Deeply as Mary abhorred sacrilege, she dared not ask for restitution to the abbeys. Such a step would probably have caused her overthrow, while Elizabeth never attempted opposition, but obeyed Cecil, the incarnation of the spirit of the oligarchy. The men who formed this oligarchy were of totally different type from anything which flourished in England in the imaginative age. Unwarlike, for their insular position made it possible for them to survive without the martial quality, they always shrank from arms. Nor were they numerous enough, or strong enough, to overawe the nation even in quiet times. Accordingly they generally lay inert, and only from necessity allied themselves with some more turbulent faction. The Tudor aristocracy were rich, phlegmatic, and unimaginative men, in whom the other faculties were subordinated to acquisition, and they treated their religion as a financial investment. Strictly speaking, the Church of England never had a faith, but vibrated between the orthodoxy of the “Six Articles,” and the Calvinism of the “Lambeth Articles,” according to the exigencies of real estate. Within a single generation, the relation Christ’s flesh and blood bore to the bread and wine was changed five times by royal proclamation or act of Parliament. But if creeds were alike to the new economic aristocracy, it well understood the value of the pulpit as a branch of the police of the kingdom, and from the outset it used the clergy as part of the secular administration. On this point Cranmer was explicit.[291] Elizabeth probably represented the landed gentry more perfectly than any other sovereign, and she told her bishops plainly that she cared little for doctrine, but wanted clerks to keep order. She remarked that she had seen it said:-- “that hir Protestants themselves misliked hir, and in deede so they doe (quoth she) for I have heard that some of them of late have said, that I was of no religion, neither hot nor cold, but such a one, as one day would give God the vomit.... After this she wished the bishops to look unto private Conventicles, and now (quoth she) I miss my Lord of London who looketh no better unto the Citty where every merchant must have his schoolemaster and nightly conventicles.” [292] Elizabeth ruled her clergy with a rod of iron. No priest was allowed to marry without the approbation of two justices of the peace, beside the bishop, nor the head of a college without the leave of the visitor. When the Dean of St. Paul’s offended the queen in his sermon, she told him “to retire from that ungodly digression and return to his text,” and Grindall was suspended for disobedience to her orders.