Mary, by her courage and great heart, had a second time triumphed over the revolution. On the first occasion, she had magnanimously thought to disarm, and win over the factious by an almost universal pardon. Three victims only suffered the just punishment of their crimes; two were held over as hostages for the peaceable behaviour of the others; the rest obtained a full and free forgiveness. Such clemency was a complete innovation. If Mary cannot be said to have been in advance, or even abreast of her time, in many ways, she often rose above it, with the inevitable result that she was misunderstood by some, and repaid by others with the grossest ingratitude. The world has never been ripe for a clemency such as she had extended to the insurgents after the first rebellion. The elementary laws of rewards and punishments were alone grasped by the people, accustomed to the frequent spectacle of revolt followed by swift vengeance. The butchery with which Henry VIII. had replied to the northern rising, though an everlasting blot on his name, made him feared, and his authority respected. Elizabeth’s ruthless punishment of the Catholics of the north, after their abortive efforts to bring back the Mass, resulted in peace for the remainder of the reign. Mary’s wholesale forgiveness of the insurgents had been interpreted as weakness, by a people who had not yet learned that mercy “becomes the thronèd monarch better than his crown”. Charles V. had insisted that it should be seasoned with a larger measure of justice, but in this one point Mary had disregarded his advice. Now her eyes were opened. Had the rebels been treated with proper severity, there would have been no second outbreak. Had Suffolk fallen with Northumberland, as the consequence of his share in Jane’s usurpation, his daughter would not have constituted a danger to the State six months later. Even those who had been implicated in the first plot were loud in maintaining that there would now be no safety for the realm while Jane lived.[412] Both she and her husband had already been found guilty by Parliament of high treason, and sentence of death was passed in November 1553, although but for Suffolk’s action they would undoubtedly both have been pardoned. Now, however, recognising the disastrous consequences of her mildness, Mary allowed herself to be guided by those who had from the beginning advocated a policy of rigid justice; and on the day after Wyatt’s arrest, she signed the warrant for their execution.