles from the sees to which they were appointed. This might have seemed a higher compliment to Great Britain than the arrangement under which the Roman Catholic bishops, which had existed ever since the Reformation, held their appointments, under fictitious titles in _partibus infidelium_. But a good deal had occurred in recent years to arouse Protestant jealousy of Papal aggression. The Tractarian movement had resulted in the secession of Newman, Manning, and other conspicuous clergy and laymen to the Church of Rome; people both in London and Rome had begun to prognosticate a general secession from the Church of England, and there was something peculiarly startling in the appointment at this juncture of Cardinal Wiseman as Archbishop of Westminster. Most Englishmen greatly preferred that the Pope should continue to regard and call them "infidels," than that he should be permitted to bring them under his immediate patronage in this formal and ostentatious manner; and the feeling of irritation was intensified by Wiseman's pastoral letter to the English people on October 7, 1850, in which the new Archbishop announced that "your beloved country has received a place among the fair churches which, normally constituted, form the splendid aggregate of Catholic communion." Either the Protestant Reformation, for which Great Britain had paid so heavy a price, was a precious reality, in which case, so it appeared to most Englishmen, this was an insolent and significant aggression by the Court of Rome, or it was an obsolete blunder, and Rome was going to forgive it and resume her spiritual sway over our people. [Illustration: _John Leech._} {_From "Punch."_ THE BOY WHO CHALKED UP "NO POPERY," AND THEN RAN AWAY. Lord John Russell's Ecclesiastical Titles Bill of February was materially modified and made much less stringent before it was reintroduced in March.]