The coronation festivities, which began January 15, put London in a delirium of rejoicings, and though the royal exchequer was so low that there was no money available for costly preparations, the people more than compensated for this by the pageants and decorations they organised out of the fulness of their hearts. "The queen," says an officer who followed the procession, "as she entered the city was received with prayers, welcomings, cries and tender words, with all those signs which argue the earnest love of subjects towards their sovereign. She, by holding up her hands and glad countenance to such as stood afar off, and most tender language to those that stood near, showed herself no less thankful to receive the people’s goodwill than they to offer it, and to such as bade ’God save her Grace,’ she said in return, ’God save you all,’ so that the people were wonderfully transported at the loving answers and gestures of the queen." Only one bishop could be found to read the coronation service, as those few Protestants who had escaped with their lives across the seas had not yet returned from their exile, and the Roman Catholics refused to assist, though no alterations were introduced into the service, excepting that the Litany, the Gospel, and the Epistle were ordered to be read in English. This bishop, with the singers, met the queen at Westminster Hall on the following day, a Sunday, and to the fine old hymn, "Hail, Festal Day," the procession wended its way into the Abbey, and the solemn ceremony took place. Nor did Elizabeth at first make any changes in the Abbey services. It was her desire, she declared at the opening of her Parliament ten days later, "to unite the people of the realm in one uniform order," and though she was determined that the English Church should be utterly severed from Roman control, and that the Bible should be an open book, she understood the bulk of her people well enough to know that, as Bishop Creighton has so clearly put it, "what they wished for was a national church, independent of Rome, with simple services, not too unlike those to which they had been accustomed." So, at the state service in the Abbey on this occasion, the Mass was celebrated with the usual ritual, though the sermon was preached by a certain Doctor Cox, who was a vigorous Protestant.