From John Rogers, the first of the martyrs, who suffered on the 4th of February, 1555, to the five who were burned at Canterbury on the 10th of November, 1558, and were the last, two hundred and twenty-seven persons according to some computations, two hundred and eighty-four according to others, and two hundred and eighty-eight according to a third authority, perished in the flames.[450] How many more might have been added to the number of victims, had Mary’s life been spared, it is impossible to conjecture, but happily those days were shortened; and on the 17th of November she herself ended a reign of continued disaster; Calais, which had been in possession of the English since the battle of Creçy, and then reckoned the jewel of the crown, lost; and lost apparently because the government dared not call a parliament to provide means of defence, such was its unpopularity;[451] a heavy debt contracted, less for national objects than to minister to the wants of the Spaniards; an exchequer too much exhausted to right itself; the learned men in exile; the universities a prey to the same Spanish rapacity;[452] the kingdom at large corrupted by Spanish vices,[453] and by a return to the law of clerical celibacy;[454] capital offences greatly multiplied; fifty-two persons being executed at Oxford at one session;[455] a pestilence depopulating the country to such a degree as to excite fears of a French invasion by reason of the nation’s weakness; for the inhabitants of the villages ceased, might Elizabeth say on her accession; they ceased in Israel, until that I arose, that I arose a mother in Israel; so that at length it was discovered that the Roman Catholic cause, for which alone Mary had lived, and would have been content to die, had by her own measures or misfortunes been brought to nought; and above all, that the fires of Smithfield had shed upon it a baleful and disastrous light. Instead of any attempt being made to alter the succession, though the queen of Scots was at hand as a candidate for the crown--of such pretensions, too, as would have been likely to secure her some support at another time--Elizabeth, Protestant as she was known to be, was advanced to the throne by acclamation; bonfires lit in the streets before Mary was cold; tables spread for merry-making in honour of her successor; costly pageants prepared for her as she traversed the city, the children crying out, God save Queen Elizabeth![456] the moderate revolted from a religion which spake of peace, but had shed blood upon the earth like water; and all parties weary of a reign of terror under which every man’s safety, to whatever party he belonged, was only upon sufferance. CHAPTER XIII. ELIZABETH.--HER ACCESSION.--HER CAUTION.--REFORMATION AGAIN TRIUMPHANT.--RETURN OF THE EXILES.--JEWEL.--INJUNCTIONS OF ELIZABETH COMPARED WITH THOSE OF EDWARD.--PROGRESS OF THE PURITANS.--THE REFORMATION NOT COMPLETED. CONCLUSION.