per se' should not be applied to the full in such a case as this. It is therefore quite futile to endeavour to relieve Pole from the charge of complicity in the abominations of the Marian persecution. But neither, to do him justice, is there any good reason to believe that he would have disowned his share in it.
The ecclesiastical counter-revolution of Mary's reign was in many respects very remarkable. It seems that the English Church, in any intelligible sense of the words, had very little to do with it, and that little was of a kind which reminds one of the Japanese institution of happy despatch. Mary's methods were precisely those of her father and Cromwell, but the process to which they were applied was the reverse of that for which they had employed them. Parliament, as we have seen, she was unable to control with the completeness with which Cromwell had done it, though even with Parliament her success was surprising; but Convocation[1] was far more compliant, and how it became so is sufficiently indicated by the fact that, whereas the assembly of the previous year had authorised the Fortytwo Articles, and, as seems almost certain, Ponet's Catechism also, the new Lower House contained but six members who declined to sign Weston's bill declaring the latter 'pestiferous and full of heresies.'
The first of Mary's Convocations conducted the well-known disputation on the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper, at St, Paul's, and decided, as of course, in favour of the Roman doctrine. The second managed the still more famous disputations with Cranmer, Ridley, and Latimer, at Oxford. The third Convocation synchronised with the first Parliament of Philip and Mary,
- ↑ Lathbury, pp. 148-9.
