of London had from the first set in for the Reformation. A preacher at Paul’s Cross,[424] who had ventured to disparage Edward’s memory, whilst making his court to Bonner, who was one of his hearers, excited an uproar amongst the people which nearly cost him his life. A queen’s guard was afterwards in attendance to protect the pulpit; and an order was issued by the mayor, that the ancients of all companies should be present, lest the preacher should be discouraged by his small auditory.”[425] Still in the country the cause of the Pope was far the more popular; custom pleaded for it; its pageants were agreeable to the taste of the million; some hope, too, might be entertained of the recovery of the rights of pasturage, if the abbeys were restored, and of the charities and hospitalities, which had ceased to flow since the suppression: then the disposition of the Queen was known before she positively proclaimed it by her policy; her own practice was enough to prove her future intentions; and such persons as were of a neutral character, a very large class in every country, went over to her side: above all, the Roman Catholic clergy, stimulated by the recollection of past wrongs (as they would naturally hold), and alive to the prospect of good things in store for them, put forth all their strength; so that the parliament now assembled made no scruple of reversing all the proceedings (save one) of the two former reigns, and Mary became at once supreme, and her church once more dominant. The single point to which the parliament, so compliant in points of doctrine, was resolutely opposed, was a proposal for a relinquishment of the abbey lands. This met with a vigorous resistance from their present possessors; and Cromwell’s sagacity was now perceived when he bound over the leading families of every county to keep the faith delivered to them, in securities of their newly-acquired estates. Mary, however, did not preach what she was not prepared to practise; for her sincere and disinterested devotion to the Roman Catholic persuasion was the virtue, the passion it might be rather said, of her life; the piety of her mother had imparted to her in her cradle a faith, which the subsequent sufferings of that mother must have hallowed in her sight. She, therefore, with no selfish or secular purpose, restored of her own free will whatever abbey lands had been attached to the crown,[426] as well as the first-fruits and tenths, a branch of papal revenue which Henry had indeed seized, but which never, it was suspected, passed beyond the hands of Pole, the sole commissioner for the disposal of it.[427] By Elizabeth, who succeeded to an exhausted exchequer, it was resumed; nor was it finally restored to the church, till Queen Anne, as we have said in a former chapter, generously appropriated it to ecclesiastical purposes; and accordingly it is now known under the name of Queen Anne’s Bounty, as a fund for the augmentation of small livings.