On the accession of Elizabeth, the refugees flocked back to London, keen to work into the fabric of the English church the religious ideas which they had imbibed and developed during their exile. The bulk of the clergy, however, were not desirous of innovation, and seem hardly to have been affected by the controversies raging at the time.[159] Of the nine thousand four hundred serving the Church under the Pope in Mary's reign, fewer than one hundred and eighty, or less than two per cent, refused the Oath of Supremacy under Elizabeth.[160] Not only had the parish priests thus accepted with indifference the various changes,[161] but the laity in the country districts, especially in the north, had scarcely been touched by the Reformation. When Elizabeth came to the throne, the distracted country needed, above all else, peace and unity. The fifth of her house to reign in the period of about seventy-five years since the end of the long War of the Roses, she found a nation yet suffering from the severe economic effects of that protracted crisis, and a church rendered unstable in doctrine and almost impotent in discipline by the four alternations between Roman and Protestant allegiance which had occurred in less than a quarter of a century. The question of her own legitimacy, bound up as it was with the question of religious authority, and the extreme delicacy of international political relations, especially with Spain, France, and Scotland, added difficulties to the problem of church settlement.[162] Footnote 159: H. Gee, _The Elizabethan Clergy and the Settlement of Religion, 1558-1564_ (Oxford 1898), pp. 1 _ff._ Footnote 160: J. Brown, _The Pilgrim Fathers of New England and their Puritan Successors_ (London, 1906), p. 26; Gee, in _Elizabethan Clergy_, p. 247, estimates that not many more than 200 were deprived between Nov. 17, 1558, and Nov. 17, 1564, for refusal to acknowledge the Elizabethan settlement. These were mainly Roman Catholics. Footnote 161: One is reminded of the satirical verses on Richard Lee of Hatfield, on his conforming again in 1662:— Three times already I have turned my coat, Three times already I have changed my note, I'll make it four, and four-and-twenty more, And turn the compass round, ere I'll give o'er. Cited by F. Bate, _The Declaration of Indulgence, 1672_ (London, 1908), p. 30. Footnote 162: _Cf._ F. W. Maitland's chapter on “The Anglican Settlement and the Scottish Reformation,” in _Cambridge Modern History_ (New York, 1918), vol. V, pp. 550-99.