The importance of Parker's primacy however was political and ecclesiastical rather than literary. The first Protestant Archbishop was not the man to stoop to servility like Cranmer, nor was Elizabeth the queen to ask such stooping. But the concordat which the two tacitly arranged, the policy so resolutely clung to in spite of Burleigh and Walsingham, was perhaps a greater curse both to nation and to Church than the meanness of Cranmer. The steady support given by the Crown to the new ecclesiastical organization which Parker moulded into shape was repaid by the conversion of every clergyman into the advocate of irresponsible government. It was as if publicly to ratify this concordat that the Queen came in person to Lambeth in the spring of 1573. On either side the chapel in that day stood a greater and lesser cloister. The last, which lay on the garden side, was swept away by the demolitions of the eighteenth century, the first still fills the space between chapel and hall but has been converted into domestic offices by the "restoration" of our own. Even Mr. Blore might have spared the cloisters from whose gallery on the side towards the Thames Elizabeth looked down on the gay line of nobles and courtiers who leaned from the barred windows beneath and on the crowd of meaner subjects who filled the court, while she listened to Dr. Pearce as he preached from a pulpit set by the well in the midst. At its close the Queen passed to dinner in the Archbishop's chamber of presence, while the noble throng beneath followed Burleigh and Lord Howard to the hall whose oaken roof told freshly of Parker's hand. At four the short visit was over, and Elizabeth again on her way to Greenwich. But, short as it was, it marked the conclusion of a new alliance between Church and State out of which the Ecclesiastical Commission was to spring. Such an alliance would have been deadly for English religion as for English liberty had not its strength been broken by the obstinate resistance in wise as well as unwise ways of the Puritan party. There are few more interesting memorials of the struggle which followed than the 'Martin Marprelate' tracts which still remain in the collection at Lambeth, significantly scored in all their more virulent passages by the red pencil of Archbishop Whitgift. But the story of that controversy cannot be told here, though it was at Lambeth, as the seat of the High Commission, that it was really fought out. More and more it parted all who clung to liberty from the Church, and knit the episcopate in a closer alliance with the Crown. When Elizabeth set Parker at the head of the new Ecclesiastical Commission, half the work of the Reformation was in fact undone.